Excerpted from John Thackara:: “”As articulated by Joanna Macy, a politics of reconnection can seem, at first encounter, to be naive and unrealistic. But it would be wrong to disregard this story as implausible given what we now know about the ways complex systems – including belief systems – change. “All the great transformations have… Continue reading
Date archives "November 2014"
OurData Coop – Sharing Data for the Voluntary and Community Sector
Technological change is transforming the operations of private business and the public sector and has created a new asset class in the form of data. In the Voluntary and Community Sector, we suspect many organisations are not currently making the most of the information to which they have access, generate themselves or could access. And,… Continue reading
Choosing between 3 strategies against netarchical capital and its state form
The internet and technology are often essentialized which then results in versions of technological gnosticism, where technology is either seen as a false god that inevitably plays an evil role in human society, or the different forms of cyber-utopianism. In its most recent iterations, the dark vision takes root in the revelations of Edgar Snowden… Continue reading
Union Cooperatives and Economic Democracy
Excerpted from John Clay: * What is a Union Cooperative? “A union cooperative is a worker-owned cooperative whose workers are covered by a labor union collective bargaining agreement, and whose workers believe everyone has a right to own the full fruits of their labor. Being a worker-owner means sharing in the decision-making, the profits, and… Continue reading
Ukraine Opens To Monsanto And Large-Scale Land-Grabs
By Pål Steigan. Original article here. Ukraine’s black earth belt may probably have the most fertile soil on our planet. Ukraine has been called the» bread basket of Europe», and international agribusiness is drooling over the chance to get hold of it. The combination of an economic catastrophe and the corrupt regime in Kiev provides… Continue reading
The Sharing Economy is using your assets
Excerpted from Trebor Scholz: “I am all there with Arun Sundararajan, professor at Stern School of Business at NYU, who describes walking down the street in New York City, musing on all the parked cars that remain unused ninety-two percent of the time. He gets it right; it seems awfully inefficient, even wasteful. Why couldn’t… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Workers Control from the Commune to the Present
Book: Ours to Master and to Own: Workers’ Control From the Commune to the Present. Edited by Immanuel Ness and Dario Azzellini. Chicago, IL, Haymarket, 2014 Review by Andy Piascik: “Much recent discussion and scholarship has gone into dissecting the decline in the strength of the working class in the United States. For the… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Re-Politicising Participatory Design in the Fairphone Project
* Essay: RE-POLITICISING PARTICIPATORY DESIGN: WHAT CAN WE LEARN FROM FAIRPHONE? Maja van der Velden. From the Abstract: “This exploratory paper is a contribution to the discussion of the re-politisation of Participatory Design. After a brief introduction of this Scandinavian design tradition, the Fairphone, a sustainable and fair mobile phone, is introduced as a case… Continue reading
‘Change through sharing’: STWR interviewed by WeltenWandel.tv
Video of Wann werden sich die Namenlosen erma?chtigen spons As part of a series of filmed conversations on the theme of ‘Change through Sharing’, STWR’s director Rajesh Makwana was interviewed earlier this year about the political implications of global economic sharing for a world in crisis. During the course of the discussion, Makwana addressed issues… Continue reading
Creating Legal Foundations for the Commons
Excerpted from Ugo Mattei: “All this, evidently requires the jurist’s attention to the difficult and urgent task of constructing the new foundation of a legal order capable of transcending the dualisms discussed inherent in the current order. Given the dominance of private property, individualism, and competition as the basis of the current legal order, the… Continue reading
The Tverberg Estimate of Future Energy Production
by Eivind Berge, reprinted with permission. This is Gail Tverberg’s estimate of future energy production. For reasons best explained by Gail herself on her blog, I believe this graph represents the most accurate prediction of our future. Now imagine what it will be like. Imagine the human suffering embedded in this graph! All the debt… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Photosynq
The Photosynq platform starts with a hand-held device which connects to your cell phone and measures fluorescence and absorbance of photosynthetic plants and algae in a non-destructive way. Photosynq is a completely open-source project which is continually being improved: “These measurements provide a detailed picture of the health of the plant and are used for… Continue reading
Video: Luigi Russi on Hungry Capital and the Financialization of Food
Luigi Russi is the author of the Book: Hungry Capital and the Financialization of Food. Watch his video presentation here:
The Right to Capital in the Alternative Liberal Tradition
Interesting convergences on distributed access to capital and ownership. Excerpted from Stuart White: “Let’s take profit-sharing first. This term can mean a number of different things, but in the mainstream Liberal party tradition it had a specific meaning. The firm is seen as a partnership of labour and capital. Workers are entitled to a (trade-union… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Fourth Phase of Water
In The Fourth Phase of Water, Gerald Pollack offers an elegant new theory of water chemistry that has profound implications not only for chemistry and biology, but for the metaphoric foundation of our understanding of reality and our treatment of nature. Let me emphasize that this is not a New Age book by someone of… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Barcelona 5.0 Plan
This proposal consists on a fab city made up of an interconnected community of neighborhood fab labs, as explained here by Tomas Diez, who is interviewed below by Sara Alvarellos: “As Tomás Diez, director of the Fab Lab Barcelona project, explains … , their idea is to make Barcelona a Fab City. The current urban… Continue reading