Excerpted from John McNamara: ““The Mondragon Cooperative Experience believes that the democratic character of the Cooperative is not limited to membership aspects, but that it also implies the progressive development of self-management and consequently of the participation of members in the sphere of business management which, in turn, requires: a) The development of suitable mechanisms… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2010"
Does human nature need to change for a p2p transformation to occur?
Someone asked me recently, if it was not naïve to expect such a major change as the one predicted and/or wished for by the P2P Foundation, as human nature does not change, and so we will have capitalism for another 50 generations. A good question, which generates a number of responses from my side. First… Continue reading
A Model for P2P Warfare
I’ve just finished reading an interesting book called ‘New Model Army‘ (NMA) – for those not into their British history, there is a play on words, as the New Model Army were also the name given to the radical reorganisation of the Parliamentary forces under Oliver Cromwell during the English Civil War of 1642-1651. It’s… Continue reading
The betrayal of the internet founding principles in the new corporate architectures
Van Schewick concludes that the original architecture of the Internet fostered application innovation. Current changes that deviate from the Internet’s original design principles reduce the amount and quality of application innovation, limit users’ ability to use the Internet as they see fit, and threaten the Internet’s ability to realize its economic, social, cultural, and political… Continue reading
A Road Not Taken – Cybernetic Socialism in the USSR
Paul Cockshott says: this is a book that should be read by anyone with a serious interest in economic alternatives * Book Review: Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford “This is a marvelous and unusual book. It sits in a remarkable way in between science popularisation, social history and fiction. The author describes it variously as… Continue reading
Interviewing open source design pioneers
The OpenSimSim project has been interviewing scores of pioneering open source design practitioners. One of the available videos features our friend Massimo Menichelli: MASSIMO MENICHINELLI: OPEN SOURCE DESIGN from opensimsim.net on Vimeo.
Progressing on the p2p political front
I would like to offer the following update on how I see the transformation towards a more p2p-oriented world occurring. A first way of looking at it, is looking at alliances, and I have covered this here, in a previous article on “Towards a Grand Alliance of the Commons”. Here, I want to offer a… Continue reading
First Open Science Summit launches tomorrow!
The first Open Science Summit begins July 29th at Berkeley. Those wishing to attend can still register at the last minute at http://opensciencesummit.eventbrite.com/ You can view the livestream at http://fora.tv/live/open_science/open_science_summit_2010 Follow us on Twitter @OpenScience2010 #OSS2010 For more on the aims of the movement and the conference see http://www.xconomy.com/san-francisco/2010/07/07/the-open-science-shift/ Recent years have seen technological revolutions… Continue reading
The intersubjectivity of P2P: the The Gift Economy vs. Communal Shareholding
Republished from my 2006 manuscript: “In my opinion, there is a profound misconception regarding peer to peer, expressed by the various authors who call it a gift economy, such as Richard Barbrook (Barbrook, 1995), or Steven Weber (Weber, 2004). But, as Stephan Merten of Oekonux.de has already argued, P2P production methods are not a gift… Continue reading
Kevin Carson responds to Greer’s “End of the Internet” prediction
Digital technology and the network revolution are at the heart of what’s creating the potential for a low-impact, less resource-intensive economy. Green and high-tech are allies against mass production and the mountains of deliberately obsolete goods piling up in our landfills, and against the globalist economic model of truck/containership warehouses linking points of production and… Continue reading
Eben Moglen on the Civil Rights and Privacy Implications of Social Networking in the Cloud (and what can be done about it)
Excerpted from an interview by Glyn Moody: “Eben Moglen: We have a kind of social dilemma which comes from architectural creep. We had an Internet that was designed around the notion of peerage – machines with no hierarchical relationship to one another, and no guarantee about their internal architectures or behaviours, communicating through a series… Continue reading
Technology and Evolution: How Software Evolves
This post looks at my research into evolution and technology. The author (me, Tomas Rawlings) is currently doing research into looking at how technology evolves, and am using p2p systems as my test subject. I’ve done a number of presentations on this subject and below are the slides from my presentations at eComm 2009, Virt3c@Hull… Continue reading
Explaining the paradox: why is the “information society” destroying universities and precarizing knowledge workers?
Bizarrely, the number of good white collar jobs seems to be shrinking as the knowledge economy grows. Brian Holmes reports: (excerpted with new subtitles) “Check out “The Structure and Silence of the Cognitariat,” an article by a UC Santa Barbara professor named Christopher Newfield. It’s a great piece, clear, concise and packed full of pertinent… Continue reading
Open Source Ecology: Getting Ready to Build
By Marcin Jakubowski. Things have been spectacular with William so far. We have basically managed to scale our progress twofold. Since he’s been here, we’ve seen full product release of the open source CEB press, The Liberator, and we’ve had significant progress on the open source tractor, LifeTrac Prototype II. We also deployed the first… Continue reading
More on John Michael Greer
Michel Bauwens solicited comments on this post by John Michael Greer, and compiled them into this: “Will the Internet survive energy contraction?” Michel also solicited my comment on Greer’s views from the standpoint of a possible tie-in with Lewis Mumford’s thought. But to the extent that, like Dave Pollard, he sees assorted Peak Everything crises… Continue reading
From a market orientation to a mission orientation
There are many ways to describe the p2p (r)evolution that we are advocating and monitoring here, and how precisely it relates to existing business structures and models. One of the ways to describe it is that we are evolving away from market supremacy, not by abolishing market players and the market, but by subsuming it… Continue reading