Comments on: Tom Slee’s critique of Peers.org as ‘astroturf’: on conflating the interests of sharers and sharing companies

By: between the lines

between the lines — Fri, 13 Sep 2013 19:04:38 +0000

As someone living in Europe, I think Tom is broadly correct about the Euro v USA split. Look at the discourses on lots of topics – all sorts, from vaccination, fluoridation and autonomous / off-grid lifestyles through to attitudes to Bilderbergers, state control and various conspiracy theories, and you will very often find that beliefs held by left-wing people in Europe are held by ultra-right “libertarians” in the US.

What this results in, in this era of internet and global communications, is that Europeans and USAmericans frequently get our wires totally tangled because we think we are after the same goals, we are even using similar language, but underneath all that we are actually on diametrically opposed sides!

A recipe for some disastrous interaction …

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 03:29:38 +0000

The differences will be particulary stark if you live in California, but otherwise, I do believe that the differences between the civic-community and business-venture oriented visions also does exist in Europe. In Europe the latter may be less marked by venture capital but the business logic is there.

Michel

By: Tom Slee

Tom Slee — Wed, 11 Sep 2013 00:17:56 +0000

Thanks for reposting this, and for the Ouishare recollections. I do have a feeling that there is a Euro-North American split, in which community-minded Europeans don’t realize that their partners across the pond are libertarian-minded Americans using similar language. I was at a conference in Manchester called FutureEverything earlier this year, and some open government folks from the Netherlands and the UK were people I felt were looking to build community-focused facilities rather than raise venture capital. Do you think such a split exists? (Exceptions will, of course, be many).