Date archives "January 2010"

Transforming humanity towards emphatic consciousness

If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Planned Obsolescence

Book: Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick, forthcoming from NYU Press. New York University, 2009 Presentation by the author Kathleen Fitzpatrick: “The last few years have seen a significant uptick in discussion of the crisis in academic publishing, particularly in the humanities. This discussion has played out on… Continue reading

Collaborative community will only thrive most where out-competing depends on out-cooperating

Competitive pressures make it likely that corporations will continue to opt for “the reassertion of hierarchy and market rather than community” (p. 65). But over time, it will become evermore evident that interdivisional and inter-firm networking are crucial for competitiveness. As this proceeds, advantages will accrue especially to those firms that can operate according to… Continue reading

From one society to another: the laws of change for major phase transitions

David Ronfeldt’s TIMN theory, which distinguishes a historical sequence of societies based on Tribes, Institutions (hierarchy), Markets, and Networks, and therefore has a kinship with peer to peer theory, recently outlined some of the principles that would characterize the change form a market based society to a network based society. David Ronfeldt (excerpts): “During the… Continue reading

Commons in a taxonomy of goods

The Commons has the potential to replace the commodity as the determining form of re-/producing societal living conditions. Such a replacement can only occur, if communities constitute themselves for every aspect of life, in order to take „their“ commons back and to reintegrate them into a new need-focused logic of re-/production. Stefan Meretz has produced,… Continue reading

From FABWiki to a CloudForge for the open fabrication community

CloudFab is a new online marketplace that provides engineers, designers, and hobbyists access to a network of job shops who provide fabrication and prototyping services (currently 3D printing). We mentioned the coming launch of the CloudFab ecology before. Below, co-founder Nick Pinkston explains what gaps the project is aiming to fill, and Eric Hunting gives… Continue reading

The state of filesharing 2010: moving towards radical decentralization?

1. The level of P2P filesharing is levelling, but music sharing is soaring. Slyck summarizes recent findings (from BPI, UK): “It’s no secret that P2P usage has declined steadily over the years – but that’s just one small avenue in the bigger file-sharing picture. Consider all multitudes of digital acquisition that have developed since the… Continue reading

Psychological requirements for a cooperative ethical economy

Dr. Michael Towsey, currently a Research Fellow in bioinformatics at the Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane (and a faculty member at Prout College), examines the scientific bases in neuro-economics and psycho-economics, so that individuals and groups could be better prepared for a cooperative economy. Worth reading, we are only excerpting the conclusion: “A healthy human… Continue reading

2010 ‘social-media mediated’ trends for online activism, social enterpreneurship, nonprofits

Low-cost social media will be used ever-more widely and creatively by social enterprises and advocacy groups to aggregate new levels of clout, funding, innovation and community support. Great set of predictions, based on trends that are already operative, for world-changers and their organisations, by Marcia Stepanek: (the original post has the links to the examples)… Continue reading

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution is now an eBook!

“The conditions of physical production have, in fact, experienced a transformation almost as great as that which digital technology has brought about on immaterial production. The “physical production sphere” itself has become far less capital-intensive. If the digital revolution has caused an implosion in the physical capital outlays required for the information industries, the revolution… Continue reading