Concerning Apple’s new iBook application for the iPad: What I’ve done here is shown you what happens when you try to copy a paragraph of text. You get the familiar iPhone-style clipping handles, and you get two options “Highlight” and “Bookmark.” But you can’t actually copy the text, to paste it into your own private… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2010"
The Fair Tracing project
Very interesting project: The aim of the Fair Tracing project is to support Ethical Trade by implementing IT Tracking and Tracing Technologies in supply chains to provide consumers and producers with enhanced information. Details: “The Fair Tracing project, funded by the UK Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) grant number EP/E009018/1, aims to help… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Escape Routes (2): What is postliberal sovereignity?
Book: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century, Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson & Vassilis Tsianos. London: Pluto Press, (2008) We presented this book here. Today, our excerpt discusses a new form of power in the network age. Excerpt: “Postliberal sovereignty is neither a substitute, nor an alternative, nor the next stage of transnational… Continue reading
The Ning retreat: a wake up call to build autonomous infrastructures
Readers are probably aware that Ning is closing its free services, including our own. Ray Matthews writes that these NING issues should act as a wake up call to all of us: “My reaction is that organizations, groups, schools, non-profits, and governments need to take this as a wake-up call. We need to reassess the… Continue reading
Beyond Left and Right: Peer-to-Peer themes and urban priorities for the self-organizing society. By Nikos A. Salingaros
Nikos Salingaros, p2p architect and urbanist, has reacted with an extensive essay on my earlier article on the topic of: can progressives and conservatives work together around p2p themes?. The full version of the essay, with notes, a bibliography and a a review of Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language, is here on our wiki. In this… Continue reading
The transformation of community activism into economic activism and the revival of cooperatives in the U.S.
From a report on the California Center for Cooperative Development conference by Bernard Marszalek: “Worker cooperatives, food stores and housing co-ops are a tiny sector of the America economy, but community activists are beginning to recognize their importance. As activists across the country move beyond a resistance strategy with essentially minor victories, to proposals for… Continue reading
OpenCourseWare: IS OPENNESS ENOUGH?
A repost from Golpe de e-Estado “Unlocking Knowledge, Empowering Minds” This is the lemma of the OpenCourseWare, or OCW, an initiative pioneered by the MIT University to provide access to university educational contents for free and ubiquitously. The project started modestly in 2002 with 50 courses published online. Now the OpenCourseWare Consortium entails hundreds of… Continue reading
Who are the red shirts? Details on the thai commoner (phrai) movement
1. “This is in essence a suffragist movement that struggles to accomplish the civil and political rights that unelected institutions in Thailand have long made a big deal of guaranteeing on paper but have otherwise systematically subverted. It’s a movement of people who no longer want to be second class citizens, who want the law… Continue reading
Solidarity University launches Commons mapping project
Via Andreas Exner: The working group “Vivir bien” of the “Solidarity University” has already developed an online-tool for mapping commons & solidarity economy (as a commons-based way of production). More precisely, Flo Lederman programmed a very promising tool – it is not online yet, but you can get invited if you are interested in co-developing… Continue reading
Thomas Greco: We need an Objective Measure of Value
Via Thomas Greco: (original with links is here) “I’ve proposed the adoption of an objective measure of value based on an assortment of basic commodities. Another option is to define a more stable measure of value and pricing unit based on existing government statistics. One such example of the latter is the Chilean Unidad de… Continue reading
Policy making as cooptation?
When Gramsci counselled “optimism of the will”, it was to suggest that there is political value in sustaining our faith in people’s capacities to resist power and transform their world even when such sentiments fly in the face of how we see people relating to authority in our particular historical conjuncture. He did not mean… Continue reading
Seettu in Sri Lanka: (Neo)traditional finance against neoliberalism
Source: Why is finance critical? A dialogue with a women’s community in Sri Lanka. Ishani Chandrasekara. Ephemeraweb, volume 9(4): 300-317 Abstract of recommended article: “The burst of the bubble has given momentum to the search of escape routes from the current transnational financial system and its underlying principles. For the past century, the transnational financial… Continue reading
The financialization of the university
Drawing on her earlier work on the financialization of student life (2009), where she appropriated Deleuze’s well-known assertion that “man is no longer a man confined but a man in debt” (1995: 181), Morgan Adamson argues that today students are no longer disciplined but controlled through debt in the university. Focusing specifically on human capital… Continue reading
Commons, Market, Capital and State (7): water commons, community and state (part two)
The article by Massimo de Angelis, of which we published the first part, then discusses in detail the local situation in different communities after attending a water fair, and adds a number of important conclusions: Part 2: A “resource pool” is the first constituent element of a commons, the others being a community and commoning…. Continue reading
Book: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education
Book: DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education. Amy Kamenetz. Chelsea Green, 2010 The excerpt below, by author Amy Kamenetz, was published in Reality Sandwich, This excerpt is about the “edupunks,” the radicals who want to liberate scholarship and learning from the constraints of institutions altogether. I also call them the… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Escape Routes: Control and Subversion in the 21st Century
The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: ‘How does social transformation begin?’ But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation… Continue reading