Excerpt from a longer text (introducing free software to an Indian audience) by Nagarjuna. Why all knowledge should be free? Let us take a blank CD and take its mass on a balance. Now, having recorded its mass, let us copy about 700MB of software or any digital documents into it. Record its mass after… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2009"
How real is green capitalism, and what does it mean for the precarious?
Below is a large extract from an interesting political thoughtpiece from Alex Foti: “The issue of the distribution of productivity is crucial. The structural cause of the Great Recession lies in the failure of neoliberalism to distribute the productivity growth afforded by the digital revolution to large strata of society, who then had to take… Continue reading
Every abundance creates its own scarcity: from blockbusters to snowballs
A Gerd Leonhard slide illustrating the above: So, if the above p2p law is true, what does this say about ‘business models’? I think the following meditation by Neil Perkin, turning towards a service model that adds value to the original artistic content, points in the right direction. “If old media was about ‘blockbusters’, then… Continue reading
The role of promoters in open innovation
Article: Innovation communities: the role of networks of promotors in Open Innovation. Klaus Fichter. R&D Management 39, 4, 2009. The above is from the special issue of the academic journal R&D Management, dedicated to open innovation, which we mentioned before. Here’s another study that focuses on innovation leadership in open communities: Klaus Fichter: “Promotor theory… Continue reading
David Bollier: towards a digital republic
These remarks were given by David Bollier at the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, Spain, on October 30. It was a well written and rousing speech which is well worth rereading. David Bollier: “This conference takes place at a time of great promise and great peril. Great promise, because we have the opportunity to secure… Continue reading
Deglobalization as an opportunity
From an article by Walden Bello, Focus on the Global South: Walden Bello: “Deglobalization,” a term that the Economist attributes to me, is a development that the magazine, the world’s prime avatar of free market ideology, views as negative. I believe, however, that deglobalization is an opportunity. Indeed, my colleagues and I at Focus on… Continue reading
Michael Goldhaber’s thesis on the ‘post-capitalist’, Attention-Centered Economy
Good summary of the argument that we have entered a post-capitalist ‘attention economy’, by Michael Goldhaber at the IDC mailing list: Michael Goldhaber: “What follows then is a rough and incomplete primer on how I see what I shall refer to as “the attention (centered) economy,” — a new, post-capitalist class system, differing in its… Continue reading
The travails of the sharing generation in the hierarchical workplace
The article in Shareable magazine starts with a real-life anecdote about a creative female intern’s experience with a ‘hierarchical son of a bitch’, and how this moved her to quit an otherwise interesting potential career. This incident is not exceptional, but increasingly a common experience amongst the sharing generation, and the article then proceeds to… Continue reading
The Problem of Growth as Related to Hierarchy
This text by Jeff Vail, from March 2008, is still very much worth reading and pondering. The non-excerpted part of this text deals with the positive construction of a rhizome-based world, but in this excerpt, he convincingly links hierarchical social forms to the problem of infinite growth. Thanks to Ryan Lanham for the suggestion. Jeff… Continue reading
How the internet reshapes healthcare and e-patients
Via e-Patient, a 6-minute recommended video on the impact of the internet on healtcare, which opened the Reshape 09 conference in the Netherlands: Healthcare and internet in the Netherlands from lucien engelen on Vimeo. This video has been made to inform and inspire about the possibilities and challenges the internet and social media are offering… Continue reading
The externalized generation and its connectivist education needs
What we create to survive during one era serves as neurosis for another. In education – particularly in technology enhanced education – a similar trailing of ideologies from another era is observed. George Siemens writes that: “Without going through a painful attempt to deconstruct learning and its systemic origins, I think it’s safe to state… Continue reading
Rebecca Moore on Mapping Tools for Indigenous People
One tribe’s defense against encroachment through laptops and maps: (Make magazine has other interesting video presentations here; recommended for our p2p audience is Mackenzie Cowell on DIY Synthetic Biology; Luke Iseman on the Garduino Garden Controller; and the reportage on the Green Maker Fair Tech.)
Launching P2P Research Clusters
Great proposal by Smari McCarthy, addressed to science and research oriented friends: “Interested in launching a P2P Research Cluster? The idea is to form research clusters at universities all over the place to study participatory models, crowdsourcing, distributed algorithms, peer-to-peer culture, viable business models and anything else that relates to the emergent ecology of the… Continue reading
Why Creativity Needs Shorter Copyright Terms
Republished from Glyn Moody the tireless advocate of openness: “In response to a tweet of mine about shortening copyright to stimulate creativity, someone questioned the logic. It’s an important point, so it seems useful to do some thinking out loud on the subject. First, I should probably address the question of whether *longer* copyright stimulates… Continue reading
Does the local and distributed economy need patents?
In our P2P Research mailing list, local economy advocate and developer Sam Rose has argued that the use of patents are counter-productive for local efforts that rely on distributed manufacturing networks: “It may seem dogmatic, but I think that usually for the problems we are focused on, patents and traditional capital (with it’s traditional expectations… Continue reading
The crisis of value is for real: Return on assets has declined by 75% since 1965
The video below is a panel discussion on “the new world of work in a web squared world’, introduced by John Hagel. It contains a very interesting passage, starting just before the four minute break: the return on assets (for publicly listed companies in the U.S.) has declined, by an incredible 75%, since 1975. This… Continue reading