The Institute of Network Cultures has announce the publication of Video Vortex Reader II: moving images beyond YouTube. You can find more info at http://networkcultures.org/wpmu/videovortex/vv-reader. You can order a copy of this free publication by emailing: [email protected] and download the book from their main page. One of the chapters is by our good friend Andrew… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2011"
Symposium “Watching the Media”
Censorship, Limits and Control in Creative Practice’, which is joint-organised by Edge Hill University and the MeCCSA practice session. The symposium investigates the impact and role of censorship for media and creative practice. The symposium will take place at Edge Hill University (Ormskirk, outside of Liverpool) on the 15th April 2011.
Why the four forms of intersubjectivity need each other
Each way of life undermines itself. Individualism would mean chaos without hierarchical authority to enforce contracts and repel enemies. To get work done and settle disputes the egalitarian order needs hierarchy, too. Hierarchies, in turn, would be stagnant without the creative energy of individualism, uncohesive without the binding force of equality, unstable without the passivity… Continue reading
The Protocol Wars of 4chan, Anonymous, and Wikileaks
This is where the war stands to be won: in the building of autonomous structures of all sorts (structures that bypass and outcompete existing ones) on top of other new structures until the entire old world is unnecessary. The above conclusion on the validity of p2p-based change strategies is from an interesting analysis which appeared… Continue reading
Homebrew Industrial Revolution: Chapter Six (Second Excerpt)
[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my recently published book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (you can check it out for free online here). Over the next few weeks, I will conclude with the last series of two excerpts each from Chapters Six and Seven.] Chapter Six: Resilient Communities… Continue reading
Open Government: Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards
Announcing a workshop on *Open Government: Open Data, Open Source and Open Standards* organized jointly by Dr Hanif. Rahemtulla, Horizon Digital Economy Research and Puneet Kishor, Science Fellow, Creative Commons, in conjunction with the annual Open Source GIS Conference, June 21, 2011, Nottingham, United Kingdom. The workshop will be held at the School of Geography/Centre… Continue reading
A message from Einstein in 1949
Via: (republished from Monthly Review) Just as food for thought: ” * Modern anthropology has taught us, through comparative investigation of so-called primitive cultures, that the social behavior of human beings may differ greatly, depending upon prevailing cultural patterns and the types of organisation which predominate in society. It is on this that those who… Continue reading
A case of Wikipedia manipulation: the Koch brothers
How extreme rigtht-wing U.S. billionaires are paying people to rewrite the Wikipedia:
Value in Prosumer practices- and in the Information Economy
Lately there have been many attempts to theorize and criticize value creation in online prosumer practices. A lot of people have proposed some version of the Marxian labor theory of value, whereby they have suggested that online content creation should be seen as a form of labor, and that consequently, social media sites like Facebook,… Continue reading
Degrowth in a context of infinite growth
A critique of the degrowth movement for skirting the issue that we live in a system that is predicated on infinite growth: Excerpted from John Bellamy Foster: 1. “What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic… Continue reading
The 20th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons
Vol 5, No 1 (2011) of the International Journal of the Commons is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Ostrom’s landmark book. Excerpted from the editorial by editors Frank van Laerhoven and Erling Berge: (the original has tables and links) “Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990) celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2010. Since its… Continue reading
The Spirit of Davos vs. the Spirit of Porto Alegre
After an interesting and ‘must-read’ analysis of the current world situation and the prospects for change, Immanuel Wallerstein posits the dual alternative that the world population will have to choose from: “All in all, it is not a pretty picture, and brings us to the political question, What can we do in this kind of… Continue reading
Should we worry about capitalist commons?
There is a particular strand of thinking, which we have featured on occasion on our blog, with authors such as Massimo de Angelis of The Commoner, Sylvia Federici and George Caffentzis of Midnight Notes, and Martin Pedersen, who particularly stress the need to be wary, and denounce, tendencies towards ‘capitalist commons’, which in there mind,… Continue reading
The Wisconsin tipping point: rousing speech by Dennis Kucinich in Madison
Worth watching, the rebirth of a mass movement for civic rights in the U.S.: (this point is made explicitely by Kucinich: economic democracy is a precondition to political democracy.) * Video 1: * Video 2: See also: Riz Khan (Al Jazeera) on the attacks on U.S. labour rights, with Ralph Nader:
Chrematistics are masquerading as economics
* Book: Wendell Berry. What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. The following excerpt, which distinguishes chrematistics, the study of individual accumulation, from oikonomia, the study of collective provisioning, is from the foreword by Herman Daly: “What do we economists have to learn from Wendell Berry? Many things, but here I will mention only two…. Continue reading
A serious problem with BitCoin: it wastes energy
Excerpted from Xfin: “With the EFF’s announcement that they would being accepting BitCoin donations, the alternative money community began to take a larger interest. I certainly did, and found that there are good and bad things about this form of money. In the end, BitCoins create a perverse incentive to consume energy to “create money.”… Continue reading