Back in 2004, i wrote a lengthy response to Alexander Wendt’s amazing article “Why a World State is Inevitable.” (Wendt, Alexander (2003) ‘Why a World State Is Inevitable’, European Journal of International Relations 9(4): 491-542.), but surfing the web of late has convinced me to bring it forward (finally). Alexander Wendt begins his paper “Why… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2010"
Video: Collaborative Consumption
Rachel Botsman, co-author with Roo Rogers of the upcoming book “What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption”, was one of the speakers atTEDx Sydney, the conference which featured a selection of Australia’s leading visionaries and storytellers on May 22nd. The book Collaborative Consumption describes the rapid explosion in traditional sharing, bartering, lending, trading, renting,… Continue reading
WebM – Open Source Video for the Web
Nicholas from the nonprofit, open video player Miro sez, “The new open-video WebM format is a real chance to move us all out of the proprietary video format mess of the current web and device world. Miro Video Converter (free and open-source, of course) is the first video converter for the WebM and definitely the… Continue reading
Immaterial Value and Scarcity in Digital Capitalism: how semiotic transactions develop values independently of physical assets
While digital capitalism may appear to be an affective form of capitalism, and to a certain extent it does deploy affective measures to achieve its ends, a more correct designation is agnotologic capitalism: a capitalism systemically based on the production and maintenance of ignorance. The accusations of fraud against banks such as Goldman Sachs for… Continue reading
Introduction to the Pirate universe
This interview of Magnus Eriksson of Piratebyran by the Digicult magazine’s Marco Mancuso, from 2009, is still very much worth reading. Don’t miss the extensive introduction in the original article. As a reminder, the 3 three main branches of the Pirate universe are the parliamentary fraction The Pirate Party (PP), the organic intellectuals of the… Continue reading
The end of the age of abundance?
Within not too many years, it’s safe to predict, only the relatively rich will have the dubious privilege of spending the last months of their lives hooked up to complicated life support equipment. The rest of us will end our lives the way our great-grandparents did: at home, more often than not, with family members… Continue reading
Book of the Week: conclusions on the (political) Engineering of Abundance (2)
Wolfgang Hoeschele. The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability. Gower Publishing, 2010 We will return to this important book on a further occasion with further thematic excerpts, but today, we conclude the week’s treatment with the conclusions of the author. How do we get from the dominance of scarcity engineering… Continue reading
Bitcoin P2P Cryptocurrency now in public beta
Bitcoin is an idea developed by Satoshi Nakamoto for an independent, fully de-centralized P2P currency. Technical details of how it is generated are described in a White Paper titled Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System available here as a PDF file. The currency is now in beta release and if you are using Windows or… Continue reading
Call for Papers, Network Politics: Objects, Subjects and New Political Affects
Network Politics: Objects, Subjects and New Political Affects October 22-23, Ryerson University, Toronto Canada A Symposium co-sponsored by the AHRC funded “New Configurations of Network Politics” project at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge UK, and the Infoscape Centre for the Study of Social Media, Ryerson University, Canada In the network age, the question of political agency… Continue reading
A critique of the conservative Big Society program
1. The ‘transition movement’ green critique: Excerpted from an article by Alexis Rowell, of Transition Belize: “What worries me about the Big Society is that I see little understanding of the real underlying problems of our society – materialism (ie capitalism), globalisation of production (as opposed to the spread of ideas) and an unwillingness to… Continue reading
Junto and the ‘pay it forward’ business model
Image designed by Gavin Keech Venessa Miemis on her blog emergent by design, has introduced Junto (Junto is born), an evolving platform for having real live conversations, but with a difference. Instead of just having the conversation and going on with our lives, Junto is a platform that not only will permit to record and… Continue reading
Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter Three. Babylon is Fallen (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).] State capitalism, with industry organized along mass-production lines, has a chronic tendency to overaccumulation: in other words, its… Continue reading
The Media as Battleground for Consciousness
1. This is one reason that the developing situation is so extremely threatening and dangerous to the powers that be: through rigorous indoctrination via the media, they have set up unreal expectations in the populace, who may become irate when it finally dawns upon them that these expectations will never be met. Instead, in reality,… Continue reading
From the Green Revolution to the Brown Revolution
“A quarter of the land area of Earth is turning into desert. Three quarters of the planet’s savannas and grasslands are degrading. And because the main activity on rangelands is grazing livestock, on which 70% of the world’s poorest people depend, grassland deterioration therefore causes widespread poverty. Enormous research efforts have been made to understand… Continue reading
Transition vs. Transformation
This musing was provoked by, and is therefore partially in response to, Michel Bauwen’s post on “late K” capitalism (http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-strategies-in-the-late-k-stage-of-globalization/2010/06/06 ). “Post-” or “late” periods are characterized by the following elements. 1) being ontologically dependent on the preceding era, in particular, its terms and definitons. 2) being “critical” in nature, since they are expressions of… Continue reading
Book of the Week: The Economics of Abundance
Wolfgang Hoeschele. The Economics of Abundance: A Political Economy of Freedom, Equity, and Sustainability. Gower Publishing, 2010 This book is probably to expensive for averagely-earning individuals, but please urge your public library to obtain it, as it is a first thorough treatment of ‘abundance economics’. A central part of the P2P proposals is indeed to… Continue reading