Excerpted from Zeynep Tufekci: “No Ferguson on Facebook last night. I scrolled. Refreshed. This morning, though, my Facebook feed is also very heavily dominated by discussion of Ferguson. Many of those posts seem to have been written last night, but I didn’t see them then. Overnight, “edgerank” –or whatever Facebook’s filtering algorithm is called now?—?seems… Continue reading
Date archives "August 2014"
The Sharing Economy as a Locust Economy
“In a locust economy, you cannot just decide to go somewhere and get in your car to drive there. You have to coordinate with other potential users of that shared resource. You have to keep your apartment clean and sharing-ready. You have to do minimum-wage work that you might consider beneath you (though such status… Continue reading
The use of cult techniques by sharing economy brands and platforms
When marketing executives at “values-led” companies try to cultivate communities around ethical consumerism, it creates a new class of problems. Much like religious cults, cult brands manipulate their customers’ emotional and psychological needs and encourage them to construct their identities and lives around the brand. The collapse of the ideal would be felt as a… Continue reading
The Five Laws of Democratic Money
Proposed by David Week: “Watching some of the discussion of money and crypto-currencies, I get the impression that (possibly incorrect) that there is a tacit assumption that all one needs to do is design the right money system, and all will be well with money. I don’t think so. Therefore I propose… THE FIVE LAWS… Continue reading
OpenEverything.ie A Collaborative Economy Convergence
“At the heart of our economies, a diversification and increasing importance of collaborative practices can be observed. By proposing alternative paths of value creation and sharing, these practices open new perspectives in terms of consumption, production and innovation models.” Michel Bauwens We are very happy to announce that registration has opened for OpenEverything.ie a Collaborative… Continue reading
Cryptocurrencies: Poison or Panacea?
I thought it would be interesting to compare two contrasting articles I have read about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies and their predicted impacts on ‘business as usual’. I think it is fairly uncontroversial to speculate that cryptocurrencies are going to be disruptive to existing banking and monetary systems, even to a layman trying to get… Continue reading
A historical critique of the degrowth from Las Indias (3): the five argumentative fallacies of the movement
The degrowth arguments form a unique fabric of classic, yet socially widespread, fallacies. Together, they form an argumentative fabric as false as it is seductive, which is able to generate the illusion of rationality, propped up on our own vices and intellectual laziness. However, it’s worth making the effort and coming back around to the… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Copyright Masquerade
A Copyright Masquerade by Monica Horten URL = http://www.amazon.com/dp/1780326408/electronicfro-20 Review by Parker Higgins (EFF): “Veteran journalist Dr. Monica Horten goes deep into the details of how the entertainment industries gain political sway, and how policymakers respond to the industry’s advances.” Horten focuses on three recent policy initiatives, and painstakingly pulls together facts from publicly available sources about… Continue reading
Bitcoin cannot serve the necessary public function of money
Bitcoin’s innovation in terms of creating a networked form of commodity money is not useful in creating networked forms of public money, and as a result it does not create a way for networked public forms to replace the current State forms. Republished from Dmytri Kleiner: “I want to write a bit about the public… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Engineering Self-Organising Electronic Institutions
* Article: Axiomatization of Socio-Economic Principles for Self-Organizing Institutions: Concepts, Experiments and Challenges. Jeremy Pitt, Julia Schaumeier and Alexander Artikis. ACM Transactions on Autonomous and Adaptive Systems, December 2012. From the Abstract: “We address the problem of engineering self-organising electronic institutions for resource allocation in open, embedded and resource-constrained systems. In such systems, there is… Continue reading
What Pixelache commoners think about the commons
A potpourri produced during Camp Pixelache 2014 by the Remix of the Commons team. Watch the video here:
Civilians Seize Control of Wandering Space Satellite and Open Source Data
The headline and opening paragraphs of this article stirred up a bittersweet nostalgia at first, pushing the same buttons as an 80s-era Spielberg movie: some kids take control of space junk using castoffs from the family rec room in an abandoned fast-food graveyard. But these aren’t kids, their plan is just ambitious enough without being… Continue reading
A historical critique of the degrowth movement from Las Indias (2): When did scarcity become a utopia?
Excerpted from David de Ugarte: The history of the social struggle between scarcity and abundance: “Popular utopias have always demanded abundance, and when empowered with technology, have established it in very similar terms to those we use today. Degrowth, on the other hand, only has historical roots in the Church’s reaction to feudal decomposition. The… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Collaborative Design, Open Innovation and Public Policy
Public and Collaborative. Exploring the Intersection of Design, Social Innovation and Public Policy. edited by Ezio Manzini and Eduardo Staszowski. DESIS, 2013 URL = http://desis-dop.org/ download Description “This book, edited by Ezio Manzini and Eduardo Staszowski, documents and presents some reflections on efforts of DESIS Labs in Europe, Canada, and the United States, that are participating in the Public and Collaborative Thematic Cluster…. Continue reading
Dmytri Kleiner on how to set up a publicly accessible Tor-based forum
My criticism of Facebook and other sites is not they are not useful, it is rather that they are private, centralized, proprietary platforms. Also, simply abstaining from Facebook in the name of my own media purity is not something that I’m interested in, I don’t see capitalism as a consumer choice, I’m more interested in… Continue reading
The flawed circuits of value in the lulz economy
Neither free software, nor crowd funding will save us from capitalism. We can’t overthrow capitalism by undertaking work merely for the Lulz, we need to create new value circuits that allow is to build new means of survival for the planet, and only then can we do away with capitalism. Excerpted from Dmytri Kleiner: “Free… Continue reading