This is the final contribution in this debate from Michael Albert, my conclusions still need to be written. We featured the first four contributions in our blog but they are also all available here, on the right hand side of the page. Soon, we will feature the similar debate on the Parecon ideas, now featured… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2009"
Peer Governance and Wikipedia (interview with Cedric and Barry Kort)
In the vein of the previous post, here two interviews are introduced. Cedric is an active member of Wikipedia Review and has written a lot of critical material on Wikipedia (The Six Rotten Pillars of Wikipedia ) published in sites such as Wikipedia Review and others. The second interviewee, Barry Kort, is a MIT Media… Continue reading
Australian report on social media
Via Axel Bruns, word on an Australian report on social media that he co-authored: “I’m very happy to say that our first report for the Social Media project at the Smart Services CRC has now been published. Written with my research assistant Mark Bahnisch (an expert in the field in his own right), this report… Continue reading
Emancipation through the play ethic?
Pat Kane on the theory and emancipatory possibilities of play: The text appeared on the IDC mailing list in preparation of a digital labor conference. Pat has three reports so far that result from this discussion. See: 1, 2, 3 “In The Ideology of the Aesthetic, Terry Eagleton devotes a chapter to Schiller’s Letters of… Continue reading
Peer Governance and Wikipedia (interview with Bauwens & Bruns)
This week the interviews with experts and (ex-)Wikipedians, on which parts of my paper “Peer Governance and Wikipedia: Identifying and Understanding the Problems of Wikipedia’s Governance (2009)” were based, are going to be presented in a series of separate posts. This first post contains the short interviews with Michel Bauwens and Axel Bruns who are… Continue reading
The Death of Why
Ulises Mejias recommends this book by Andrea Batista Schlesinger. Here’s the blurb: “We exercise our power as citizens by asking questions. Inquiry is less valued today, however, as our society demands quick and dirty answers. We see this play out all around us: in the increased ideological segregation that divides us, the outsize role of… Continue reading
George Caffentzis on the Petroleum Commons
The Petroleum Commons is an important essay George Caffentzis and also the last chapter of his latest ebook (see at bottom for details) George Caffentzis introduces his essay: “The “struggle over oil” has been largely seen as a struggle between oil companies and governments, since its beginnings in the mid-nineteenth century. However, over the last… Continue reading
From the Invisible Hand to the Invisible Handshake
Via Frank Pasquale at IDC: The Invisible Handshake is an important essay by Michael D. Birnhack’s and Niva Elkin-Koren which describes new and hidden exchanges of information for power that are key to government-business relations: “Law enforcement agencies seek to enhance their monitoring capacity and online businesses seek to prevent fraud and combat piracy while… Continue reading
Micropower, not nuclear power
There is a sustained media campaign going on to rehabilitate nuclear power, which would require huge subsidies and delay the transition to the more competitive renewable energy solutions, and saddle humanity with very long term hyper-pollution. The brilliant video exposition by Amory Lovins is followed by an excerpt from John Robb in which he explains… Continue reading
Restoring the research commons
How do we get the general public to pressure governments to open up research results so that other people can more easily build on it? Paul D. Fernhout’s text is a reaction to a proposal for a research funding proposal for green research around the concept of dual licensing, to which we may return. But… Continue reading
Modularity and creativity
The key here is _whose_ creativity is being enabled by this. Modernist use of modularity generally wasn’t concerned with enabling the creativity of the inhabitants of buildings and so was indeed folly. But post-modernists still didn’t offer anything better in that they were still not enabling creativity outside their professional community based on the very… Continue reading
Property, existential security, and abundance
A meditation on the nature of property by Andrew Robinson: “The reason there is resistance to ending property is that property has become connected to existential territory. This is also what is meant by “owning” something in Stirner. I suspect that people will always have existential territories, though they may be more mobile and open-ended… Continue reading
Open Technology and the Future of Wireless Communications
Lee Dryburgh strongly recommends this video presentation by Sascha Meinrath, which explains how to translate democratic technology demands, into policy.
Strategic Support for Factor E Farm and Open Source Ecology
A call by Franz Nahrada: Marcin Jakubowski has posted a short video that shows me discussing strategic support opportunities for Open Source Ecology. So here I am – talking about OSE strategy without ever having been there and having laid my hands on the ground there. Thank you Marcin for that much trust and cooperation…. Continue reading
The Power of Sharing
Mark Pesce is a great speaker, so as usual, this is really worthwhile: The Power of Sharing from Mark Pesce on Vimeo.
The distributed atttention economy: microstardom and tactical fandom
Interesting contribution on the nature of the “distributed attention economy”, by Julian Kücklich in the IDC mailing list. Julian Kücklich: “I think what we see evolving is a system of microstardom and tactical fandom that calls into question the classical power relationship between fans and stars. This is obviously preceded by alt.fan communities such as… Continue reading