A travel report via Shane Hughes of the REconomy project: I was very excited to be returning to Sao Paulo, Brazil and exploring it from a REconomy perspective. I lived there for 7 years during the 90’s and I know that pretty much anything is possible within the Brazilian economy. For example, do you… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2013"
Video of the Day: Biohacking — you can do it, too
“Ellen Jorgensen is helping to democratize biology making it less the purview of academics and Big Pharma and more an enterprise accessible to anyone who wants a hands-on scientific experience.” – Discover Magazine, October 2011 If the video doesn’t load here, please watch it here. Info on the speaker at the TED website – http://www.ted.com/speakers/ellen_jorgensen.html… Continue reading
Umair Haque: What’s wrong with TED thinking?
Excerpted from Umair Haque: ” let the phrase “TED thinking” serve as a shorthand for the way we’ve come to think about ideas and how we share them, whether it’s through an 18-minute talk, an 800-word blog post, or the latest business “best-seller.” Hence, this post isn’t really about TED (so please don’t leave me… Continue reading
Four Scenarios for the Future of Capitalism
* Article: The Great Rebirth: The Future of Capitalism, Economy, and Exchange. Christopher Manfredi. Journal of Futures Studies, March 2013, 17(3): 127-130 The author writes: “The world is still reeling from the shock of almost complete global financial collapse in 2008. Through the worried looks and furrowed brows, sprinklings of new forms of capitalism have… Continue reading
The internet’s strengthening of labor has weakened the delocalization strategies of capital
It took 25 years to organize rural labor, now it takes five. This seriously weakens the advantages of fleeing to cheap labor countries. A very interesting editorial by Immanuel Wallerstein: “Ever since there has been a capitalist world-economy, one essential mechanism of its successful functioning has been the runaway factory. After a period of significant… Continue reading
How Green Is Your Internet?
Have you ever thought about how much energy the Internet uses? A single laptop or smartphone doesn’t use much electricity but when you multiply that by 2.4 billion Internet users and add in all the servers we rely on to deliver web content, things really starts to add up. http://p2pfoundation.net/How_Green_Is_Your_Internet
An Introduction to the PsyCommons
“Just as psychiatrists have ‘enclosed’ mental illness as their domain of specialist practice, counsellors have done the same for human relations, argues Denis Postle. In this article he explains the concept of the ‘psyCommons’ and calls for the recognition and reclamation of everyday, informal family, friendship and peer relationships as a rich source of emotional… Continue reading
The P2P Foldarap crowdfunding campaign
Making the FoldaRap open-source 3d-Printer foldable to bring it everywhere ! For more background info, see here!
What today’s students think about the future of Economy, Sustainability and Employment
I find this extremely significant to explain the rapid rise in the p2p imaginary: * Article: Future Visions for 2030: Of Economy, Sustainability and Employment. By Juha Saukkonen, Minh Thu Dang, et al. Journal of Futures Studies, March 2013, 17(3): 119-122. A survey of the Students of the International Study Programs in JAMK University of… Continue reading
Project of the Day: REactiv#s, new narratives for democracy in Bolivia
REactiv#s is an encounter of young activist who are creating new narratives in democracy and sociopolitical paradigm shift in Bolivia. Daniel Cotillas Ruiz explains: “REactiv#s is a meeting of cultural and politics activists, digital collectives and Latin American organizations. Development activists gathered to exchange learning on their contexts, mechanisms of mobilization and social action, as… Continue reading
Sixty-six theses on the crowd-intelligent business
Reproduced from Antoni Gutiérrez-Rubí & Juan Freire: 1. Markets are relationships. 2. Crowds are not a mob, chaotic, nor a mass, homogenous, they are plural groups organized through networks. 3. The collective intelligence is not determined by the individual intelligence of each member of the group. 4. Add and filter individual opinions is only a… Continue reading
Two models for open hardware economic governance: beyond the ‘candy economy’
The following article explains the radicality of the open value accounting approach as an alternative for the ‘capitalist’ open hardware model. Key question: to split or not to split market and community? 1. So why is the open value network a menace to current OSHW business models? Because by abolishing the distinction between the commercial… Continue reading
Thinking about new p2p forms of habitat
So that’s some of what’s occupying my mind these days. An update from our p2p-urbanistic correspondent Eric Hunting: “Most of my own thinking about urbanism has revolved around the development of new communities and habitats and how we adapt our civilization to the logistics of renewables and the progressively decentralized/de-massified industry and economics of the… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Alternative Economies Resource Guide
A guide to alternative and sustainable urban living and livelyhoods by the Alternative Economies Subgroup of OWS Arts and Labor. The official title is: What Do We Do Now? The group writes: “This list has been compiled collaboratively by members of the OWS Arts & Labor Alternative Economies group to increase the visibility of and… Continue reading
Project of the Day: La Cura, open sourcing individual health efforts for collective benefit
= “La Cura”, a global art performance open sourcing the health efforts of Salvatore Iaconese, diagnosed with a brain tumor. An introduction: “Salvatore was not really satisfied with medicine’s approach to his illness. As he said many times: “I felt as if I disappeared”. Doctors are, obviously, the “good guys”: they are people who save… Continue reading
The Spark: documentary about p2p resilience and thrivability experiments
THE SPARK is a documentary about a genius technologist and a rebel educator, two pioneers from opposite spectrums with one goal in common: Build a sustainable community. Exclusive footage from the Open Source Ecology farm in Missouri and from an urban farming in disadvantaged Afro-American neighborhoods in the U.S. Watch the trailer here: The Spark… Continue reading