Well said, by Steve Denning: “There are thus two deep streams in management in today. They are like oil and water. We can pretend that they are just evolutions or developments or nuances or verbal nitpicks and that it would be divisive to draw sharp distinctions between them. But the reality is that these two… Continue reading
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
Open innovation vs. user innovation: what’s most encompassing
I used to think that open innovation, mere cooperation between companies, was less broad and encompassing than user-driven innovation, which involves a broader section of users, but this article suggests otherwise. What do you think? From the 15 inno site: “Last week, I read an article on how Coloplast has set-up communities for their users… 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
Book: Towards a Economics of Abundance
Via Shareable: Book: Wolfgang Hoeschele. The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability. “The “economics of abundance” is based on a critique of our present economic system, which finds value only in scarce commodities – i.e., things which can be sold at a high price because demand exceeds supply. Because this… 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
Two Assessments of the situation in Thailand
Coercion and consent from http://thailandtrouble.blogspot.com/ Operation Ratchaprasong to put an end to the peaceful protest, arguably an act of civil disobedience in a form akin to a sit-in, on 19 May was an act of coercion to impose the will of the government administering the state. Coercion came in the theatrical form of overwhelming force… 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
Goteo: research on creative currencies and p2p-financing
Olivier Schulbaum of Platoniq, announces the following project: “AT LAST BUT NOT LEAST, we start a new adventure, whose codename is GOTEO (drop by drop) This is our new open R+D project. Goteo is a community platform for cultural and social innovation p2p financing, which is not exactly crowdfunding, but we do hope it will… 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
Money and the dangers of abstraction
Excerpt from a longer commentary on the speculative bubble that money has become ‘in itself’, by John Michael Greer, which appeared in the always stimulating Reality Sandwich: “The metastasis of money through every aspect of life in the modern industrial world is a good example. While no past society, as far as we know, took… Continue reading