[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 several weeks, I will conclude with the last series of two excerpts each from Chapters Six and Seven.] Chapter Six. Resilient Communities… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2011"
Son of ACTA: meet the next secret copyright treaty
So many countries in need of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so little time! The US government, still trying to secure final passage for the drafted-in-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), has already turned its attention to a new multilateral trade agreement that will bring the wonders of the DMCA to countries like Australia, Brunei, Chile,… Continue reading
P2P and Deliberative Democracy approaches compared
Excerpted from an article Michael Brooks with as main theme: “what’s needs to be done in terms of social change”: “Michel Bauwens, an independent writer and researcher based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, articulates an open peer-to-peer (P2P) politics that extends the practices of open information cultures to a broader political project. P2P politics builds on… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution
* Book: Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution. Social Struggles in a Transition to a Post-Petrol World. Ed. by Kolya Abramsky. AK Press, 2010 The above is really comprehensive book with many excellent chapters on social movements related to equitable energy provisioning: “a major contribution to the movement working for a transition from carbon capitalism to… Continue reading
The disintegration of work
Mark Pesce predicts that online supply and demand applications will destructure the labor market: “For many years, economists and futurists have discussed the fragmentation and disintegration of the labour market. We’ve seen a steady increase in casual work over the past generation, but we’re at a precipice, about to take a plunge downward, into the… Continue reading
Academic MindTrek 2011
Call for Papers, Posters, Tutorials, Demos, and Workshops 28th-30th September, 2011 Tampere, Finland In cooperation with ACM, ACM SIGMM and ACM SIGCHI publications will be published in the ACM digital library and a selected set of high-level contributions will published as book chapters or in journals We are pleased to invite you to the Academic… Continue reading
An update on collapse thinking and preparedness
Kunstler suggests that “cheap abundant energy” has facilitated ever-increasing industrialization for centuries. But now that society is in a period of self-destructive capital accumulation, he expects debt to increase as abundance in energy drops. The tremendous amount of accumulated debt, “a by-product of cheap abundant energy,” will mean that in the future governments will be… Continue reading
What’s the right attitude for living in a complex, chaotic, unpredictable system?
It is through our participation — although not only through our participation — that God (or the Goddess, or the Tao, or Life) works wonders. How to position yourself in a world of change, while being a force for good? An interesting response from Tom Atlee: “These strategies are remarkably consistent with what you’d expect… Continue reading
Open Education: Changing Educational Practices
E-Learning Papers have published its issue number 23 entitled “Open Education: Changing Educational Practices”. You can download it from this link. In the Editorial section, Ulf-Daniel Ehlers and Tapio Koskinen, says: The idea of open education has spread to hundreds of educational institutions, foremost higher education and adult learning institutions, across the globe. “Giving away… Continue reading
Is ignoring copyright the best strategy against IP monopolists?
Rick Falkvinge has an excellent editorial on the death of copyright if the IP industry ignores all appeals for sensible reform, such as those proposed by the Swedish Pirate Party. Kevin Carson has a further reaction: “I think ignoring the law and developing countermeasures against enforcement are a much more cost-effective use of resources than… Continue reading
Disempowerment of labor: enough is enough
Excerpted from David Harvey in an analysis of the prospects for continued neoliberalism after the meltdown of 2008: 1. Disempowerment of labor: enough is enough “Whether we can get out of this crisis in a different way depends very much upon the balance of class forces. It depends upon the degree to which the entire… Continue reading
Successful Global Commons need Social Capital on a global scale
Kaitlyn Rathwell makes an important point relative to an age of global problems, global solutions and global governance, i.e. we need global trust. This can be achieved through local engagement, global solidarity, and the intelligent use of social network tools. Excerpted from a longer article by Kaitlyn Rathwell: “We can start now building trust, reciprocity,… Continue reading
Wikileaks, Hacktivism 2.0 and the Threats to National Sovereignty and Empire
Very interesting essay in the Hungarian blog War Systems (from Bodó Balázs ), which has two important themes. First is how Wikileaks/Anonymous represent new threats to the principle of sovereignty, and second how they represent an empowerement of hacktivism 2.0, defined as ‘attacks from the inside’. Read the whole essay here. 1. First Theme: Wikileaks… Continue reading
PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference 2011
The Public Knowledge Project is pleased to announce that, in partnership with the Freie Universität Berlin, the Third International PKP Scholarly Publishing Conference will be held from September 26 – 28, 2011 in Berlin, Germany. This is the first time that the PKP Conference is being held outside of Vancouver, Canada, and we look forward… Continue reading
Reportage on a Seed Commons project and p2p farmers network in the Andhra Pradesh region of India
Reproduced from an article by David Bollier: “Over the past twenty-five years, thousands of women in small villages in the Andhra Pradesh region of India have escaped from working as low-paid, bonded laborers, to become self-reliant farmers able to grow enough to feed their households. Food was once unaffordable and hunger common. Now the women… Continue reading
Business Models for Open Hardware
Few months ago, Platoniq commissioned me a report about business models for Open Hardware, DIY Craft and Fab Labs, for their crowdfunding project Goteo. It is now available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website, and on openp2pdesign.org in English. I’m now reposting it here, since the text is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported Creative Commons… Continue reading