Gordon Cook has been kind enough to transcript Michel Bauwens’ presentation at last year’s Border’s to Cross Conference in Amsterdam. We’ve also included the video at the end for good measure, (so you can see Michel being “invited” offstage for going over his allotted time). The content is very interesting as it touches on the… Continue reading
Date archives "February 2014"
Activists and changemakers meet and support peers on Gittip
Gittip is a way to give small weekly cash gifts to people you love and are inspired by. Gifts are weekly. The intention is for people to depend on money received through Gittip in order to pay their bills, and bills are recurring. Gifts come with no strings attached. You don’t know exactly where your… Continue reading
Academics launch torrent site to share papers and datasets
Torrentfreak reports that researchers from the University of Massachusetts have launched a torrent site which allows academics to share papers and datasets. Here is the article Some excerpts… One of the core pillars of academic research is sharing. By letting other researchers know what you do, ideas are criticized, improved upon and extended. Unfortunately it’s… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Unified Architectural Theory
“what his book is all about: answering “the old and very disturbing question as to why architects and common people have diametrically opposed preferences for buildings.” * Book: Unified Architectural Theory. Nikos Salingaros. Introduction Nikos Salingaros: ‘The book itself arose from a lecture course on architecture theory I taught last year. Students were presented with… Continue reading
The P2P Interpretation of Soul as Intersubjective Reality and Spirit as Interobjective Reality
The spirit of society as a collective Buddha will require more than just the self-organizing tendency toward increasing complexity between the parts of a technologically distributed system of actors and institutions. It will require real human beings to make the inter-subjective bonds of soulful compassion and mutual understanding through empathy. Realizing the power and wealth… Continue reading
Ethereum – the next step after Bitcoin
Bitcoin has demonstrated to us that money can be programmed, that neither a central issuing authority nor the backing of some valuable commodity such as gold or the power of a government are needed to make a currency trustworthy and therefore functional. There is a plethora of alt coins, bitcoin siblings that emphasize this feature… Continue reading
Intelligent Cities: Jan Gehl on the Neighborhood
Danish urbanist and author Jan Gehl describes the value of walkable and bike-able neighborhoods:
Today We Fight Back
The P2P Foundation fully supports this campaign. Thanks to Kevin Flanagan for coordinating this for us! – Michel Bauwens In the last year, the world has learned that mass surveillance by governments knows no bounds. Today, February 11th, internet users around the world are standing together. Today we are joining, individuals, civil society organizations, and… Continue reading
Call for scholars and collaborators at the new P2P Lab
The P2P Lab, a Greece-based media lab, proudly opens the doors of its new facility (see pix) to potential collaborators, scholars, activists, geeks and friends. The call for visiting scholars & collaborators has just been announced here. It is intended to create networks of researchers, entrepreneurs, activists, policy creators, journalists, geeks, and public intellectuals who… Continue reading
Medieval Spanish ghost town now self-sufficient ecovillage
Description from faircompanies.com: “It’s a utopian fantasy- discover a ghost town and rebuild it in line with your ideals-, but in Spain where there are nearly 3000 abandoned villages (most dating back to the Middle Ages), some big dreamers have spent the past 3 decades doing just that. There are now a few dozen “ecoaldeas”… Continue reading
Call for Abstracts : Emerging fabrication models as generators of new socio-technical paradigms.
The 5th STS Italia Conference titled “A Matter of Design. Making Society through Science and Technology” will be held in Milan, Italy, June 12 through 14, 2014, by the Italian Society of Science and Technology Studies, in collaboration with the Politecnico di Milano Doctoral School in Design. The deadline for the current a call for… Continue reading
Marina Gorbis: The Nature of the Future
Marina Gorbis. The Nature of the Future: Dispatches From the Socialstructured World (Free Press, 2013). Gorbis’ book is about the transition from the old world of high-overhead, hierarchical institutions like governments and corporations, with most aspects of life monetized in the cash nexus, to a “socialstructured world” — that is, a world characterized by cheap,… Continue reading
ICTs for a Global Civil Society
* Essay: ICTs for a Global Civil Society. By Markus Sabadello. URL = http://projectdanube.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/ICTs-for-a-Global-Civil-Society.pdf Abstract “Having always been closely linked to the ideal of peace, the concept of civil society has a long history as a third actor besides the state and the economy. It is a nonviolent “zone of civility” that can debate and address… Continue reading
The surprising negative ecological impact of Netflix streaming and sharing-by-mail ecommerce
A study by the University of Massachusetts found that streaming a movie requires 78% of the energy needed to ship a DVD, but accumulates a carbon footprint that’s roughly 100% higher. The higher carbon impact comes from the intensive energy use – caused by inefficient equipment – of data centers that store movies and pipe… Continue reading
Solar Coin – a crypto currency designed to stimulate solar energy production
Solar Coin is a crypto currency specifically intended to stimulate solar energy production. Each Solar Coin represents the equivalent of 1 MW/hour of solar electricity. Coins can be obtained by mining like any other crypto currency, but the vast majority of coins, 99.4% of them, are reserved and held in non circulating accounts (wallets) to… Continue reading
A proposed ‘open cooperativism’ strategy for the commons-based phase transition
Commentaries are very welcome: “Today we have a paradox, the more “communistic” the sharing license we use (i.e. no restrictions on sharing), the more capitalistic the practice (i.e. multinationals can use it for free), with for example the Linux commons having become in a sense a corporate commons enriching IBM and the like … it… Continue reading