Book: Configuring the Networked Self: Law, Code, and the Play of Everyday Practice. Julie E. Cohen. Yale University Press. 2012. Overview The legal and technical rules governing flows of information are out of balance, argues Julie E. Cohen in this original analysis of information law and policy. Flows of cultural and technical information are overly… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2012"
Video of the Day: Some interesting numbers related to the sharing economy.
Worth seeing, made for the launch of sharing site Uniiverse:
Essay of the Day: Exploring the Emergence of the Cyberhero Archetype
* Article: The Hero and the Internet: Exploring the Emergence of the Cyberhero Archetype. Dana Klisanin. In this article, Dana asks: the total number of people engaging in acts of digital altruism and other forms of pro-social digital activism exceeds 100 million (Klisanin, 2011). Who are these people? Excerpts: “It is not surprising then, that… Continue reading
Why the #OccupyWallStreet Movement Represents a New Politics
Excerpted from Carne Rosse: “This is the start of a new politics, but obviously mere meetings and protest marches are not enough. There is nothing certain about the future, save that it is our actions that will create it and that others are already exploiting our inaction. It is no longer sufficient to appeal to… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Qualitative Easing Through Stock Issuance
Excerpted from Chris Cook: “For several hundred years, the Exchequer financed and funded English sovereigns by issuing IOUs, in the form of wooden tally sticks (pictures) split into two parts. Individual creditors were given the Stock as a receipt and as a credit token which was returnable to the Exchequer in payment of taxes: the… Continue reading
Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a ‘Rights of the Internet’ declaration
Source: Nico Mendoza – Aljazeera Chiang Mai, Thailand – “OH $%#@!”, reads the caption under the image depicting a group of protesters wearing Guy Fawkes masks and holding both humorous and denunciatory signs, “The internet is here”. The caption not only conveys the sentiment that drove US congressmen to drop their support of the SOPA… Continue reading
Networked Resistance Movements as an Example of Distributed Infrastructure
[This is a new section I’ve added to Chapter Three of my forthcoming book The Desktop Regulatory State. I gotta say it was pretty cosmically mind-blowing reading the passages below from Earl and Kimford, and mentally collating them with material in my manuscript that dovetailed with them.] Think back to our discussion in Chapter One… Continue reading
Arte documentary on the hacker class
Provocative and intelligent profile of hackers, by Benoit Fabien et al, which was shown on Arte:
Is Peer Production a Real Mode of Production?
Michel Bauwens: “In the foundational essay on peer to peer, I call peer to peer a third mode of production (as well as a third mode of property and governance). The question is: is this correct? A mode of production classically is viewed as a combination of forces of production, how we extract value from… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Why the market fails to protect privacy
Excerpted from Scott Cleland: “Why are market forces so weak in protecting users’ online privacy? The main reason is that the online marketplace is economically structured around users being a commodity, data, to be aggregated and mined, not customers to be served and protected in a competitive marketplace. That’s because the overriding economic force that… Continue reading
Graphic of the day: Mapping the Solidarity Economy
Source: SolidarityNYC Interesting map showing how the various aspects of the solidarity economy are being integrated.
What can we learn from the early success of Local Motors, the first open source car?
Interesting details, excerpted from Stay Davis: “This industry is not for everyone. But Jay Rogers thinks it is. Four years ago, he founded Local Motors to make open-source cars. The company developed an online platform for crowd sourced car design and developed a unique micro-factory for rapid local manufacturing. This may be what the automotive… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: How the Law Is Used To Stifle the Sharing Economy
Excerpted from Chris LaRoche: “Last May, New York City enacted a law “banning renting out Class A residential spaces — apartments intended only as permanent, rather than transient residences — for less than 30 days,” according to the real-estate magazine The Real Deal. “The move was prompted, in large part, by complaints from those living… Continue reading
Person of the Day: Laurence Schechtman on Peer to Peer Food Growing
Mira Luna interviews Laurence Schechtman. “Laurence Schechtman is the founder and coordinator for Neighborhood Vegetables in the San Francisco East Bay, which he started four and a half years ago. Neighborhood Vegetables is a grassroots network of 2,500 volunteers who help each other plant urban vegetable gardens in their yards. Laurence is a long-time Bay… Continue reading
Call to Action: Towards Fab Factories in Africa
Excerpted from Erik Hersman: “The FabLab is small … What would happen if you put it on steroids and made it 10 times larger? What if we were talking about a Fab Factory instead? A factory A space that has all the machines needed to fabricate prototypes and manufacture pieces in at least small quantities…. Continue reading
Why Empire and Cognitive Capitalism need ACTA to combat the Global South
Excerpted from Thijs Markus: “To understand the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, we need to go a little further back in time than the 00?s. We need to go back somewhere to the late 80?s, early 90?s. During this time, a new fashion came over the industries of the day: as pioneered by Nike, large corporations decided… Continue reading