Date archives "July 2010"

Participatory Management practices at Mondragon

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

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

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

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

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