The Committee to Nuke Elysium

The Internet continues to change people’s lives, and lets them connect in new ways, often quicker than companies and governments can respond. Ben Hammersley explained that people with similar interests, cultures and beliefs have more in common than people who live near to each other – what we’ve known as countries – or with our families, and the Internet means they can self-organise. Officials are used to hierarchies (“take the leader out”) not unstructured networks or sheets of people that can instantly reconfigure and change everything from tactics to what they believe in, as we’ve seen with the various protests about tax evasion and student fees in the UK. Ben posited that Governments should spend more time understanding the web – should there be British ambassadors for Wal-Mart and Google rather than the Seychelles? Which has more impact on the UK?