'Steal from the Capitalists'

"People at this camp don't want fame, they don't even want to be photographed. The majority of us prefer to be ANONYMOUS"

As the Twitter co-creator returns to activism, his fellow hackers question the techniques he brings from Silicon Valley.

11 Nov 2015 14:05 GM

Evan Henshaw-Plath is a coder, activist, anarchist, and a hacker. He is also one of the original developers of Twitter.

Programmers are like digital superheroes. Everybody else gets to use the technology, the reality in which we play, but the programmers get to reshape the rules, the physics of our digital universe. Evan Henshaw-Plath

Henshaw-Plath believes that as a tech activist his role is to promote social justice and he is keen to empower civil society to affect politics through the use of software. He explains how TxTMob, a platform that enabled protesters to send text messages to large groups anonymously, formed the basis of Twitter.

But when he came to the realisation that Twitter was not the world-changing idea he had hoped it would be, he sold his share.

Now bridging the worlds of hackers, activists and Silicon Valley start-ups, he's on a mission: to use the techniques he has learned in the world of lean start-ups to support the technology being developed by activist groups.

The technologies he's trying to promote are all about allowing people to have truly have secure communications, and his attempts to use Silicon Valley techniques provoke resistance from his radical colleagues.

Can Evan convince the activists to steal from the capitalists in the name of efficacy or is that a political compromise too far?

'Steal from the Capitalists' can be seen on Al Jazeera English from November 23 at 2230 GMT

• stories: INTEL and The Birth of Silicon Valley

Credere - to believe!

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Credere

Why 'make money' when you can accumulate wealth on a mega scale simply by extending credit? Whereby each loan itself becomes money in for the bank! Money that previously never even existed before. Prior to the creation of each and numerous debt.

Social Capital and The Flight From Mortality

'Know Yourself'

Love

Creeds and Malcontents

Read the pages of any passionately evangelical atheist, like Dawkins for instance, and the adjectives they use are not 'scientific' by any means.

They betray a profound bitterness and anger, even sense of betrayal.

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what else?

link

The Englightenment

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The Age of Reason

Barbarians At The Gates

Mystery

The Great Mystery.

Under the cover of technological science a new arrogance repeats precisely what it accuses pre-scientific ways of understanding of doing. Only the new tendency is to bring everything low.

sages on the path was right

Caesar's coin

The Real Stories Are The Best

A sense of wonder, a sense of discovery, a need for child-like questioning. Let us imagine a shot of light hits the earth ratcheting heaven-wards our mind. 

The 5th Century BC has been named The Axial Age. 
Around this period, arose global movements having a significant historical impact right up to this day.

• This was the period of Classical Greece when the foundations of Western Civilisation were laid in and around ancient Athens. 
• In the Middle East it was the time of the great prophets of Judaism, helping to forge that great body of spiritual writings which would lay a foundation for the world's three great religions. 
• In the Orient, Confucius walked the earth.  
• In the Indian sub-continent a Prince turned his back on all his inherited wealth and privilege and set out, instead, to discover the meaning of life, at all costs.

Perhaps a 'critical mass' had been achieved in one small corner of the globe for example, which tipped over into a 'tipping point' radiating outwards to saturate the wider collective human sphere of awareness ('consciousness')?

If the human ape emerged 'out of Africa' perhaps more subtly a transmutation, or alchemy, of consciousness subsequently incubated in the Indian Sub-continent?

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