Following the release on Monday of YaCy 1.0, a free, peer-to-peer search engine, many in the media were quick to view it as a challenge to Google, Bing and the other big contenders in the search arena. Since then, however, Karsten Gerloff, president of the Free Software Foundation of Europe–a key supporter–has spoken out to… Continue reading
Date archives "December 2011"
Joi Ito on the internet as a (innovation) philosophy
Excerpted from Joi Ito: “As we all know, the Internet won. It was the triumph of distributed innovation over centralized innovation. The belief system of the Internet is that everyone should have the freedom to connect, the freedom to innovate and the freedom to hack without asking permission. No one can know the whole of… Continue reading
Michael Hudson: why Obama is to the right of the Republicans, and what this means for the #OccupyWallStreet awakening
Michael Hudson, in an interview conducted by Alan Minsky: “What is easiest for most people to accept is the idea of restoring the way the economy used to be more in balance – back when people earned income by being productive rather than getting rich by transferring other peoples’ savings and public giveaways into their… Continue reading
P2P Gift Credit Cards, popular born credits
Paolo Cirio’s new project was born with the goal of exploring the possibility of generating wealth for ordinary people through a more equitable system of wealth distribution. Currently, banks are the only (legitimate) entities playing the role of custodians of credit. But as demonstrated in the last recession, credit does not always have a corresponding… Continue reading
Mayo Fuster Morell on the Spanish Revolution & the Internet: From Free Culture to Meta-Politics
In the context of multiple crises – ecological, political, financial and geopolitical restructuring – there are emerging forms of social cooperation. In the Spanish case, we have seen some of the largest demonstrations since the country made its transition to democracy in the 70s with massive occupations of public squares, attempts to prevent parliaments’ functioning… Continue reading
Crowdfunding Nation eBook Now Available
What is crowdfunding? How is it evolving? How can you use it to power your dream project? How can it be used as a force for social change? Shareable's eBook Crowdfunding Nation: The Rise and Evolution of Collaborative Funding, now available in the Amazon Kindle store or as an ePub direct download, investigates this transformative tool and… Continue reading
How BitTorrent wants to save the Internet
Via Gigaom: This week’s talk about usage-based billing, spurred by the growing adoption of streaming services like Netflix and their impact on ISPs, has been a bit of a deja vu for BitTorrent CEO Eric Klinker. BitTorrent Inc. was at the center of the last big hubbub about clogged pipes back in 2007, when Comcast… Continue reading
The Personal Computer Is Dead
Author: Jonathan Zittrain is a professor of law and computer science at Harvard University, and author of The Future of the Internet—and How to Stop It. Published in Technology Review The PC is dead. Rising numbers of mobile, lightweight, cloud-centric devices don’t merely represent a change in form factor. Rather, we’re seeing an unprecedented shift… Continue reading
The Colbert Report on Stop Online Piracy Act with Danny Goldberg & Jonathan Zittrain
Music manager Danny Goldberg defends Internet piracy laws, and Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain doesn’t want Justin Bieber to go to jail for copyright infringement. The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Stop Online Piracy Act – Danny Goldberg & Jonathan Zittrain www.colbertnation.com Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog Video… Continue reading
Three ways to dissimulate the conflict between the 1% and the 99% (#OccupyWallStreet update)
Excerpted from Jodi Dean: ‘After the movement was impossible to ignore, after the protesters had demonstrated determination and the police had reacted with orange containment nets and pepper spray, other efforts to efface the fundamental division opened up by Occupy Wall Street emerged. All tried to reabsorb the movement into the familiar and thereby fill-in… Continue reading
Michael Hudson on why the core issue today is Debt (#OccupyWallStreet Teach-In)
Excerpted from an interview of Michael Hudson by Alan Minsky: “Michael Hudson: The Occupy Wall Street movement has many similarities with what used to be called the Great Awakening periods in America. Such periods always begin by realizing how serious the problem is. So diagnosis is the most important tactic. Diagnosing the problem mobilizes power… Continue reading
New publisher of computer books embraces e-books and authors, not DRM
For technical books, publishing has a nearly fatal lack of speed. E-books are increasingly popular, but they’re usually not produced until after the print edition is already complete. That makes about as much sense as posting Instagram photos of yesterday’s paper, and the results are often just about as usable. A new company, Fair Trade… Continue reading
Should #OccupyWallStreet protestors have applied hermeneutic philosophy?
Excerpted from Santiago Zabala: “In the midst of our global economic crisis, which sees financial centres such as Wall Street occupied by protesters who call for change, Marx’s statement points out that we are still framed within the thought system that sustains the crisis, but it also demands a change in thought, that is, a… Continue reading
P2P History (7): Some examples of peer-to-peer issued money in the Middle Ages
Via open money researcher Eli Gothill: “There are some good examples of peer-to-peer issued money in the Middle Ages in David Graeber’s book ‘Debt’, Chapter 10 ‘The Middle Ages’: p 270: In China, bank-issued paper money was in use during the Song dynasty (960-1279 AD) but was unstable due to inflation and the ‘newly available… Continue reading
A Foreign Policy based on Collaborative Power
Anne-Marie Slaughter writes about the nature of power on the foreign policy frontier: “This past fall, I gave the inaugural Joseph S. Nye lecture at Princeton. Nye is perhaps the world’s pre-eminent theorist of power; he coined the term “soft power” for the power of attraction versus “hard power,” the power of coercion. (Full disclosure:… Continue reading
Reclaiming the Right to Insolvency
Excerpted from Franco Berardi: “A new concept is coming out from the fogs of the present situation: a right to insolvency. We’ll not pay the debt. The European countries have been obliged to accept the blackmail of debt, but people are refusing the concept that we have to pay for a debt that we have… Continue reading