“I don’t want to say we’re making our own Facebook. But, we’re making our own Facebook, ” said Ed Knutson, a web and mobile app developer who joined a team of activist-geeks redesigning social networking for the era of global protest.
They hope the technology they are developing can go well beyond Occupy Wall Street to help establish more distributed social networks, better online business collaboration and perhaps even add to the long-dreamed-of semantic web — an internet made not of messy text, but one unified by underlying meta-data that computers can easily parse.
The impetus is understandable. Social media helped pull together protesters around the globe in 2010 and 2011. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak so feared Twitter and Facebook that he shut down Egypt’s internet service. A YouTube video posted in the name of Anonymous propelled Occupy Wall Street from an insider meme to national news. And top-trending Twitter hashtags turned Occupy from a ho-hum rally on Sept. 17 into a national and even international movement.
Now it’s time for activists to move beyond other people’s social networks and build their own, according to Knutson. “We don’t want to trust Facebook with private messages among activists, ” he said.Read the rest at Wired
Occupy Geeks Are Building a Facebook for the 99%
This type of innovation is going to have huge implications for the global economy in the near future. I think that alternative digital money is coming quicker than many people think. The savvy people already realize that control of money by the TPTB is one of their chief and most effective lever of power. There is a push developing to circumvent traditional markets and state money.
Oh, did I forget to mention that geeks are now at work building an alternative internet that governments cannot shut down easily or monitor at will.
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