Book: Cyber-Proletariat/ GLOBAL LABOUR IN THE DIGITAL VORTEX. Bhy NICK DYER-WITHEFORD. Pluto Press, 2015 URL = http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo20704212.html Description “The utopian promise of the internet, much talked about even a few years ago, has given way to the information highway’s brutal realities: coltan mines in the Congo, electronics factories in China, devastated neighborhoods in Detroit…. Continue reading
Date archives "January 2015"
The commons are making a comeback
The commons is an old, simple idea but one that we have never needed so urgently. It’s whatever a community of people shares and manages together. A commons can be anything from a lake that has been fished for centuries to a folk song no one owns to a neighborhood garden to the planet itself…. Continue reading
Civil Power and the Path Forward for Greece
With the prospect of a Syriza government, everyone is wondering what the future holds for Greece. Whether disaster or deliverance, or just the normal chaos, it is hard to ignore the potential for game-changing repercussions from a Syriza government. On the street however, embittered by the failures of governments in the past to change a… Continue reading
CRIME!
In his famous essay of 1908, “Ornament and Crime,” the Austrian writer/architect Adolf Loos presented an argument for the minimalist industrial aesthetic that has shaped modernism and neo-modernism ever since. Surprisingly, he built this argument upon a foundation that is accepted today by almost no one; the cultural superiority of “modern man”, by which he… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Radio Audiences and the Social Life of Radio Content (3)
* eBook: Radio Audiences and Participation in the age of Network Society. Ed. by Tiziano Bonini and Belen Monclus. Routledge, 2015 Key theme: The listener as producer: the rise of the networked listener In this third installment, editor Tiziano Bonini explores the social life emerging around radio programmes: From the Conclusion: The Social Life of… Continue reading
Global Civil Society launches the Internet Social Forum
A Call To Occupy The Internet PRESS RELEASE. Geneva, Switzerland, 22st January, 2015. A group of civil society organisations from around the world has announced the Internet Social Forum, to bring together and articulate bottom-up perspectives on the ‘Internet we want’ and the ‘Web we want’. Taking inspiration from the World Social Forum, and its… Continue reading
Greek political parties for a Commons-oriented society
With the chance of the oncoming Greek elections EEL/LAK, an Athens-based NGO focused on the promotion of FLOSS and the Commons, has recently asked the political parties about their agenda in relation to Open Governance and the Commons. In total, four political parties replied -according to the polls three of them will succeed in electing… Continue reading
A very brief history of the meaning of “community”
“Community” is now one of those words that arouse an emotional and positive consensus. But it is relevant to ask ourselves, when two people use it in the same conversation, whether they really mean the same thing. Few words have become so polysemous as “community.” During its medieval origins, it became the basis of the… Continue reading
Video: Pat Conaty on Social Cooperatives
Very clear 4-minute explanation of this important social innovation, i.e. solidarity (or ‘social’) cooperatives for social care. Watch the video here at:
Project of the Day: Tekla Labs, guides for research grade DIY labs
Excerpted from María Elena Hurtado: “Hard-up laboratories in developing countries may soon be able to build their own research equipment by joining Tekla Labs, an online community set up by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, United States. Tekla Labs aims to link researchers requiring lab equipment with science and engineering graduate students or… Continue reading
The Mechanistic Idea of Order
The mechanistic idea of order can be traced to Descartes, around 1640. His idea was: if you want to know how something works, you can find it out by pretending that it is a machine. You completely isolate the thing you are interested in – the rolling of a ball, the falling of an apple,… Continue reading
(a) P2P money manifesto
The following is an original contribution by Olivier Auber, a research associate at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and part of the Evolution, Complexity and COgnition group (ECCO) and the Global Brain Institute. Scroll to the bottom of the post to see the accompanying slides. Republished from MCD (magazine des cultures digitales), Dec 2014…. Continue reading
Book of the Week: Radio Audiences and Networked Listeners (2) : The Four Ages of Participation
* eBook: Radio Audiences and Participation in the age of Network Society. Ed. by Tiziano Bonini and Belen Monclus. Routledge, 2015 Key theme: The listener as producer: the rise of the networked listener In this second installment, editor Tiziano Bonini attemps a periodization of the evolution towards audience particpation and asks whether it is a… Continue reading
An update on the Open Source Ecology project, ten years after
I’m seeing that this work takes a long time to develop, so it’s more like a two-decade project than the two-year project I initially imagined. So I’ve revised my timeline and am planning for the long haul. I’ve realized that to make the Global Village Construction Set tools feasible, we need to explore what’s known… Continue reading
Houshi
Owned by the same family for 1,300 years, the Japanese inn Houshi Ryokan is a marvel of tradition and resilience:
Commoners in Transition: Sustainable Economies Law Center
Reposted from our new Commons Transition web platform “Commoners in Transition” features exclusive global-P2P oriented interviews with people working on similar subjects, worldwide. In this section, we will periodically feature interviews and articles involving Commoners in Transition, or, individuals and teams working together towards increasing the viability of the commons. Our inaugural article is an… Continue reading