Below is Dean Baker’s contribution to the Re-Imagining Society debate at ZNet. Dean Baker: “As every backcountry hiker recognizes, you must first know where you are before you can figure out how to get to where you want to be. While it is important to know where we want to go, progressives often badly misunderstand… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2009"
The creative city mythology of Richard Florida
The Toronto Star reports on a backlash against Richard Florida’s Creative City policy proposals. Here’s a sample excerpt on the kind of local opposition that is emerging: “Richard Florida’s exotic city, his creative city, depends on ghost people, working behind the scenes. Immigrants, people of colour. You want to know what his version of creative… Continue reading
A Red and Green Coalition
Often the cause of labour and that of environmentalism clash – for example in the UK debate of the expansion of Heathrow airport we see the union siding with the airport operators, both of whom are squared off against a coalition of environmentalists and residents who will see their houses lost. The often over-simplistic ‘jobs… Continue reading
Len Krimerman on solidarity and subjectivity
As part of the larger pool of contributions to ZNet’s Reimagining Society debate, Len Krimerman discusses the Solidarity Economy movement at length. This article is well worth reading in full for its strategic assessment and recommendations. Here, we excerpt Len’s discussions of the strengths of the movements, closely related to how it deals with subjectivity,… Continue reading
The DIY podcast/webcast revolution
Via the Replicator blog: “While not quite a mass customization catalog, the latest iTunes Podcast Spotlight does feature a collection of great podcasts centered around the DIY ethos. Howcast, Threadbanger, and Make: and others are well worth a watch/listen and hopefully this is just sample of what’s to come.” Here’s a selection from our own… Continue reading
Value Creation outside the Cash Nexus
A contribution by Kevin Carson: “The shift of value-creation outside the cash nexus provoked an interesting blogospheric discussion between Tyler Cowen and John Quiggin. Cowen raised the possibility that much of the productivity growth in recent years has taken place “outside of the usual cash and revenue-generating nexus.” Quiggin, in an article appropriately titled “The… Continue reading
The six discontinuities of human evolution and the participatory universe
“Physics gives rise to observer-participancy; observer-participancy gives rise to information; information gives rise to physics.” Wheeler called this subjective self-creation, “the participatory universe. From an extensive meditation by Kevin Kelly, inspired by the theses of philosopher Bruce Mazlish. Kevin Kelly on the first four discontinuities: “Philosopher Bruce Mazlish claims that the eyes of science have… Continue reading
What is co-housing?
Excerpt from a recent report in the New York Times, by CHRIS COLIN: “The Cohousing Association of the United States has been answering that question quite frequently as more people sign up for its tours: The communities consist of individual houses whose residents share some common space, a few communal dinners a week and a… Continue reading
Barcamp Transparency
BarCamp Transparency, Oxford UK Wiki Twitter Open discussion for a more open world. Increasingly, the UK has become a surveillance society: one in which we aren’t allowed to see the workings of government, nor governmental information relating to our towns and cities, yet are captured on camera more often than citizens of any other country… Continue reading
Facebook and your data
A short video to make you think:
Strategies for enhancing the evolution of cooperation
John Stewart is the author of Evolution’s Arrow, a book that argued that evolution itself has evolved. Evolution has progressively improved the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to discover the best adaptations. And it has discovered new and better mechanisms. The book looked at the evolution of pre-genetic, genetic, cultural, and supra-individual evolutionary mechanisms. In an… Continue reading
Can we re-size civilisation?
To survive, the institutions of these massively oversized systems have waged a continuous and brutal war against communities, the natural human structures that we instinctively seek to belong to. Aboriginal communities all over the world have been systematically exterminated, their members slaughtered or moved into institutional structures and forced to adopt the civilization monoculture constructs…. Continue reading
The Solidarity Economy and the Commons: report from the Graz “Solcom” workshop
A report by Andreas Exner: “On 2.-3. July, a workshop on Solidarity Economy was held in Graz, Austria. Organized by Andreas Exner (www.social-innovation.org) and Bernhard Mark- Ungericht (Univ. Graz, Dep. of International Management), it was kindly supported by the Arbeiterkammer Steiermark (Labor Chamber, Styria) and the Dep. of International Management. This enabled us to invite… Continue reading
Technological determinism vs. human choice
Where is the source for the wisdom to discern the difference between the inevitable stages of technological development and the volitional forms that are up to us? What we would really like is a technique which makes the inevitable obvious. Kevin Kelly has an interesting and extended meditation on technological evolution and determinism, in which… Continue reading
The disaster in waiting of the non-commons approach to climate change
With the Senate debate over climate now beginning, there is still time to turn back from cap-and-trade and toward fee-and-dividend. We need to start now. Without political leadership creating a truly viable policy like a carbon fee, not only won’t we get meaningful climate legislation through the Senate, we won’t be able to create the… Continue reading
A rundown and typology on Citizen Science projects
This is a good time to have a look at our special tag on the topic, available here, as we just added two dozen new projejts. To make sense of the many different projects we uncovered, we found this typology to be particularly useful: “While there are dozens of Web sites and projects dedicated to… Continue reading