By Federico Guerrini for http://www.forbes.com/sites/federicoguerrini/2015/03/18/sharing-economy-or-just-vulture-neoliberalism-the-debate-is-on/ LONDON – Innovation it’s a bit like marriage, you know: after the initial wave of enthusiam, problems start. Something similar is happening with the so-called “sharing” economy, popularized by the likes of Uber, AirBnb and Task Rabbit. While users still flock to these platforms, more and more people are starting… Continue reading
Date archives "March 2015"
Podcast of the Day: Philip Mirowski – How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown
Source: http://majority.fm/2014/06/26/philip-mirowski-how-neoliberalism-survived-the-financial-meltdown/ Professor Philip Mirowski author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste: How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown, explains the intellectual history of Neo-liberalism, what Neo-liberals believe, making capitalists think differently, the role of think tanks in Neo-liberalism, the mythology of market supremacy, how Facebook teaches you to be a Neo-liberal agent, shaming and Neo-liberalism,… Continue reading
Renewable Futures 2015: Call for Conference Proposals
RENEWABLE FUTURES 2015: Transformative Potential of Art in the Age of Post-Media The 1st edition of new academic art and science conference series, complemented by the RIXC annual festival programme October 8-10, 2015, Riga, Latvia http://renewablefutures.net The Renewable Futures is a new conference series in the Baltic Sea and North European region that aims to… Continue reading
How we got Here? #Greece has an immense network of organisations focused on social good
Greece has an immense network of organisations that are focused on improving the social good, with or without the support of the state or private foundations. In many cases, they are self-organised and autonomous Months after the fall of Matera, some unMonasterians came to Athens on a brief “exploratory” excursion in December, 2014. During their… Continue reading
Fair and Open IT: Part 3 – Openness is a Business Model
By David Charles This idea of taking back control is the same impulse that drives the open source hardware movement. Open source hardware is hardware whose designs are made publicly available for people to study, modify and use to build and sell products. It’s about empowering people with knowledge, rather than becoming dependent on the… Continue reading
European Cultural Foundation: Connecting Culture,Communities and Democracy
Here is an opportunity to meet projects working for the commons all over Europe and a chance for a 10.000 euros R&D grant for the projects selected. Deadline to send proposals: 13 April 2015. Source: http://www.culturalfoundation.eu/thematic-focus We bridge people and democratic institutions by connecting local cultural change-makers and communities across Europe because we firmly believe that… Continue reading
Map of #Grassroots groups in #Greece
Presenting… our new grassroots map (June 2014)! Source: http://omikronproject.gr/grassroots Still think Greeks are sitting idle, the helpless victims of events in their country? Think again. In 2013, we carried out an extensive study to map all the grassroots movements in Greece who are stepping in where the system is failing, and produce the first edition… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Making of Global Capitalism
* Book: The Making of Global Capitalism. Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin. Description by Bastiaan van Apeldoorn, Naná de Graaff: “Leo Panitch and Sam Gindin’s masterly ‘political economy of American empire’ stands out among other recent books on the topic, not only in the detailed and meticulously researched history it provides, but also with respect… Continue reading
Technological Progress in a Market Economy is Self-Terminating and Ends in Collapse
Read the whole essay by JMG here. At this point it may be helpful to sum up the argument I’ve developed here: a) Every increase in technological complexity tends also to increase the opportunities for externalizing the costs of economic activity; b) Market forces make the externalization of costs mandatory rather than optional, since economic… Continue reading
Fair and Open IT: Part 2 – Fairness and Open Supply Chains
By David Charles In 2009, Susanne Jordan and Nager IT took on the challenge of developing the first fair IT device on the market. “I have been unable to find alternatives,” she says. “So I did it myself.” Her aim was to offer critical “consumers” an alternative. “At the moment, we either buy nothing or… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Anthrobscene
* Book: THE ANTHROBSCENE. By Jussi Parikka. University of Minnesota Press, 2014 URL = http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-anthrobscene Description “Smartphones, laptops, tablets, and e-readers all at one time held the promise of a more environmentally healthy world not dependent on paper and deforestation. The result of our ubiquitous digital lives is, as we see in The Anthrobscene, actually… Continue reading
What matters with makerspaces are not the machines, but the new social relation to technology
Excerpted from Marc Chataigner: “Technology is a specific set of know-how and habits that will shape the way you interact with the world surrounding you, thus shape the way you see the world. You may think that, in order to free yourself from that specific way to see the world, you should free yourself from… Continue reading
Three Evils of Capitalism
Excerpted from a longer piece by professor Eric Schechter. I strongly recommend reading the whole essay here. “The old world is dying; we must move on to the new world being born. How will we make the great change? I don’t know the details of that. But it has already begun; you can see it in… Continue reading
In #Solidarity with #Blockupy
De Nieuwe Universiteit (DNU) TV, our own media channel, goes On Air: Block, Liberate and Deliberate! Standing together in solidarity with #Blockupy swarm action targeting the new Troika Towers opening in Frankfurt which cost billions of Euro, billed to the people. Kom, kijk, en discussier mee! Come, watch and discuss together! There will be an… Continue reading
Our Generation of Hackers
We are all hackers now, apparently—or are trying to be. Guilty as charged. I am writing these words, as I write most things, not with a pen and paper, or a commercial word processor, but on Emacs, a command-line text editor first developed in the 1970s for that early generation of free-software hackers. I had… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Rise of the Network Commons
Book (upcoming). The Rise of the Network Commons. By Armin Medosh. URL = http://www.thenextlayer.org/node/1231 Description Armin Medosh: “The Rise of the Network Commons is the working title of a new book which I am currently writing. It returns to the topos of the wireless commons on which I worked during the early 2000s. In… Continue reading