Date archives "February 2008"

Book of the Week: Hacking Capitalism. Part Three: From class struggle to play struggle

We continue our presentation of Johan Soderbergh’s book with a last excerpt about perhaps the key concept of the book: Play Struggle. Johan Soderbergh: “The notion of hackers becoming ‘revolutionaries just for fun’ would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down to… Continue reading

Podcast: Interview with Michel Bauwens, P2P and spirituality

A interview between James Burke and Michel Bauwens on participative spirituality and the relationship of P2P with religion and religious practice. This podcasts clarifies and adds to a recent series of posts including, The next Buddha will be a collective. See related posts below: part 1:Spiritual expression in the peer to peer era part 2:… Continue reading

Charles Leadbeater’s book on mass innovation, We Think, is out!

Announcement from the author: “WE THINK: mass innovation not mass production – is published this week. The book was partly written online and incorporates readers’ comments on a draft released on the web in late 2006. The first three chapters of the finished book can be downloaded from my website, where you can also comment…. Continue reading

Book of the Week: Hacking Capitalism. Part Two: Hacking as a labour movement

Book: Johan Söderberg. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Movement. Routledge, 2007 We continue our presentation with an excerpt on the topic of “Hacking and Capitalism”, which stresses the continuation between the hackers and the labour movement. Johan Soderbergh: “The skirmishes between the hacker movement and corporations and governments have deeper roots… Continue reading

Chris Cook’s critique of Carbon Trading : If you want to keep a donkey healthy, you don’t regulate what comes out of it, but what goes in

From the very beginning of our work at the P2P Foundation, we were in touch with Chris Cook, who has been working on open capital formats, a kind of peer to peer based market reform, which could be enabled by new methods of corporate governance, such as the UK-based Limited Liability Partnerships. I’m must admit… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Hacking Capitalism. Part One: presentation

Book: Johan Söderberg. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Movement. Routledge, 2007 We expressed our enthusiasm for this book before, so we would like to present it more formally here. Below is the short description, followed by the chapter by chapter outline. Short description: “The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement… Continue reading

Marcin Jakubowski: an appeal for global collaboration on open product development.

From an appeal by Marcin Jakubowski, distributed by email: Fellows, I would like to raise the issue of wide collaboration for open source product development. Sam Rose and I have been in a heated discussion regarding collaboration, and how to align a wide range of people to collaborate more deeply. We’d like to break the… Continue reading

Chris Cook on a structure for Market 3.0, part three: Market Corporations

Third and last part of Chris Cook’s propositions for a new market structure: Chris Cook: We have seen how two distinct consortia comprise Market 3.0. How is it possible to link them together into a seamless enterprise with a viable business model? Virtually all markets were until relatively recently run by cartels of intermediaries (i.e…. Continue reading

Erik Davies reviews Steven Vedro’s Digital Dharma

Erik Davies: “Ten years ago, I came out with the first edition of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic and Mysticism in the Information Age, which for its novelty alone still stands as probably the most “important” thing I’ve written. Lots of things have happened in the last decade to the media ecologies I looked at back then,… Continue reading

Chris Cook on a structure for Market 3.0, part two: Regulation 3.0

We continue the exposition of the proposal for a new market structure by Chris Cook, which we started yesterday. Chris Cook: Mutual trust is the glue that binds markets together. Regulation engenders trust, and the setting and enforcement of market standards of behaviour and propriety are the essence of successful regulation. At the dawn of… Continue reading

Drew Endy on the need to open source synthetic biology

From a long in-depth interview at The Edge, with Drew Endy, who is Assistant Professor of Biological Engineering at MIT, and which reviews 30 years of progress in ‘engineering biology’. The start of the conversation has the following significant quote: “the biosecurity framework needs to recognize that it’s not going to be nation-state driven work… Continue reading

Chris Cook on a structure for Market 3.0, part one

Chris Cook on Why Market 3.0?: The first generation of markets — Market 1.0 — was decentralised but disconnected, and ‘market presence’ required the physical presence of buyer and seller, typically in local and regional exchanges. Market 2.0, which has now reached its zenith, is centralised but connected, with market presence through intermediaries such as… Continue reading

Stan Rhodes: 3 fundamental arguments against the continuation of copyright restrictions

Stimulated by a series of sceptical arguments against the full abolition of copyright by Marco Fioretti, the P2P research discussion list debated the issue for a few days. What particularly struck me is the intervention of Stan Rhodes, which I’m reproducing here below. Stan and myself also believe there is an added subjective reality, which… Continue reading