Date archives "December 2013"

Movement of the Day: A History of Tech-Roots Organizing

While it’s tempting to get excited about the potential of global connectivity — tech-enabled pan-studentism! Millennials of the world unite! — it’s important to remember the barriers to a universal identity. The Internet diminishes the importance of geographic proximity and increases the importance of affinity, but the global student identity still raises big questions about… Continue reading

“The Times Are Urgent; Let’s Slow Down” an Open Letter

“The system is not the cause of our problems, it is a consequence of our separation from each other, a consequence of our complicity with our own destruction. In other worlds, we are the system we fight against” …..and later…..”If we beat the system at it’s own game, we’ve lost” “Civic society from all over… Continue reading

Book of the Day: What Then Must We Do

“argues that a new system, one that is not corporate capitalism and not state socialism but something new entirely, could “democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.” * Book: What Then Must We Do? Gar Alperovitz. Gar… Continue reading

The emergence of smart citizens for a new urbanism

Excerpted from Dan Hill: “There are weak signals that, as institutional frameworks continue to crumble, citizens are increasingly actively engaged in decision-making about their city. Again, at its most viscerally obvious, we can see it in Tahrir Square, Occupy Everywhere, Croydon, Athens, or the underreported protests in urban China. But beyond those flashpoints, we can… Continue reading

Can we organize independently of governments, corporations and religion?

Excerpted from Sakari Maaranen: “Governments have got stuck with the weight of their own regulations. Regulations are important, but they also do slow down progress. Therefore governments rarely are at the forefront of new developments, though they are necessary for sovereign jurisdictions. Other large organisations, especially corporations, are stuck with money even more tightly. They… Continue reading

Elite overproduction and the next great wave of social instability

Of about 30 detailed indicators I developed for tracing these historical cycles (reflecting popular well-being, inequality, social cooperation and its inverse, polarization and conflict), almost all have been moving in the wrong direction in the last three decades. Excerpted from Peter Turchin: “How does growing economic inequality lead to political instability? Partly this correlation reflects… Continue reading

McKenzie Wark on the Unity of Cultural and Technological Hackers

How … are those of us training in the use of language, to collaborate with those who work with code? Excerpted from McKenzie Wark: Almost never is the “technical a real object of inquiry. It is something fallen, quotidian, not an object to be thought. Its something about which to direct only a hermeneutic suspicion…. Continue reading

Book of the Day: Off the Network

“Off the Network is a fresh and authoritative examination of how the hidden logic of the Internet, social media, and the digital network is changing users’ understanding of the world—and why that should worry us. Ulises Ali Mejias suggests how we might begin to rethink the logic of the network and question its ascendancy.” *… Continue reading

What’s the nature of the ‘invisible work’ created by the sharing economy ?

“eBay’s impact hasn’t been on the thousands of tech jobs it created for eBay,” Sundararajan says, “but on the hundreds of thousands of sellers it created.” Excerpted from EMILY BADGER: “The sharing economy, however, is not exactly like economic disruptions that came before it. More complex technology typically demands more complex skills. And, in the… Continue reading