THE CAPITAL AND INFORMATION FLOWS

Capital and information flows

This is the one of the six type of Cyber activism. The community use the internet to destroy or inspire people who funds or donate in certain political movements.  The following are the three main types of net based economic activity: -

1. Networked channels of capital distribution, solicitation, and management by social movements;
2. Computer mediated barter banks and local capital pools and credit unions and collective goods coordinated via the net, and
3. Decentralized P2P media distribution networks.
   
   

Networked channels of capital distribution: Large mainstream movement organizations and NGOs raise funds and coordinate capital through the Internet. Information resources are also extensive on the net including extensive information on foundations and grant making. Databases of movement organizations and contacts enable networking across organizations and coalition building. Emails campaigns are not only used to organize protests they can be used to solicit ongoing donations from members. Employees of established SMOs and unions and ESOP corporations, some of whom act as organizers in more radical social movements, can check their retirement accounts and investments online. Larger activist organizations use wire transfers coordinate by email. These adaptations to the modes of managing capital by the public and social movement sector to the Internet as a confluence and site of contestation and accommodation to capital (sometimes in the life of same person or activity of same organization).   

While new AGMs networks, which are extremely diverse and usually transitory, tend not to   use of bureaucratic organization methods, new groups within and across various AGM networks do use net-based capital flows.      

Computer mediated local capital pools: As co-op sectors and alternative community organizing projects organize, forms of decentralized forms capital sharing and accounting may expand.

Decentralized P2P media distribution networks: This might be seen as a form of alternative media but it is actually a major site for contesting information age capitalism (qua information capital as private property) and forming alternative information distribution networks. The propriety of digital information continues to be challenged by post-Napster peer-2-peer, p2p, distribution networks based on free/liberated software such as Gnuttela, KaZaA, and WinMX. Indeed, the attack on Napster may have been counterproductive to the goal of Media conglomerates to suppress digital piracy and counter culture competition in that the architecture of pirated and alternative noncommercial media distribution is now decentralized, hence much more difficult to control. Decentralized networks dedicated to sharing digital media are probably here to stay, as long as the net is a relatively open system. It should be noted that cultural media can be the carriers for encrypted political messages and were used as such as the use of messages in electronically transferred pornography to other people by the Al Qaeda network. Various alternative media and distribution processes are of course used by a whole range of – from fascist to conservative to progressive to radical – politicized artists and musicians, can serve simultaneously as political organizing venues (political bands and protests/cyber activism go together), online media distribution, and alternative media.

By: Ulaya Sijali A.
BAPRM 42681