John Robb presents a narrative in 3 moments: 1. Terrorist-criminal networks, their systempunkt open source warfare strategies 2. Failed states through spectrums of security and care that favour the rich and orphan the population 3. Self-reliant counter-reactions of cities and local communities using P2P formats It is really important to put the Global Guerillas feed… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2007"
Is there a future for open search? (about the Quaero conference)
An important conference will be held in the Netherlands at the end of September, focusing on the political aspects of internet searching and its dominance by private actors. The organizers write that: Quaero is the name of a consortium of technology firms and research labs working together on multimedia and web search projects. It is… Continue reading
Why we need equity-based open licenses
Open licenses leave something important out, nl. equity in the economic process, argues Patrick Godeau. The excerpt is part of an ongoing discussion which you find here, and Patrick’s own proposal is called the IANG License. Excerpt: “The IANG approach is somehow to apply the copyleft principle to economy. That is to say, economic contributions… Continue reading
The basic income creates trust
We are republishing an interview with the German work sociologist Gunter Voss. Interview with Gunter Voss [Would an unconditional basic income lead to many doing nothing? No, work sociologist Gunter Voss says. An unconditional basic income would be the basis for a meaningful life of personal responsibility. This interview published in: die tageszeitung, 12/2/2006 is… Continue reading
A festival of openness: join our documentary efforts
Let nobody say we haven’t been working hard at the P2P Foundation! In our concept of the circulation of the common, i.e. how peer production socially reproduces itself, so that it lasts over time, three elements are crucial. 1) the availability of open and free raw material for social cooperation to occur 2) participatory processes… Continue reading
Why paying for non-reciprocal peer production is a really bad idea
The idea of a separation of the ethical economy of free sharing and cooperation, from the monetized economy, is really a crucial point of view of peer to peer theory. Of course that does not mean we do not want creative people and voluntary contributors to make a living, but only that this is a… Continue reading
Ripples in the Open Money Sphere
Ryan Fugger is making continued progress with his Ripple and RipplePay initiatives, and I asked him for a review of recent developments. Ryan Fugger: “I launched Ripplepay.com a year and a half ago, I have let it evolve on its own as much as possible in order to focus on the main goal of the… Continue reading
Peer to peer and the feudal transition
In this thought capsule, inspired by the reading of the very stimulating book Deep History by David Laibman, I’m not going to claim, as others have done, that we are going to evolve to some kind of neo-medievalism, or a new period of dark ages. But rather, that there are some interesting similarities between the… Continue reading
Video: Exploiting disasters for globalism: The Shock Doctrine
(Click on the link if you don’t see video within your RSS reader) via Boing Boing
Responding to Tony Judge on the dark side of peer to peer
Some time ago, we published some critical remarks by Anthony Judge , about the dark side of peer to peer. The general feel of the different arguments presented is that peer to peer theory inadequately represents the dark side of peer to peer processes, so I want to address that issue first. I believe that… Continue reading
The call for open social networks is getting louder and louder
A few weeks ago, the influential Wired magazine called for an open social web, where people do not have to re-enter their friends and relations yet again, and find a way to coordinate their different networks in an open and transparent manner. This is also called the Social Graph problem and consequently there is a… Continue reading
Not really lurking
The phenomenon of lurkers and lurking has been well studied and noticed over the past decade. Other than the observation they exist almost as a norm in certain online communities, the fact that they actually make up the majority of members in online communities is staggering. Katz (1998) and Mason (1999) reported that lurkers make… Continue reading
What does the Skype outage mean for P2P computing?
We asked our resident p2p technology expert, Gwendal Simon, to comment on what the recent Skype outage means for the future of peer to peer computing, as it may be interpreted as a sign of weakness. For added context, check our updated entry on P2P Computing. Please also note this technical detail which suggests the… Continue reading
Bandwidth as P2P currency
Peer-to-peer is frequently associated with illegal downloading, especially music and video. For this purpose, downloading video, peer-to-peer can also be considered as positive for once. What is the case? Research workers of the Technical University of Delft, the Free University of Amsterdam and Harvard’s School of Engineering are working on the development of a video… Continue reading
Bifo: Does connectivity kill sensibility?
The following is a disturbing but very interesting and stimulating essay by Bifo, which however requires you to navigate quite some bit of post-modern jargon. The main thesis is that the current stage of connected capitalism is destroying inter-human sensibility, both in the current generation of western youth, but ominously, the economically-driven mass child abandonment… Continue reading