Excerpted from Stanislav Datskovskiy: ” One of the world’s greatest cryptographers, Adi Shamir, published the following analysis: – “We discovered that almost all these large transactions were the descendants of a single large transaction involving 90,000 Bitcoins which took place on November 8th 2010, and that the subgraph of these transactions contains many strange looking… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2013"
The democratization of hardware invention through TechShops
The business version of hackerspaces and Fablabs is also having its effects:
The People’s Cloud and the inevitable talent migration to P2P: the future of cloud computing is p2p!
Towards the People’s Cloud: Meshes which function like Metacomputers! Vinay Gupta argues that Bitcoin and Bittorrent show that the future of Cloud Computing is P2P: “1> Computer power is an ever-more-abundant resource. As a result, the data center is doomed for a variety of reasons. Yet even in such times, the temporary efficiency of the… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Hacking Your Education
* Book: Hacking Your Education. Dale Stephens. Penguin, 2013 The author, founder of Uncollege.org, explains: ‘Hacking Your Education is a practical guide to adapting Homeschooling and Unschooling principles for college age learners. In the book, Dale helps people learn how to challenge themselves when college is not meeting their needs. From practical tips for newcomers,… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Authority and Governance as the Next Great Internet Disruption
The OMS platform has sweeping implications for political governance in both theoretical and practical terms. It could transform the role of the State by empowering citizens to devise new forms of self-actualized institutions. These institutions would likely provide greater social legitimacy, efficacy and adaptability than conventional government. Instead of regarding political authority as something inherent… Continue reading
Selected Citations on P2P Spirituality and Epistemology
The sources for the citations can be found here. Jesus, in the Gospel, did not say, “My kingdom is not of this world; that was the bad translators who, by suppressing three words in one phrase of St. John, have made it say this. Jesus said literally, “My kingdom is not yet of these times.”… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Democratic Innovations
“At a time when citizen participation is considered – at least in theory – an important part of the open government movement, those working in this sphere should pay particular attention to different methods of participant selection (e.g. self-selection, randomized) and what the prospects and limits for each of these different methods are. An awesome… Continue reading
Towards a Commons-Compatible Cultural Economy in the European Union
* Article: THE CULTURAL COMMONS AND SOCIAL JUSTICE: FOUNDATIONS FOR A NEW EUROPEAN HUMANISM. By Philippe Aigrain. This text is excerpted from a contribution to the Green Paper produced by the Toolquiz project funded by the Interreg-C European programme of inter-regional co-operation. Toolquiz aims at creating the conditions for an inclusive creative economy. Philippe Aigrain:… Continue reading
Janelle Orsi on the legal issues around the sharing economy
Excerpted from ANYA KAMENETZ, who reports on a conversation with sharing lawyer Janelle Orsi: “”I admit, the sharing economy is mind-blowing and its potential to transform commerce is amazing,” writes attorney Janelle Orsi, the director of the Sustainable Economies Law Center in Berkeley, California, and a foremost expert on the emerging law of the sharing… Continue reading
The dawn of non-market ‘networked’ innovation: the open hardware movement and digital fabrication as case study
we need to shift the interpretative framework. Instead of an aggregation of atomistic users with overlapping (but individual) incentives, we must stipulate a collective of sort, held together by shared worldviews, norms and identities. From the latter vantage point, we see that the recursive nature of the tool is mirrored in the recursive nature of… Continue reading
Is open government a bad thing?
Three items here. First a summary of Evgeny Morozov’s treatment of Tim O’Reilly as the bogeyman that distorted “open government” into a dystopia. Amidst the mischaracterisations and polarization features that are the hallmark of Morozov’s interventions, there lies a good point that standard open government approaches may be too reformist and simplyfying. But I fundamentally… Continue reading
A critique of Strategic-Instrumental Rationality
Excerpted from JOE CORBETT: “In his theory of communicative action, Jurgen Habermas spoke of ‘the grammars of the forms of life’, the human socio-cultural expressions of these emergent quantum-archetypal forms, which are the aesthetic-expressive (beauty), moral-communal (goodness), instrumental-technical (truth), and strategic-political (justice) forms of rationality that constitute human psychological, cultural, and social existence. Strategic-instrumental rationality… Continue reading
Chris Cook: P2P Exchanges should be distinguished from peer production, but both are p2p
Chris Cook has respnded to my thesis that P2P Marketplaces are not “peer to peer” as I understand it, which requires the common construction of value. He writes in various comments: 1. “Peer to Peer exchange (which may or may not involve the time delay and credit which gives rise to a monetary relationship) is… Continue reading
On the viral spread of the Brazilian protests
Excerpted from the New Scientist, where Debora MacKenzie writes that the “Brazil uprising points to rise of leaderless networks“: (the original article has links) “Brazil’s uprising came “totally out of the blue”, says Marcus de Aguiar at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. “We never had anything like this before.” It began when… Continue reading
Against spiritual authoritarianism (1): Andrew Cohen steps down ?
One of my personal interests related to the P2P philosophy is the fight against spiritual authoritarianism. In this context, the stepping down of the abusive guru Andrew Cohen, seems like a piece of hopeful news. We reproduce in full the article by Hal Blacker, founder of the critical What Enlightenment blog which first collected the… Continue reading
Against Jaron Lanier: financing the commons without commodifying it
I must make a confession, I have not yet read Jaron Lanier, and I am reluctant to do so. The two ‘trivial’ reasons are that 1) I remember Lanier’s inane comments on digital maoism 2) he continuously uses the straw men argument that “information wants to be free”, means gratis, and that has of course,… Continue reading