Excerpted from the book, What Technology Wants, by Kevin Kelly: ” Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2011"
Brian Holmes on the current conjuncture of Empire: 15 years of chaos
Excerpted from a 3-post dialogue with Felix Stadler on the nettime list. A must read analysis of “where we are at”, by Brian Holmes: “The Cold War military order ended along with the Keynesian-Fordist industrial paradigm way back in the 1970s. The crisis that is opening now (for the last three years) will spell the… Continue reading
Launch of a U.S. Public Banking Institute
Excerpted from Mike Krauss : “Americans are wondering if there is a way out of what now appears to many as a decades long and accelerating decline of the fortunes of the once fabled American middle class. A diverse group of American educators, entrepreneurs and businesspeople, local government officials and civic leaders, economists, writers, lawyers… Continue reading
On the relationship between leaderless peer networking and hierarchical structures: the case of Egypt
Networks which start out as diffuse can and likely will quickly evolve into hierarchies not in spite but because of their open and flat nature. A very important thinkpiece by Zeynep Tufekci warns us against a too easy equation between p2p networks and leaderlessness. Zeynep Tufekci: “Many commentators relate the diffuse, somewhat leaderless nature of… Continue reading
The history and revival of pro-market, anti-capitalist left libertarianism
The essay below is excerpted from a longer treatment by Sheldon Richman, and presents the tradition to which our frequent contributor Kevin Carson belongs. 1. “Capitalism, arising as a new class society directly from the old class society of the Middle Ages, was founded on an act of robbery as massive as the earlier feudal… Continue reading
An update on BIBO, financial stability standards, and the debt-virus hypothesis
In December 2009, Sepp Hasslberger introduced to us Bibo, a proposed standard for stable currencies, that would replace the current inherently unstable banking money system. This article has become our most comment rich article, in particular through a recurring debate between one of the Bibo co-authors Marc, and Ardeshir Mehta. Ardeshir has written an article… Continue reading
Rick Falkvinge on the information freedom wars: Tear Down This Firewall!
Excerpted from an editorial on the information freedom wars: (Rick Falkvinge is the founder of the Swedish and first Pirate Party, which has representation in the European parliament. The formerly Swedish-language blog, with advanced discussion on info freedom issues, will now be available in english, so that the rest of the world can share Swedish… Continue reading
The Tahrir Square tipping point as Revolution 2.0 (2): the mechanics of the Facebook moment
But the lesson of Egypt is that dictators can no longer rely on their victims’ fatalism and despair. Untrammeled Internet access—by which I mean, in practice, Twitter and Facebook—will make blatant tyranny impossible, by revealing the simple frailty of tyrants. Egypt has a mere 4 million Facebook users, only 5% of the population; even if… Continue reading
Misrepresenting Complex Systems
This post was prompted by the recent traffic of a piece by Zeynep Tufecki ( Can “Leaderless Revolutions” Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks ) here: http://technosociology.org/?p=366 It dismays me to see people like Zeynep Tufecki lapse into tired complex systems rhetoric to present a biased picture of networks and organic systems. Time… Continue reading
Want a new identity, here’s where you can buy one
British Artist Heath Bunting is selling new identities. Identity Bureau @ A New Day’s Work from A New Days Work on Vimeo. Heath Bunting, is a British artist and hacktivist, based in Bristol, known for creating art provovations that challenge political norms. He’s still banned from traveling to the United States for his work on… Continue reading
The shadow workers of the iceberg economy, the other ‘invisible hand’
Radicals often speak as though we live in a bleak landscape in which the good has yet to be born, the revolution yet to begin. As Constantino points out, both of them are here, right now, and they always have been. They are represented in countless acts of solidarity and resistance, and sometimes they even… Continue reading
Empire and its Discontents: The Tahrir Square tipping point as Revolution 2.0
In part one, Steven Colatrella gives the long view of the importance of the uprising/revolution in Egypt. In part two, one of the leaders of the movement in Egypt, Ghonim stresses how important the peer to peer communication infrastructure was for the success of the movement and how it is a tipping point for a… Continue reading
On monetary transformation: Thomas Greco in conversation with Daniel Pinchbeck
Luminous interview of Thomas Greco, on solutions for our financial/monetary crisis: “Thomas H. Greco, Jr. is a community and monetary economist, educator, writer, and consultant. Tom is the author of; ‘Money: Understanding and Creating Alternatives to Legal Tender’ (Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2001); ‘New Money for Healthy Communities’ (1994); ‘Money and Debt: A Solution to… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): Umair Haque on how to become a ‘constructive capitalist’
* Book: New Capitalist Manifesto. Building a Disruptively Better Business, Umair Haque. Harvard Business Press, 2011 In this second installment, the author discusses the case of Walmart in Chapter 2: Loss Advantage: From Value Chains to Value Cycles Umair Haque: “”The first step in becoming a constructive capitalist is learning to attain a loss advantage…. Continue reading
Governments vs. Freedom of Assembly
The first requirement when governments need to consolidate control is to prevent horizontal peer-to-peer communication. To this end, the first tactic is to suspend the right of “freedom of assembly” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_assembly ). In the past, people gathered in public squares and coffee houses. Today, they gather online. So it comes as no surprise that… Continue reading
Frank Pasquale: The A2K movement and the necessary reform of financial capitalism
As Yochai Benkler’s seminal work on the Wealth of Networks showed, A2K’s promise lies in modes of production that sidestep markets and states (and the ever more prevalent “predator state” that melds both). But if A2K fails to pay attention to the fundamental drivers of markets and states, ominous forces of surveillance, exploitation, and control… Continue reading