Excerpted from Rex Weyler: 1. The failures “Forty years have passed since the founding of Greenpeace and the first UN environment meeting in Stockholm, fifty years since the groundbreaking Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, and 115 years since Svante Arrhenius warned that burning hydrocarbons would heat Earth’s atmosphere. Today, we have more environmental groups and… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2012"
Towards Cognitive Democracy: “democracy beats markets and hierarchies at complex problem solving”
* Essay: Cognitive Democracy. By Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi. Crooked Timber, 2012. Summary by Henry Farrell and Cosma Rohilla Shalizi: “In this essay, we outline a cognitive approach to democracy. Specifically, we argue that democracy has unique benefits as a form of collective problem solving in that it potentially allows people with highly… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: The 15M Civic Taskforces in Spain
Excerpted from JONATHAN BLITZER: ‘On Monday, July 30, 40 Spaniards ranging in age from their mid-20’s to early 70’s congregated in a dilapidated plaza in central Madrid. Those wizened by past experience brought folding chairs; others tore off cardboard slabs from a nearby recycling heap to fashion makeshift cushions. Newcomers stood or crouched. All had… Continue reading
How Journalism is Changing through Open API’s and Crowdfunding
Two important research articles: 1. Open innovation in digital journalism: Examining the impact of Open APIs at four news organizations. By Tanja Aitamurto and Seth C Lewis. The article discusses the constant negotiation between openness and control, and open and closed paradigms in journalism. “This article examines the relative value of open innovation principles for… Continue reading
Book trailer for John Boik’s “Creating Sustainable Societies”
We discussed the book previously, see here. Watch the book trailer:
The production chain management for 3D Printing is born: Botqueue
Another seminal moment for distributed manufacturing, excerpted from Zach Hoeken: “I believe that low cost 3D printing has the potential to revolutionize not just prototyping, but small-scale manufacturing of parts: from 10 to 1000 units. With a small fleet of 3D printers it is possible to run them around the clock and produce enough parts… Continue reading
James Livingston on the “socialist” consequences of the internet-driven market revolution
“What happens to (capitalism) when the internet permits what I have elsewhere called “primitive disaccumulation,” the conversion of basic commodities like information and music into goods that we can appropriate or distribute without the mediation of money and markets? What do we call the results? The decommodification of communication, the demise of “reification,” the socialization… Continue reading
Bitcoin Monitor: Bitcoin Conference 2012!
The second annual Bitcoin Conference, and the largest Bitcoin international event yet, is set to begin tomorrow Friday September 14. If you are located in London and wish to pop in, you can get tickets at the door for 80 GBP. Starting Friday and continuing until Sunday, speakers and guests from around the world will… Continue reading
An introduction to the Common Welfare Economy and its metrics – Christian Felber
Very thought out proposal that would make a huge difference in creating a sustainable ethical economy. Watch the very clear video explanation:
3D Printers are not for your home, but for microfactories!
Excerpted from Ryan Whitwam: “No one can deny that 3D printing is really cool from a purely technological standpoint. The idea that physical objects can be rapidly fabricated from digital files is fascinating, and could change the world. However, it’s very possible that we’ve all gotten so caught up in the 3D printing hype that… Continue reading
Bruno Latour: Compositionism as a replacement of critique.
P2P has to be is a reconstructive, post-critical approach. This idea is echoed in the text from Bruno Latour: ‘I have chosen to give this manifesto a worthy banner, the word compositionism. Yes, I would like to be able to write “The Compositionist Manifesto” by reverting to an outmoded genre in the grand style of… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: A critique of the glorification of violence by Zizek
Democracy and Revolution in the Thoughts of Marx and Zizek. Excerpted from Alan Johnson: “In “The Jacobin Spirit” Žižek “Marxified” his argument for terror and dictatorship by radically misconstruing what “Marx’s key insight” was. He claimed Marx understood political democracy to be a mere “democratic illusion” because without economic equality political democracy can only be… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: The Municipal Open Data Movement (U.S.)
The City as a Platform, excerpted from Paul Davies: “In many cases, it’s neither possible nor desirable for government institution to embrace the “fail early and often” approach preferred by tech entrepreneurs. While the process of governance may be painfully slow for technologists, existing policies aren’t always the result of bureaucratic inefficiency. But citizens can… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Insurgent Tactics and their Responses
Interesting: * Article: McAdam, Doug. Tactical innovation and the pace of insurgency. American Sociological Review. 1983 Dec;48(6):735–754. Summary: “Using statistical analysis of newspaper reports from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, McAdam makes a case that the cyclical or wave nature of political insurgencies is driven by an iterative process of tactical… Continue reading
James Livingston on capitalism overcoming its own functions
“The upshot of these changes, which I would summarize as the decomposition of capitalism, is a situation in which the extraction of surplus value from labor by capital has lost its investment function, and the production of value by labor has lost its income function. In short, capitalism has stopped making moral sense because it… Continue reading
How Do You Build a [P2P Labour] Union for the 21st Century?
SARA HOROWITZ is the founder of Freelancers Union in the US. She suggests in her below article that replacing the current business like model with more social unionism can be a way for ‘recovering the middle class way of life’. According to the author it can be done by initiating social and nonprofit economy by union owned cooperatives and… Continue reading