Lakeview School Sit-In, Oakland.

This is a great video made by a student at Lakeview Sit In, Oakland. The school was closed down, so the community re-opened it. So the police arrived and closed that down. This is a childs documentary. Powerful stuff. You can follow them on Twitter. There’s also some more video on Vimeo and community activism on Facebook where you can get involved. “Education should be free – not cuts, no fees” being the chant. The police show up to shut it down about 9.20 – as is the current status of the school. It’s a great video – and just goes to show how media-aware the community is – and how much they want their school to stay open. If you so choose, watch the video or highlight it via your network layers.

Published on Jan 7, 2013

The footage and photographs in this video were shot by Myles Boyd, one of the students at the People’s School for Public Education, at the Lakeview School Sit-In, located in Oakland California, on July 3, 2012, in the hours after the early morning police raid.

The Lakeview Sit-In was held at Lakeview Elementary school from June 15th-July 3rd, 2012, and was not only a sit-in, but also ran as a summer school program. The People’s School For Public Education (the free summer school program provided by volunteers) continued for a few weeks after the raid in the park across the street.

Hat-Top to Political Fail Blog.

No Clean Feed 2

The digital-president Rudd has once again got the social movement up in arms over the National Filter announcement today.

The shadow minister is not exactly oppositional to the idea. In a statement Smith said the Coalition “supports measures to protect children from inappropriate internet content” and that “appropriate adult supervision and guidance should be front and centre of all online safety efforts”. Well he would say that, it’s basically the law.

A trial conducted by Enex Testlab earlier this year with a handful of ISPs resulted in a report also released today. Internet Service Providers (ISP) may also be offered incentives to go beyond the mandatory blocks. One report about the ‘over-blocking‘ suggests that the government is ignoring key recommendations. The Christian lobby of course want even more filtration. Smashing keyboards and re-instating scribes seemingly on the agenda.

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you.”  Friedrich Nietzsche

Perhaps the best way to experience this is to look at a twitter search using a real time visual tracker. Huh? Just click here to see what we are saying about the plan to filter Australian content by the government.

My take on it is that there are so many lobby groups and intersections; filtration of content is key to risk-managing the long term legacy of the digital-president. No one ever went online to find Utopia and indeed much of the internet’s phishing and criminal activity was perpetuated from geographical locations that supposedly had or have tight control over it’s citizens. We are not facing a dystopia from cyberspace either — despite the endless flow of mainstream media feeding ignorance.

The protagonists of cyberpunk fiction are almost invariably street punks, cyberspace hackers, black market techies, mercenaries and their likes. They perform their dubious skills in the greyzones of this new world, this witch-broth of commercialisation, technologisation and globalisation gone wretched

It seems that the government, like many organisations is saving us from this fiction. Worlds imagined by writers such as Gibson or movies such as Blade Runner. In reality, we are chatting, shopping and playing games … our biggest crime is that we are simply not interested in much of what goes on in the name of governance. We are hard to predict and hard to herd now we have Facebook.

Clay Burrell wrote about social intelligence today, and why grades and current assessment methods are increasingly unrepresentative of a persons worth. It is well worth reading in the context of the social limitations. We are obviously less and less interested in listening and commenting through the varicose veins of old media. #nocleanfeed is just a movement of ordinary people who actually believe that we are able to make our own decisions, and that the laws are already there to deal with online content. Remember the concessions to porn and gambling Howard did to get the GST a decade before.

Filtration pushes content to ‘sanctioned’ outlets — and that is not good for speed or access. Bottom line — if you are thinking about or running a filter — you’re brain-missing to think we can’t beat it.