Excerpted from Steven Vedro, author of Digital Dharma: “Technology is an alienating force, removing us from contact with community, with Nature, and our Mother Earth; and yet, at the same time, we heard of communications technology as something that was preserving native languages, allowing native communities to reach out to each other and to supporters… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2011"
Understanding the transformative potential of the present historical moment
Excerpted from Chris Spannos (founder and editor of The New Significance): “Widespread skepticism about the foundation of society’s structure combined with social and material crises and an information revolution seem to have placed us in a unique historical moment. Fragmenting confidence in ruling relations and defining institutions are happening on a scale suggesting that we… Continue reading
Is there a politics and economics of happiness?
Excerpted from a speech by Jeffrey Sachs, on the occasion of the Gross National Happiness conference in Bhutan: “First, we should not denigrate the value of economic progress. When people are hungry, deprived of basic needs such as clean water, health care, and education, and without meaningful employment, they suffer. Economic development that alleviates poverty… Continue reading
More Thoughts on Social Currency, Part II
How do social currencies differ from money as a measure of value? As well as working as a kind of social means of exchange, social currency is also a tool for measuring value. In that respect, it resembles money’s traditional function as a “unit of account.” Although money can be used to store and exchange… Continue reading
Kevin Carson on the curse of Artificial Property Rights
Natural property rights reflect scarcity where it naturally exists; artificial property rights create scarcity. Natural property rights secure the individual’s right to her own labor product; artificial property rights enable the holder to collect tribute from the labor product of others. Natural property rights entitle the holder to a return to his contributions to production;… Continue reading
On Couchsurfing becoming a B Corporation: the controversy
While you can’t please all of the people all of the time, anyone who runs a community-based website knows that their business can live and die on the goodwill of superusers. The CouchSurfing protesters have eleven demands, mostly focused on greater transparency and getting more information about how the site might be more heavily commercialized…. Continue reading
#India #anti-corruption: what kind of movement?
[View the story “India Anti-corruption Protests” on Storify]
Is there a third way in Asia centered around the commons?
* Conference: RE-THINKING PROPERTY: pathway to a Well-Being Society scenario. INTERNATIONAL EXCHANGE PLATFORM. Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, 25-27 August 2011 The objective of the Exchange Platform conference in August 2011 was to engage in multi-stakeholder and interdisciplinary dialogue around re-thinking property as a core challenge in various domains. What made it unique was… Continue reading
Lib/Dem driven censorship in the UK: In the 21st century, power comes from the blocking of the message
Excerpted from an editorial by Loz Kay, of the UK Pirate Party: The context is the governmental, political and judicial reactions to the UK riots. “The one thing that took centre stage was controlling the public’s flow of information. Rick Falkvinge has already written about proposed social media blocking and its implications in this blog…. Continue reading
More Thoughts on Social Currency, Part I
In Splitting the Social Currency Atom I explored how it was possible to make sense of the various uses of the term “social currency” by analogy to the different functions of money. “Social currency” means different things depending on whether we are talking about it as a “means of exchange” (jokes, information, rumours) or as “unit of… Continue reading
#chile #estudiantes: the amazing Chilean student mobilization
The political temperature continues to rise in Chile since last week’s killing of 16-year-old high school student Manuel Gutiérrez in the capital Santiago. The country, which is the world’s major producer of copper, has been viewed as a rock for global capitalism in an unstable South America. But now it is seeing – horror of… Continue reading
Going beyond the nation-state through humanistic globalization
Excerpted from an interview with the late Howard Zinn: “Nation states become obstacles to a true humanistic globalization. In a certain sense the movement towards globalization where capitalists are trying to leap over nation state barriers, creates a kind of opportunity for movement to ignore national barriers, and to bring people together globally, across national… Continue reading
Stop the racketeering by Academic Publishers!
Excerpted from George Monbiot, who exposes the true scandal of current practices: “Who are the most ruthless capitalists in the western world? Whose monopolistic practices make Walmart look like a corner shop and Rupert Murdoch a socialist? You won’t guess the answer in a month of Sundays. While there are plenty of candidates, my vote… Continue reading