Date archives "May 2010"

Moral capitalism for better economics: Umair Haque’s Betterness Manifesto

Institutions are emergent: born from the bottom up, they suddenly catch fire, and then transform the fabric of economies. It’s through small changes massively distributed, like those above, that 21st century institutions are most likely to spark and ignite a great reboot. Call it a new American Dream. Its details aren’t visible yet, but it’s… Continue reading

Report from the El Cumbre Rights of Mother Earth Conference: 1) context and conclusions

Conference: People’s World Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth We will be serializing an extraordinarly stimulating report by Massimo de Angelis: Today, the context and conclusions of this climate change conference: “Fifteen years ago, I attended the First Encuentro for Humanity against Neoliberalism, called by the Zapatistas and held in the… Continue reading

Users are not commodities: A bill of privacy rights for social network users

Proposed by the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Social network services must ensure that users have ongoing privacy and control over personal information stored with the service. Users are not just a commodity, and their rights must be respected. Innovation in social network services is important, but it must remain consistent with, rather than undermine, user privacy… Continue reading

On the difference between free speech and free beer: free culture as “people want to be free”

“Information wants to be free” has the same relationship to the digital rights movement that “kill whitey” has to the racial equality movement: a thoughtless caricature that replaces a nuanced, principled stand with a cartoon character. Calling IWTBF the ideological basis of the movement is like characterising bra burning as the primary preoccupation of feminists… Continue reading

The Growth of Peer-to-Peer Product-Service Systems

From car-sharing to online dress rentals, solutions that provide services without requiring ownership offer a means to reduce consumption and environmental impact. There’s now growing interest in a somewhat different type of product-service-system: rather than consumers renting services from businesses, several websites are facilitating rentals (or free loans) of products between individuals. Items that someone… Continue reading

Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter Two: Moloch–The Anatomy of Sloanist Mass Production (first excerpt)

[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my forthcoming book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. Over the next several weeks, I will post two excerpts from each chapter (one excerpt a week).] The mass-production model carried some strong imperatives: first, it required large-batch production, running the enormously expensive product-specific machinery… Continue reading

Anti-inflationary sovereign credit against financial predation: the answer for Greece and Europe

In this article, Ellen Woods first explains why the German hyper-inflation of the thirties was not caused by the printing of money by the government, but by speculative attacks of shortsellers and private banks creating huge credits for them, then shows how several countries got out of economic meltdowns by creating sovereign credit for productive… Continue reading

New book: Sharing and the Creative Economy

Book: Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age. Philippe Aigrain, 2010. The full announcement with links is here. Philippe Aigrain: “Sharing and the Creative Economy: Culture in the Internet Age is an extended and adapted English version of “Internet & Creation : how to recognize non-market exchanges over the internet while funding… Continue reading

A groundswell of sharing

Sharing infrastructures are much bigger than we thought! This is a video preview, with some impressive stats, of Rachel Botsman and co-author Roo Rogers upcoming book: What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption. Collaborative Consumption Groundswell Video from rachel botsman on Vimeo.

Against competitive education

Abby Quillen is convinced by Alfie Kohn, and in the full article, gives specific advice to parents about non-competitive parenting: ” Competition, which Kohn defines as any situation where one person can succeed only when others fail, seems to be something of a state religion in the United States. But Kohn is convinced that we’ve… Continue reading