Date archives "March 2014"

David Graeber: Bank of England confirms alternative theory of monetary creation

Excerpted from David Graeber: (republished from a Guardian editorial) “Back in the 1930s, Henry Ford is supposed to have remarked that it was a good thing that most Americans didn’t know how banking really works, because if they did, “there’d be a revolution before tomorrow morning”. Last week, something remarkable happened. The Bank of England… Continue reading

Project of the Day: OCTO

Extracted from our friends at Telekommunisten and described as a “Global Pipe Dream Come True”, OCTO is Telekommunisten’s response to the looming fuel crisis which will surely affect the shipping industry, food supplies, etc. Rather than passively wait for the collapse of globalized capitalist production and distribution, or turn to overtly reactive lifeboat-based solutions, OCTO… Continue reading

Could crowdfunding help scale up renewable energy projects?

Image by lamoix CCBY2.0 This recent article in the Guardian highlights the potential of crowdfunding investment in renewable energy projects. “The minister for climate change Greg Baker recently said that crowdfunding could be an “incredibly powerful” way to deliver a “decentralised energy system, and help achieve the goal of turning the Big Six into the… Continue reading

Robin Good on the Ideal Profile of a P2P Search Tool to replace Google

Excerpted from Robin Good: Robin also give recommendations to use already available alternative P2P search engines. “What could be the alternative search route available to us? How could we escape the limitations imposed by the Google search model? Proposal: What would happen if it was me and you, individually, the ones who selected the criteria,… Continue reading

The new Danish Alternative Party is optimistic about the politics of horizontality

Excerpted from Uffe Elbaek and Neal Lawson: “The old icebergs of state and corporation are dissolving into a fluid sea where action only becomes meaningful in concert with others. The waves of change demand interconnections, because we know all of us together are smarter than any one of us on our own. Today the world… Continue reading

Nikos Salingaros: A Future Without Starchitects

Read the paper: – A Future Without Starchitects Chapter 4.3 in Jonathan Manns, Ed. Kaleidoscope City: Reflections on Planning and London, RTPI Press, London, 2014, pages 123-131: http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~yxk833/Kaleidoscope-London.pdf From the ingress of the paper: London could develop in several very different ways. One of them follows the urbanicidal model applied liberally across the globe in… Continue reading

Essay of the Day: David Graeber on the degradation of research

Excerpted from a much longer essay, originally published at The Baffler, David Graeber talks about the underlying reasons for the paucity of research innovation in the sciences. “The Internet is a remarkable innovation, but all we are talking about is a super-fast and globally accessible combination of library, post office, and mail-order catalogue. Had the… Continue reading

Interview with George Dafermos FLOKsociety researcher

George Dafermos during a presentation in Equador Source : http://commonsfest.info/en/2014/sinentefxi-me-ton-ellina-erevniti-sto-ekouador/ CommonsFest: Tell us a few things about what you do in Ecuador. What is the goal of the project and the benefits that you see for society in Ecuador as well as for the rest of the world? George Dafermos: The goal of the FLOK… Continue reading

Edward Snowden’s testimony to the European Parliament Inquiry Into Mass Surveillance

Extracted from Techdirt, this is Glyn Moody’s analysis and commentary on Snowden’s Testimony to the European Parliament’s Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs committee inquiry on the mass electronic surveillance of EU citizens. If you’d rather read Snowden’s testimony directly, you can find it in this link. A few weeks back, we reported that the… Continue reading

Project of the Day: JoatU — Community-driven Economics

In this video Jamie Klinger presents JoatU — a Community-driven Economics and a development of a web application enabling this kind of exchange This is also a call for developers to this volunteer project, if you are a developer you can find Joatu on GitHub What is JoatU, exactly? It’s a web application that allows… Continue reading

From the Communism of Capital to a Capital for the Commons

Michel Bauwens: The labor/p2p/commons movements today are faced with a paradox. On the one hand we have a re-emergence of the cooperative movement and worked-owned enterprises, but they suffer from structural weaknesses. Cooperative entities work for their own members, are reluctant to accept new cooperators that would share existing profits and benefits, and are practitioners… Continue reading

Video of the Day: Walton Pantland and Andrew Brady on the Labor-Oriented USi Organising Network

What are we in the labor movement doing to develop our own private spheres of communication? If all social networks are political, given their built-in biases, why not build one that is openly political? In the following video, Walton Pantland and Andrew Brady explain the origins of Union Solidarity International’s new Organizing Network. We’ve also… Continue reading