Date archives "October 2010"

The moral economy of the farmer, and the problem with profit maximisation

Via Vinay Gupta’s blog, who cites a review of the James Scott 1977 book, The Moral Economy of the Peasant: Rebellion and Subsistence in Southeast Asia The review cited is from Faruk Ekmekci: “Scott complains that approaches to exploitation hitherto have been “too one-sidedly materialistic,” (p.165). Accordingly, his goal is to shed light to the… Continue reading

An integrated vision of Industrial Revolution 3.0 based on Open Design

‘Yes, we’re open.’ is an exhibition on how our networked society is reshaping the way we create, produce and consume. Exhibition overview + open design manual can be downloaded at http://www.intrastructures.net/yes_we_re_open.pdf The poster by Thomas Lommee is a really great overview of open design principles and manufacturing, and shows an integrated vision of this new… Continue reading

The social commerce wars and beyond: choosing between Metcalfe, Reed, and the new Phyles

What we know of social commerce, i.e. the forms of business taking advantage of social networks, such as Facebook or the ad network of Google, are still based on a vision of individualism, albeit a network version. Taking advantage of their understanding of Metcalfe’s Law, which states that each additional network node exponentially grows the… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Phyles, Economic Democracy in the Network Century

* Book: Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network Century. by David de Ugarte This is a really remarkable, breakthrough and must-read book for the p2p-oriented community, especially those groping for personal sustainability, open business models and an economy of the commons, and which outlines the new network form of phyles, as well as discussing historical… Continue reading

On human cooperation with other species

Republished from 2006 and [reblogged from Cooperation Commons] Human-Plant/Animal Species Symbiosis The nature of human cooperation with other species is now largely a based upon a symbiotic structure that has changed very little since the dawn of agriculture in early human civilization. This symbiotic relationship has consisted mostly of humans selectively breeding, raising and caring… Continue reading

Design is power: A review of issues around the concept of protocollary power

Protocally Power is a concept developed by Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol, to denote the new way power and control are exercised in distributed networks. (See also, in the P2P Foundation wiki, our entries on the Architecture of Control and on Computing Regimes.) Here is the description of the concept from Alexander Galloway in… Continue reading

Using Protocollary Power for Insuring Diversity: the gender-friendly design of the LilyPad Arduino

“LilyPad is a microcontroller platform that Leah created a few years back and that is specifically designed to be more useful than other microcontroller platforms (like normal Arduino) in the context of crafting practices like textiles or painting. Leah’s design goal with LilyPad was to create a sewable microcontroller that could be useful for making… Continue reading

Red Pepper on the free culture movement and the Barcelona free culture summit

Red Pepper has an article by Marco Berlinguer in which he explains the growing movements for free culture and begins to explore its political and social significance, in the context of the the second meeting of the Free Culture Forum (FCF) which will take place at the end of October, with the participation of artists,… Continue reading

Dmytri Kleiner’s critique of peer production ideology

(republished from July 2010) By Dmytri Kleiner: “Imaging that a “better” copyright system or a “freer” Internet could exist within the present system of economic relations is to misplace the deterministic factors. The intrinsic truth in arguments against copyright and the clear technical superiority of distributed technologies over centralized ones have not been the deciding… Continue reading

Social change and social media: why the revolution won’t be twittered

Deep social change, requiring high-risk activism, is a strong-tie phenomenom, while social media essentially are based on ‘weak ties’. Hence, the revolution won’t be twittered or facebooked. This is the essential argument of Malcolm Gladwell’s interesting article in the New Yorker: (also read the rebuttal by Angus Johnston here) “High-risk activism … is a “strong-tie”… Continue reading