This is a very important book, in the process of being translated from the Italian: Enrico Grazinni: “The thesis of this book is that, to overcome the current dramatic economic and ecological crisis, it is necessary to create and develop a polycentric economy based on common goods and not just on market monoculture or state… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2012"
Essay of the Day: Marvin Brown on the Necessity for Civic Design
Excerpted from Marvin Brown: “A citizen is one among the many—one among others. Citizens are members. We are always citizens “of.” “Of what?” Of the many? Yes. But citizens are not mobs or crowds. Citizens are members of civic communities, and citizens create and re-create civic communities. The civic, in other words, comes into existence… Continue reading
Video of the Day: ‘The Garage has gone global”, by Chris Anderson
Recorded in 2009, but still insightful video on the ‘distribution’ of manufacturing.
Book of the Day: Triumph of the Commons
* Book: Triumph of the Commons: Fifty-Five Theses on the Future. Writer: Leland Maschmeyer Editor: Tonice Sgrignoli, Brian Collins. Publ. Collins, 2011 The publisher, a design firm, writes that: “Triumph of the Commons is a collaborative book from fifty-five artists. It resurrects a disparaged, yet newly valuable, cultural narrative. Presented as fifty-five theses, this narrative… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: How Open Source Has Changed the Software Industry
Article: How Open Source Has Changed the Software Industry: Perspectives from Open Source Entrepreneurs. Juho Lindman, Risto Rajala. TIM, January 2012 How enterpreneurs are adapting to the FLOSS challenge, internally, in their own words: 1 F/LOSS induces user involvement in software development 2 Open source development relies on external resources 3 Open source development encourages… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Consent of the Networked. The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom
* Book: Consent of the Networked. The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom. Rebecca MacKinnon Description from the publisher: ‘A global struggle for control of the Internet is now underway. At stake are no less than civil liberties, privacy and even the character of democracy in the 21st century. Many commentators have debated whether the Internet… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: From Common Goods to the Common Good of Humanity
* Article: From ‘Common Goods’ to the ‘Common Good of Humanity’. By Francois Houtart. This text, prepared by Francois Houtart, was presented by Francine Mestrum to the conference From ‘Common Goods’ to the ‘Common Good of Humanity’, organized by the Rosa Luxembourg Foundation in Rome, 28-29 April 2011, and revised after the conference discussions. The… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Yochai Benkler on the Networked Public Sphere, its SOPA victory, and the MegaUpload case
Enlightening comments from Yochai Benkler:
Movement of the Day: Societal Constitutionalism
Here is an interesting blogpost at the Italian Commons Sense Forum: ““in February 2011 at the International University College of Turin, Gunther Teubner presented an interesting paper in which he provided several interesting suggestions for thinking about the phenomenon of societal constitutionalism. The Teubner version of “societal constitutionalism” is, of course, imbued with the sociologically-informed… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: The key issue for newspapers is, “what do our core users want”
A contribution by Clay Shirky to the newspaper paywall debate: Clay Shirky: “A printed paper was a bundle. A reader who wanted only sports and stock tables bought the same paper as a reader who wanted local and national politics, or recipes and horoscopes. Online, though, that bundle is torn apart, every day, by users… Continue reading
Discussing the P2P-driven Crisis of Value (3): Douglas Rushkoff on Getting Past Free Through Radical Abundance
Douglas Rushkoff (Author, “Life Inc.”), “Radical Abundance: How We Get Past “Free” and Learn to Exchange Value Again” English and Dutch captions by Martien van Steenbergen:
Book of the Day: Too Big To Know
“Too Big To Know” is a book about how the Internet is changing knowledge, and, in turn, how it is changing us. Here is an excerpt from an interview of the author conducted by Rebecca J. Rosen: “In your book, you argue that we are in a new age of “networked knowledge,” meaning that knowledge… Continue reading
Discussing the P2P-driven Crisis of Value (2): Open Source Abundance Destroys the Scarcity Basis of Capitalism
Excerpted from JD Moyer, the owner of a netlabel: “The music industry still consists of proprietary players (including my company, Loöq Records), but music culture has been open-sourced, and this spirit now pervades the more enlightened aspects of the music industry. Music is radically less expensive to produce (a laptop with good software in capable… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Insurgent Citizenship and the Production of Enclosure vs. the Commons
* Article: Rethinking Enclosure: Space, Subjectivity and the Commons. Alex Jeffrey, Colin McFarlane, et al. (to be published by Antipode) In the abstract, the authors propose: “While concepts of “enclosure” and the “commons” are becoming increasingly popular in critical geography, there have been few attempts to think them together. This paper sets out a dialectic… Continue reading
Discussing OWS (7): The state of #OccupyWallStreet and its lack of reliable allies
An assessment of the state of the movement, excerpted from Michael Greenberg: “Lately, the contest has entered a new phase, with police pushing reporters aside, and sometimes arresting them before a crackdown, in order to avoid a repetition of the kind of scenes of brutality that propelled the movement’s rise when they appeared on YouTube…. Continue reading
Movement of the Day: the European Charter of the Commons Campaign
A European Citizen’s Initiative for a European Charter of the Commons was initiated by the municipality of Naples, with the the first high level technical meeting of jurists taking place recently (in December) at the International University College of Turin. Introduction: “The dichotomy of private property and the state, on which the current constitutional tradition… Continue reading