The ILU wants to be “a decentralized labour union which occupies the space of the “social factory” (Facebook, Google, Twitter etc ..) the profit of a privileged few”. Rosie Gram explains more: “The Immaterial Labour Union is a decentralized labour union which occupies the space of the operaista “social factory”: Facebook, Google, Twitter, Instagram, etc,… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2015"
Nicole Foss: We Need Freedom of Action To Confront Peak Oil
Eivind Berge’s comment to the video: Nicole Foss seems far more optimistic about what level of civilization we can retain after the collapse than Gail Tverberg. I am not sure how realistic her advice is. Does it really make sense to insulate your house better or put solar panels on your roof? But she… Continue reading
The Automated Leisure Society is Impossible under Capitalism
Excerpted from Michael Roberts: “Employment growth is falling in the advanced capitalist eocnomies. Employment growth is way less than 1% a year in the 21st century. Computer engineer and Silicon Valley software entrepreneur, Martin Ford puts it this way: “over time, as technology advances, industries become more capital intensive and less labour intensive. And technology… Continue reading
Book of the Day: 21st Century ReAlignments in Art and Politics
* Book (in preparation): A STATE OF PRE: 21st Century ReAlignments in Art and Politics. An anthology of art and theory. from the ReAligned Project. Ed. by Ivor Stodolsky and Marita Muukkonen. Sternberg Press, 2016. URL = www.ReAligned.net Description “A State of Pre” is a pluridisciplinary investigation into the conditions, subjectivities and agencies provoking a… Continue reading
Peak oil also means peak renewables
By Eivind Berge. Original post here. Mainstream experts on energy promote some incredible beliefs. Today I was reminded just how fantastical are their beliefs by a conversation on Twitter with oil analyst Thina Saltvedt. She claims that thanks to technological progress, renewables can be scaled up at the same time as fossil fuels are scaled down…. Continue reading
Money as a Common Pool Resource
Republished from FEASTA’s Graham Barnes: “The Money we are working towards here is a value-led means of exchange – the manifestations of value being decided by its users – the commoners. What follows is a consideration of three important design areas from a commons perspective: convertibility, the equitable allocation of issued money, and how to… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Government of the Precarious
* Book: State of Insecurity: Government of the Precarious. by Isabell Lorey. Verso, 2015 URL = http://www.versobooks.com/books/1737-state-of-insecurity Description “Years of remodelling the welfare state, the rise of technology, and the growing power of neoliberal government apparatuses have established a society of the precarious. In this new reality, productivity is no longer just a matter of… Continue reading
WHAT IS AN UNFOLDING?
By Christopher Alexander. Original post here. The elements of a generative code are “unfoldings”. Whether in the evolution of a neighborhood or in the evolution of a building, each unfolding is an operation which gets you from one stage or moment of development (whether conceptual or physical), to the next moment of development. The full sequence… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Birth of the Cyber Left
* Book: Digital Rebellion: The Birth of the Cyber Left. by Todd Wolfson. University of Illinois Press, 2014 Description From the publisher: “Digital Rebellion examines the impact of new media and communication technologies on the spatial, strategic, and organizational fabric of social movements. Todd Wolfson begins with the rise of the Zapatistas in the mid-1990s,… Continue reading
Details on the taxation and economic practices of the Catalan Integral Cooperative
Excerpted from an in-depth profile of Enric Duran and the CIC by Nathan Schneider in VICE, very much worth reading in full: “”The office of the CIC’s five-member Economic Commission, on the first floor of Aurea Social, doesn’t look like the usual accounting office. A flock of paper birds hanging from the ceiling flies toward… Continue reading
What is Shared is Loved
IF ONE THING, MORE THAN ANY OTHER, distinguishes a real neighborhood from the corporate machine-architecture of the 20th-century developer, it is the fact that real people have — together — conceived it, planned it, and built it. It is this human reality which makes it worth living in, pleasant to be there, and valuable. –… Continue reading
The current state of conflicts in open source production and movements
Excerpted from Matt Asay: “Corporate influence — and control — is both a blessing and a curse. While 12.4 percent of development on the Linux kernel is done by unaffiliated developers, presumably out of the kindness of their hearts, most of the kernel is written by developers paid by Intel, Red Hat, and others. While… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media
*Book: Fuchs, Christian. 2015. Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media. New York: Routledge. 424 pages. URL = http://fuchs.uti.at/books/culture-and-economy-in-the-age-of-social-media/ Description This book applies Raymond Williams’ approach of Cultural Materialism to critically analyse cultural labour, digital labour, ideology, politics, democracy, the public sphere, globalisation, social media in China, the international division of digital labour,… Continue reading
The Most Important Entities
By Christopher Alexander. Original post here. Use the following list of “entities” as a model for making your own first rudimentary list for the neighborhood — just to get started. Once again, the exotic nature of this list is intended to encourage you to allow free reign to your imagination at this early stage. A… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness
Book: Wikipedia and the Politics of Openness. By Nathaniel Tkacz. University of Chicago Press, 2015 Review Paul Bernal: “Nathaniel Tkacz … examines the entire Wikipedia project in the way that we as academics examine a Wikipedia article: questioning at every stage, digging deeper, looking through the project to its source, so as to apprehend its… Continue reading
Mesh networks – 12 US communities experimenting with independent WIFI networks
Local WiFi mesh networks are an idea that would radically change how we connect. They reduce the necessity of everyone buying a connection from an internet provider, but they also would provide direct connectivity for a neighbourhood or even a city. A mesh network creates reliable and redundant wireless internet access. Instead of relying on… Continue reading