The fact is this: private bankers need a Eurozone bailout. Eurozone taxpayers do not need private bankers. It is possible, desirable even, to break loose from the chains of financial injustice and untie the cords that yoke the taxpayers of Europe to the interests of a financial elite. * This is not new, but this… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2011"
Book of the Week: Integrity at Scale
* Book: Integrity at Scale: Big Answers to America’s Challenges. By Steven Howard Johnson. People generally behave with more integrity amongst peers and at the localized level then they do at the national or global level. This issue, on how to scale integrity politically, socially and economically at the nation-state level, with specific proposals for… Continue reading
WikiHouse – An Open Hardware Building System
“WikiHouse is a contribution to the debate on Open Hardware and Open Design by 00:/, Momentum Engineering, Espians, Beatrice Galilee… and a global community of designers, including YOU! WikiHouse will be shared via a Creative Commons license for anyone to adapt and improve. A WikiHouse is fabricated from locally sourced plywood cut on a CNC… Continue reading
The Gupta State Failure Management Archive – a public resource for hard times
Vinay Gupta just released 4.3gb of files on State Failure and contingency management into the public domain at Archive.org. You can browse, watch and download individual files there. You can also download the entire set as a TAR file from Archive.org or try bit Bittorrent version here. At 4.3gb it’s ideal for burning on DVD…. Continue reading
6 Reasons Why Filesharing Will Go Down in History as the Greatest Thing Ever to Happen to Music
via Torrent Freak The record labels would have you believe that Napster and now BitTorrent are ushering in the Dark Age of music, but really it’s just the Dark Age of the music industry; music as an art form is on the brink of a new renaissance. Here’s a countdown of the top six reasons… Continue reading
And When Even The Death Penalty Doesn’t Deter Copying — What Then?
By Rick Falkvinge This week has seen some disturbing news. British Telecom has been sued into censoring Newzbin2, and domain seizures in the United States were motivated and justified by the flabbergasting “they can have free speech in another country if they like”. In the United Kingdom, it appears that legislation to deny people basic… Continue reading
Communitarianism in a Market Culture
A. Allen Butcher: “Intentional community itself will likely always be a parallel society, moving through time apace with the dominant culture, the two influencing each other in sometimes subtle, sometimes fundamentally challenging ways. Both the dominant and the parallel cultures have always adapted or co-opted what each found to be of value in the other,… Continue reading
Slow Media and the reconfiguration of time in the post-media era
* Article: The Origin of Slow Media: Early Diffusion of a Cultural Innovation through Popular and Press Discourse, 2002-2010. By Jennifer Rauch. Transformations, Issue No. 20 2011 — Slow Media Summary from the introduction by Jennifer Rauch: “Since the turn of the 21st century, people from diverse walks of life have begun to form a… Continue reading
Not all that’s open and p2p is gold: a case of hyper-neoliberal openness in education
Open access and peer to peer architectures are not sufficient conditions to actually achieve equitable peer to peer outcomes. Witness this proposed education reform, which wants to convert students into shareholders, with students and parents attempting to turn a profit based on educational results, which appeared on John Robb’s resilience site, miiu site. Obviously no… Continue reading
A three-fold strategy for social change
Social movements grow and evolve, not through top-down direction, but around framing ideas and mutually supportive relationships. New ideas gain traction or not depending on their inherent appeal and utility. As individual groups find one another, new alliances may emerge or not, depending on what works for those involved in the moment. Some alliances are… Continue reading
Seltzer Says Internet Providers Will Now Be Copyright Cops
Aug. 4 (Bloomberg) — Wendy Seltzer, Fellow at Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy, talks with Bloomberg Law’s Lee Pacchia about a new approach between Internet Service Providers and content providers to curb online copyright infringement. Source: http://isp-services.com/videos/seltzer-says-internet-providers-will-now-be-copyright-cops/
On the enclosure and depletion of spiritual capital
An excerpt from the book, Sacred Economics, by Charles Eistenstein: “Spiritual capital is more subtle. It refers to our mental and sensuous capacities, for example, the ability to concentrate, to create worlds of the imagination, and to derive pleasure from experiencing life. When I was young, in the very last days before television and video… Continue reading
Introducing the Transparent (T-) Corporation
A proposal for a Transparent corporation (via): “T as in transparent. How transparent? Transparent enough to satisfy Transparency Extremist: – Every ledger, every account, every transaction held or made by a transparent corporation should be open and auditable by the world. Commercial confidentiality be damned: we have a right to know.” “I propose a “soft… Continue reading
Can a resource-based economy work?
Excerpted from a reflection on a non-monetary economy, from the Moneyless Society blog : “All of the ‘alternative solutions’ to the problems we have in the world today deal with solutions within the monetary system. We have ‘recycling’, ‘carbon shares’, ‘cradle to cradle’, ‘environmental protection’, and so forth. All of these deals with the industry… Continue reading
10 Things to Know About Net Neutrality
“Net Neutrality”, also known as “Internet Neutrality” and “Network Neutrality”, is more of an idea than it is a set of rules, and the basic tenet is that Internet providers and governing bodies should not deny access to anybody seeking to use the net, regardless of content, sites, and myriad other applications. Rights of free… Continue reading
Leadership and the Swarm
Excerpted from Rick Falkvinge: A swarm … “is not an amorphous cloud of equals, where nobody gets any decision power. While this would be an ideal society to some, it is not a Swarm. Neither is it a traditional hierarchical organization where commands are issued top-down and people are expected to follow them. A Swarm… Continue reading