There are a number of mutually-reinforcing systemic crises — called “terminal crises” of “Late Capitalism” for good reason — that threaten the current model of globalized corporate capitalism. One of these is Peak Oil, which drastically increases the cost of long-distance supply and distribution chains. Another is the Fiscal Crisis of the State (which James… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2014"
Podcast of the Day: Are Utilities Ready for the Coming Death Spiral?
Extracted from the Energy Gang Digest, Jigar Shah, Stephen Lacey and Richard Caperton discuss the ongoing ephemeralization of the utilities sectors. The hosts suggest it may follow a similar pattern to the ongoing abandonment of landlines in favour of mobile networks. From the shownotes to the episode: Utilities may soon be on the verge of a… Continue reading
The 2014 Vienna Declaration on Freedom of Information and Expression
“We call for media reforms and a deeper and more sustained public discourse that equip critical, alternative, independent and public service media with adequate resources, help establishing a resource-base for alternative Internet, social media, software and open access projects, and limit the dominance of advertising culture in the media and on the Internet. We also… Continue reading
Desktop Regulatory State, Chapter Three: Networked, Distributed Successors to the State: Saint-Simon, Proudhon and “the Administration of Things”
[This is the sixth installment in my serialization of the first three chapters of my book-in-progress, tentatively titled Desktop Regulatory State] , and the second of two installments of Chapter Three. Two other stand-alone posts at P2P Foundation Blog are also the basis for material in this chapter: here and here. Since this is a… Continue reading
The consensus at MoneyLab: Cryptography (alone) won’t set us free and Bitcoin is NOT a revolutionary currency
by explicitly rejecting the need for trust among the community of users as a fundamental feature of its technological design (a distributed public ledger called the “blockchain”), Bitcoin threatens to remove the last residues of our social bonds from the money-form, thus transforming it into the ultimate agent of separation. Precisely because it is decentralized… Continue reading
How the “Internet of Things” is Killing Capitalism
Short intro to the ideas in Jeremy Rifkin‘s new book: Watch the video: How the “Internet of Things” is Killing Capitalism
How to Think Like a Commoner: A conversation with David Bollier
This interview, authored by Jessica Conrad, was originally published in Shareable. “We need to relearn and reeducate ourselves about what it means to be in relationship to one another and to the world. The commons helps us do that—while providing a framework for new policy and technology that will enable those essential social relationships to… Continue reading
Open Source Laptop – all parts inspectable, runs Linux
Mashable has a report When Raspberry Pi Isn’t Enough: Behold the Open Source Laptop The laptop, brainchild of Chumby designer Andrew “Bunnie” Huang, is easy to open, every part can be inspected and if need be substituted. The computer is made to run on Linux. “I’ve been a hacker of consumer electronics,” Huang told Mashable…. Continue reading
“Stop, Thief!” – Peter Linebaugh’s New Collection of Essays
I first encountered the work of Peter Linebaugh reading his essay “Charters of Liberty in Black Face and White Face: Race, Slavery and the Commons” and his book “The Magna Carta Manifesto” is one of my personal favourites on the history of commons, so I am delighted to read that he has just published a… Continue reading
Jeremy Rifkin on the Zero Marginal Cost Society
Jeremy Rifkin presents his new book for the the Politics and Prose bookshop. His new book predicts the end of capitalism and the emergence of the collaborative commons as the central area for value creation. Watch the video here:
The Gooseberry Project: Blender Institute first crowd-funded, feature-length open movie
Last month at South by Southwest, the Blender Institute launched its new open movie project codenamed «Gooseberry». Unlike the previous projects, this one will be a feature length movie, produced during 18 months by 12 studios from all over the world, using an online collaboration platform named Blender Cloud. A team of 15 developers will… Continue reading
America’s Homegrown Terror: Scarcely Regulated Facilities
The following article, written by Emanuel Pastreich (director of The Asia Institute) in association with John Feffer, and originally published at the Foreign Policy in Focus website, highlights the magnitude of the risks derived from infrastructure oversight and the United States’ suicidal denialism in the face of real, as opposed to hyped-up, dangers. “The greatest… Continue reading
Transforming Facebook into a tool for global governance
It is not a moment too soon to start the hard work of transforming Facebook – or some avatar of Facebook – into a platform for participatory democratic global governance. We don’t have long to design a global response to the crisis of climate change through meaningful coordination of humanity’s actions; the institutions we assumed… Continue reading
15M: “Excellent. A wake-up call. Important” – Documentary
“On May 15, 2011 everything changed, or nothing. Tens of thousands of citizens took to the streets for what would be the start of the final change in Spanish society and in the minds of the people, or not. And it was not just “a 15M movement” were “many 15MS”, as many as people. In… Continue reading
Policies for Shareable Cities 1: Preface and Introduction
Shareable’s groundbreaking “Policies for Shareable Cities” report has been out for a few months now, but we feel it’s worth revisiting, so we’ve decided to serialise it each Thursday for next month or so right here, on the P2P blog. This report is the result of months of research by Shareable and the Sustainable Economies Law Center, and… Continue reading
Hullcoin World’s First Local Government Cryptocurrency?
A forum at Hull City Council in the UK this month saw the launch of the very first UK local government operated cryptocurrency, dubbed HullCoin. The reason for this unprecedented technological act of local government is to tackle poverty, the council says, making it arguably the most worthy use of a cryptocurrency yet. Hull, or… Continue reading