Back in September I wrote a post for A Sense of Place, one of the blogs in the Pagan channel at Patheos, that felt particularly appropriate for the P2P Foundation community. At Stacco Troncoso’s invitation, I share that post with you here. Today I read an article that made me steaming mad. It was predictable… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2015"
Why Deflation is the Endgame, Conceptually Explained
By Eivind Berge. Original article here. – To intuitively understand why deflation is the endgame of our civilization, divide people into miners and everyone else. The miners are everyone in the business of extracting nonrenewable resources, such as oil and metals. Miners are indisputably subject to diminishing returns as we consume the highest ore grades… Continue reading
The opportunity in Greece
The Greek people must be thanked for putting the need for changing the course of economic policies firmly on the European agenda. The stakes are high. A failure in Greece will be seen as vindication of austerity as the only option. It will have negative repercussions for any progressive alternative throughout Europe. Those convinced that… Continue reading
Book of the Day: eGaia by Gary Alexander
I was fortunate enough to meet Gary Alexander, a New Yorker living in East Anglia, UK, at the Open Everything meetup in Cloughjordan, Ireland in the autumn of last year (2014) and was party to the discussion of some of the ideas contained in this book, although with all that was going on we didn’t… Continue reading
Commoners in Transition: Janice Figueiredo
Reposted from our new Commons Transition web platform “Commoners in Transition” features exclusive global-P2P oriented interviews with people working on similar subjects, worldwide. Our News and Articles section features interviews and articles involving Commoners in Transition, or, individuals and teams working together towards increasing the viability of the commons. Here, we present an interview with… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Sociofobia
Book: Sociofobia, El cambio político. César Rendueles Link: Sociofobia Description Geert Lovink: “At a conference in Barcelona in June 2014 I ran into Madrid-based critic César Rendueles who told me about the success of his book Sociofobia, El cambio político en la era de la utopia digital in the Spanish speaking world, published late… Continue reading
The graph that everyone should see: the P2P revolution is real and exponential
It is not always easy to objectify the reality of the P2P transition. On the cultural front, we can point to the change in attitudes documented by the Edelman Peer Trust Barometer, which between the years 2003 and 2007 saw a radical shift from trust in institutions to trust in ‘people like me’. On the economic… Continue reading
SELC and Shareable Kickoff Campaign to Save Seed Sharing in the U.S.
Reposted from our friends at Shareable, please share the following article, written by Cat Johnson, as widely as possible. Neil Thapar first encountered seed issues in law school when he worked with the Center for Food Safety against genetically-modified food. But it was a season spent working on an organic farm in Santa Cruz, California when he began… Continue reading
Podcast of the Day: Brewster Kahle and Matt Senate on the Revival of the Green Range Progressive Farming Tradition
Reposted from Shaping San Francisco Description “January 14, 2015 , panel on “Home on the Grange”: “Grange Future” celebrates the history and contemporary expression of ‘the grange idea.’ From the 19th century populist movement that backed the early campaign for an “information commons” in the form of Rural Free Mail delivery, to public banking and… Continue reading
Top P2P Books You Should Have Read in 2014 (1): The return of the cooperative commonwealth
Our book of the year is Humanizing the Economy by John Restakis. See why below.. I can truthfully say it’s one of the most important books I have read in the last ten years. 2014 was definitely the year of the commons – cooperative convergence. Two objective trends especially since the systemic economic crisis of… Continue reading
Commons Way of Life vs. Market Way of Life
by Silke Helfrich The market has always been with us. What’s new about life in the last three hundred years — and especially the last thirty — is that the buying and selling of goods is the overriding goal of human civilization. The market is seen not just as an efficient way to do some… Continue reading
A political assessment of the (post-) 2011 horizontal movements
after 2011 horizontality must be criticized and overcome, clearly and unambiguously — and not just in a Hegelian sense. Secondly, the situation is probably ripe enough to attempt once again that most political of passages: the seizure of power. We have understood the question of power for too long in an excessively negative manner. Now… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States
* Report: The Role of Crowdsourcing for Better Governance in Fragile States Contexts. World Bank, 2014 From the Summary: ““[The report serves] as a primer on crowdsourcing as an information resource for development, crisis response, and post-conflict recovery, with a specific focus on governance in fragile states. Inherent in the theoretical approach is that broader,… Continue reading
Who Owns All the Bitcoins – An Infographic of Wealth Distribution
This brilliant infographic is from March 2014 but still worth sharing. It was originally published at Cryptocoins News Everyone knows that global wealth is unevenly distributed. The top 1% has control over almost 50% of the global economy. But how does bitcoin wealth distribution compare to the global distribution of fiat and fixed assets? This… Continue reading
Ten Degrowth-Oriented Policy Proposals
Degrowth is a historical necessity but a very hard political sell, and at the P2P Foundation we use rather the post-growth thematic and a focus on ‘thrivability’. But these proposals from Giorgios Kallis seem entirely reasonable and even vital. Giorgos Kallis: “In what follows we present 10 proposals that we wrote for the context of… Continue reading
Will Syriza pave the way for a Commons-oriented society?
In a previous article we attempted to provide a bird’s-eye view of the political agendas of four Greek parties in relation to the digital/knowledge Commons. We saw that Syriza —the left-wing party which, according to the gallops, will win the elections— has one of the most thorough and well-documented set of policies towards a Commons-oriented… Continue reading