“A little discussion on the partner state concept in the context of the flok experience: I think there are really big misunderstandings if the relative failure (which also means relative success ) of Ecuador is interpreted to mean that it means the failure of the Partner State. The Ecuadorian state is not a partner state,… Continue reading
Date archives "July 2014"
Latest Issue of Scanda Journal looks at Innovation and Human Development
The latest issue of Scanda Journal looks at Innovation and Human Development with contributions from a number of writers whose work we have previously featured here on the blog including – Michel Bauwens, The Open-Commos Based Knowledge Society as a New Configuration between State, Civil Society and the Market. Helene Finidori, An Ecology for Transformative… Continue reading
Democratized public services as the new commons ?
new social forms of ownership are emerging in which public utilities are run by coalitions of workers and service users. Theirs isn’t just a defence of public services but an attempt to democratise them so they are not the top-down bureaucracies of old or simply job-saving strategies (important though these may be). They become what… Continue reading
Bitmessage: send P2P encrypted messages easily
I stumbled on this new messaging technology recently and am convinced that it is going to catch on (much as the developers of the Betamax video standard were convinced, no doubt). Anyway it does seem very promising – here’s an excerpt from a wiki page about it: Bitmessage is a peer-to-peer communications protocol based on… Continue reading
Gender and the Commons in India
The following is an interview with Soma Kishore Parthasarathy from the website of the Association for Women’s Rights in Development (AWID) on June 6. The interviewer was Ana Abelenda, and the piece is called “Reclaiming the Commons for Gender and Economic Justice: Struggles and Movements in India.” It is republished here with permission. AWID spoke to… Continue reading
Fan-Based Peer Production of Virtual Celebrities
“Miku isn’t just a pop star; she’s a bold improvement on the way we engage with intellectual property. She’s what Justin Bieber, Mickey Mouse and other western icons aren’t and can’t be: available to the public.” Source : http://www.polygon.com/2014/6/24/5834596/who-is-hatsune-miku-video
Mohism: the emancipatory tradition in China
Excerpted from Henry Tam: Confucious “was not the only moral teacher to have a lasting impact on China, and his ideas did not go unchallenged. For a start, we should take a closer look at Mo Tze (c. 479-399 BC), who studied under Confucian scholars but came to the conclusion that their philosophy was fundamentally… Continue reading
Annemarie Naylor on The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library
We featured Henry Warwick’s “The Radical Tactics of the Offline Library” video a few days back. Today we present a guest post on the subject written Annemarie Naylor, director at Common Futures. In the course of our work, we have called for common libraries as platforms for the production, exchange and consumption of knowledge and know-how –… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Reclaiming the Commons for the Common Good
With so much scholarship focused on commons as “resource management” and the measurement of externals, it’s refreshing to encounter a book that plumbs the internaldimensions of a commons –that is, commoning. Canadian writer and scholar Heather Menzies has taken on this challenge in her recently published Reclaiming the Commons for the Commons Good (New Society Publishers), a book that… Continue reading
David Harvey on Piketty’s “Capital”
There’s been plenty of talk about Thomas Piketty’s recent volume. While the attention and awareness it has generated is not a bad thing, it’s also worth exploring some constructive critiques of the book that go beyond mere defensive slander. Of these we feel that David Harvey’s review of Piketty’s study, originally published on his webpage, is… Continue reading
From Spain’s 15-M Movement: The Charter for Democracy
Stacco Troncoso and his colleagues at Guerrilla Translation, in Madrid, have completed an English translation of an important statement from Spain, “The Charter for Democracy,” which should be of great interest to small-d democrats throughout the world. He explains that “the group behind the piece, “Movimiento por la Democracia” (Movement for Democracy) is undoubtedly one of… Continue reading
Reconnecting Democracy, Civil Rights and the (Land) Commons
Excerpted from Pat Conaty: “On your key point Henry below that the Levellers (civll rights movement) and Diggers (the commons and commonwealth movement) took separate paths, you are right. But this was not any intention as key Diggers were Levellers and they described themselves as True Levellers. The same divergence happened during the early days… Continue reading
Age of Limits, CommonBound, Left Forum and the space between
As host of the weekly C-Realm podcast, KMO holds a singular position, acting as facilitator for a wide range of perspectives on economics, consciousness, resource depletion, techno-utopianism, climate change, etc. KMO’s own evolving worldview combines all of the above into a very unique and nuanced analysis that informs the underlying, and not always immediately evident, C-Realm… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Open State cc on Building the Open Source Economy
We recently featured Open State cc as a “Project of the Day” on the P2P blog. I first heard about it while watching Dominik Wind’s excellent presentation at this year’s Ouishare Fest. As I expressed in that earlier post, “In talking with others afterwards, we agreed that it had been amongst the most powerful. While other… Continue reading
Facebook, Google and the little people…. by @PaulbernalUK
Original Article by Paul Bernal This last week has emphasised the sheer power and influence of the internet giants – Facebook and Google in particular. The Facebook Experiment First we had the furore over the so-called ‘Facebook Experiment’ – the revelation that Facebook had undertaken an exercise in ‘emotional contagion’, effectively trying to manipulate the… Continue reading
No, Marc Andreessen, there won’t be an Awesome Robot Future if they are owned by the 1%
we don’t need to wait until a hypercapitalist techno-utopia emerges to do right by our struggling neighbors. We could pay for universal health care, higher education, and a basic income tomorrow. Instead, you’re kicking the can down the road and hoping the can will turn into a robot with a market solution Excerpted from a… Continue reading