Excerpted from Julia Elyachar: “What does debt have to do with empowerment? At first glance, the answer would seem to be nothing. Debt, in the western tradition at least, is commonly associated with the loss of power. In early Greece, debt could lead to enslavement. One of the great radical slogans of 4th century Greece… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2012"
Collaboration and the Coming of the Commons – A Conversation With Michel Bauwens
Source: South Melbourne Commons “Michel will share co-production and post-ownership trends and report on on-line and in-place innovations. Michel will discuss the political-economy implications of peer-to-peer. He will highlight the opportunity to reverse the economic perversity that currently considers ‘ideas as scarce’ and ‘nature as abundant.’”
In dialogue with Hazel Henderson on Steve Pinker’s thesis of the decline of violence
A contribution by Rich Carlson, in response to an earlier article by Hazel Henderson, quoting Steve Pinker’s work on the decline in violence: “Using Steven Pinkers “Better Angels” is a precarious support for a view of “progressive human evolution” or of the species advance in mass learning capabilities that Hazel Henderson seems to champion in… Continue reading
A critique of the Thrive conspiracy documentary
If the ills of the world are the deliberate intentions of malevolent beings, then we don’t have to take responsibility for our problems because they are being done to us. Thinking this way may provide the momentary comfort of feeling exonerated, but it is ultimately disempowering because it undermines our ability to be accountable for… Continue reading
Money is not a commodity (2): Why Keynes favoured Clearing Unions
Excerpted from Luigi Doria and Luca Fantacci: “To overcome the “fetish of liquidity”, Keynes advocates a monetary reform, based on a radically different conception of money, understood as a mere intermediary, which passes from hand to hand, is received and dispensed, and disappears, when its work is done, from the sum of a nation’s wealth…. Continue reading
What if we checked the commons into GitHub?
Not all of the commons, mind you, and not all at once. But each of our little slices of this vast wealth, our areas of interest, that which we wish to share, to curate, and to remix. Why should programmers have a monopoly on the paradigm shifting technologies and new information topologies known to the… Continue reading
Jon Wilkins on Organizing Independent Scholars with the Ronin Institute
Source: Radio Boston [powerpress] “Once upon a time, earning a Ph.D. in America meant you were on your way to a career in academia. With a doctorate degree in hand, you had a pretty good shot at a full professorship, research support and the backing and credibility of a university. Back in 1970, America was… Continue reading
Argument: why money can’t be a commodity
The notion that money is an object of intrinsic value is a scientific and mathematic absurdity. Money is a logical entity not a physical one, it is nothing more than a record of value and therefore is not in and of itself a precursor to the creation of wealth nor is it subject to being… Continue reading
Tim Mansfield on the Journey towards Transmodernity
Source: Action Foresight 4-part interview of Tim Mansfield by Jose Ramos. [powerpress] Part 1 Jose Ramos: “The following is the 1st segment of an interview I did with Tim Mansfield in Dec. 2009. I had wanted to interview Tim Mansfield for a number of reasons. First, he is by far one of the most outstanding… Continue reading
Should we really give Apple, or any patent-holder, ownership over human gestures?
Republished from Douglas Rushkoff, warning us of a slippery slope that we have been on for quite a while: “Imagine we were just developing spoken language for the first time. And someone came up with a new word to describe an action, thought, or feeling – like “magnify” or “dreadful.” But in this strange world,… Continue reading
Tiberius Brastaviceanu on the Scalable Peer Economics of the Sensorica Open Value Accounting Network
A strongly recommended video on the bleeding edge of p2p innovation. Tib is experimenting and building a model which seemlessly blends authentic social allocation of productive efforts, with an open business model that does not generate corporate hierarchies and production for profit. “A discussion of scalable peer economics, from the standpoint of a practiced innovator…. Continue reading
Safe-Xchange: Bringing Artists and File Sharers Together
From Tom Jeffries, founder and CEO of Safe-Xchange: “The goal of Safe-Xchange is to bring together two groups that have been split apart by misguided efforts by the record and movie industry. Musicians and filmmakers are told that that their income is being destroyed by people who share files, that file sharers are “worse than… Continue reading
Relating to Objects in a P2P World
Andre Ling offers us an introduction to some recent philosophies that are taking ‘objects’ very seriously. The P2P Wiki article has many references. Andre Ling: “In the present era, we humans find ourselves surrounded by a continuously expanding mountain of ‘things’. From the new entities revealed to us through scientific discoveries (the Higgs Boson for… Continue reading
AGORA 99: EURO-MEDITERRANEAN MEETING ON DEBT, RIGHTS AND P2P DEMOCRACY
What is it? A meeting of European and Mediterranean movements and networks to talk about Debt, democracy and Rights that will take place in Madrid between the 1st and 4th of November 2012. Why? The cuts and plundering policies we are suffering are generated on a global and European level. The financial economy plays its game… Continue reading
Open source efforts are moving to open web
Open source powers the server side of the web, but there’s no guarantee of openness on the user-facing side. And that’s where open source advocates are focusing much of their efforts now. This article focuses mostly on the efforts of the Mozilla Foundation. Excerpted from KLINT FINLEY: “de Icaza says the desktop wars were already… Continue reading
The Esperanto economy is booming
Excerpted from Las Indias: “Internet itself seems to have fueled Esperanto as idealistic Zamenhof’s pacifism couldn’t imagine. Today the big global associations of the Esperanto world are in crisis, as almost all decentralized structures are. They surely are too XXth century for this time of distributed communications and P2P communities. But the social fabric of… Continue reading