This looks like a project well worth supporting: We are crowdfunding to connect communities, entrepreneurs & makers with the world’s most powerful energy source, by releasing free construction methods and guides. Free the Sun! The energy from the sun is free, with free construction guides to build high-powered solar concentrators, anyone, anywhere could tap into… Continue reading
Date archives "May 2015"
Aral Balkan: Beyond The Camera Panopticon
Aral Balkan of https://ind.ie discusses surveillance and solutions to it.
Chris Hedges: we live on the cusp of a great revolutionary moment
From an interview of Chris Hedges conducted by Rudyard Griffiths: * Unpack for us why you think we live on the cusp of a great revolutionary moment? As a journalist, I have covered two Palestinian uprisings, the revolutions in Eastern Europe, the street demonstrations that brought down Slobodan Milosevic. You know as a reporter the… Continue reading
Video of the Day: The Alternet
Sarah T. Gold provides an excellent overview of the current state of personal data privacy (or, increasingly, the total lack of it) and imagines some possible solutions in her video ‘The Alternet’: …the Alternet evolved as a superfiction, a creative proposal that blends fiction and real world structures, presenting organisations and the lives of invented… Continue reading
Towards a new municipal agenda in Spain
Carlos Delclós, a sociologist and lecturer at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, and an activist in the 15M Movement, writes about new generation of activist-politicians advancing the municipal agenda in Spain. What the Spanish media ignore about this new generation of activist-politicians is why they became famous enough to put on a ballot in the… Continue reading
Richard Stallman on “Intellectual Property”
I know Stallman is not everyone’s cup of tea but he does have a way of breaking down apparently complex issues so that they can be easily understood. And once you have read his opinions about so-called ‘Intellectual Property’, you may start to wonder how we ever came to lump together three disparate concepts under… Continue reading
The great debate: to collapse (followed by resurgence) or to transform ?
Interesting conference report on debates within the environmental movements, excerpted from Michael Bayliss: “On Friday the 13th of February I attended the “Great Debate: To Collapse or Not to Collapse,” hosted by the Sustainable Living Festival at the Deakin Auditorium. The following Wednesday I attended a screening on the movie Cowspiracy, hosted by Animal Liberation… Continue reading
OuiShare 2015, From Transition to Transformation: The Elephant in the Room
#OSFest15 – May 21, 22: Just a few steps into the main entry hall of Cabaret Sauvage, the site of the OuiShare 2015 event, was a large, black chalkboard. On the board there was a drawing of an elephant, and the phrase, “Share Your Elephant in the Room”. In case the expression “elephant in the room”… Continue reading
FairCoop, Swarm, and “Cryptoequity” Funding
This blog has been following the adventures of the FairCoop project since it began and we are now seeing another development. Coopshares is an emerging example of a ‘cryptoequity’ platform, launching during the Ouishare Fest (where FairCoop was nominated for the Collaborative Finance award). I have been in touch with Enric Duran, the founder of… Continue reading
The sharing economy is a rent-extraction business of the highest order!
Is there a fundamental conflict at the heart of an industry that preaches collaboration but, due to being radically commercialised by venture capital money from Silicon Valley, also needs to profiteer from the goodwill of others if it’s to remain viable? Excerpted from Izabella Kaminska: “In Paris this week, at the Ouishare Fest, the great… Continue reading
The ‘New Republics’ documentary: Will holomidal collective intelligence replace the pyramidal one ?
Check thenewrepublics.org for more. Jean-Francois Noubel explains that: “We name holomidal collective intelligence the new form of collective intelligence that emerges thanks to the Internet. Local and global, decentralized and distributed, agile, polymorphic, based on leadership, individuation, open source, integral wealth and mutualist economy, this young form of collective intelligence still lives through its infancy… Continue reading
Autogestió: Adventures into the New Economies of Catalonia
Autogestió: Adventures into the New Economies of Catalonia from Enfable on Vimeo. To support this project visit – http://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/autogestio By Hannah and Adam Hello! We’re filmmakers, and we’re called Enfable. We want to make a research film about the New Economy in Catalonia, Spain, exploring cooperatives, local currencies, and community governance. What is Enfable? We’re videographic… Continue reading
Internet VS Pilar del Castillo and the Spanish government
Just a couple of months ago we sounded the alarm to defend net neutrality, a fundamental principle of the Internet that guarantees our online freedoms, in Europe. The threat comes from the role of the EU countries, including Spanish government, vassal of the telcom lobbies, and MEPs like Pilar del Castillo, the rapporteur of the… Continue reading
The prospects for radical democracy (2): how Flatpack Democracy disenclosed local elections in the UK
Excerpted from John Harris: “A small-scale revolution that has turned local politics there, and elsewhere, on its head. The basic aim seems both simple and benign: “Taking political power at a local level, then using it to enable people to have a greater say in the decisions that affect their lives.” But the results have… Continue reading
How to Rein in Monopoly-like Network Platforms?
The latest issue of Boston Review has a lively forum on the growing power of network-based businesses such as Amazon, Uber and Airbnb. These companies may not be monopolies in the strict conventional sense of the law, but they nonetheless use their market dominance and network platforms to extract all sorts of advantages from competitors,… Continue reading
Towards a regenerative capitalism ?
There is a bit of a contradiction in this approach, which calls us to go beyond the capitalism-socialism dichotomy, but then offers capitalism, albeit regenerative, as a solution. Excerpted from Jo Cofino: “John Fullerton, says that society’s economic worldview has relied on breaking complex systems down into simpler parts in order to understand and manage… Continue reading