Community Power makes a powerful case for decentralized renewable energy generation. After reading this report, it’s hard to imagine that policy makers would be content to allow renewable energy development to continue under the conventional central-station model. * Report: Community Power: Decentralized Renewable Energy in California. By Al Weinrub. Excerpted from John Farrell: “Reaching our… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2011"
Short history of the recent events in Greece, and what they portend
The people in the squares have started, again, to believe that they have the freedom and the responsibility to act; they are urging radical change through the creation of different personal and social relations. (for updates, see this daily blog attempting to neutralize the blackout here) Excerpted from a longer review of recent mobilizations, by… Continue reading
Transitioning towards an economy of meaning
Written by Safa Alai: “An economy based on creation and exchange of meaning is rushing to dominate what most of us do for a living. Here we discuss the reasons. Human economy has evolved from hunter-gatherer, to agricultural, to industrial and now to knowledge-based. Each transition has been faster than the transition before it, the… Continue reading
Shanzai!! How China’s Cell Phone Pirates Brought Down Middle Eastern Governments
Excerpted via Solidarity Economy, originally in Fast Company. Part 1: Background and origins in Taiwan and China “In 2004, a Taiwanese electronics firm named MediaTek unveiled its latest product–a cell-phone-in-a-box aimed at manufacturers, equipped with everything they needed to make the guts of a working phone on one chipset. Write some software, add features, and… Continue reading
What crowdsourcing really means and why we shouldn’t like it
Excerpted from Tiberius Brastaviceanu : “To put it bluntly, to my ear “crowdsourcing” sounds like “flock milking”. I don’t like the term and I don’t even like the concept it stands for. But there’s more than what I personally like or dislike. I believe that this concept is not going to survive. It simply doesn’t… Continue reading
Call for papers: Expanding the frontiers of hacking
A call for papers on “Expanding the frontiers of hacking. Bio-punks, open hardware, and hackerspaces” has been issued by Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP), a new open access, online journal that focuses on the implications of peer production for social change.. The papers collected will be published in a future special issue of CSPP…. Continue reading
Jerry Brito on Bitcoin and the End of State-Controlled Money
Via: “Just how revolutionary is Bitcoin? Reason.tv sat down with Mercatus Senior Research Fellow Jerry Brito to learn how Bitcoin operates and what the implications are for traditional state-based fiat currencies. “Whether Bitcoin succeeds or fails is neither here nor there,” says Brito, who predicts that currencies in the future will almost certainly be deregulated… Continue reading
A report on the rebirth of Hellenic democracy in Athens
As reported on Yeshe’s blog: From Maria Skordialos in Athens, an account of her experiences in Syntagma Square on June 5: “The evolution of consciousness is definitely on in Greece – with our Greek spirit rising in a beautiful way – yet, here in Athens surrounded by people now living in Greece from different parts… Continue reading
Richard Stallman on the U.S. Government’s monitoring of the Internet
Via Russian Television, RT: “American software freedom activist Richard Stallman, better known as the author of GNU General Public License, joined RT to give his comments on modern software copyright laws, and the risks of cyber sneaking by the U.S. government.” Watch the video:
Mobilization of the precarious movement in Italy this Sunday, June 19th
Our correspondent Bertram Niessen informs us of the mobilization of Italian precarious workers on Sunday 19th, as a response to infamous remarks by the Italian minister of the Berlusconi government: “After the infamous declarations of the Minister for Public Administration and Innovation Renato Brunetta against precarious workers, bottom-up social movements are meeting in Rome, near… Continue reading
Book of the Week (3): Why we need Demurrage
* Book: New Currency: How Money Changes the World As We Know It. By Jordan Bruce MacLeod. Integral Publishers, 2009 In our third and last instalmment on this very readable introduction to the importance of complementary currencies, we attach the scribd version of the chapter on demurrage-based currencies. See the link at bottom for accessing… Continue reading
The minimum wage, demurrage and the economics of labor
What I am about to summarize or, more or less faithfully record, here is a discussion on facebook which should be available for future reference … temporary as they are those traces that remain of our social networking interactions and exchanges of ideas and views. Michel Bauwens started the ball rolling by pointing to an… Continue reading
Transforming human relationships for the p2p age
Excerpted from Yeshe: “In our transactional worldview, where the dominant economic model plays such a pivotal role, relationships are coloured by some very unconscious, unquestioned but fundamental assumptions about how the world works. In a society where the market place rules, we step into relationships on the premise that I have a need, and that… Continue reading
Updating the wave theory of social change: entering the 6th information revolution in human history
The magazine strategy+business has an interesting interview on wave-based change dynamics, with historian Elin Whitney-Smith who has spent 30 years researching and refining her theory of economic progress as a series of information technology disruptions. This interview by Art Kleiner is worth reading in full. Excerpt: “S+B: Your book-in-progress says that today’s turbulent economic events… Continue reading
The meaning of the Greek mobilizations: the emergence of peaceful popular insurrections
On the squares of Greek cities we are witnessing a unique experiment in democracy. The mass assemblies, with their very strict rules of equal voicing and collective decision that leave no room for traditional demagogy, offer an alternative paradigm of the collective processing of political demands and strategies. At the same time, they are also… Continue reading
Dmytri Kleiner interviewed on the Telekommunisten Manifesto
Excerpted from another excellent Furtherfield interview, conducted by Marc Garrett: “MG: Who is the Manifesto written for? DK: I consider my peers to be politically minded hackers and artists, especially artists whose work is engaged with technology and network cultures. Much of the themes and ideas in the Manifesto are derived from ongoing conversations in… Continue reading