While 2001 and 2008 marked, respectively, the political and economic deaths of neoliberalism, 2011 marks the End of the End of History. Brilliant editorial and political-cultural analysis of the #Occupy movement by Jerome Roos: “The Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. The Arab Spring. The looming Greek default. The increasingly likely breakup of the eurozone. The second… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2011"
What Is Free Culture?
Source: http://questioncopyright.org/what_is_free_culture Free culture is a growing understanding among artists and audiences that people shouldn’t have to ask permission to copy, share, and use each other’s work; it is also a set of practices that make this philosophy work in the real world. The opposite of “free culture” is “permission culture”, which you probably don’t… Continue reading
The Ethics of Sharing
This issue brings together contributions towards an ethics of sharing that embed the new technological potentialities linking them to their actual social impact. In our understanding, information ethics “deals with ethical questions in the field of digital production and reproduction of phenomena and processes such as the exchange, combination and use of information.” So, the… Continue reading
Pirate Service Makes Textbook Rentals Last Forever
The ever-rising costs of textbooks is an unavoidable nightmare for many students and hot-topic to those who see the system as corrupt. Now, a site with a mission to dismantle what they say amounts to a publishing monopoly has come up with another solution to bring cheap and free textbooks to students. The publishers are… Continue reading
Towards a new spirituality for business: challenging consumerism
Walter G. Moss reviews a conference in Antwerp, Belgium, searching for new economics: “Professors Luk Bouckaert (Catholic University of Leuven), Hendrik Opdebeeck (University of Antwerp), and Laszlo Zsolnai (Corvinus University of Budapest) have done much, as Schumacher had, to stress the necessity of spiritual values in economics and business. In 2004, they were among the… Continue reading
Antisocial tracking practiced by ‘social’ media
The Institute of Network Cultures has an interesting article on how social media track our every move, even when we are doing things on the web that are not related to our social activities. The title: Antisocial Integrations: Inverting the Tracking Logic More and more websites add buttons that exhort us to “like” (facebook) or… Continue reading
How do we achieve a civil(ised) economy?
I asked Marvin Brown, author of the P2P Foundation Book of the Year in 2010, i.e. of “Civilizing the Economy“, to give us an idea how we can get :from here to there ..” “How do we get from here to there—from where we are to where we want to be? One can imagine a… Continue reading
#OccupyEverywhere as response to economic permafrost and political stagnation
Excerpted from Paul Mason: “These protests are a powerful signal worldwide. Their mere existence shows that people are determined to “think globally” about routes out of this crisis – at a time when economics is driving politicians down the route of national solutions. However marginalised they are politically – and in some countries, above all… Continue reading
A potpourri of videos on #OccupyWallStreet (2)
1. A Third wave of protest: Dylan Ratigan analyzes the movement as a the third wave of protest against the capture of the American government by a financial superelite: 2. Must-see: “What the f.ck is going on?” Powerful message of the U.S. workers, speaking truth to power: 3. Actor Tim Robbins supports the movement 4…. Continue reading
Measuring the fluid value of distributed contributions
Excerpted from a meditation by Kurt Laitner: “The gifts of previous generations are given without obligation. We are born into a rich ecology of benefits that we rarely acknowledge. We objectify culture, which is deeply subjective, and internalize our successes as merit. We need to take the time to acknowledge the shoulders we stand on…. Continue reading
Mira Luna on the State of the Solidarity Economy
Excerpts from an interview conducted by Neal Gorenflo and Michel Bauwens in Shareable magazine. “Michel Bauwens: What is the Solidarity Economy? How closely is it related to other ‘social economy’ formats such as what is called the ‘social economy’ in France. What are the requirements to be counted as part of that economy? As defined… Continue reading
Paul Hartzog on turning the Internet into a real ecosystem by enabling interoperability
Klint Finley of SiliconAngle talks to Paul Hartzog of the Future Forward Institute about Flows, a system for building interoperable applications.
Rethinking Darwin to uncover the Evolutionary Roots of Morality
* Books by David Loye: 1) DARWIN’S LOST THEORY: BRIDGE TO A BETTER WORLD; 2) DARWIN’S 2nd REVOLUTION; Benjamin Franklin Press, 2010 Excerpted from a longer review in Tikkun by Dan Levine: “When most people think of evolution, the first thing that comes to mind is either survival of the fittest or selfish genes. Yet… Continue reading
Tactical and Strategic reflections on #OccupyWallStreet: is it wise to only use peaceful protest tactics?
Excerpted from Federico Campagna: “Once partners, State and Capital are today developing separate strategies. Capital’s strategy articulates through an unprecedented concentration of economic wealth at the expense of both national states and society, while the State implements its strategy through a vertiginous expansion of its military role within national (or, in the case of the… Continue reading
Turning financial and corporate risk management into a commons
Exposing complex financial instruments to the vetting of thousands of experts could help restore trust in banks, kick-start venture capital, unfreeze the paralysis of lending markets and lay the foundation for a new and stronger financial service industry. Excerpted from Don Tapscott: “Wall Street reform requires restructuring of the industry. Wall Street companies need to… Continue reading
Kickstarter campaign for the Global Village Construction Set
Marcin Jakubowski, who has recently been selected as a Senior TED fellow for 2012 – 2013, began a KickStarter campaign for the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS) – a modular, DIY, low-cost, open source, high-performance platform that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts…. Continue reading