Book: The Caryatids. Bruce Sterling. Del Rey, 2009 Review by Kevin Carson: “By way of caveat, let me get out front with the admission that this review involves mainly aspects of the “future history” scenario I find most intriguing, rather than with the story line or characters. While I can get into a good story,… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2009"
Responding to the Maghrebi/Genovese challenge
Ignacio de Castro has written a fine trilogy on medieval p2p-like practices, that is somehow framed as a challenge to our p2p approach. It describes the practices of jewish maghrebi traders in the Middle Ages and their international support network, and wonders why they ultimately lost against their Genovese more ‘capitalist’ competitors. Ignacio asks: could… Continue reading
Technological inventions and human history
Kevin Kelly continues his interesting investigations into the Technium. True, to some, including me, his approach may appear sometimes as technological determinism. In this text, Kevin Kelly makes the point that individual changes in consciousness matter little, because they don’t scale up, but that changes in tools and technologies change the brain circuitry of millions… Continue reading
The power of affinity: there’s nothing virtual about online communities
Every Second Life (SL) and World of Warcraft (WoW) avatar is a person pouring time and resources into community, that every tweet by every tweeter through every Twitter handle is a person who has taken finite time and resources and poured it into community, and every blog post by every blogger are time, energy, and… Continue reading
John Heron: there can be no participatory epistemology without mutuality
Below, John Heron reacts to the article, Participatory Perspectives on Counselling Research, by David Hiles, which we presented before. John Heron: “From my perspective a fundamental weakeness of the paper is that Hiles attends exclusively to the epistemic wing of participatory inquiry, that is, to the nature of a researcher’s participatory knowing, and not at… Continue reading
How a Community Stopped Worrying about Journals and Learned to Love Repositories
HEP scientists seldom read journals, preferring preprints instead! The analysis of citation data demonstrates that free and immediate online dissemination of preprints creates an immense citation advantage in HEP, whereas publication in Open Access journals presents no discernible advantage. In addition, the analysis of clickstreams in the leading digital library of the field shows that… Continue reading
The persistence of scarcity in virtual worlds
There is no reason to believe that the role that virtual worlds like Second Life will play in the economic, political, and cultural innovation will be anything short of monumental, but it is imperative that we keep in view the ways in which such spaces,while transforming how many resources for us are arrayed and available,… Continue reading
Chinese group buying explained
The Chinese Internet is more developed from a social perspective than in the West. There are more people who are participating in these kinds of conversations, and they are more active. Nice article on Tuangou, Chinese ‘group buying’, and why it is not (yet?) working in the West. Excerpts from Lara Farrar: “Welcome to China’s… Continue reading
Crowdsourcing in Government: the Next Stop Design Bus in Utah
Via Henry Jenkins. Daren C. Brabham: ” Next Stop Design asks the crowd to design a bus stop for Salt Lake City, Utah. With Thomas W. Sanchez and a team of researchers from the University of Utah, we’re working in cooperation with the Utah Transit Authority (UTA) and funded by a grant from the U.S…. Continue reading
Twitter’s intersubjectivity
This is really one of the best explanations I’ve seen on the underlying dynamics of Twitter! Kevin Marks: “Flow: At it heart Twitter is a flow – it doesn’t present an unread count of messages, just a list of recent ones, so you don’t have email’s inbox problem – the implicit pressure to turn bold… Continue reading
After destructive capitalism, can there be a constructive capitalism?
Today, in the better economy we’re building, less carbon emitted does add to national wealth. And that’s exactly why Cash for Clunkers matters. Cash for Clunkers isn’t perfect — but it’s a promising start. It’s the kind of economic reform that’s sparking a revolution in Constructive Capitalism. I missed a bunch of interesting blog articles… Continue reading
How California could solve its fiscal crisis through sovereign credit
Could California learn from Guernsey in the 19th century, Germany in the thirties, and China today? A state-owned bank could be fast-tracked into operation in a matter of weeks. With over $17 billion available to deposit in its own bank, California could create $170 billion or more in credit — enough not only to meet… Continue reading
Book of the Week (3): Activist lifestyles
Book: David Graeber. Direct Action, an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009 In this third and last series of excerpts from David Graeber’s book, we turn to chapter 6, which is a review, critique, and defense, of activist lifestyles and cultures. We choose some not necessarily connected paragraphs, to give an idea of the richness of the… Continue reading
Planning through the market?
Excerpt from a contribution to thinking about political strategy, by G. William Domhoff: (Article: Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System) “If non-market planning is a disaster and markets are primarily instruments for exploitation, then it is no wonder that leftists have not been able to project the necessary vision of a… Continue reading
What property rights in virtual resources might look like
Important essay: John W. Nelson. 2009. “The Virtual Property Problem: What property rights in virtual resources might look like, how they might work, and why they are a bad idea” Summary: “Virtual property’ is a solution looking for a problem. Arguments justifying ‘virtual property’ lie among three common themes — Lockean labor theory, theft protection… Continue reading
MAGHRIBIS & P2P: ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE DEFINITION
A re-post from the Golpe de Estado blog: Maghribi traders organization system is similar to current P2P processes, maybe similar enough to consider them P2P pioneers (Maghribis I). However Maghribis suffered from intrinsic disadvantages that deterred their expansion and success (Maghribis II). Maghribis succumbed to history while Genoese, a proto-capitalist society survived stabilising the foundational… Continue reading