Via Slashdot: “The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia’s first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2009"
The meltdown of the state under neoliberalism through New Public Management
Essay: The Rise and Demise of the New Public Management. By Wolfgang Drechsler (University of Tartu and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), 2005 From 2005, but still a crucial critique of the neoliberal approaches to the state. Summary: “Within the public sphere, the most important reform movement of the last quarter of a century has… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): Direct action and direct democracy
Book: David Graeber. Direct Action, an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009 In this second excerpt of David Graeber’s new book and analysis of the alterglobalization movement, he focuses, in chapter 5, on the linkage between direct action and direct democracy. The excerpt focuses on the evolution between the feminist moment to the emergence, ‘seemingly out of… Continue reading
Five Geopolitical Feedback-Loops in Peak Oil
Though this analysis appeared in the April 23, 2007 issue of Energy Intelligence Note, it really explains a lot of the current geopolitical situation, so I’m reproducing it in full. Jeff Vail: “It is quite common to hear “experts” explain that the current tight oil markets are due to “above-ground factors,” and not a result… Continue reading
From corporate publishing, via self-publishing, to cloud publishing
Book Oven is constructing tools and processes for the collective and independent production of books. In a thoughtful, but really hard to summarize blog entry, the concept of self-publishing is rejected, in favour of ‘cloud publishing’. Read the whole article here. Just the definition: “Cloud-publishing will provide the tools to allow groups of people to… Continue reading
A new book on Independent Media in Chinese Societies
Via Iam-Chong Ip: “Hong Kong In-media is a non-profit organization advocating blogger journalism and media activism in Hong Kong. Recently we’ve published a book titled Info-Rhizome: Report on Independent Media in the Chinese-speaking World. This book is about the recent development of independent media (including small activist media, community radio, blogger, media activist, etc) in… Continue reading
Should a free RSS Cloud replace Twitter?
Twitter — or, rather, the idea of a pervasive, public short messaging network — could be too important to be left under one entity’s control. The people behind the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) movement say it’s time for the 140-character, publicly-subscribable format pioneered by Twitter to become an open standard, in part because, as last week’s attack… Continue reading
Open Source Wikipolitics
Our Greek friend Vasilis Kostakis has produced a presentation with the basic concepts of “open source politics”. Open Source and Wikipolitics View more presentations from Vasilis Kostakis.
Douglas Rushkoff on the end of movements
We covered the tension between prefigurative and instrumental politics before, and in our mind, both are needed, even as the p2p movement is now too weak to have powerful social movements. So we disagree with the argument below, but it is a provocative thesis that needs to be addressed: are social movements really obsolete? Douglas… Continue reading
Crisis at the Factor E Farm (2): Stefan Meretz
The following is the point of view of Stefan Meretz about the recent crisis at the Factor E Farm: The project »Factor E Farm« (FeF, also »Open Source Ecology«, OSE) has crashed now. Publicly, which is good. The FeF-project has become a somewhat show-case with regard to transfering cultural peer production approaches to the physical… Continue reading
The political critique of superlativism
The aspiration to superabundance seems an all too familiar eruption of the infantile fantasy of a circumvention of the struggle with necessity, Ananke: in psychoanalytic terms a pining for a return to the plenitude represented by the Pleasure Principle and renunciation of the exactions represented by the Reality Principle. Or, in different terms, it is… Continue reading
Book of the Week: David Graeber’s Ethnography of Direct Action
The standard right-wing line, since at least the 1790s, had always been that revolutionary dreams were dangerous precisely because they were utopian: they ignored the real complexity of social life, tradition, authority, and human nature, and dreamed of reshaping the world according to some abstract ideal. By the 1990s, the places had been completely reversed…. Continue reading
The emergent tradition of participatory research in the social sciences
Participatory Perspectives on Counselling Research. By DAVID HILES: Summary of paper presented at NCCR Conference, Newport, November 22, 2008. The above essay by David Hiles has great introductory material on participatory methods of inquiry. First, David Hiles proposes three types of knowing: Positivist Knowledge: (present-at-hand), i.e. “Getting about in “the world”, measurement, size, weight, shape,… Continue reading
Pat Mooney on Nanotechnology and the Enclosure of the Chemical Elements
This is the rough transcript, still including some typos, of a presentation at the Crottorf Consultations on the Commons, transcribed by Silke Helfrich. Pat Mooney (ETC Group): “I first came across on biotechnologies in the 70th. In that time we saw, that 3 things were coming together. We saw the genetic erosion of crop species… Continue reading
Elisabeth Husserl on Sufficiency vs. Abundance: together we have everything
I met Elisabeth Husserl, a descendent of the famous philosopher and extraordinary coach for personal sustainability, in the Bay Area last year. She has started her own website and reports on a discussion between two very important concepts: sufficiency vs. abundance. Elisabeth: “Last Wednesday evening I had the privilege of attending the opening San Francisco… Continue reading
Peter Bihr on the politics of the German Pirate Party
Interesting commentary which I’m reproducing in full and which transcend the specific German situation. Peter Bihr: “Lots of discussions about the Pirate Party (PP) lately, and their role in German politics. With federal elections coming up in late September and some very salient web issues like data retention and planned legislation to block (supposed) child… Continue reading