This really is a moment when centralized top-down legacy systems are coming into conflict with distributed, decentralized, bottom-up systems Below, two very interesting excerpts that analyses the nature of contemporary p2p politics. In the first, we see the filesharing support community described as ‘partisans’, i.e. temporary mobilizations defending an already required style of life. The… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2011"
Jeff Jarvis: thanking the Gutenberg of Arabia
The editorial from Jeff Jarvis is followed by an analysis by Charlie Beckket. 1. Jeff Jarvis Excerpted from a right-on editorial from Jeff Jarvis: “At the critical climax of the Egyptian revolution, one of its sparks, Google’s Wael Ghonim, told his followers on Twitter that he would not speak to them through media but instead… Continue reading
Roberto Verzola on counter-(peer)productive laws
This is Roberto Verzola‘s contribution to a online A2K symposium: “By “counter-productive”, I refer to laws which undermine, suppress or otherwise diminish the production and exchange of goods and services. Sometimes, such laws start off with good intentions. But when some powerful economic interests get disproportionate benefits from such laws, these get expanded, enhanced, or… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Internet Architecture and Innovation
* Book: Internet Architecture and Innovation. Barbara van Schewick. MIT Press, 2010
Does human nature need to change for a p2p transformation to occur?
Republished from July 31, 2010: “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… Continue reading
What to do when the ‘internet kill switch’ hits? Lessons from Egypt
Though the Internet was an important tool for mobilization, leaflets were used by organizers to call for more demonstrators and to spread awareness of the demands of the protesters. These leaflets were largely distributed in areas with low Internet penetration rates, and these areas were well represented in the first day’s demonstrations. Alex Dunn, a… Continue reading
Elements of the grassroots economy, and its counterfeits?
Please look at the following two videos in sequence, and ‘spot the difference’. The first one is not new, but this video of the Grassroots Economy Festival held in the Bay Area in 2009 by JASEcon, is a great overview of the components of the already existing and genuine social economy which expresses different values,… Continue reading
On leaderlessness and the digital generation in the Middle East
Excerpted from Anne-Marie Slaughter : Why did the people involved in the recent uprisings refuse to be represented by leaders? “The reason, in part, is that the Internet generation—the digital natives who took to Cairo’s streets—has a very different conception of leadership. They don’t see the world in terms of atomized actors requiring leaders to… Continue reading
A new history of hacking, hacktivism and hackerspaces
If you have missed it so far, Jarkko Moilanen is a PhD student in Tampere, Finland, who is writing a detailed history of the hacker movement and its different manifestations. His blog is here and contains many interesting entries, supplement by summarizing graphs and visualizations, that are well worth reading. I have excerpted some of… Continue reading
Christian Fuchs: A Critique of the Liberal Bias of Wikileaks
Excerpted from Christian Fuchs: “WikiLeaks can be seen as an alternative media project: it tries to provide information that uncovers the misuse of power by powerful actors, it is an Internet-based medium that enables critiques of power structures. Power is based on a dialectic of visibility and invisibility: powerful actors want to make their enemies… Continue reading
What is a really free school?
from Really Free School London, UK Communique #3 What is a really free school? Perhaps its easier to explain what a not really free school is… A not really free school is one that comes with a price tag so high that most will never consider attending, whilst those that do will spend a good… Continue reading
Regime Change in the ‘Arab Spring’ is a System Change
A contribution by Jaap van Till: arabspring
How the new forms of common value creation challenge both the market state and state capitalism
Republished from August 2010: These evolving dynamics — the decommodification of common goods through co-governance and the deterritorialization of value through co-production — are shattering the liberal assumptions which underlie state capitalism. The emergence of this new kind of management and valuation for the preservation of natural and social assets is posing a momentous crisis… Continue reading
Shann Turnbull on transforming capitalism through trusteeship governance
Republished from November 2008: Shann Turnbull is an advocate of new forms of network governance such as ‘stakeholder mutuals‘ Amongst his articles and essays are: * ‘Agendas for Reforming Corporate Governance, Capitalism and Democracy’ * ‘The Seven Deadly Sins of Capitalism’ Here, we republish his vision of how to transform the current form of capitalism…. Continue reading
Debating the Iron Law of Bureaucracy and the Power Law: Knowing Networks as an alternative to scale-free networks
These are further elements to the debate (between Zeynep Tufekci and others) as to whether and how the Iron Law of Bureaucracy, which affects initially egalitarian distributed networks, can be countered. 1. Clay Shirky: inequality is not always unfair Classic discusion of how the power law operates in blogs, and why it is inevitable, by… Continue reading
Food sustainability in Hackney, UK
“Growing Communities is a social enterprise run by local people in Hackney, East London. We are working to create a more sustainable food system through our projects which provide practical alternatives to the damaging food system that currently exists.”