The cat’s out of the bag and more and more people are awakening to the fact that a college degree is no longer what it was cracked up to be. If you are convinced, there are a few people who are doing a great job of sharing ideas for alternatives that are less costly, more… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2011"
Puerta del Sol/Syntagma joint statement
The following text has been collectively created by Indignant working groups at Spain’s Puerta Del Sol and Greece’s Syntagma Squares recently: “The citizens of Puerta del Sol and Syntagma Square express our indignation and invite all the ‘indignados’ in all the squares around the world to join us. From the USA to Brussels, from… Continue reading
Why you should come to ContactCon and help create a truly free internet
To make the sorts of choices that might actually yield our next and truly decentralized network, we must take a good look at the highly centralized real world in which we live – as well as how it got that way. Only by understanding its principles, reckoning with the forces at play, and accepting the… Continue reading
The Political Economy of Waste (1): History
Kevin Carson wrote an excellent study on how much of our economy is actually unproductive and non-contributive. You can read the full text here. And here is our wiki entry. Now we present a brief introduction and history: A recurring theme, from the Enlightenment on, has been the radically reduced work week that would be… Continue reading
P2PU’s School of Webcraft
School of Webcraft is a free, online community for learning open web development. We think that learning with other people is the best way to help you learn the skills and theory to create web sites and apps using up-to-date open web technologies. At School of Webcraft you can start learning web development right away…. Continue reading
GPLv3 is great to promote open innovation, but not enough to protect our constitutional communication rights
(this is a summary of some of the reasons why TFF Founder Rufo Guerreschi and others started the UVT project . For the record, the uselessness of GPL3 and AGPL in the sense explained below is one of the reasons why I liked this project when I was asked to do some work for TFF… Continue reading
Fukushima nuclear disaster still active – media is silent
Fukushima, by all accounts, is turning out worse than the only comparable event in recent history, which is the meltdown at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine. More radioactivity has been released, and is still being released six months after the disastrous event, than ever was the case in Chernobyl. It is not only reactors but stored… Continue reading
Joi Ito: Designing institutions with Transparency in mind
A very important insight on Social Business Design, excerpted from Joi Ito: “As we work on this process of making the powerful transparent, we run into some difficulties because most institutions, even those that are for the most part well-meaning and good, are not robust against transparency because they haven’t been designed to be transparent…. Continue reading
Series recap: the Commons, Market, Capital and State debate
THis is a reminder for a seven-part series we published some time ago, but worth revisiting: The commons as system-confirming paradigm Commoning as resistance and disruption the really really free market approach? a critique of free market ideology network vs. state water commons, community and state (part one) water commons, community and state (part two)
The attack on higher learning as de-democratization
Why the sustained attack again education budgets in the current rounds of austerity? Here is an interesting thesis and contextualization: In his book Democracy, Charles Tilly treats democracy not as an unchanging state of existence, but as an unstable balance between two antagonistic forces: democratization and de-democratization. The latter, in its most advanced state, prepares… Continue reading
Open Data: Emerging trends, issues and best practices
US protest movements inspired by public space occupation
American citizens seem to be catching the protesting-by-occupying bug and a couple of initiatives are fast approaching their due dates soon. One of them, the October 6th movement is organising and rallying for a Tahrir style camp out in Washington DC. The following “promotional” video has been released on Youtube looking to fundraise for the… Continue reading
Intellectual Property as an Artificial Property Rent
For background, see also Kevin Carson’s critique of Artificial Property Rights. Kevin Carson: “Of all the forms of artificial property and legal privilege in existence, the one most indispensable to corporate power in today’s economy is probably “intellectual property. A large portion of the price of most goods and services consists of embedded rents on… Continue reading
Josep María Antentas on the effect of the Spanish 15M movement on representative democracy
Excerpted from an interview with Josep María Antentas: “What Has Happened Since 15 M Has Favoured The Politicization Of Society And The Opening Of New Spaces For Self-Organization and Participation”. Interview with Josep Maria Antentas, Professor of Sociology at the Autonomous University of Barcelona (UAB), published in the Brazilian electronic journal IHU on-line on August… Continue reading
Towards a public policy in support of a social sharing economy
Excerpted from Derek Wall: “Generally economic activity is conceptualized as either market based or state controlled. If capitalism is criticised the only alternative that is normally cited is that of a planned centralized economy. The experience of the Soviet Union suggests that the alternative to capitalism is bureaucratic, stifles personal freedom and is hugely inefficient…. Continue reading
Jaron Lanier: we should monetize, not demonetize, the contributions of civil society
We’ve been hypnotized in the last eleven or twelve years into thinking that we shouldn’t expect anything for what we do with our hearts or our minds online, we think that our own contributions aren’t worth money, very much like we think we shouldn’t be paid for parenting, or we shouldn’t be paid for raking… Continue reading