As reported by Inhabitat, an abandoned medieval village situated in a valley in the Ligurian Alps in the northwestern part of Italy has been restored and transformed into a self-sufficient ecological community which promotes a healthy lifestyle with a much reduced carbon footprint. The project has been two decades in the making. The renovation used… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2011"
The modern trend to monetize everything ignores civilizational wisdom
A contribution from Ramaswamy Sudarshan (UNDP.org): (with acknowledgement to Michael Sandel (Harvard University) Civilizations, for good reasons, have an idea of some of the things that are part of nature’s bounty that money ought not be able to buy. Forests, rivers, sanctity of the human body, blood, water, are some of the things that civilizational… Continue reading
Homebrew Industrial Revolution Serialization: Chapter Seven, last installment
[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my forthcoming book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto. This is the final installment.] Chapter Seven. The Alternative Economy as a Singularity D. Seeing Like a Boss The contrast in agility and learning ability between stigmergic organizations and hierarchies… [is fundamental] Eric Raymond sees… Continue reading
Book of the week: “Life Rules” (Part 1)
This week we are presenting the book “Life Rules. Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it” by Ellen LaConte. According to David Braden, Ellen discusses 9 aspects of “Life’s /Eco/nomic Survival Protocol” that continuously puts life into upward spiral in spite of the geologic history… Continue reading
The Egalitarian practices of immediate return societies
An important question: is there any relationship between the characteristics of egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies, and the peer to peer ‘egalitarian’ practices in peer production (I’m by no means claiming there are ‘only’ egalitarian aspects to this modality, but they are more present than in other forms of cooperation). I wonder if anyone has investigated this… Continue reading
The American Revolution of 2012
The following are selected from James Fallows‘ diary in The Atlantic, and indicative of an emerging mood in the U.S. The two quotes are followed by reporting from Barbara Ehrenreich about “post-meltdown poverty”. 1. Letter from a librarian in the Midwest: ” A university librarian in the Midwest responds: — I’ve never actually written to… Continue reading
Presenting “panoply”, a p2p-inspired economic proposal
Excerpted from a much longer original, which also engages the reader with a set of questions. To my mind, Mohamad Tarifi is making a lot of good sense, here below. Mohamad Tarifi: “In Panoply, money is in direct correspondence to scarce natural resources. Public policy determines the amount of scarce natural wealth available for private… Continue reading
Ken MacLeod Interviews Cory Doctorow on Makers
Ken MacLeod recently interviewed Cory Doctorow on his near-future sci-fi novel Makers (I reviewed it here), about a micromanufacturing economy arising in the ruins of the old mass-production economy. The old-line corporations, in an economic environment where there was no conventional industry to invest in because most existing capacity was idle, turned to dumping their… Continue reading
Emlyn O’Regan on Paid and Unpaid Labor
At Point7 blog, Emlyn O’Regan attempts to answer the question: in a society with far less paid labor, “who would take out the garbage?” In what he calls an “adhocracy,” the cluster of stuff like Wikileaks, The Pirate Bay, Anonymous, the Arab Spring, etc., that seems to be supplanting the old corporate hierarchies as the… Continue reading
Making the internet more private – the example of Syria
Governments all over the world like to keep tabs on their citizens, especially when they feel threatened, and especially when they have an authoritarian streak. Syria is no exception. However a very out-of-balance situation may easily develop, where government knows what people are up to but the people dare not even talk about the government’s… Continue reading
Peer to Peer compared to Transhumanism: what are the politics of the future?
Michel Bauwens writes: I’ve always appreciated Dale Carrico’s critique of transhumanism, and ‘futurology’, which you can find here, and his support for p2p-oriented politics, but this table is particularly useful for the contrast that it provides between the two approaches. The Politics of Technodevelopmental Social Struggle, Peer to Peer The Anti-Politics of Futurological Enhancement and… Continue reading
Towards non-authoritarian spirituality
Poor Richard has a very long post with a critique of spirituality, which in my opinion, he doesn’t “get” (as I did, for many years, and I think this is an unbridgeable gap until some numinous experience is profound enough to make you change your mind), though I appreciate the effort to make the experience… Continue reading
Global Revolution Channel
This channel will feature live streams from global non violent revolution spreading across the globe, with the first broadcasts from Wall Street Occupation in NYC that will start on Saturday, September 17, 2011. The channel will also feature live stream from solidarity protests and events in Spain, Greece, France, Belgium, Iceland and other places around… Continue reading
Do we really need jobs?
Very interesting question, and answer, by Douglas Rushkoff. Excerpt: “Since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs? We’re living in an economy where productivity is… Continue reading
#15SHM Hub Meeting Barcelona
The #15SHM Hub Meeting Barcelona is currently taking place to “organize a common political strategy and a transnational network of social movements struggling against austerity”. Follow the meeting on @15shm and #15shm on twitter and watch the livestream The background information below is taken from the meeting webpage: This is the blog of Barcelona Hub Meeting, a… Continue reading
The Role of Technology in Current Ecological Problems
The Internet has provided humanity with a unique chance to globally communicate about crises and how to handle them. I will not mention any specific thinkers, only note that the social and natural sciences both have rich traditions of thought that attempt to show how social power and inequalities are interconnected with natural circumstances such… Continue reading