“The real question to me is not whether private banks should be allowed to create money through the lending process, but whether – and to what extent – there should be private banking at all. Nationalized banking, at least the nationalization of big banking, should be considered, in my opinion.” A few days ago, we… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2014"
Video of the Day: FLOKSociety opens its investigation
The FlokSociety transition project in Ecuador, which is producing policies for the realization of open and social knowledge economies, is starting a series of dialogues between the researchers of the project and local and global open knowledge advocates. Here, research director Michel Bauwens presents the general framework, and local advocates including Raphael Boniface (free software,… Continue reading
Tim Berners Lee and World Wide Web Consortium support Encrypted Media Extensions, Copyright enforcement on the Net
Techdirt reports on the controversy over making Digital Rights Management (DRM) part of the Web’s very makeup by adding support for Encrypted Media Extensions to HTML-5. In the article titled DRM In HTML5: What Is Tim Berners-Lee Thinking? Techdirt points out that… Rather ironically, given the fact that EME may well lead to the official… Continue reading
David de Ugarte on Terminal Modernity
Extracted from computerklaus.com, here’s David de Ugarte talking about the latest IP developments in Spain and the dynamics of decentralized information flow. To me, Big Data is modernity’s ultimate expression. It is terminal modernity. That what Foucault would allude to as a kingdom being an extension of the king’s body has become a huge volume… Continue reading
Berlin as the Capital of the Social Share Economy
Excerpted from Philip Oltermann: “The notion of the “share economy” may have been coined as long ago as 1984, by Harvard economist Martin Weitzman. But there is a sense that the shift away from ownership towards functionality is nowhere as tangible in Europe as in Berlin. If Berlin is establishing itself as the sharing capital… Continue reading
Podcast of the Day/C-Realm: Kevin Carson on enclosing abundance
Reposted from the C-Realm podcast, KMO talks to our regular contributor Kevin Carson. This podcast is a follow up to an earlier episode featuring Kevin which you can find here. From the shownotes to the episode: KMO talks with Kevin Carson, author of The Homebrew Industrial Revolution about the technologies that seem poised to end the dominance of capital-intensive production methodologies… Continue reading
Responding to Stefan Meretz’s critique of the Peer Production License
Stefan Meretz produced a critique of the Peer Production License, or more generically, Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses, in the Keimform blog, to which I promised to respond. Unfortunately, the critique is rather weak and misleading, so our responses will be rather short and inserted inline. Our responses are in bold and b-quote. For context, I support… Continue reading
Ownshelf – an App for sharing eBooks with friends across devices
Ownshelf is a virtual bookshelf for discovering and recommending eBooks with friends across devices. It is a file-locker for legitimately storing eBooks, like Goodreads meets DropBox. Making eBooks actually available to have on a “shelf”, to allow friends to see what you have and to loan out a book to a friend. There is something… Continue reading
Paracity — A Peer-based Urban Organism in Taipei
A commentary by Eric Hunting: “Paracity is a new project of Marco Casagrande which promises to be one of the first full scale demonstrations of a practical peer-to-peer urbanism. Taking advantage of a unique situation on the Danshui River Island in Taipei, Paracity explores a notion of positive urban parasitism, using a novel, freely adaptive,… Continue reading
Terje Bongard: No grant for MEDOSS
I just received the following email from Terje Bongard, and my spirit fell low. The RID-model (Representative Ingroup Democracy) is the most promising initiative I know about. For me the rejection of Bongard’s project feels like the end of the world, and actually I think it is. I’m sorry, my dear daughter. These anonymous referees shot down… Continue reading
The Art Of The Start: Supporting Open Source Synthetic Biology
“Take Synthetic biology and turn it from where it is now the purview of big corporates and academia and turn it into a fertile field for entrepreneurship and particularly interested in an Open Source way. A lot have people have told me that they consider, they are concerned about open source and letting this technology… Continue reading
Sharing clout and the EU’s Copyright Consultation
Edgeryder’s Nadia EL-Imam reports on the progress of EU’s copyright consultation Today the following message popped up in my feeds and reminded me why I want to see Swedish MEP Amelia Andersdotter in the European Parliament for at least another mandate: The Copyright Consultation of the EU received 11,117 replies in the course of 2… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Internet, Social Media and the Workplace
* Article: The internet, social media and the workplace. By Martin Upchurch. International Socialism. Issue: 141 Republished from Martin Upchurch (without notes): “There have been heated debates on the left over the last few years on the role of the internet and social media through web based communication (WBC). In an article in International Socialism… Continue reading
How Dogecoin Could Lead the World into a Gift Based Economy
Dogecoin-mania continues unabated. The following short article, reposted from Ihavebitcoins.com, argues that it could lead to a surge in the gift economy. Read on… In a recent blog post on CoinDesk, Brett Scott introduced the idea that cryptocurrencies could have a major impact on the rise of a gift based economy. At the fore of… Continue reading
Rick Wolff on the unravelling of 20th Century Socialism
Reposted from Democracy at Work. In this short, concise, interview with Truthout’s Leslie Thatcher, professor Rick Wolff explains, among other things, one of the factors that led to the unraveling of the 20th century’s experiments in Socialism: lack of democracy in the workplace. “First, most of the “actually existing” socialist experiments to date unraveled in… Continue reading
Knight News Challenge Submission – A global platform for transition to an open knowledge society
Show your support for the submission to the Knight News Challenge to build on the experience of the FLOKsociety project and create a global platform for transition to an open knowledge society. You can help by spreading the word or show a little love by applauding the project and others on https://www.newschallenge.org/challenge/2014/submissions/a-global-platform-for-research-and-collaboration-for-transition-policies-to-an-open-knowledge-society In ONE sentence,… Continue reading