Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society
* Book: From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond: The Quest for Identity and Autonomy in a Digital Society. Ed. by John Henry Clippinger and David Bollier. ID3, 2014
URL = https://idcubed.org/bitcoin-burning-man-beyond
Anthology probes the rise of digital currencies, self-organized governance and secure online identity.
Description
From the official announcement:
"A collection of fifteen essays that explores a new generation of digital technologies that are re-imagining the very foundations of identity, governance, trust and social organization. The fifteen essays of the book stake out the foundations of a new future – a future of open Web standards and data commons, a society of decentralized autonomous organizations, and a world of trustworthy digital currencies and self-organized and expressive communities like Burning Man. A recurrent theme in all of the essays is the huge, untapped potential for self-organized, distributed governance on open platforms.
The book was edited by Dr. John H. Clippinger, cofounder and executive director of ID3, and David Bollier, an Editor at ID3 who is also an author, blogger and scholar who studies the commons. The book is published by ID3 in association with Off the Common Books, and is available in print and ebook formats from Amazon.com and Off the Common Books.
Among the contributors to From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond are Alex “Sandy” Pentland of the M.I.T. Human Dynamics Laboratory; Dr. Clippinger; former FCC Chairman Reed E. Hundt; long-time IBM strategist Irving Wladawksy-Berger; Silicon Valley entrepreneur Peter Hirshberg; monetary system expert Bernard Lietaer; journalist and author Jonathan Ledgard; and H-Farm cofounder Maurizio Rossi.
The book explores such cutting-edge concepts as evolvable digital contracts that could supplant conventional legal agreements; smartphone currencies that could help Africans meet their economic needs more effective; the growth of the commodity-backed Ven currency; and new types of “solar currencies” that borrow techniques from Bitcoin to enable more efficient, cost-effective solar generation and sharing by homeowners.
A chapter on the 28-year history of Burning Man, the week-long encampment in the Nevada desert, traces the arc of experimentation and innovation in large communities devising new forms of self-governance.
In addition to explorations of self-governance, From Bitcoin to Burning Man and Beyond introduces the path-breaking software platform that ID3 has developed called "Open Mustard Seed," or OMS. The just-released open source program enables the rise of new types of trusted, self-healing digital institutions on open networks, which in turn will make possible new sorts of privacy-friendly social ecosystems."