The new technologies of abundance, by their very nature, thwart the enforcement of state-imposed artificial scarcity. The present corporate-state order, exhausted and bankrupted from the sheer cost of subsidizing inefficiency and protecting it against competition against the superiority of free cooperative labor, has reached the breaking point. It is a dying system. Republished from Kevin… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2013"
James Cascio on retro-virus strategies for social change
Excerpted from James Cascio: “What makes climate and poverty wicked problems is that they’re complex — complicated + interconnected with other systems — *and* that they’re attached at the root to fundamental political-economic power structures. That is, altering the status quo of climate & poverty will upset power balances; those with the power who stand… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Life Without Money
Unfortunately, a free copy of this book is not available. (I could not even obtain excerpts from the author) * Book: Life Without Money; Building Fair and Sustainable Economies. Co-edited by Anitra Nelson and Frans Timmerman. Stefan Meretz writes: “The ten contributors to Life Without Money argue that we need to dispense with monetary values… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives
Presentation excerpted from David Morgan: “Inspired by the Mondragon cooperative network, the Valley Alliance of Worker Cooperatives (VAWC) came together in Western Massachusetts in 2005. The group first met at the U.S. Federation of Worker Cooperatives Eastern Conference on Workplace Democracy, and they are a direct result of national networks crystallizing at the regional level…. Continue reading
The dawn of algorythmic currencies
The ultimate promise of math-based systems is to bring the principles of the Internet to money. Money is information and the Internet is the greatest information engine of all time. The missing link was a money protocol. The Hypertext-Transfer-Protocol allowed the Internet to share text and graphics. The Simple-Mail-Transfer-Protocol made communication free and instantaneous. Each… Continue reading
Can we go beyond Wikipedia’s Eurocentric Encyclopaedism
* Master Thesis: Wikipedia and Encyclopaedism: A genre analysis of epistemological values. By Steve Jankowski. Pierre Levy writes: “Steve Jankowski’s Master Thesis (Wikipedia and Encyclopaedism: A genre analysis of epistemological values is proof that a supervisor (me) can learn more from his student than the student from his supervisor. And I’m not speaking here about… Continue reading
Video of the Day: From the Old to the New Digggers
Watch the video here: This is from a talk from the Diggers 2012 group that have been inspired by the Gerald Winstanley and the original Diggers and have taken to reclaiming the land at Runnymede Park. Some details about the New Diggers movement: “We: peaceful people, declare our intention to go and cultivate the disused… Continue reading
Book of the Day: On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice
Thinking about equality is never superfluous: * Book: On the Currency of Egalitarian Justice, and Other Essays in Political Philosophy. By G. A. Cohen. Edited by Michael Otsuka. Princeton University Press, 2011. “G. A. Cohen was one of the most gifted, influential, and progressive voices in contemporary political philosophy. At the time of his death… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Social Bonding and Peer Nurture
“Resolving the decades long divide between cultural versus sociobiological approaches, Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship unites cultural and biological approaches to social life and kinship. The synthesis is non-reductive, respecting the core tenets of both paradigms, and also incorporates psychological attachment theory into the account. Praised by adherents of both cultural and biological perspectives, the… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives
Presentation excerpted from David Morgan: “A similarly rich cooperative culture exists across the country, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where the Network of Bay Area Worker Cooperatives, or NoBAWC (pronounced “no boss”), is a hub for the region, literally centralized within 30 minutes of each member organization. A stunningly large network—nearly one out of… Continue reading
H.G. Wells on the need for a Open Conspiracy
Excerpted from H.G. Wells: “It seemed to me that all over the world intelligent people were waking up to the indignity and absurdity of being endangered, restrained, and impoverished, by a mere uncritical adhesion to traditional governments, traditional ideas of economic life, and traditional forms of behavior, and that these awaking intelligent people must constitute… Continue reading
Are UK’s twittering farmers at the core of agricultural innovation ecosystem?
Excerpted from Ed Dowding‘s presentation at TEDxOxbridge, entitled “The Great Feast”: “In the UK over 50% of farmers have a twitter account. On Thursday evenings, many of them converge online in a conversation using the hashtag #agrichatUK. It regularly ‘trends’ in the UK – which is to say it is one of the most active… Continue reading
Book of the Day: towards an Economy of Experiences
A book published by my dutch friend Alber Boswijk, an expert in the “experience economy”: * Book: Economy of Experiences. By Albert Boswijk, Ed Peelen & Steven Olthof. The European Centre for the Experience and Transformation Economy, 2013 A summary of the contents, by Albert Boswijk: “In chapters 1 and 2 we present a concise… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: the Italian Struggle for the Constitutionalism of the Commons
The common goods movement in Italy is a powerful example of the way in which social movements are emerging as the new “pouvoir constituant” in a top down and undemocratic process of economic constitutionalism imposed by international economic institutions. They are proving on both national and supranational levels that civil society actors are a potent… Continue reading
Monetary and Fiscal Policies for a Finite Planet
A steady-state economy must follow clear rules: renewable resource extraction cannot exceed the regeneration rate, pollution outflows cannot exceed absorption capacity, neither extraction nor pollution can threaten essential ecosystem functions, and essential non-renewable resources cannot be depleted faster than we develop substitutes. Current levels of throughput exceed all these rules. A must read paper on… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: the US Federation of Worker Cooperatives
Presentation excerpted from David Morgan: “Smaller, regional efforts like VAWC and NoBAWC now feed into a national network of worker cooperatives. As the first and primary national hub, the United States Federation of Worker Cooperatives (USFWC) brings together the full array of players within this movement. After many years of organizing, they were incorporated in… Continue reading