Gilberto Gil at Google Zeitgeist: Viva la Peeracy!

(via Joi Ito)

Gilberto Gil gave a speech the other day at Google Zeitgeist (below) touting the advantages of distributed, peer to peer culture. I am not surprised it's Gil and not Brian Mikkelsen, Gil's danish counterpart, trying to articulate the air du temps of digital culture. To be fair, it's difficult to beat Gil's cool factor..

I met Gil and his team (and did not just drink beer with them), and wish more progressive people worked closer with governments around the world to make them understand digital culture. One thing I do miss, though, in Gil's speech, is the inadequacy of the traditional left / right political spectrum, to capture what is at play:

"Digital Culture initiatives can play a fundamental role in shaking away the inertia of the traditional politics that has secluded society from public life, generating a vacuum of critical political thinking and even producing cynicism, especially in governmental sectors. We need to acknowledge that traditional politics is failing in advancing democracy and social development.
The conversion of the digital technologies, has created around the Internet a totally peaceful revolution. A bottom up unrest, happening everywhere, which I see as a very positive sign of the rising of a non governmental political movement that I believe to be a direct and matured result of cultural and countercultural movements of our most recent history, in their increasing power to influence public policies.

It is the rise of a peer to peer culture. Peeracy!"

Read the full speech here