Reproduced from the new commons-oriented, and strongly recommended, political magazine called “Stir To Action”: Marianne Maeckelbergh: “In this brief article I would like to summarise some alternative approaches to ‘knowing’ that I have encountered through activism and anthropological fieldwork within the alterglobalization movement. Specifically I will address four assumptions about knowledge found within the alterglobalization… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2011"
The corporation: a business automata that runs our lives and has become a ‘dominant species’
Reproduced from Roberto Verzola‘s popular article: “We created corporations and gave them life before Asimov drew up his Three Laws of Robotics. The First Law was: “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.” The Second: “A robot must obey the orders given it… Continue reading
Replacing systems management with complex responsive processes in peer to peer work environments
all major management schools are based on the idea of organisations being systems. From 1920s scientific management to 2000s complexity edge of chaos ideas. Systems thinking requires a separation between controlled and controllers even if they are the same people Excerpted from Bob Cannell: “As a worker cooperator I have struggled for years to use… Continue reading
Business models for Fab Labs
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 on openp2pdesign.org, and it will be soon available in Spanish from Platoniq’s YouCoop website. I’m now reposting it here, since the text is under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0… Continue reading
Paolo Virno on Collectivity as a precondition for Individuality
Excerpted from an extensive interview of Paolo Virno conducted by Alexei Penzin of Chto Delat in Mediations Journal: 1. Collectivity as a Precondition for Individuality Paolo Virno: “Lev S. Vygotskij’s thoughts on the collective, on the relation between the collective and singularity: His main idea is that the social relation precedes and allows for the… Continue reading
A #NextNet Proof-of-Concept
via http://blog.futureforwardinstitute.com/2011/04/01/a-nextnet-proof-of-concept Background “A proof of concept or a proof of principle is realization of a certain method or idea(s) to demonstrate its feasibility,[1] or a demonstration in principle, whose purpose is to verify that some concept or theory is probably capable of being useful. A proof-of-concept may or may not be complete….” (from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_concept… Continue reading
Zeynep Tufekci on the Role of Social Media in the Middle East Revolutions
From the YouTube intro: “What role has social media played in revolutionary movements sweeping through the Middle East? UMBC sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has addressed this question in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Forbes and on public radio and television. In this video, made in collaboration with UMBC’s student bloggers at USDemocrazy, Tufekci tackles… Continue reading
Towards a bio-urbanist policy for the Basque region
Excerpted from a long article by John Thackara, which cites many examples of alternative Basque urbanists working in this direction, against the starchitectural options still chosen by mainstream politicians and planners: “Buildings conceived as icons, spectacles or tourism destinations have fallen victim to the law of diminishing returns. Bilbao’s Guggenheim is now one among hundreds… Continue reading
Compound Interest, exponential growth and the 2008 Meltdown
“The political fight in nearly every economy for thousands of years has been over whose interests must be sacrificed in the face of the incompatibility between financial and economic expansion paths. Something has to give, and until quite recently creditors have lost. This is the point that modern economists and futurists fail to appreciate. Financial… Continue reading
On the importance of local victories for social change
From Jonathan Gordon-Farleigh, in the new commons-oriented, and strongly recommended, political magazine called “Stir To Action”: “After Alain Badiou, one of the most important recent philosophers, we acknowledge that everybody has an “immediate intelligence” of inequality and this means that we can avoid one of the Left’s main preoccupations: explaining exploitation to the exploited! It’s… Continue reading
Towards a Reputation Economy: a response to Adam Arvidsson
This is a response to Value in Prosumer practices- and in the Information Economy, by Adam Arvidsson Adam wrote: “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… Continue reading
Chomsky refutes “libertarian” “anarcho”- capitalism
Brilliant critique by Noam Chomsky on the political misrepresentation of the libertarian tradition in the U.S., where it is used by authoritarian defenders of corporate monopolies: (let us stress that our p2p friend and U.S. left-libertarian Kevin Carson does not belong to that category!)
Android should no longer be considered open source: a pattern of enclosure by Google
The vendor-neutral mobile Linux space is gradually being displaced by a walled garden in which Google is the ultimate arbiter and has complete control. In that sense, Android is unambiguously detrimental to the goal of encouraging software freedom on mobile devices. After the refusal of Google to share the Honeycomb source code, Ryan Paul offers… Continue reading
The role of peer to peer media in the Tunisian Renaissance
there is another dimension to it that concerns the revolutionary, democratic left the world over: the use of the media. When the official media told a lie, within the next half hour it was disproved by civil society on the Internet: a thousand people, ten thousand, a hundred thousand saw the real images, the state’s… Continue reading
Analyzing mixed socio-economic systems
This is a response to “Should we worry about capitalist commons?” by Michel Bauwens . What follows won’t make as much sense if you don’t read that article first. Avoiding the language trap As Michel Bauwens acknowledged in an article about theories of property rights subtitled “The Ubiquity of Mixed Systems”, when we try to… Continue reading
Time-Lapse Video of Global Protests
This is an interesting use of mapping – its shows the location and information about the protest, as the creator notes: The? colors are Red: resulting in death, Orange: major injuries, damage, arrests, Yellow: minor injuries, etc. Green: Peaceful…the number of pickets is the size, 1: Under 100, 2: 100-1000 3: 1000-10000 4. 10K –… Continue reading