My blogs

A Democracia de Comunicação

Complexity Revolution

About me

Introduction	I am a political scientist who advocates democratization at all levels.
Interests	This blog is part of a continuing intellectual odyssey that began for me after living in Brazil under a military dictatorship (1968-1971). Toward the end of my stay in the country, I concluded that a focus on information control by the dictatorship was the best way to understand the draconian politics I had witnessed. Back in the U.S, I sought to understand the political ramifications of information and stumbled across Claude Shannon’s definition of information as negative entropy. I found an uncanny resonance in the notion that information suppression in Brazil had produced a sort of “politics of entropy” and pursued this idea in a master’s program at Stanford in the mid-1970s. In a 1977 essay I wrote that “…dictatorship can be described as the politics of the probable or the politics of entropy and democracy as the politics of the improbable or the politics of negative entropy. Because democratic and dictatorial systems are in these terms respectively analogous to open and closed thermodynamic systems, we may begin to speculate about the possible future development of a science of political thermodynamics”. As I became involved in the more tangible technological side of information, I put this kind of theoretical speculation on the back burners. I put out Reset, a newsletter on activist computing (1982-1989). I co-founded the Computers for Social Change and Community Organizing conferences held in New York City (1986-1996). Along the way, I picked up a Ph.D. in political science (CUNY, 1995). In recent times, I decided to write a sequel to my 1977 essay. It has drawn me into the ideas of Ilya Prigogine, Fritjof Capra, Edgar Morin, Immanuel Wallerstein and a good many other complexity thinkers. The result is a combination of complexity theory and political power theory, what I call of complexity theory of power. This blog is one way I am exploring this line of thought.

Introduction

I am a political scientist who advocates democratization at all levels.

Interests

This blog is part of a continuing intellectual odyssey that began for me after living in Brazil under a military dictatorship (1968-1971). Toward the end of my stay in the country, I concluded that a focus on information control by the dictatorship was the best way to understand the draconian politics I had witnessed. Back in the U.S, I sought to understand the political ramifications of information and stumbled across Claude Shannon’s definition of information as negative entropy. I found an uncanny resonance in the notion that information suppression in Brazil had produced a sort of “politics of entropy” and pursued this idea in a master’s program at Stanford in the mid-1970s. In a 1977 essay I wrote that “…dictatorship can be described as the politics of the probable or the politics of entropy and democracy as the politics of the improbable or the politics of negative entropy. Because democratic and dictatorial systems are in these terms respectively analogous to open and closed thermodynamic systems, we may begin to speculate about the possible future development of a science of political thermodynamics”. As I became involved in the more tangible technological side of information, I put this kind of theoretical speculation on the back burners. I put out Reset, a newsletter on activist computing (1982-1989). I co-founded the Computers for Social Change and Community Organizing conferences held in New York City (1986-1996). Along the way, I picked up a Ph.D. in political science (CUNY, 1995). In recent times, I decided to write a sequel to my 1977 essay. It has drawn me into the ideas of Ilya Prigogine, Fritjof Capra, Edgar Morin, Immanuel Wallerstein and a good many other complexity thinkers. The result is a combination of complexity theory and political power theory, what I call of complexity theory of power. This blog is one way I am exploring this line of thought.