Date archives "November 2011"

The Implicit Critique of Technology in the #OccupyWallStreet movement (2): Materiality and prefigurative politics

material agency seems to affirm the worst fears of distopian authors and gives credence to the excited musings of techno-rapture utopians. But if we focus on the mangle, the point at which we are actively building our future, I think we are forced to consider a much more complicated reality. The affordances of routers and… Continue reading

Book of the week (2): Why Tackling Property Rights and Democratic Planning are a environmental necessity

* Book: The Rise of the Green Left” by Derek Wall. First, a Review “Derek Wall contrasts the long term sustainability of the shared Commons, written about extensively by Elinor Ostrom, with the inherent need for capitalism to create goods which become obsolete sooner and sooner, either via technical breakdown or aspirational shifts in fashion…. Continue reading

The principle of contribution vs the principle of community

In a discussion on the Apache Software Foundation and the GitHub coordination tool, Mikeal Rogers makes an interesting distinction between two different peergovernance principles, which are sometimes in tension: “On GitHub the language is not code, as it is often characterized, it is contribution. GitHub presents a person to person communication system for contributions. Documentation,… Continue reading

Surviving the atemporality of internet technology by becoming multi-temporal

Becoming ‘multi-temporal’, rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don’t bind… Continue reading

The Implicit Critique of Technology in the #OccupyWallStreet movement (1): combining hi and low tech

The low-tech vibe, partly born out of a structural necessity, has come to be symbolic of the movement itself. If Occupy is a thought experiment in questioning society and envisioning new possibilities, then the story of technology and Occupy is also about questioning the role modern technology has in our lives. Excerpted from Nathan Jurgenson:… Continue reading

Book of the week: The Rise of the Green Left and the Commons, by Derek Wall

A left take on the topic of the commons: * Book: The Rise of the Green Left” by Derek Wall. Derek Wall: “This book aims to inspire change and to resource it. The first chapter outlines what I see as the crisis and the solution. Basically ecological cycles are under assault on our planet, the… Continue reading

On the connection between Tahrir Square And The #OccupyWallStreet Movement

Via David Wearing: “In the rising wave of international protests happening under the Occupy banner, Cairo’s Tahrir Square has gained iconic status, frequently invoked by activists from New York and Oakland to Barcelona and London. The substantial differences between what is happening now in Zuccotti Park, or outside St Paul’s Cathedral, and events in Egypt… Continue reading

The historical importance of the Italian referendum and victory for the water commons

The government, throught the law that has been repealed by Italian citizens, had intended to eliminate all wholly publicly-owned joint-stock water management companies. The water movements, in contrast, having won the referendum, intend to take now a further step and transform all the current joint-stock companies (even those totally publicly owned) into authentic public-law institutions,… Continue reading

Why such a level of coordinated and militarized attacks against #OccupyWallStreet campers?

Excerpted from Naomi Wolf: “US citizens of all political persuasions are still reeling from images of unparallelled police brutality in a coordinated crackdown against peaceful OWS protesters in cities across the nation this past week. An elderly woman was pepper-sprayed in the face; the scene of unresisting, supine students at UC Davis being pepper-sprayed by… Continue reading