Via Tino Rizzo: “Let’s complete Anders’s project” is a P2P contest aimed to complete Anders Simonsen’s research on mass culture, consumption, and decadence in post-socialist countries in Europe See: http://www.presstletter.com/articolo.asp?articolo=2044 This will be one of the first experiments in P2P media-art research. I hope you will be proud to take part on it and, therefore,… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2009"
Charter of Knowledge Workers Rights
On May 1, 2009, Precario.org published the following Manifesto: “When knowledge, information and culture become commodities, then knowledge workers are doomed to sink into disownment, weakness and occupational blackmailing. Italy has declared war to intelligence. This concept was launched in France in the recent past: Intelligence has been sacrificed on the altar of market economy… Continue reading
From tactical media to counter-networks
Geert Lovink was invited to participate “to discuss the whereabouts of tactical media in the age of the financial meltdown“, through a Skype conference organized from Ljubljana. The description of the discussion would seem to indicate that the artivist communities are ready to engage in the more long term building of counter-networks that has been… Continue reading
There is such a thing as peer money
In a recent contribution to Keimform, Christian Siefkes reiterates that talking about peer money is a contradiction in terms. I want to line up the arguments that show the inter-relatedness of open money efforts with the general thrust to a peer to peer based society. As a reminder, peer to peer dynamics are for us… Continue reading
Building the new in the shell of the old
The Sandinista revolution thirty years ago may well have been the last of its kind. The revolutions that have mattered since have been less interested in seizing and becoming the state than circumventing it to go straight to becoming other people doing other things without state permission. Rebecca Solnit, in The Nation, says the Revolution… Continue reading
Ungeeking as transformative strategy
Ungeeking is what happens when behaviours developed online make their way into areas of our lives independent of the technology through which we learnt them. Technological changes reflect prior changes in consciousness by those who designed the technology as well as the struggles for socially embedding and using those technologies in daily practice. Then in… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Cyberchiefs (3): Debian governance case study
This is the third and last part of our treatment of a landmark book on the governance of online ‘tribes’. Book: Cyberchiefs. Autonomy and Authority in Online Tribes. Mathieu O’Neil. Macmillan/Pluto Press, 2009. In this excerpt from Chapter 7, Mathieu O’Neil covers authority and leadership at debian.org : (the references are listed here) ‘The Cathedral… Continue reading
A political strategy for the Obama age
An excerpt from a very clear strategic analysis by Immanuel Wallerstein, about how progressive movements should handle the political situation after the meltdown and Obama’s election victory: “The United States has elected a centrist president, whose inclinations are somewhat left of center. The left, or most of it, voted for him for two reasons. The… Continue reading
A critique of Data Portability efforts from a Free Network Services point of view
A contribution from Adriana Lukas in the Autonomo.us mailing list, which expresses the point of view of those interested in promoting Free Network Services, and see existing Data Portability approaches as insufficient: “The problem I have with dataportability.org is that they don’t actually insist on the user owning the data but merely being able to… Continue reading
A Second Life environment for educators
My friend Chris Smith, who lives in Chiang Mai, and is the driving force behind Shambles.net, a popular resource site for Southeast-Asian international school educators, has produced a mash-up showing its island in Second Life. Enjoy!! It’s well done. Shambles ISI MashUp from =IcaruS= on Vimeo.
Pirates as true friends of music
What we can learn from the studies is that true music fans buy and pirate more music. The labels are fighting against those who generate a large chunk – perhaps even the largest – of their yearly revenue. The labels should understand that piracy is merely a signal that they are on the wrong track…. Continue reading
P2P as Emergent Order
I was recently contacted by Gus diZerega, a post-Wilberian integrative thinker who has been studying “emergence”, and started a website with online journal, Studies in Emergent Order. One of his articles, New Directions in Emergent Order Research, from the Fall 2008 issue, charts out the aims of the project and its historical grounding. Much of… Continue reading
The minerals and metals scarcity crisis
Without timely implementation of mitigation strategies, the world will soon run out of all kinds of affordable mass products and services: Many warnings in the past of impending metal minerals shortages have been proven wrong because of the availability of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. Every time the ratio of reserves to production of a… Continue reading
“Your Own Democracy” and Government 2.0 Platforms
One of the most promising entrants in the 2008 Buckminster Fuller Institute Challenge was Your Own Democracy (YOD) by Gong Szeto, a feature rich platform for online political engagement. YOD proposes to offer a suite of useful tools, such as collaborative bill building, issue tracking, and real-time data about citizen sentiments. YOD also overcomes one… Continue reading
Video introduction to Digital Activism
The New Change-Makers: An Introduction to Digital Activism is produced by the Berkman Center Initiative for Internet & Society and interviews many leading activists. 6 minutes of tips and experiences. Please note that the following videos are also available via our Wiki’s Politics section: * Andrew Rasiej on how Social Media are Transforming Democracy *… Continue reading
The underlying value system of post-piratical p2p mobilisations
While traditional media have a commitment to “let both sides be heard,” network mobilisation can focus on emergency-campaigning in defence of those values that it prizes the most. The Liquid Culture blog has an interesting analysis of the current p2p mobilisations, which contains a section summarizing the values that inspire the movements: “So, what are… Continue reading