Not everyone is happy with the strategic decision of the Israeli 15M movement to focus solely on social issues affecting Israeli’s alone. Excerpted from Dahlia Scheindlin: “Just don’t mention Israel’s occupation of the West Bank, or even the neutral local euphemism “medini” [lit: political/diplomatic] issues. Just leave out the institutional inequality most Palestinian citizens of… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2011"
Assange and Kimura: Transforming human culture and the ideosphere through collective intellectuality
We human beings are at our best not when we are engaged in abstract solitary reflection or on our individual transformation for its own sake but when we are engaged together in the act of transforming the world. The act of idea-generation through authentic thinking and the sustained engagement in the conversation of humankind, if… Continue reading
Police occupy Puerta del Sol #spanishrevolution #nopararemos
Yesterday morning, Tuesday August 2nd, Spanish police took over Puerta del Sol in Madrid and prevented access to the square all night. The Spanish protest movement quickly reacted. ROAR Mag, along with other blogs, has reported and collected graphic material. See yesterday’s report and several videos detailing the cleaning operation. In a telling display of… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): David Graeber’s take on the fake economics and their Imaginary Myth of Barter
David Graeber’s is an amazing, must read book, important because it deals with the core issue of our civilisational crisis, i.e. how we deal with debt, very well written, surprising, and full of historical and anthropological insights. * Book: Debt: The First 5,000 Years. David Graeber. Melville House Publishing, 2011 Today, David Graeber debunks the… Continue reading
Elinor Ostrom on Going Beyond the Tragedy of the Commons
The first video is an eight minute mini-seminar on the basic ideas around the sustainability of the commons. In the second video, she explains “polycentric governance models” for complex economic systems. Video 1: Video 2:
The insuffficiency of efficiency
Important aspect of the transition to post-growth economics, from the CASSE group, which has produced a number of interesting short briefings: the insuffficiency of efficiency
Thinking about propertization and the commons
An excerpt from the book, Sacred Economics, by Charles Eistenstein: “Despite land’s obvious independence of human effort for its existence, land is not so different from any other kind of property. Let us first consider material property — anything made of metal, wood, plastic, plants or animals, minerals, and so on. Are these anything other… Continue reading
Mozilla: Open Source Competition for Android?
As Michel Bauwens reported on this blog in April this year, Google has steered the development of the Android operating system into a direction that is less and less open, to the point where Android should no longer be considered open source Enter Mozilla, the creators of the open source Firefox browser. Mozilla announced in… Continue reading
Arab Spring inspires Israeli social justice movement
First, for a quick visual summary, see this video report by RT: Here are some comments from ROAR magazine, by Jerome Roos: “Unlike in Spain and Greece, the mainstream media in Israel appear to hail the movement as a force for good. This morning, Gideon Levy wrote for Haaretz that “As of yesterday, [Netanyahu] is… Continue reading
Vertaisrahasto.fi: innovative Peer Fund for scientific research in Finland
Vertaisrahasto.fi (literally “Peer Fund”) is a new way of collecting and allocating funding for research. The idea is very simple. There are two roles for volunteer participants: donors and applicants. Everyone is invited to donate to the fund, the minimum sum is 10 euros. Donations are piled up during a predesignated time. During the same… Continue reading
Archon Fung on Transparency and Democratic Control
As part of a special issue of Re-Public on Transparency, Archon Fung discussed the politics of transparency, arguing that its primary aim should be to “enable citizens, individually and collectively, to understand and protect themselves against the risks and threats that they face”. We reproduce the article in full because of the clarity of the… Continue reading
What Role for Users in a More Social Peer-to-Peer?
* Paper. What role for users in a more social peer-to-peer?. Francesca Musiani. (July 12th, 2010). Communication presented at the 6th International Graduate Conference, UFR Communication, Université Sorbonne Nouvelle – Paris 3, Paris: France. Francesca Musiani, a p2p-oriented Italian-French researcher listed in our directory (Association of Peer to Peer Researchers), is doing an interesting thesis… Continue reading
Book of the Week: David Graeber’s First Five Thousand Years of Debt
“This is a great trap of the twentieth century: on one side is the logic of the market, where we like to imagine we all start out as individuals who don’t owe each other anything. On the other is the logic of the state, where we all begin with a debt we can never truly… Continue reading
Video from the RealDemocracy movement: One World, One Revolution
Atmospheric video, focusing on the resistance in Greece: