Futurismic’s regular columnist Jamais Cascio recently gave a talk at the International Association for Public Participation conference in Montreal, Canada, and has now made the transcript and slides available to the general public on his blog. In it he discusses the rise of a new participatory global culture which is “technology-enabled, not technology-focused”, covering topics such as open source, sousveillance and the advantages of networks over hierarchies. Go and read why he believes that these phenomena could empower real progress in our civilisation.

It appears to be a foregone conclusion that we’ll be building more nuclear reactors over the next few decades. However, while they are considered to be ecologically sound they may run into problems of economics in the near future – uranium is a rare substance to start with, and it’s not getting any cheaper. A potential solution to this problem (and others) is the Molten Salt Reactor concept – as the name implies, it would use molten salt as a coolant for the reaction chamber, and could use the safer and more abundant element thorium as a fuel.

Second Life has been witness to a furore of protest over the last day or so, providing an interesting insight into intellectual property issues in a digital world. An in-world script called ‘CopyBot’ was doing the rounds, making it possible for any user to exactly duplicate an item from another’s inventory. Given that a number of people make a (meatspace) living by selling their SL designs, this provoked outcry and protests until developers Linden Labs announced that using CopyBot would be considered a TOS breach. What is most interesting is the diversity of attitudes among residents regarding the situation, as indicated by this comment thread.

Wouldn’t it be excellent if we could get rid of the countless proprietary chargers that our gadgets come with, in favour of one simple device that could charge them all without the need for plugs and cables? Of course it would, which means that an MIT boffin is on to a winner if he can get his ‘evanescent coupling‘ idea off the ground.

In the light of recent problems with electronic voting machines, you’d think that promoting the idea of voting over the internet would be the last thing on anyone’s mind. However, there is a small minority of political futurists who think that is exactly the way the democratic world should be heading – as they say, the technology is already in place (with computers and set-top boxes in almost every home) and has been tested successfully in a number of real-world situations. There are understandable objections from the security experts, and it would be madness to roll out such a system before you made it bullet-proof and verifiable. But as our world becomes increasingly wired, a digital implementation of the democratic process seems an eventual inevitability – reality TV is laying the foundations right now.