"Democracy is in retreat, according to the latest edition of the Democracy Index from our sister company, The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU). This annual survey, which rates the state of democracy across 167 countries based on five measures -- electoral process and pluralism, the functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties -- finds that democracy has been eroded around the world in the past year. The global score of 5.44 out of ten is the lowest recorded since the index began in 2006. Just 22 countries, home to 430m people, were deemed “full democracies” by the EIU. More than a third of the world’s population, meanwhile, still live under authoritarian rule."
Roberto Stefan Foa and Yascha Mounk in The Signs of Deconsolidation in the Journal of Democracy share evidence of a global pattern of disaffection with democratic systems...
"Americans’ dissatisfaction with the democratic system is part of a much larger global pattern. It is not just that the proportion of Americans who state that it is “essential” to live in a democracy, which stands at 72 percent among those born before World War II, has fallen to 30 percent among millennials. It is also that [...] a similar cohort pattern is found across all longstanding democracies, including Great Britain, the Netherlands, Sweden, Australia, and New Zealand. In virtually all cases, the generation gap is striking, with the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy falling to a minority."
"What is more, this disaffection with the democratic form of government is accompanied by a wider skepticism toward liberal institutions. Citizens are growing more disaffected with established political parties, representative institutions, and minority rights. Tellingly, they are also increasingly open to authoritarian interpretations of democracy. The share of citizens who approve of “having a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament or elections,” for example, has gone up markedly in most of the countries where the World Values Survey asked the question -- including such varied places as Germany, the United States, Spain, Turkey, and Russia"
"On a scale of 0 to 10 based on 60 indicators across five broad categories -- electoral process and pluralism, functioning of government, political participation, democratic political culture and civil liberties -- concludes that less than 5% of the world’s population currently lives in a “full democracy”
"Military might alone won’t defeat Islamic State and its ilk. The U.S. needs to promote economic empowerment. [...] Today we hear the same economic and cultural pessimism about the Arab world that we did about Peru in the 1980s. But we know better. Just as Shining Path was beaten in Peru, so can terrorists be defeated by reforms that create an unstoppable constituency for rising living standards in the Middle East and North Africa. To make this agenda a reality, the only requirements are a little imagination, a hefty dose of capital (injected from the bottom up) and government leadership to build, streamline and fortify the laws and structures that let capitalism flourish. As anyone who’s walked the streets of Lima, Tunis and Cairo knows, capital isn’t the problem -- it is the solution. [...] The people of the “Arab street” want to find a place in the modern capitalist economy. But hundreds of millions of them have been unable to do so because of legal constraints to which both local leaders and Western elites are often blind. They have ended up as economic refugees in their own countries. To survive, they have cobbled together hundreds of discrete, anarchic arrangements, often called the “informal economy.” Unfortunately, that sector is viewed with contempt by many Arabs and by Western development experts, who prefer well-intended charity projects [...] All too often, the way that Westerners think about the world’s poor closes their eyes to reality on the ground. In the Middle East and North Africa, it turns out, legions of aspiring entrepreneurs are doing everything they can, against long odds, to claw their way into the middle class. And that is true across all of the world’s regions, peoples and faiths. Economic aspirations trump the overhyped “cultural gaps” so often invoked to rationalize inaction."
"Developed by Gnip, MapBox and tech-data expert Eric Fischer, the maps reveal that the iPhone are overwhelmingly used in the most densely-populated urban areas while the Android is more popular in the suburbs. Mapbox CEO Eric Gundersen said: 'The patterns of usage in each city often reflect economic stratification. 'For example iPhones, in red, are predominantly in wealthy sections of the city while Android phones, in green, have more coverage in poorer sections."
Here's New York Metro centered on Manhattan...
Texan sprawlcity Houston...
Indonesians in Jakarta prefer Blackberry, colored purple...
Our MIT Media Ventures alumnus Jose Luis Garcia del Castillo y Lopez has launched BrickItUp on Kickstarter!
"BrickItUp is an online platform for creation, navigation and sharing of 3D Worlds. As simple as that. It could be defined as an user-generated content sharing platform for 3D environments. Or an online real-time block construction engine. Or a crowdsourcing environment for 3D information. All of them apply. Want to suggest your own definition? We would love to hear it!"
"New York City's Manhattantown (1951) was one of the first projects authorized [for destruction and "upgrading"] under urban renewal and it set the model not only for hundreds of urban renewal projects but for the next 60 years of eminent domain abuse at places such as Poletown, New London, and Atlantic Yards. The Manhattantown project destroyed six blocks on New York City's Upper West Side, including an African-American community that dated to the turn of the century. The city sold the land for a token sum to a group of well-connected Democratic pols to build a middle-class housing development. [...] The community destroyed at Manhattantown was a model for the tight-knit, interconnected neighborhoods later celebrated by Jane Jacobs and other critics of top-down redevelopment."
P.S. How ironic that Cape Town's District Six got the same treatment just a couple decades later.
Thanks to new MIT Media Lab student Erhardt Graeff for pointing me to Emerson Professor Eric Gordon and colleagues and their work on Participatory Chinatown...
"...a 3-D immersive game designed to be part of the master planning process for Boston's Chinatown. [...] you'll then be tasked with considering the future of the neighborhood by walking through and commenting on proposed development sites. Every one of your comments and decisions will be shared with real life decision-makers."
"Since 1997, Funmilayo Omotosho lived and worked in a market in Ajelogo, a neighborhood in Lagos, Nigeria. For reasons it has not made public, the Lagos State Government ordered that the Ajelogo market be destroyed during the early morning hours of March 7, 2010. More than 10,000 residents and vendors were displaced. With her business, home, and community in ruins, and with nowhere else to go, Fumilayo still lives in Ajelogo, amidst the ruins of her home and business."
Destroying markets seems like the very last thing one should do in order to improve peoples lives. What the hell is going on here? And here's a similar situation in Mumbai's Dharavi... And in Nairobi's Kibera...
"He's been called the father of nonviolent struggle. He could be also described as a revolutionary's best friend. Or perhaps, more accurately, as a dictatorship's worst nightmare. Now 84, the American academic has dedicated most of his life to the study of the bold, some might say reckless, idea that nonviolence -- rather than violence -- is the most effective way of overthrowing corrupt, repressive regimes. [...] His practical manual on how to overthrow dictatorships, "From Dictatorship to Democracy," has spread like a virus since he wrote it 20 years ago and has been translated by activists into more than 30 languages. He has also listed "198 Methods of Nonviolent Action" -- powerful, sometimes surprising, ways to tear power from the hands of regimes. [...] His ideas of revolution are based on an elegantly simple premise: No regime, not even the most brutally authoritarian, can survive without the support of its people. So, Sharp proposes, take it away. Nonviolent action, he says, can eat away at a regime's pillars of power like termites in a tree. Eventually, the whole thing collapses. For a half century, Sharp has refined the theory of nonviolent conflict and crafted the tools of his trade. His methods have liberated millions from tyranny -- and that makes regimes from Myanmar to Iran quake in their boots."
"...many Africa-watchers perceive a gradual erosion of democratic standards. [...] African elections do not necessarily produce representative governments. [...] Academic studies also paint a gloomy picture. [...] Southern Africa, historically the best-performing region, is now a problem child. [...] Still, Africa has come a long way..."
"Science is driven forward by discovery, and we appear to stand at the beginning of a democratization of discovery. An ordinary person can be the one who realizes that a long arm of a protein probably tucks itself just so; a woman who never went to college can provide the crucial transcription that reveals a spidery script to be a love poem from 2,000 years in the past. Nobody can say where the movement will go, but among the new pioneers of crowd science, there is a palpable sense that they have just happened upon a powerful, poorly understood new resource."
Lots of interesting examples mentioned, including iSpot, NOAH, SETI@home, Galaxy Zoo, Zooniverse, and others!
The Soviet hardliner attempted coup twenty years ago, 19-21 August 1991, triggered the dissolution of the USSR by Christmas that year. An amazing period in history but still shrouded in mystery as the FT's Moscow chief Charles Clover writes in Last days of the USSR...
"...the failure of the GKChP [coup committee] has long been characterised as a triumph for democracy over the forces of reaction, people over politburo. It was a pivotal episode in the extraordinary year of 1991, which academics and statesmen now speak of in the same breath as 1789 and 1917: a moment of inflection between the paradigms of totalitarian rule and liberal democracy. In this story, the Soviet coup provides a microcosm: the two systems collided, and one emerged victorious. As Yeltsin said afterwards: “One century ended, the century of fear, and another began.” The image of the ordeal remains Yeltsin standing on a tank, an elected leader facing down the gun."
"The only problem with this reading of the putsch is that it doesn’t sit well with the facts. The more one delves into those three days, the more shadowy and shifting they become. The vital, decisive moments had very little to do with democracy, or the march of history; what counted in the crisis was the superior ability to mystify, mislead and manipulate. This was a clash of conspiracies, and the best conspiracy won."
Take a look at a contemporary newscast to get a sense of just how disconcerting these events in Moscow were. People really thought this was prelude to a bloody civil war... But with tank commanders shifting sides and the word spreading of Yeltsin and the defenders of the parliament, the coup collapsed, and by Friday, 23 August 1991, Russians had pulled down the statue of KGB founder Felix Dzerzhinsky right in front of the KGB headquarters in Moscow! And by Christmas, Gorbachev resigned live on global satellite TV! Amazing! And, of course, there's far more to the backstory as shared by Der Spiegel's Christian Neef in a joint interview with Gorbachev and his piece The Gorbachev Files: Secret Papers Reveal Truth Behind Soviet Collapse. In any case, the saddest thing about all this is that 70 years of pervasive and pernicious Communist dictatorship has been difficult to undo and the subsequent two decades has been extraordinarily disruptive for the common citizenry. Perhaps in another decade or so Russians will finally achieve their rightful measure of prosperity. The Guardianspotlights what happened with the former elements of the Soviet empire...
"White House and congressional negotiators, hunting for savings in the federal budget, recently came upon a juicy target: a 387-acre tract of land in the heart of ritzy West Los Angeles. It could be worth billions. [...] The government could raise $12 billion by selling unneeded federal land, with as much as $5 billion coming from this one Los Angeles property. "Sell it," said Rep. Eric Cantor, the No. 2 House Republican, adding that any business would do the same. No one in the room, from either party, disagreed. [...] Previously undisclosed plans -- to raise funds by offloading valuable government-owned properties -- are up for discussion. Potential target sites run the gamut, from the West Los Angeles plot owned by the Department of Veterans Affairs to a former Social Security Administration office in Flint, Mich. The discussions are evidence of how the budget battle has already had a profound effect on the national debate, even though its final outcome remains murky, by teeing up for slaughter a litany of sacred cows -- from pricey real estate to the federal government's social safety net. [Federal asset wastefulness is legion, and indeed,] the Government Accountability Office reported this year that 24 federal agencies own more than 45,000 under-utilized buildings that cost $1.66 billion annually to operate."
Of course, this one LA land sale is quite controversial, with every ankle-biter special interest group weighing in about why this particular cow is extraordinarily sacred. But this and literally thousands of properties will be part of the inevitable Federal fire sale needed to pay for the Ponzi politics and crony corruption that dominate the modern era. To help you envision the future, there's even a handy online Federal Excess Properties viewer...
Madiba -- Nelson Mandela -- was convicted of treason and sabotage in 1964 with a life sentence. On 11 February 1990 -- two decades ago, today -- he was finally released from prison. Mandela and FW de Klerk shared in winning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1993. And in the 1994 first free all-races elections in South African history, Mandela was elected President. Epic! As his autobiography calls it, a Long Walk to Freedom and to building a new, ever-more prosperous Rainbow Nation. One of my favorite late-1980s songs was "Free Nelson Mandela" -- and it actually happened!
Thanks to colleague José Gómez-Márquez for spotting this WIRED article The Good Enough Revolution: When Cheap and Simple Is Just Fine by Robert Capps. Skype, Kindle, Hulu, MP3, SketchUp, Netbooks, AUVs, MinuteClinics, the Flip -- all examples of low-end innovations blossoming and dominating their respective sectors. Writes Capps...
"The Flip's success stunned the industry, but it shouldn't have. It's just the latest triumph of what might be called Good Enough tech. Cheap, fast, simple tools are suddenly everywhere. We get our breaking news from blogs, we make spotty long-distance calls on Skype, we watch video on small computer screens rather than TVs, and more and more of us are carrying around dinky, low-power netbook computers that are just good enough to meet our surfing and emailing needs. The low end has never been riding higher. So what happened? Well, in short, technology happened. The world has sped up, become more connected and a whole lot busier. As a result, what consumers want from the products and services they buy is fundamentally changing. We now favor flexibility over high fidelity, convenience over features, quick and dirty over slow and polished. Having it here and now is more important than having it perfect. These changes run so deep and wide, they're actually altering what we mean when we describe a product as "high-quality." And it's happening everywhere. As more sectors connect to the digital world, from medicine to the military, they too are seeing the rise of Good Enough tools like the Flip. Suddenly what seemed perfect is anything but, and products that appear mediocre at first glance are often the perfect fit."
MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition, Enterprise Forum Global, Enterprise Forum of Cambridge, Muddy Charles Pub, African Business Club, Sloan Entrepreneurs for International Development, Global Startup Workshop, Sustainability@MIT, TechLink, Making Progress, HighTechFever.tv, MIT Innovation Tours
