The following is excerpted from the essay: • Essay: The Commons and World Governance. TOWARD A GLOBAL SOCIAL CONTRACT. Arnaud Blin and Gustavo Marín. Forum for a New World Governance. April 2012 (draft version) Arnaud Blin and Gustavo Marín: “Another central element to both democracy and capitalism has contributed to the atomization of societies: the… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2012"
Why China may not be ‘capitalist’: the Role of the State in Chinese Economic Development
* Essay: The Chinese Economic Miracle – A Triumph for Capitalism or the Planned Economy? By Jonathan Clyne. Please request the full document, which exists in both abridged and full-length version, from author Jonathan Clyde via [email protected] More generous excerpts are here. The Key Thesis of Jonathan Clyne is the following: “A transitional economy is… Continue reading
Preparing for the People’s Summit at Rio+20
* Essay: Another Future Is Possible. Draft forwarded by Silke Helfrich. This working document, in preparation for the seminar of May 9 and 10, 2012, pulls together the proposals set out in the texts produced by the Thematic Groups of the Thematic Social Forum that was organized in Porto Alegre from January 24 to 29,… Continue reading
How the internet is enabling the creating of common resources in the Italian earthquake zone
Republished from Alberto Cottica: “I find it hard to concentrate on my work today. I am from Modena, Emilia Romagna, Italy, that just today has been hit by a 5.8 magnitude earthquake. I live in France, but my whole family and lots of friends are in hard-hit areas. As I keep an eye on Twitter… Continue reading
Internet craft companies and the renaissance of handicrafts in Germany, Europe and around the world
Excerpted from Der Spiegel: “Rob Kalin, a painter, carpenter and photographer who wanted a suitable virtual outlet for his creations, founded Etsy in the United States in 2005. Since then, there has been a proliferation of similar online marketplaces for handmade items, sites where you can buy everything from a screen-printed t-shirt to a 1980s… Continue reading
The condition of market dependency
The best that socialists can do is to aim as much as possible to detach social life from market-dependence. That means striving for the decommodification of as many spheres of life as possible and their democratization—not just their subjection to the political rule of “formal” democracy but their removal from the direct control of capital… Continue reading
Joseph Redwood-Martinez on the scarcity of simplicity
What if we just abandoned this compulsion toward complexity and, instead, revisited this effort to live simply within systems we understand? In a great new reader by SALT (SALTonline.org) of Istanbul, entitled, “One day, everything will be free“, Joseph Redwood-Martinez replies to artist-intellectual ‘Federica’, who initially called for a complexification of thought to accompany the… Continue reading
The ethics of military funding for hackerspaces, the maker movement, and learning
Excerpted from Open Buddha, this relates to Make magazine accepting DARPA (U.S. DoD military research funding) money for educational projects. The original article has a lot of background links. “We have school programs being funded through the Department of Defense, of which DARPA is a member, rather than the Department of Education. As a parent… Continue reading
Open Source Culture as a methodology to solve global problems
My good colleague Silke Helfrich always says my lectures are ‘too complicated’, but this time, she complimented me … So this is a good basic introduction to what the P2P approach is all about, and how it is a general methodology to solve global issues and problems. It focus on the social and relational logic… Continue reading
An artistic freedom voucher to replace copyright?
A proposal by Dean Baker, excerpted from Al Jazeera: “The market works best when items sell at their marginal cost. That means we maximize efficiency when recorded music, movies, video games and software are available to users at zero cost. The fees that the government allows copyright holders to impose create economic distortions in the… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Central or Distributed?
By Dmytri Kleiner: I gave a talk with Jacob Applebaum at last week’s Re:publica conference in Berlin.It seems it had fallen to us to break a little bad news. Here it is.– We are not progressing from a primitive era of centralized social media to an emerging era of decentralized social media, the reverse is… Continue reading
The Rising of the P2P Mode of Foreign Relations
Based on the insights drawn from Kees van der Pijl and Michel Bauwens, I have identified the rise of ‘P2P mode of foreign relations’ as the radical alternative to the top down ‘Global Governance’ mode. Below slide presents the argument. P2P Mode of Foreign Relations View more PowerPoint from Örsan ?enalp In the Modes of… Continue reading
Why marketizing the environment leads to more degradation (#Rio+20 debate, 2)
the reduction of people’s values to exchange value ensures that what people most care about is disregarded. Many of the things people most care about (e.g., significant social relations and evaluative commitments including those constitutive of identity and social loyalties) have the property of what Joseph Raz ? calls ‘constitutive incommensurability’. To assume that these… Continue reading
Trend of the Day: Peak Social
By George Siemens: “Dunbar and Shultz argue that significant human evolution in intelligence occurred due to the “computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains”. Similarly, Mesoudi, Whiten, & Dunbar’s research states that social information receives preference for cultural transmission.If this hypothesis holds true, then humanity has gained astounding intelligence… Continue reading
Is Europe really at the brink of war?
A provocative article by Vinay Gupta at EdgeRyders draws a response from Christopher Brewster (below): (thanks to Dante Monson for the forward) 1. Vinay Gupta: Europe’s New War “Europe is at war. It’s not obvious until you know some history, but Europe is at war. There are three critical pieces of information you need to… Continue reading
George Siemens and Michael Wesch Talk About Future Learning
Source: ELI In Conversation: George Siemens and Michael Wesch Talk About Future Learning. In this podcast we feature a conversation between George Siemens, Associate Director of the Learning Technologies Centre at the University of Manitoba. and Michael Wesch, Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Kansas State University It was recorded at the ELI 2008 Annual Meeting. Michael… Continue reading