Very interesting interview with John Thackara and Sunil Abraham in Cluster magazine, reprinted at the Doors of Perception site. We excerpt a few of the questions and answers that create the framework for thinking about the topic, but there’s a lot more, such as a discussion on ‘speed vs. slowth’, the use of alternative monetary… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2008"
Yihong-Ding on the market for low quality vs. high quality mind assets
This is Yihong-Ding’s response to some of our earlier remarks about the measurability of mind assets. Yihong-Ding: Thank you for blogging my post and raising these questions. Web evolution is an interesting, but also very important issue that is still less of well study until now. I expect that my thoughts may bring a few… Continue reading
The case for the efficiency of localized production, even for large-scale industrial production
Kevin Carson has a very interesting, and substantive book review of: William Waddell and Norman Bodek in Rebirth of American Industry: A Study of Lean Management (Vancouver, WA: PCS Press, 2005). These authors blame Corporate America’s mismanagement on “the imposition of the DuPont definition of profit, the Sloan management method, and the Brown accounting method… Continue reading
Obama’s user-generated election campaign
A very interesting ‘on the ground’ investigation in The Atlantic (by Joshua Green) of how the Obama campaign generated unprecedented amounts of campaign money from a very large pool of small donors. The article stresses several factors: 1) the success of Obama of generating a support network in Silicon Valley, that brought new ideas and… Continue reading
Estonia: 50,000 citizens clean up city in a day
Listening to this story makes me think of its opposing umbra, Naples. Problem with Naples though is the lack of waste treatment centres, something you could not build in a day, nevertheless… “When Estonians regained independence from the former Soviet Union in 1991 they not only acquired new political freedoms, they inherited a mass of… Continue reading
Social networking, constant monitoring, and the death of time
Excerpts from a stimulating thoughtpiece by Gavin Clabaugh. After introducing the joint aggregating and disaggregating effects of the internet, Gavin focuses on what he calls the third force. Here’s how he introduces it: “The third force is all about the network and it’s all about the collapse of time. It’s all about a new network… Continue reading
Reprap Reality Check
Via Bruce Perens, an excerpt from Technocrat: “RepRap is an attempt to create a Fused Deposition Modeling engine, in other words a “3-D printer”, that can make solid objects. Its designs are in Open Source. The design is getting to the point that a prototype unit can begin to replicate some of its own components…. Continue reading
Report about P2P foundation in Greece
During last months, we experimented with different projects in P2P foundation in Greece, with the ambition to spread the message of this new emerging civilization. Apart from the campaign for emancipation of the ERT archive, a campaign-platform which due to some technical incapacity is still under construction, the “P2P in a nutshell”, created by Mauro… Continue reading
The ‘green’ post-industrial transformation of America’s rustbelt cities
Via the Rustbelt Intellectual blog: “In the postindustrial era, nature is reclaiming parts of nearly every old Rustbelt city. Deer and foxes inhabit Philadelphia’s vast Fairmount Park system. And scrubby lots are reverting to grass and weeds. Nature’s reclamation of the city isn’t quite as dramatic in the City of Brotherly Love as it is… Continue reading
Video: Stirring up education with the Edupunk Manifesto
Video version of the Edupunk Manifesto. More info here.
Douglas Rushkoff on the dangers and opportunities of the Obama brand
Very interesting political analysis by Douglas Rushkoff, a commentator who almost never gets it wrong in my book. Read the whole commentary, which starts with an evaluation of transpartisan politics, how Obama did already so much more than the Dean campaign on the internet, BUT, still shows substantial limitations. I’m limiting my excerpts to what… Continue reading
Kevin Carson reciprocity in an (un)free market (2): the problem of artificial scarcity
We continue the publication of Kevin Carson’s critique of capitalism from a ‘free market’ perspective. Here, in the last of the two-parter, he outlines what reciprocity can mean under unfree conditions. Kevin Carson: “Privilege–coercion–creates a zero-sum situation in which one party benefits at the expense of the other. There is a symmetrical relationship between one… Continue reading
Freedom Hardware – or – Hardware Freedom
Pure information such as ideas, plans, intellect, software, video, audio, genetics, or any design of any kind is not rivalrous, so does not need owners. But each copy must be “hosted” by the rivalrous land and capital needed to store, copy and express it. It is this inescapable connection to the physical world that makes… Continue reading
Video: Marcin Jakubowski – Progress at the Factor E Farm
Marcin Jakubowski: “Along the lines of Global Swadeshi, Unplugged Lifestyle, neosubsistence, Global Village Construction Set, Buying out at the Bottom – here is our first video to record the history of changes at Factor e Farm. This change is continuous. You may have seen this post on how our place has evolved from a plain… Continue reading
The measurement of mind assets
Yihong-Ding has a great post (as usual) on web evolution, in which he makes the following claim about the measurement of mind assets: “By presenting mind in Web resources, we are able to objectively measure its value as if we measure the value of capital asset. As we know, there is a large variety of… Continue reading
Everything is hackable: the economy, politics, …
Stimulating intervention by Umair Haque: Excerpt from a longer article which also includes references to the history of hacking: “Why is everything hackable today? Because in the edgeconomy, the universe of the economically possible has exploded: resources are more and more accessible. And if you can get your hands on it, you can hack it…. Continue reading