Ismael Peña-López is continuing his work clarifying issues on the intersection of the digital divide and using communication technologies such as the internet for development. The following two illustrations show his integrative approach to the subject:
Date archives "May 2010"
Is peer production a real mode of production?
(mini-essay dedicated to Cosma Orsi and his scholarship and to the most impressive personal library I have seen in a dozen years …) In the foundational essay on peer to peer, I call peer to peer a third mode of production (as well as a third mode of property and governance). The question is: is… Continue reading
P2P, Peak Oil and the degrowth scenario
A contribution and challenge by Joss Winn: “I’d be really interested in what people think about the future of P2P in a near-term scenario of energy depletion. While I am hugely supportive of P2P values and approaches, I do worry that while still in their embryonic forms, a global Peak Oil scenario will do serious… Continue reading
Three generations of bikesharing
Excerpt from Carbuster’s Paul DeMaio: “Originally a concept from the revolutionary 1960s, bikesharing’s growth had been slow until the development of better methods of tracking the bikes with improved technology. This development gave birth to the rapid expansion of bikesharing programs throughout Europe and now most other continents. There have been three generations of bikesharing… Continue reading
Analysis: Most Developing Countries Stand to Lose from a Worldwide Patent System
A recently published analysis by legal scholar Morten Walløe Tvedt of the Fridtjof Nansen Institute in Norway, finds that the probable effects of introducing a Worldwide Patent System are overwhelmingly negative for most Third World nations, with more adverse effect the less developed a country is.
Continue readingToward a Commons-based Framework for Global Negotiations
This article focuses on why the international community has been unable to bring the full range of commons issues and their representatives into strategic discussions. It calls for a new framework of global interaction and dialogue based on natural law. To create this metalogue on the global commons, world society must engage in a kind… Continue reading
Social Networking in the cloud – Diaspora to challenge facebook
Social networking may be about to change. At least that is the intention of four New York students who believe that we should own our data and share what we want, but do so directly – peer2peer – without a central server to go through and without anyone picking our personal data apart or making… Continue reading
Cory Doctorow. For the Win
Cory Doctorow. For the Win (Tor, 2010). Let me start with a disclaimer: I am not a gamer, and have never seen the appeal of gaming. So the world Doctorow describes in this book is utterly foreign to me–although I think I’ve pretty well managed to use contextual cues to get a handle on the… Continue reading
The Power of Pull
Gordon Cook, the editor of the Cook Report on Internet Protocol (read by leading members of the telecom industries) and also moderator of the Arch-Econ mailing list that is platform for dialogue of internet luminaries, has written a long and extensive discussion and review of the new book by John Seely Brown (and John Hagel),… Continue reading
13 “million dollar babies”: Open hardware business takes off
Via Boing Boing: “Limor “Adafruit” Friend and Make editor Phil Torrone presenting a quick Ignite talk on the growth of open-source hardware businesses, including the remarkable revelation that there are 13 companies turning over $1 million or more per year making hardware that anyone can copy and improve upon. Many are based on the Arduino,… Continue reading
A Mute Special on Struggle in Education Today
The student movement, however, faces a political problem, most evident in the US and, to a lesser extent, in Europe. The movement has two souls. On the one side, it demands free university education, reviving the dream of publicly financed ‘mass scolarity’, ostensibly proposing to return to the model of the Keynesian era. On the… Continue reading
Recovering groupness but retaining individuality
As Carolyn Baker points out in Sacred Demise, civilization is a manifestation of heroic consciousness. I wonder whether its origins might be in a partial disconnection from nature needed for the successful hunter to kill his prey. Also — and more importantly — competition for a mate favors those who are most aggressive in both… Continue reading
Groping for the common
The open access and sharing that characterize use of the common are outside of and inimical to property relations. We have been made so stupid that we can only recognize the world as private or public. We have become blind to the common. Michael Hardt rereads the early Marx and concludes that he was groping… Continue reading
Does the commons need the state?
Yes, argues Nick Dyer-Whiteford in this essay from the journal Turbulence: “Movements are proposing, as alternatives to market failures, new forms of commons. These too vary in each domain, although, as I will argue in a moment, they also overlap and connect. In the ecological sphere, commons provisions are based primarily on conservation and regulation… Continue reading
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter One (second 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).] Chapter One. A Wrong Turn (first excerpt) The natural course of things, according to [Ralph] Borsodi, was that… Continue reading
The subversion of gaming
I like this older, but still very current and significant text by Nick Dyer-Whiteford, because his approach to gaming echoes our double approach in p2p theory, i.e. that peer production is SIMULTANEOUSLY coopted by the present dominant system, while at the same time strengthening aspects which transcend it. Here are the conclusions of his analysis,… Continue reading