SPRING IS HERE. WE ARE COMING THE PLAN For May 1st, 2012 Occupy Los Angeles is organizing around a “4 Winds” People’s Power Car and Bike Caravan through the urban sprawl of Los Angeles that will culminate in Direct Action in and around the Financial District of downtown LA. People from all sectors of the… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2012"
Video of the Day: Marty Kaplan on Going from Attention to Engagement
The Learner Blog writes that this is “one of the best presentations on media, entertainment and technology I have ever watched”. Here are some details: “Barcelona Media, an interdisciplinary center of research and innovation, hosted Lear Center director Marty Kaplan to speak at its 10th anniversary celebration on March 6, 2012. His talk is titled… Continue reading
Steve Keen: Two proposals to eliminate the unproductive debt burden
Via Steve Keen: “To prevent bubbles, we therefore have to reduce the appeal of leveraged speculation on asset prices, without at the same time choking off demand for debt for either legitimate investment or unavoidable borrowing. I propose two mechanisms: “Jubilee Shares” and “Property Income Limited Leverage” (“The PILL”): 1. Jubilee Shares: To redefine shares… Continue reading
Technological Change Is Drastically Reducing the Efficient Scale Size
A crucial contribution to the ‘value crisis’ debate, by David de Ugarte of Lasindias.net: (many thanks to Etienne Figueroa for the translation) “In a time when technologies have drastically reduced the efficient scale of production, capital, instead of adapting itself to this reality, has fled towards the opacity of securitization and large-scale short selling. As… Continue reading
Video of the Day: The Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Project in Indonesia
In this lecture-video, Kate Chapman from the Humanitarian Open Street Map Team (HOT) discusses mapping an entire country into OpenStreetMap for disaster preparedness:
Chilean documentary: preparing Pucon for Post-Growth realities
Pucon in Transition is a wonderful documentary giving voice to the local people involved in a Transition project. Subtitled in englisn. Watch the video here:
The Open Scientific Publishing movement is gaining traction
From a longer article in the Guardian by Alok Jha, who reports on the progress of a scientific revolt against exploitative scientific publishing: ‘in January this year, Gowers wrote an article on his blog declaring that he would henceforth decline to submit to or review papers for any academic journal published by Elsevier, the largest… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Kate Raworth on Social and Planetary Boundaries
Kate Raworth explains: “There are 9 vital processes for planet earth that have to remain within a ‘safe operating zone’ for humanity. But we need to add eleven social limits as well.”
Dale Carrico’s critique of the fallacy of geo-engineering
Via Dale Carrico: “This article is not intended as a contribution to the debate on “geo-engineering.” I insist on that because it seems to me the more important point to make about “geo-engineering” is that it is, strictly speaking, non-debatable. More specifically, I think the principal work of “geo-engineering” discourse is to displace debate, not… Continue reading
Peer to Peer User Owned Communications Infrastructure at #OccupyWallStreet and beyond
Gordon Cook has done it again, in providing a very detailed treatment of the alternative, user-owned p2p infrastructures that are emerging, and detailing in particular the case study of Isaac Wilder’s FreedomTower meshwork. Very much work reading also as a historical document on the OWS movement’s technological spin-offs: Peer to Peer User Owned Communications Infrastructure
Video of the Day: Free the Network
This documentary looks at how DIY hack-tech is changing the discourse of modern day protests: “Our story follows the trials of a pair of college dropouts who head up the Free Network Foundation, a peer-to-peer communications initiative seeking to liberate the global Internet from corporate clutches by building their own decentralized, cooperatively owned, free network,… Continue reading
Zurker – A social network owned by its users
Zurker is still in private beta, which means you can get in only with an invitation. It is a social network in the making, which will be owned by its users. Being developed on a shoestring budget, the application isn’t your typical social network backed by investors. Yet the people behind it would love to… Continue reading
New documentary on democratizing the money supply: 97% Owned
Via: “97% Owned investigates behind the scenes of the ever changing financial system, to uncover how the monetary system provides the foundations for international dominance and national control. Fresh thinking, new ideas and answers to simple questions are squeezed into this 2hr 10minute expose.” Here’s the trailer of what looks to be a very good… Continue reading
Kudunomics: property rights for the information-based economy
David Bollier explains the research of Samuel Bowles: “A kudu is a species of antelope that hunters in the Pleistocene era used to hunt. Bowles makes a fascinating comparison between the property rights of subsistence economies that once hunted kudu, and what he calls the “weightless economy” of digital information today. Huh? Here’s Bowles’ analysis:… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Argentine Worker Cooperatives in Civil Society
* Article: ARGENTINE WORKER COOPERATIVES IN CIVIL SOCIETY: A CHALLENGE TO CAPITAL–LABOR RELATIONS. By Peter Ranis. WorkingUSA, The Journal of Labor and Society. Volume 13 · March 2010 · pp. 77–105 Peter Ranis explains how Argentine’s coops have fought for their place in the Argentinian economy and society, through the building of alliances across the… Continue reading
Jodi Dean: #OccupyWallStreet as a Necessary Call for Collectivity
Excerpted from Jodi Dean, this article focuses on how OWS achieved ‘practical unity’ through the occupation tactic: “The continuity of occupation has been a potent remedy to the fragmentation, localism, and transitoriness of contemporary left politics. Occupation unites and disciplines via local, self-organized, assemblies. This “unity” has not meant accord with a “party line” or… Continue reading