Geert Lovink has conducted an extensive and interesting interview with the author of the book “Networking Futures“,which he has strongly recommended in the past. The interview (and the book) has lots of interesting examinations of alterglobalization movements like the Peoples’ Global Action or Indymedia, focusing on their ‘networked’ aspects. Below, to give you a taste:… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2008"
Howard Rheingold’s Invitation to the new Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory
Significant new p2p-learning initiative from Howard Rheingold: “Welcome to the Social Media Classroom and Collaboratory. It’s all free, as in both “freedom of speech” and “almost totally free beer.” We invite you to build on what we’ve started to create more free value. The Social Media Classroom (we’ll call it SMC) includes a free and… Continue reading
LittleShoot – Open Source P2P File Sharing
You can now publish any file you would like to share on LittleShoot. The application, which works on both Windows and Mac, is the brainchild of Adam Fisk, former lead developer at LimeWire and a team of volunteers. LittleShoot is open source and it works through whatever browser you are using. The program recently came… Continue reading
A critique of conservative techno-libertarianism
Geert Lovink: How can we raise, and organize a new generation of technology-aware research that have the guts, and the creativity, to design a comprehensive field of critical concepts that can be implemented into code? We have to stop understanding the Internet, and start to shape it. Geert Lovink has written a stimulating review of… Continue reading
A structured brainstorming session on Civilisation 2.0
My thesis is that no matter if we do “P2P everything”, although a massive evolution in its own right, and a quantum leap forward, this will still be insufficient for us to save the human species for tremendous suffering. I also believe that we can be spared from the worst of the negative effects of… Continue reading
The other meltdown: climate change
Via Starhawk: Meltdown Strategies: Financial Disaster and Climate Change Starhawk writes: “While the financial markets have been melting down around us, another sort of meltdown has been occurring, one even more frightening and dangerous. Climate change has been progressing, more quickly than anticipated, fueled even more rapidly by methane bubbles released from a warming Arctic… Continue reading
Raoul Victor: on the role of money in the transition to a peer society (2)
This a continuation of part one here. It is part of an ongoing debate on the Oekonux mailing list. Raoul Victor: In order to try to understand the possible relations between peer-production and money, I have focused on that specific moment of the transition from capitalism to a fully-developed “peer-society, (4th step in the 5-Step… Continue reading
Update: Spanish-language material on Peer to Peer
Minerva magazine, after a visit to Madrid’s Circulo del Bella Artes last April, has published two articles on peer to peer: * El P2P: ¿más allá del capitalismo? Entrevista con Michel Bauwens. (by Igor Sádaba) *La red social y sus contratos sociales. Apuntes sobre el antagonismo en el capitalismo netárquico This complements the translation of… Continue reading
The social basis of McCain
Via Mediacology. Watch this in amazement: (the good news is that this portends the crisis of the Republican Party)
Towards a post-industrial ‘p2p’ aesthetics based on modularity
A contribution by Eric Hunting: “There aren’t a lot of good media-based models of a Post-Industrial culture and those that do exist tend to be set in a pretty depressing context. (James Howard Kunstler’s World Made By Hand, for instance) But I also think that the upper-classes no longer represent a model as they once… Continue reading
Participatory consultation on the future of Melbourne
Via Mark Elliot: “As part of One Web Day, the City of Melbourne held a breakfast event to share the experiences of the participatory consultation process used to develop the Future Melbourne Community Plan. Dr Mark Elliott (Collabforge) gives a presentation (part 2) covering how the City of Melbourne used a wiki-based collaboration environment to… Continue reading
The leapfrogging potential of open design
A contribution by Eric Hunting: “We are discussing a chess game with an extremely large number of different pieces. There are no artifacts or systems which have only one possible design and the nature of this design determines the fabrication methods and thus the potential minimum of scale of production facility and the nature of… Continue reading
Celebrating free culture and music: the What CD
One of the things we always wanted to do on this blog, but have to little time to realize, is to celebrate the expressions of the new culture of open and collaborative movies and music. For movies and documentaries, see our selections in our Webcast directory. And for music, you can start with The What… Continue reading
What´s cooking in Venezuela?
The antics and caudillistic temptations of their leader aside, something important and significant is happening at the grassroots level in Venezuela. Here are some examples, from Venezuela Analysis. 1. Localizing the economy “Farmers, industrial workers, community councils, students, local and national government officials, and international experts converged in an economic forum titled “Local Alternatives to… Continue reading
Robin Good: Is Web 2.0 Really Democratic?
Robin Good launches a debate on this important topic. Here’s the introduction: “Web 2.0 has revolutionized the panorama of the information society: users have become information producers and the new web platforms have become relationship venues where new knowledge and ideas emerge. Also the new tools of social networking, social tagging, wikis and blogs enable… Continue reading
Locabucks against the liquidity trap
The Peak Energy blog has a good article about the use of local currencies in the context of the current liquidity crisis. It gives some case studies and the theoretical background. Please read it here. What I didn’t encounter yet was the ecological rationale for using depreciating local currencies, sourced from Bernard Lietaer: “The most… Continue reading