R.U. Sirius has interviewed Aram Sinreich of Mondo.net, one of the more ambitious attempts to restore a true autonomous internet. His colleague Valkyrie Ice has a very good introduction to the issues at stake: “If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, I’m sure you’ve heard about the “Declaration of War” by Lulzsec and… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2011"
Barriers to Open WiFi
Excerpted from the EFF’s call for an open wireless movement: “When people turn on WEP or WPA encryption for their networks deliberately, there are two common reasons: a desire to prevent their neighbors from “free riding” on their connections; and a fear that unencrypted WiFi is a security or privacy risk. Both of those reasons… Continue reading
David Ronfeldt engages with the “Partner State” (2)
Second part of our republishing of David Ronfeldt engagement with the ‘partner state’ hypothesis. * Article: Bauwens’ “partner state” (part 1 of 2) . . . vis à vis TIMN. By David Ronfeldt. ‘Visions from Two Theories’ blog. The version below is without the links to the source material, so go to the original for… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): Treating all culture as collective property and a gift
* Book: The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International. McKenzie Wark. Verso, 2011. A second excerpt from Ken Wark’s new book: “The Situationist International was founded at a meeting of three women and six men in July 1957. All that remains of this fabled event are a… Continue reading
A sustainability proposal: Demand-Side Reduction Cooperatives
A sustainability proposal by Jeffrey Sterling: “The global economy is broken because it has evolved and mutated to serve the needs corporations (govt corps and fortune 1000 corps) not human beings. Many of the commonskeeper and caregiver roles that are a critical function for civil society are either considered undervalued chores or the responsibility of… Continue reading
Amir Taaki on Bitcoin
Amir Taaki, founder of BitcoinConsultancy, talks about the peer to peer aspects of Bitcoin, and its recent trials and tribulations, to the Max Keiser Report. Interview starts 14 minutes into the program.
The call for a debt jubilee
Via: “Hudson says that – in every country and throughout history – debt always grows exponentially, while the economy always grows as an S-curve. Moreover, Hudson says that the ancient Sumerians and Babylonians knew that debts had to be periodically forgiven, because the amount of debts will alwayssurpass the size of the real economy. For… Continue reading
“Share or Die”, the story of the precarious generation
We’re a bit late presenting this important book from Shareable magazine: “Containing nearly 30 essays, cartoons, instructional how-to’s, and guides from Shareable contributors, Share or Die is the first ebook of its kind. In its pages, young people tell the story of a new economy based in collaboration instead of competition, and how they’re making… Continue reading
Michael Hudson on financial terrorism and Europe’s slide to neo-feudalism
You have to realize that what they’re trying to do is to roll back the Enlightenment, roll back the moral philosophy and social values of classical political economy and its culmination in Progressive Era legislation, as well as the New Deal institutions. They’re not trying to make the economy more equal, and they’re not trying… Continue reading
#madrid #tomalaplaza #23J #24J
This weekend, July 23rd and 24th, Madrid’s Puerta del Sol has been reclaimed by the Spanish protest movement. Indignados arrived after walking for weeks from several cities across Spain. Others arrived in buses from all over the country hired for the occasion. Many made their own way there. Roar Mag has published The reconquest of… Continue reading
David Ronfeldt in Dialogue with the Partner State Concept
David Ronfeldt, the author of an integrated theory (TIMN) of the evolution of governance, is starting a detailed and fair treatment of the partner state concept, for which I’m very grateful, since my own writings have been quite scattered. Here for the first time, they are collated by someone else. We publish his own ‘first… Continue reading
Social Media Are Re-embedding Cultural Production into Concrete Social Relationships
One way to understand copyright is as an abstracting mechanism. Copyright stabilizes a work so that it can be lifted out of concrete social relations – between the author and her cultural environment – and made to circulate as a commodity in abstract, impersonal markets. The more innovative alternative models re-embed cultural works in concrete,… Continue reading
Book of the Week: A Situationist blast from the past
One of the best books I have read is The Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, a dense book which offers a class analysis of current society, featuring a hacker class vs. a ‘vectoral’ class, and invites for deep and reflexive reading. Ken Wark has now produced a new book, about a period that was just… Continue reading
Tim Wu on the age of internet monopolies
This appeared a while ago in WSJ, but still important and current. Tim Wu (excerpts): “Today’s Internet borders will probably change eventually, especially as new markets appear. But it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that we are living in an age of large information monopolies. Could it be that the free market on the Internet… Continue reading
Sustainable Agriculture and Off-Grid Renewable Energy
Small integrated farms with off-grid renewable energy may be the perfect solution to the food and financial crisis while mitigating and adapting to climate change writes Dr. Mae-Wan Ho of the UK Institute for Science in Society. In a Nutshell An emerging scientific consensus that a shift to small scale sustainable agriculture and localized food… Continue reading
Does the great disruption also mean ‘big government’?
We presented Paul Gilding‘s important book on the Great Disruption yesterday. On his blog, he discusses whether getting humanity out of this mess also means ‘big government’, and his answer is an emphatic yes. Paradoxically, this has not come about through a left conspiracy, but through the actions of free market ideologues themselves. Paul Gilding:… Continue reading