Renting is not sharing: it should be regulated and taxed!! “Under a rhetoric guise of “sharing”, websites like AirBnb or Uber are creating a new informal economy of uninsured workers whose entire life is up for rent, from cars and homes, to their own hands available to perform chores for a fee in sites like… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2014"
PirateBox and LibraryBox – are edges of net coming alive?
The PirateBox … is a DIY anonymous offline file-sharing and communications system built with free software and inexpensive off-the-shelf hardware. PirateBox creates offline wireless networks designed for anonymous file sharing, chatting, message boarding, and media streaming. You can think of it as your very own portable offline Internet in a box! PirateBox is designed to… Continue reading
Peadar Kirby in discussion with Michel Bauwens
Continuing our series from Open Everything we have today Professor Peadar Kirby, a resident of Cloughjordan Ecovillage in discussion with Michel Bauwens. If you are interested in other videos from this series see presentations by Peter Couchman , John Restakis and Michel Bauwens . Open Everything took place last month at Cloughjordan Ecovillage in Ireland and… Continue reading
Fair.coop: Using Cryptocurrency to Bring Economic Justice to the World
“Up until now, cryptocurrencies have held great potential, but it hasn’t always coincided with a practicality that would alleviate [social] ills. Certain elements such as bypassing the need for central banks are steps along the way, but there was something missing. A holistic social and economic system is urgently needed to address the inequalities inherent… Continue reading
Burning Man as a Commons
The Burning Man festival held every year on the desolate salt flats of Nevada is usually associated with the culturally avant tech crowd of the Bay Area – an image that is accurate as far as it goes. But the event is really much richer in implication than that. Burning Man is a rare space… Continue reading
The problem with Facebook “likes” and Netarchical Social Media Metrics
A fascinating video on Facebook’s dubious practices, which will (hopefully) make you think twice before making grandiose proclamations based on any for-profit Social Media stats. From the notes to the original video Evidence Facebook’s revenue is based on fake likes. My first vid on the problem with Facebook: http://bit.ly/1dXudqY I know first-hand that Facebook’s advertising… Continue reading
Book of the Day: With P2P Towards a Post-Capitalist Society
De Wereld Redden. Met P2P naar een post-kapitalische samenleving. Michel Bauwens en Jean Lievens. Houtekiet / Oikos, 2013 This book achieved its third printing in a very short time in the Flanders (Flemish) region. French translation is already secured. Please note: the original Flemish title for the book is “De Wereld Redden”, which translates to… Continue reading
Inspiring New Film, “Voices of Transition,” on the Agriculture That We Need
How will agriculture have to change if we are going to successfully navigate past Peak Oil and address climate change? A new film documentary, Voices of Transition, provides plenty of answers from Transition-oriented farmers in France, Great Britain and Cuba. Produced and directed by French/German filmmaker Nils Aguilar, the 65-minute film is “a completely independent,… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: Solidarity Economy St. Louis
Here’s a very inspiring interview with Solidarity St. Louis, an anti-capitalist, social justice and commons-oriented collective out of St Louis, Missouri. We’d like to thank the author, Mira Luna, for encouraging us to republish it. Since early August, the tragic killing of Mike Brown has caught fire in the news. It’s no surprise that mainstream media has… Continue reading
Occupy Scrum: How Sprint Retrospectives Brought us to Agile Nirvana
We are big fans of Loomio and have been using it for a while now for organising tasks and decision making here at the P2P Foundation. It’s always interesting to learn about how other groups work. I recently came across this article on how Loomio use Agile and Scrum methods to get things done. Loomio… Continue reading
THE COOPERATIVE MODEL REVISITED – Michel Bauwens
Today, the third video from Open Everything features our own Michel Bauwens who asks how can we think about the relationship between the cooperative movement and the commons? If you are interested in other videos from this series see the presentation by Peter Couchman and John Restakis from earlier this week. Open Everything took place last… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Virtual Economies
* Book: Vili Lehdonvirta with E.Castronova. Virtual Economies: Design and Analysis. MIT Press, 2014 URL = http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/virtual-economies aims to bring virtual economies to the attention of social scientists, and secondly to help digital designers use social science and economics scholarship when designing their virtual economies. Introduction By Vili Lehdonvirta: “Digital gaming, once a stigmatized… Continue reading
How Land Property Is Tied To Inequality: the UK example
This article on land and wealth originally proposed for New Start magazine in the UK, in October 2014, by Robin Murray: ” In Britain in 1700 agricultural land accounted for three fifths of all wealth. Land and its rents were the source of power and the pre-occupation of politics. Until the mid 19th century they… Continue reading
Video of the Day: 3 hacks for a resource-based economy
From the notes to the video: The Zeitgeist Movement Ecuador invited Michel Bauwens to talk about a possible transition towards a Resource-based economic model and the “hacks” he proposes to achieve this (edited to include English audio only). Michel Bauwens: In this video I explain how, through the Commons-Based Reciprocity License, one can create an… Continue reading
Going beyond platform capitalism
“By controlling their ecosystems, platforms create a stage on which every economic transaction can be turned into an auction. Nothing minimizes cost better than an auction – including the cost of labour. That’s why labour is the crucial societal aspect of platform capitalism. It is exactly here that we will have to decide whether to… Continue reading
Evolutionary Biologist Divulges The Secret To Human Coexisting
Luke Rudkowski of We Are Change in Majorca, Spain talks with Evolutionary Biologist and Futurist Elisabet Sahtouris about her life’s work. She studied algae which covered Earth in its first 2 billion years to find that there’s a maturation cycle of all life, wherein the costs of competition are too high and the solution for… Continue reading