Date archives "June 2008"

There can be no evolution of technology without evolution of consciousness

In the last few days I have had the occasion to explore and communicate with Rich Carlson, who is part of team maintaining a very high quality website on Science, Culture, and Integral Yoga, which brings informed ‘postmodern’ reconstructions of the integral theory of Aurobindo. (see as an example, his masterly treatment of Ken Wilber… Continue reading

Announcement: Call for Papers: Free Software and Beyond: The World of Peer Production

Call for Contribution to the 4th Oekonux Conference (in collaboration with P2P Foundation) Invitation: During the past decade the phenomenon of Free Software has become successful and well-known. It is still amazing how in the realm of software the creativity of so many volunteers leads to products which are useful for the whole mankind. In… Continue reading

Raoul Victor: P2P in the material world (2): how would a P2P society look like

We continue serializing Raoul Victor’s reply to an Oekonux text by the ‘two Stefan’s” Today, Raoul Victor asks: Can we imagine what could be peer material production? Raoul Victor: Part 3 of the text reads: “Today it is hard to see how material production can be organized according to the logic of information goods… It… Continue reading

Market economy and peer economy: talking about sustainability

I start publishing parts of the paper “Laser Theory and Peer to Peer”. Although that it carries considerable flaws, I hope that you will also find some interesting seeds of thought in it. Biello [2007] admonishes of the danger that the planet Earth cannot support the demands humanity is placing on it, as the environmental… Continue reading

Raoul Victor: P2P in the material world (1): true vs. false rivalry

Raoul Victor has written a long reply to a theoretical text (draft) by Stefan Merten and Stefan Meretz on peer production and its potential to become embedded not just in the production of informational goods, but as the dominant system for material production as well. We are serializing this reply in three parts. Raoul Victor:… Continue reading

Book ofthe Week: Developing a Mediacology for a Media Permaculture

How should we approach literacy in a digital age? For Antonio Lopez, it’s not just about using new types of media, but recognizing the different ways our brain deals with information, and that this is media-dependent but also inserted into the larger ecologies of our life, which must be sustainable. Hence the link between the… Continue reading

Video: Bank of Common Knowledge – knowledge generation and transmission among citizens

I discovered this scintillating project on the WMMNA blog by Regine Debatty, which provides an overview of sensitive and promising practices emerging from Platoniq‘s work with volunteers in Spain. Burn Station “The Barcelona-based group Platoniq (aka Susana Noguero, Oliver Schulbaum, Ignacio García and Joan Villa Puig) gained world fame a few years ago when they… Continue reading

Xavier Comtesse on Value Chain 2.0

“When customers are no longer in a passive or self-service mode, but have become active — i.e., operating in a do-it-yourself, co-design or co-creative mode –, the traditional value chain of Michael Porter is no longer effective.” Introduction: Swiss “P2P Business” thinker Xavier Comtesse, whose modelling efforts on the direct economy we have covered before,… Continue reading

Ernst Lohoff: information goods are not commodities

Translation, then comments, from Stefan Meretz of Oekonux. In `issue 31`_ of the magazine krisis_, Ernst Lohoff published a very interesting article_. Title: “Der Wert des Wissens. Grundlagen einer Politischen Ökonomie des Informationskapitalismus” (“The value of knowledge. Fundamentals of a political economy of the information capitalism”). It discusses the question whether digital information goods are… Continue reading