In this emerging technologically accelerated economy, wealth increasingly concentrates in the hands of a few rather than spreading itself out across the larger population (i.e., the traditional ??bell curve of normal distributions). The Report explores the mechanisms of this phenomenon and its suspected role in ??hollowing out? the American middle class. It also questions contemporary… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2013"
Carne Ross on the Leaderless Revolution
An interview by Bill Moyers of author Carne Ross, that is still of interest:
Exposing the inner mechanics of the netarchical Ted experience
Lots of swearwords, Californian hyper-individualism but also lots of genuine concern about a hyper-managed elitist machinery in the video below. Eddie Huang, booted out as Ted Fellow explains his experience during the latest TED conference. Hilarious, and worth watching: For extra context, see Evgeny Morozov‘s take on the TED meme machine: “Today TED is an… Continue reading
Sharing Commons Spring Barcelona March 2013
Sharing commons sprint. Barcelona. March 20th & 21st 2013. In occasion of Michel Bauwens (P2P Foundation) visit to Barcelona. Brought to you collaboratively by OuiShare, IGOP – UAB & Spanish Chapter of Open Knowledge Foundation, with the support of BCN The Lab. March 20th 14h – Wikisprint When: March 20th What: Wikisprint es un esfuerzo… Continue reading
Coming soon: Open source operating systems for smartphones and tablets
Daily Wireless has an article which points to several open source developments in the smartphone and tablet market. Firefox, Tizen 2.0 and Ubuntu Smartphones Introduced Firefox Built entirely using HTML5 and other open Web standards, Firefox OS is a Linux-based open source operating system for smartphones and tablet computers. It has been demonstrated on Android… Continue reading
Participation has its problems, but representative systems are very exclusionary
Tiago Peixoto explains the problem: “In my frequent conversations about open government and citizen participation, the subject of elite capture (or “how representative it is”) is almost unavoidable. Some go as far as evaluating participatory initiatives on the grounds of an ideal notion of representativeness: participants should perfectly mirror the socio-demographic traits of the larger… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Societing Reloaded
Book: Societing Reloaded. Pubblici produttivi e innovazione sociale. Curated by Adam Arvidsson and Alex Giordano. EGEA, 2013 Description The economy is in crisis, both in Italy and in the rest of the world. The system has to radically change to survive. The biggest problem is not in the lack of ideas (which are abundant on… Continue reading
Legal strategies for resilient communities
Janelle Orsi and her friends at the Sustainable Economies Law Center, have produced a short introductory video on the need for a legal framework for the resilient/sharing/p2p economy to thrive. Worth watching:
The differences between open source software and open source hardware: extra management challenges
Excerpted from Simone Cicero: “The main problem now with open hardware, is that to have something to what GIT and GitHub were for software is much more complicated. The main difference lies not so much in the management of files – many open hardware projects already manage all documentation via GitHub today – but in… Continue reading
Three p2p-inspired collaborative art projects by Furtherfield.org
* Article: DIWO: Do It With Others – No Ecology without Social Ecology. By Marc Garrett, Ruth Catlow – Furtherfield, 26/01/2013 The full article also refers to p2p-theoretical considerations before describing three concrete collaborative art projects with a specific p2p-inspiration: (source: Remediating the Social 2012. Editor: Simon Biggs University of Edinburgh. Pages 69-74) * Project… Continue reading
Open source credit rating agencies are needed NOW!
Republished from Marc Joffe: “Five years after the financial crisis, European and US regulators have yet to solve the problem of biased credit rating opinions. Moody’s downgrade of the UK’s credit rating and the recent US lawsuit against S&P remind us that credit ratings remain both consequential and controversial. More importantly, they are a byproduct… Continue reading
Lessons in horizontal work culture from the Valve Employee Manual
The MoreHuman Tumblr blog has a running commentary on the employee manual of the ‘bossless’ gaming company Valve. The Valve excerpts are preceded by the “-” sign. Discussion on Emergent Excess Social Capital and Value in Horizontal Networks Excerpts: “Conditional membership Biggest difference from emergent social networks like Occupy: conditional membership. The handbook focuses a… Continue reading
Review of Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty — The Resilience Imperative
Michael Lewis and Pat Conaty. The Resilience Imperative: Cooperative Transitions to a Steady-State Economy (New Society Publishers, 2012) 400pp. This book starts with a macroscopic analysis of where the existing corporate capitalist economy goes wrong — the pathological effects of debt-based currency, a GDP that counts waste as “growth,” etc. — and proceeds to outline… Continue reading
Rhizomatics for the People: from the meshworked mind to the meshworked civilization
“Withdraw allegiance from the old categories of the Negative (law, limit, castration, lack, lacuna), which Western thought has so long held sacred as a form of power and an access to reality. Prefer what is positive and multiple, difference over uniformity, flows over unities, mobile arrangements over systems. Believe that what is productive is not… Continue reading
No Art Ecology without “P2P” Social Ecology
I’m extremely happy that our p2p theoretical work has inspired actual art curators and artists such as Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow of Furtherfield. In this essay, they describe their projects in the context of p2p developments and theorizing. In our second installment we will present the actual art projects. * Article: DIWO: Do It… Continue reading
Beware of progress traps
The excerpt is part of a must-read analysis of the neoliberal neo-environmentalist movement, which unfortunately sees no alternative between the dead-end of commodifying nature and green defeatist survivalism. Midway in the essay, author Paul Kingsnorth discusses the important notion of the ‘progress trap’: “IN HIS BOOK A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright coins the… Continue reading