“My research project is an exploration of an alternative way of organizing the production, outside of the capitalist logic based on the obligation to work, separation between producers and consumers, and the orientation on profit and not the benefit.” Please support this very important campaign from P2P Foundation-associated researcher Katarzyna Gajewska. You can find the… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2014"
The Politics of the Sharing Economy by Trebor Scholz
The status quo is being replaced by a movement. Peer-to-peer is going to become the default way people exchange things, whether it is space, stuff, skills, or services. (Botsman and Rogers) As best we can tell, the politics of the venture capital elite boils down to fending off higher taxes, keeping labor costs low and… Continue reading
The Madrid P2P Commune
Here’s Bernardo Gutiérrez’s love letter to his home city, a place that’s still surprisingly alive and vibrant in the midst of the austerity meltdown affecting southern Europe. This article originally appeared on Guerrilla Translation’s website. Amidst the nebulous boomerang of history, the 20s live on as a red postcard of a burlesque cabaret in Dadaist Berlin…. Continue reading
Students are taking on neoclassical economics – and winning
Reposted from the New Economics Foundation website. Here, Alice Martin explores the rising concern about the preponderance of neoclassical economic models in higher education curricula, and what’s being done about it. This is getting exciting. With student groups across 30 countries now calling for change, it’s clear the campaign to reform university economics curriculums is reaching new heights. Just last… Continue reading
Proton mail: Scientists from CERN and MIT offer encrypted email to escape NSA surveillance
Forbes reports on an email system created by a group of young scientists at CERN that offers end-to-end encryption, securing communications from prying eyes. In an article titled The Only Email System The NSA Can’t Access Hollie Slade reports on a group of young computer scientists from MIT and CERN who decided that surveillance by… Continue reading
When sharing isn’t caring
More perspectives on what a “sharing economy” entails – this time from Nathan Schneider, one of the editors of Waging Non-Violence. This article was originally published in Al-Jazeera. In the beginning, there was sharing. That, at least, is the story according to Dominik Wind, a German environmental activist with a genial smile and a cycling cap whom I met… Continue reading
Robert Steele presents Open Source Everything Manifesto at LIBTECH NYC
21 May 2014 – Robert Steele Vivas, open source activist and intelligence reformer presents his ‘Open Source Everything’ manifesto at LIBTECH NYC (see 5-hour live webcast of the whole event here ) A summary of the presentation is on the Public Intelligence Blog Robert Steele at LIBTECHNYC: The Open Source Everything Manifesto At the highest… Continue reading
The Coming Revolution of Peer Production and the role of Revolutionary Cooperatives
This essay is a critique of our proposals on Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses: * Article: The Coming Revolution of Peer Production and Revolutionary Cooperative. A Response to Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Stefan Meretz . By Jakob Rigi. Triple-C, 2014 From the Abstract: “This article agrees with Meretz (2014) that the peer producing cooperatives which are… Continue reading
On the Convergence Between the P2P Commons Movement and the Cooperative Tradition
One of the activists and thinkers I admire most is Pat Conaty, who is part of a network of mostly British cooperative thinkers. With them, I have been having discussions on the potential of a convergence between the p2p/commons movements and priorities, and those of the cooperative tradition, which is being revived after the meltdown… Continue reading
Is Sharewashing the new Greenwashing?
There’s a debate going on about what a “sharing economy” actually constitutes – and that’s a good thing. The fact that there’ll be no end to this debate will be stressful to those who’d like some tidy answers to parrot. From our point of view, the mutulization of resources and the decrease of “consumerism for its… Continue reading
David Sloan Wilson on Human Evolution and the Commons
I recently discovered the work of Evolutionary Biologist David Sloan Wilson. Wilson is a proponent of what in evolutionary theory is called multi-level selection theory (MLS) or group selection. Put simply MLS provides arguments for the evolution of pro-social traits such as altruism. In recent years Wilson investigating how his research in evolutionary theory could… Continue reading
In the Bitcoin world, half the wealth belongs to the 0.1 percent
From the Washington Post‘s Brian Fung, the key figures that everyone should know about Bitcoin’s inequality effect, which is worse than society’s general average inequality: 1. “the drawback to consolidation is that those benefits will be concentrated in the hands of a relative few. That dynamic is already playing out among individual holders of Bitcoin,… Continue reading
Person of the Day: David de Ugarte
This bio is an English translation of David’s full bio at lasindias.com David de Ugarte. Economist, technologist and entrepreneur committed to new models of economic democracy. Founder and theorist of the Spanish cyberpunk group (1989-2007), founder of Piensa en red SA (1999-2002) and later of the Cooperative Society of las Indias Electrónicas (2002) and of the Cooperative Group of… Continue reading
Indie Box: Let’s Bring Our Data Home
Indie Box One is the first ready-to-use personal server appliance for storing your personal data and running indie web applications at home. Made for humans, not just geeks: although everything on the box is free/libre/open-source, you don’t need to be a system administrator and it just works. What can you do with your Indie Box… Continue reading
Does America Really Need More Jobs? Video with Douglas Rushkoff
Source: The Wall Street Journal. Douglas Rushkoff, following on from his (in)famous article for CNN ‘Are Jobs Obsolete?‘, is interviewed here by the Wall Street Journal. The interviewer, seemingly a little bemused by Rushkoff’s (to him) radical proposition that creating ‘jobs’ in and of themselves, might not be the answer to all America’s problems, falls… Continue reading
The Peer Production License: A case in point from the Circus and Flow Arts
An anecdotal account on the usefulness of the peer production license from an experience in the circus/flow/spinning arts. My friend Ronan McLoughlin was member 951 of home of poi back in 2003, a website dedicated to the global renaissance of the traditionally Maori art of swinging poi . Back then the ‘jedi’ move, the most… Continue reading