Date archives "December 2010"

Announcing the Remix the Commons Video Series

Remix the commons is a collaborative and evolutive multimedia project. It aims to document and illustrate the key ideas and practices of the commons movement, including through the creative process of the project itself. Description of the project by David Bollier: “The International Commons Conference in Berlin continues to generate some interesting follow-up work. One… Continue reading

Homebrew Industrial Revolution, Chapter Five: The Small Workshop, Desktop Manufacturing, and Household Production (first excerpt)

[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my recently published book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto.  My plan is to post two excerpts from each chapter.] Neighborhood and Backyard Industry. A recurring theme among early writers on decentralized production and the informal and household economies is the community workshop, and… Continue reading

Book review: The Art of Not Being Governed

From a double book review in The American Interest, which also reviews Benedict Anderson’s 2006 book, Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. Here, we excerpt from the review of: * Book: The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia. by James C. Scott. Yale University Press, 2009 Henry… Continue reading

Charlie Stross: Let a Thousand Utopia’s Bloom

Historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …? Excerpted from Charlie Stross: “It seems to me that the post-cold war neoliberal dominated political consensus (which is a consensus of the Right, insofar as the flagship of the Left hit an iceberg and started to… Continue reading

Lawrence Bird Interviews Michel Bauwens about creation, the city, and p2p dynamics

Lawrence Bird, a designer, instructor and writer with an interest in cities and their image, interviews Michel Bauwens for furtherfield.org, an online arts community, platforms for creating, viewing, discussing and learning about experimental practices at the intersections of art, technology and social change Interview It’s a commonplace now that the peer-to-peer movement opens up new… Continue reading