Date archives "February 2007"

Book of the Week: Adam Arvidsson on Ethics and the General Intellect, 3

We continue the pre-publication of Adam Arvidsson’s second chapter of The Ethical Economy. In this excerpt, Adam discusses the concept of the General Intellect, which he also defines here. Excerpt: Indeed, the main productive advance of capitalism, for Marx, and for Adam Smith before him, was that it makes possible new forms of productive cooperation…. Continue reading

Book of the Week: Adam Arvidsson on Ethics and the General Intellect, 2

We continue the pre-publication of Adam Arvidsson’s second chapter of The Ethical Economy. Today, Adam discusses Ethics and capital ‘Ethics’ derives form the Greek which can mean both ‘habit’ (from etomai to use to ..) and ‘character’ mood or, affective state (as in o miaron eton kai gynaikos ysteron- the terrible character that rests in… Continue reading

Ludocapitalism and artificial scarcity in gaming worlds

The following is a long quote from an excellent essay by Steven Shapiro, which starts as a review of the new book by Julian Dibbel, Play Money, in which he combines an analysis of gaming economics with extensive real life experiences in the various game metaverses. Shapiro’s essay draws on Dibbel and adds a fascinating… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Adam Arvidsson on Ethics and the General Intellect, 1

This is the second chapter of Adam Arvidsson’s new book draft on the Ethical Economy, a follow-up on our earlier publication of the first chapter. We strongly recommend it as Adam has a thorough understanding of both peer production and the market. Introduction For quite some time now there has been a strongly developing interest… Continue reading

Supporting the reasonable proposals of the Pirate Party

I find the proposals of the Pirate Party, to be eminently reasonable and worth supporting. Thanks for reading them carefully! Proposal 1: Reform of copyright law The official aim of the copyright system has always been to find a balance between the interests of publishers and consumers, in order to promote culture being created and… Continue reading

Online Consumer Advocacy is making a big impact

Slashdot reports on an overview article in The UK-based Independent newspaper, which lists a number of important cases where internet-enabled consumers undertook disruptive and winning actions against what they saw as corporate abuse. Slashdot writes: ‘Consumer militancy’ is becoming ever more common, as individuals join forces on the internet to fight back against the state… Continue reading

The Future Of Open Business

[via OpenBusinessModels WikiHive blog] Intro Open Business.cc blog reports about a Time Magazine article titled “Getting Rich Off Those Who Work For Free”. The Time article is about the GiftEconomy: People who are creating OpenSource Software on a volunteer basis People who are creating content for OpenContent publications, like Wikipedia People who’s activity is the… Continue reading

Urban development: nurturing health, happiness, and wellbeing in cities

‘Placemaking‘ brings back life to urban centers, removing cars, and creating cultural capital, preserving memories and places for people to meet each other. The Project for Public Spaces operate using a bottom-up consultative approach. An example might be, find an under-performing city center, go talk to all the locals, capture visions and ideas for how… Continue reading

Virtual worlds and Second Life as environment for political activism

The most successfull metaverse, Second Life, continues to stir the passions, after a series of critical articles questioning the number of participants, its very high energy usage (an avatar has a very large carbon footprint), and its commercial implications. Nevertheless, many pioneering participants, such as Joshua Levy who shared his experiences at the IDC mailing… Continue reading

How many economies and how do they inter-relate?

Here’s a summary of Community-Currency advocate John Rogers, who distinguishes four economies. After quoting him, I want to use the opportunity to put forward a slightly different version. John Rogers: The biggest picture we can imagine is one of Four Economies. At the bottom, underpinning everything else, the Natural Economy – planet earth with its… Continue reading

Why community currencies and LETS are not working

I devote a lot of pages in our P2P Foundation wiki to the issue of monetary reform. In the macro-economic sense, we have a scarcity-based monetary system that leaves five billion people largely outside its benefits, and as people like Bernard Lietaer have shown, it is possible to conceive of sufficiency-based monetary systems where individuals… Continue reading

Peer Production and intrinsic motivation

Why is it that in so many cases, peer production projects turn out the winners in the asymmetric competition with for-profit companies? One of the reasons given is of the availability of a large source of unpaid volunteers, and another reason is that peer production is directly motivated by use value, and therefore, there is… Continue reading