Ryan Carson from the reknowned Think Vitamin design blog just posted on how crowdsourcing and our old friends at Kickstarter are changing the landscape for independent design pros while showing new channels of communication and expression. People investing small amounts of their own savings into projects they believe in, in return for a limited renumeration… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2011"
Social Media and Social Revolution (4): Learning from Iran
* Book: The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam. Philip Howard. To realistically gauge the role of social media in social revolutions, it’s useful not just to look at successes like Tunisia, but also at failed attempts, such as Iran. In his research-based book, Philip Howard argues that even with… Continue reading
Eco-climatic background to the Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings
Excerpted from John Michael Greer: “Let’s start with the revolution in Tunisia and the ongoing turmoil in Egypt. Behind the explosion of popular resentments that’s putting once-secure governments at risk is the simple fact that in both countries, and across the Third World more generally, people are having an increasingly hard time getting enough to… Continue reading
Book of the Week: towards an economics of provisioning
* Book: Civilizing the Economy. A new economics of provision. Marvin T. Brown. Cambridge University Press, 2010 We nominated this as p2p book of the year for 2010 and presented it in our blog on January 5. However, we never gave it the book of week treatment, with original excerpts from the book. That oversight… Continue reading
Franz Nahrada on the launch of the Demonetization initiative
From Vienna, but not limited to local interest, comes an initiative to discuss and promote demonetization initiatives. An introduction by Franz Nahrada: “The idea to call for “demonetization” and the call for this mailing list brings together a very broad range of perspectives, theoretical traditions and social activists. – So how can we build on… Continue reading
Chris Carlsson on assertive desertion: What Critical Mass is all about
Critical Mass cyclists are among the most visible practitioners of a new kind of social conflict. The “assertive desertion” embodied in bicycling erodes the system of social exploitation organized through private car ownership and the oil industry. And by cycling in urban centers in the Empire, we join a growing movement around the world that… Continue reading
Free Rice through Seed Banks – An Interview with Dr. Debal Deb
Excerpt: The principle is local self-sustainability, depending on the locally produced seeds of indigenous varieties, and access to the seed bank for everybody – Not in exchange of money, but in exchange of varieties. This was pioneered by Dr. Debal Deb, Founder of the rice seed bank Vrihi In 1997, the Indian ecologist Dr. Debal… Continue reading
Social Media and Social Revolution (3): why the ‘how’ of media are so important
This is crucial: The point is that the existence of a specific technology and its widespread adoption fundamentally alters the society which adopts said technology. (This is alters not determines.)*. The first contribution is excerpted from Zeynep Tufekci. In the second contribution, Dave Parry examines the case of Egypt in more detail. In the third… Continue reading
An answer to Internet blackout during a popular uprising: pre-programmed mass movements
Pre-programing means preparing the masses in advance to react to different outcomes of a future action. The action can be a protest, or a popular revolt against a tyrannical government. This preparation becomes necessary in situations where technology-based lines of communication are temporarily cut during the events or in preparation for such an eventuality. But even with the most sophisticated one-to-many means of communication, pre-programing is always advised in order to reduce panic during events, and to increase the level of cohesion of the masses.
Continue readingU.K. labour can use its neo-traditional roots for contemporary renewal
UK conservatives have stolen Labour’s mutualism in their Big Society program whose ultimate aim is to destroy any form of social support for the majority of the UK population. Labour should re-appropriate this tradition as well, argues Maurice Glasman, who in a long essay, first starts by analysing Labour as a marriage between working class… Continue reading
Towards a dialogic orientalism
Dialogic Orientalism: This is constituted by the awareness among those within the West who perceive the origin of the Other within their own culture, who believe that spirituality is part of the definition of the Human, which has been suppressed and neglected in the development of the progressive “logocentric” discourse of the Enlightenment. This anthropological… Continue reading
Successfull examples of land value tax reforms
Don’t tax productive activities, but land and real estate speculation: ” * The “Four Tigers”, 1940s. Apologists for state planning and state partnership with big business point enthusiastically to Pacific Rim Asia but overlook the fact that all these success stories began on a firm footing of land reform. The city-state Singapore, founded on Georgist… Continue reading
Wikilawyering and the bureaucratisation of Wikipedia
Excerpted from Alex Roshuk: “The problem that I see with the dispute resolution process is not that it weeds out problematic users, but that it does not function to teach these users how to be good volunteers. While I originally suggested in the fall of 2003 that Wikipedia have a structured dispute resolution process, instead… Continue reading
Towards a Peer-to-Peer Strategy for Social Change
“The P2P movement is…at a historical juncture, where it has to start developing the ability for policy formulation and connect with social mobilizations…. the next step is changing the old institutional order itself, and this crucial step has barely started.” — Michel Bauwens, ( How does real change occur ) There comes a time in… Continue reading
What’s ailing Europe, and what’s bubbling below the surface?
The destiny of Europe will be played out in the biopolitical sphere, at the border between consumerism, techno-sanitarian youth-styled aggressiveness, and possible collective consciousness of the limits of the biological (sensitive) organism. The age of senilization is here, and Europe is the place where this experience will first find its voice. Bifo has written a… Continue reading
Herbalism: Open Source Medicine
Herbalism is a low-cost, accessible, community-powered, patent-free form of medicine. It’s also under threat from the patent-driven pharmaceutical business. Could the values and struggles of open-source software proponents have much in common with herbalists? In his article that likens herbalism to open source software, Thierry Gagnon draws on the many parallels that exist between the… Continue reading