Applied to systems and solutions design, this means that total openness is the antidote to openness. When everything is open, nothing is open. In order to design openness, one of the first decisions designers have to make is therefore to determine what needs to remain closed. This is a strategic task: making negative choices for… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2010"
Book of the Week: Education in the Creative Economy
* Book: Education in the Creative Economy: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Innovation. Edited by Daniel Araya & Michael A. Peters. Peter Lang, 2010 I generally prefer monographs to books bringing together essays, but this book deserves special treatment, because it may be the first to so explicitely make the link between the… Continue reading
David Bollier reviews “Common as Air”
Review of the Book: Common as Air. Revolution, Art, and Ownership. Lewis Hyde. 2010 Excerpted from David Bollier in On The Commons: “At a time when the entertainment industry’s argumentation about copyright and patent law is generally stale, disingenuous and alarmist, Hyde’s book reveals an arc of political history that has been all but obscured… Continue reading
Jeremy Rifkin on the Science of Empathy
The last thirty years of scientific inquiry into animal and human intersubjectivity have radically undermined the worldview proposed by neoliberalism and neoclassical economics. According to Tikkun, “science is now on our side”. Jeremy Rifkin, in this presentation of the research for his latest book on the Empathic Civilisation, explains why: Some extra comments from Rifkin:… Continue reading
Explorations Towards a Vocabulary of a More Open Politics
* Article: On Open Space: Explorations Towards a Vocabulary of a More Open Politics. Jai Sen. Antipode. Volume 42, Issue 4, pages 994–1018, September 2010 Must read essay by Jai Sen, we excerpt the passages on the shift from open space techniques to open politics. Abstract “Drawing on my work in and on architecture, urban… Continue reading
500 million on facebook – will diaspora have a chance?
Diaspora, I might remind you, is a project by four New York University College students, to develop and code a social network that isn’t centralized and that allows users full control over who gets to see what they publish, post for post. It will not run on centralized servers – every user is to host… Continue reading
The radical potential of nowtopian struggles
Nowtopia is a term that attempts to describe the myriad efforts to reclaim and reinvent work against the logic of capital. Nowtopia identifies a new basis for a shared experience of class. Specifically, the exodus from wage labor on one side, and the embrace of meaningful, freely chosen and “free” (unpaid) work on the other…. Continue reading
Istvan Rev on the civilisational import of the free software movement
Activists today are not fantasizing about the coming of the revolution rather about self-organizing systems, where software developers imitate the model of ant communities following supposedly simple rules that result in unforeseen complex patterns. The emphasis is always on hybridization, the collaboration of the social, the natural and the technical, on the the lack of… Continue reading
Definition of Peer-to-Peer Urbanism
This definition has been prepared by the “Peer-to-peer Urbanism Task Force” consisting of Antonio Caperna, Michael Mehaffy, Geeta Mehta, Agatino Rizzo, Nikos A. Salingaros, Stefano Serafini, and Emanuele Strano (September 2010). References for further info are here. “P2P (PEER-TO-PEER) URBANISM is an innovative way of conceiving, constructing, and repairing the city that rests upon five… Continue reading
John Holloway on the Revolt of Doing Against Labour
“In this article I suggest that the key to understanding autonomies is the revolt of one form of activity against another. I relate this revolt to Marx’s concept of the dual character of labour, and suggest that the rise of autonomist politics should be understood as an expression of the crisis of abstract labour.” *… Continue reading
Remi Sussan: Hacking the Sacred project
Remi Sussan announced the creation of a mailing list for discussions on neurotheological hacking, i.e. “hierohacking”: Remi Sussan: “I have just created a google group about hierohacking: the goal of this group will be to discuss applied neurotheology, see how we can “hack the sacred”, use intelligently and rationally religious thinking and practices for personal… Continue reading
The Gurstein Open Data update: end-user requirements for effective usage
Michael Gurstein has updated and expanded his much talked about earlier intervention on open data, which we also reblogged here. Excerpts: “In the following I want to extend the argument to include some discussion and analysis that was left out of the original post and as well to integrate some of the comments that folks… Continue reading
Thinking about autonomy and self-management
* Special issue of Antipode, journal of radical geography. SYMPOSIUM Autonomy: The Struggle for Survival, Self-Management and the Common Organiser. Volume 42, Issue 4, pages 897–908, September 2010 Details about this must-read issue of Antipode: Contents “The special feature begins with an essay by John Holloway. He lives in Mexico and is author of several… Continue reading
French Government Looks to Mass Spyware to Control P2P Software
A while ago I wrote about the technical difficulties of implementing any reasonable solution to stopping people from using p2p to download copyrighted material (post 1 and 2) – I notice that the French government is adopting methods very similar to that of China in an attempt to control p2p use; French Internet users could… Continue reading
Book of the Week: The New Economics of True Wealth (2): Plenitude as transformative strategy
* Book: Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth. By Juliet B. Schor. Penguin, 2010 We finalize our presentation of this important book. Here are excerpts from chapter one of plenitude: Plenitude as the way forward out of the meltdown of global capitalism Juliet Schor: “There is a way forward, and I call it plenitude…. Continue reading
Tom Crowl on Creating Communities
Guest contribution by Tom Crowl: Some background: When humans moved from living as Hunter/Gatherers to Organized Agriculture and then on to other forms of economic activity requiring a larger Social Organism* it resulted in some very fundamental changes to the communities in which we and our progenitors had lived for literally millions of years… *A… Continue reading