I strongly recommend this interview with Robert Brenner as a must read for understanding the current crisis. It’s really chockfull of important insights. Robert P. Brenner is director of the Center for Social Theory and Comparative History at UCLA and is interviewed by Seongjin Jeong is professor of economics at Gyeongsang National University, South Korea…. Continue reading
Date archives "February 2009"
The three determinants of openness: access, ownership, participation
The Open ICT for Development wiki has published an essay with a good summary to the question: “What is Openness?” and “What are its determinants”. (see also here for different attempts to answer the same questions) What is Openness? “The term openness, or open, is often applied as a descriptive adjective appended in front of… Continue reading
Public Media 2.0
Jessica Clark Director of the Future of Public Media Project and Pat Aufderheide, Director of the Center for Social Media have written a very well documented report on participatory public media experiments drawing on hundreds of real-life examples of both public broadcasters and public advocacy organisations. Go here for the Executive Summary of the report:… Continue reading
Debating Internet Collectivism (3): towards a non-totalitarian commons?
An expanded concept of sociality as always constituted by this logic of infinite relationality, and including non-human as well as human elements, might serve better here than any conception of either ‘community’ or ‘totality’. Third installment of our debate on internet collectivism, but second part of the essay by Jeremy Gilbert. After his critique of… Continue reading
Open Design and Mass Customization in Architecture: Open Source Building Alliance from MIT
Open models are now famous for being adopted in many fields outside software development, and we can see this as a proof of their importance and a clear sign of their success. One of the most interesting fields where we witness the adoption of Open models is the Design one, where we can find cases… Continue reading
An open source approach to urban planning
Excerpted from a report by Wired, which goes into the details of its development and profiles the maker. Eliot Van Buskirk: “Gorton, whose LimeWire file sharing software for the open-source gnutella network was at the forefront of the P2P revolution nearly a decade ago, is taking profits earned as a software mogul and spinning them… Continue reading
Debating Internet Collectivism (2): Jeremy Gilbert on going beyond fundamentalist individualism and collectivism
This text is a little more philosophically grounded and more difficult to read than yesterday’s contribution on the topic by Cathy Fitzpatrick, but well worth the effort. Unlike Cathy’s contribution, it does not deal directly with internet collectivism, but provides a broader context to it, by reviewing and critiquing concepts of individualism and community, positing… Continue reading
Can distributed renewable energy solve the energy crisis, right now???
in real terms, even when you factor in all of those costs, solar power is likely to produce power at about half the cost of the cheapest coal-fired power plants Nanosolar, Konarka, and the dozens of other solar power outfits who are pushing the price of solar down, down, down below the price of coal… Continue reading
What really happened to the bike-sharing program in Paris
A recent story by the BBC suggested the Velib experience in Paris was doing badly because of vandalism, suggesting a modern day Tragedy of the Commons. But WorldChanging’s Ben Fried sets the story straight, an excerpt: “If you’ve read this BBC story currently making the rounds, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Vélib, Paris’s wildly… Continue reading
Debating Internet Collectivism: Cathy Fitzpatrick
In the next few days, I want to counterpose some approaches to the tension between individualism and collectivity, in the new types of relationality that I monitoring in our specialized wiki section as well as a special Delicious tag dedicated to P2P-Intersubjectity. Today, we present what I would guess is a more neoliberal or neoconservative… Continue reading
Is a digital commons sustainable without corporate support?
Marc Fawzi argues that large projects clearly are not sustainable without such support: Marc Fawzi: “In any “sharing” system, if the amount of demand exceeds supply, i.e. if there are more leechers than seeders or if certain leechers hog resources, the system will eventually run aground. That is why BitTorrent sharing sites enforce what is… Continue reading
Bitcoin: new open source P2P e-cash system
Satoshi Nakamoto has developed a new open source P2P e-cash system called Bitcoin. He writes: It’s completely decentralized, with no central server or trusted parties, because everything is based on crypto proof instead of trust. “The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that’s required to make it work. The central bank must… Continue reading
Towards zero-configuration p2p clouds
Web 2.0 is P2P (in a social sense), done with Web 1.0 tools and old infrastructure. Against the inane and one-sided conceptions peddled by some that the “internet is dead” and no longer a pure peer to peer network (which it never was!), here is a rather more insightful article (from ReadWrite Web) that correctly… Continue reading
Only (democratic and green) cities can save us from climate catastrophe
Essay: Who Will Build the Ark? The Utopian Imperative in an Age of Catastrophe by Mike Davis in Telepolis This is one of the most riveting and interesting essays I have read in a long while. I strongly recommend it as a indispensable must-read. This essay by Mike Davis has two parts. In the first,… Continue reading
Obama’s inauguration was the first ‘crowd-curated’ event in history
… or so says Harry Gayner in Contagious magazine. (This article appeared in the Contagous newsletter on February 10th, 2009.) Some excerpts: Harry Gayner: “Barack Obama’s presidential inauguration was the first ‘crowd-curated’ media event in history. Understanding how crowd-curation works may help us to be better citizens, and even better marketers. And that was what… Continue reading
Unequal exchange of labor: at the heart of the mutualist argument
We regularly engage in dialogue with Kevin Carson, whose mutualist approach I find very interesting, in particular because it suggest a reconciliation between the market and peer to peer principles. I found this contribution in a recent email discussion and find that it represents well the specific framework of that tradition, which basically argues that… Continue reading