Excerpted from Martijn Arets et al.: “There is little doubt that the sharing economy can make a contribution to a more sustainable economy. While sharing used to be limited to a small circle of family and friends, the internet platforms allow us to share with anyone in society. This means that physical assets can be… Continue reading
Date archives "June 2015"
Event with Brazilian philosopher, Euclides André Mance
We republish here the announcement for an interesting forthcoming event to be held in Athens: Euclides André Mance, Friday 12 June, 19.00 p.m at the Greek Archeologists Union. “If for many it is only a utopia, an ever-receding horizon of hope, for millions of others solidarity economy is a way of working, producing, commercialising, consuming… Continue reading
Renewable energy in South Africa: status report
Excerpted from Jeffrey Barbee: (not exactly a distributed energy strategy, but still largely good news) “Although still heavily dependent on fossil fuels, South Africa has been quietly creating one of the world’s most progressive alternative energy plans. Solar, biomass and wind energy systems are popping up all over the country and feeding clean energy into… Continue reading
The Next Edge Summit 13 June 2015 Montreal
Source – http://thenextedge.is/summit/ “Over the past four years, a root network of pioneers, future-hunters and visionaries has been quietly growing underground. From a small initial seed, the Next Edge has blossomed to a diverse global community that is now thousands strong and thinking every day about the challenges of our time. Collectively, we hold an… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Festival for Solidarity and Cooperative Economy in Greece
This very effective promotional video shows how far Spithari – Waking Life (based in the town of Marathon in Greece) has come over the last few years with their open data, off-grid, experimental living project: They are asking for crowdfunding solidarity to help support the second pre-festival event of Solidarity, Creativity, and Sustainability: Following the… Continue reading
The dangers of the Sharing Economy (3): A Platform for (Cooperative) Revolution
by Trebor Scholz for THE NATION In the past few months alone, you’ve probably read or listened to at least one story about the unethical labor practices of Amazon Mechanical Turk, TaskRabbit, or CrowdFlower, to name a few crowdsourcing labor platforms. To get gigs, workers must go through the bottleneck of the platforms, where thousands… Continue reading
Roberto Verzola: Finite demand makes relative abundance possible
From time to time we like to look back through the blog archive. Here again we present an important contribution to abundance theory by Roberto Verzola: “It is almost by definition that economists predominantly focus on scarcity, when they define economics as the study of “the most efficient ways to allocate scarce resources to meet… Continue reading
A plea for slow computing
Excerpted from Nathan Schneider: “Many of the brand-name gizmos that we associate with the Internet age—iPhones, Facebook, Twitter and Google—are indeed formidable tools for distraction, extraction and surveillance. But these are not, in fact, our only options. This month in The New Republic, I propose a different way: “Slow Computing.” What I mean by this… Continue reading
P2P Summer School – The Art of Commoning
“What becomes possible when we harness our collective capacity in service of the commons?” 25 – 27 August 2015 | WeCreate, Cloughjordan Ecovillage, Tipperary, Ireland Standard Fee: €380*/ early bird by June 30th: €340 Low Income Fee: €340*/ early bird by June 30th: €310 * Depending on registrations there will be a limited amount of bursary options available…. Continue reading
The Digital Town Square
by Pia Mancini for THE NATION At the end of 2014, an unlikely group—public hospital nurses—was able to force the government of Buenos Aires to pass a bill that has been dormant for many years, resulting in better conditions for them. And they did it without a strike. Instead of walking off the job or… Continue reading
A new graphic summarising the transformative proposals of the P2P Foundation
The P2P Foundation is all about making peer production more autonomous vis a vis the current dominant planet-destroying, knowledge-enclosing and inequality-enhancing economic system. With the help of Irma Wilson of FutureSharp in Johannesburg, South Africa, we made a drawing summarizing our proposals to achieve this goal, and Fabio Barone of Medellin, Colombia, put them in… Continue reading
DotComrade – Tech Workers of the World Unite for a Hackday in London
DotComrade are organising their first one day hack event hosted at Mozilla London June 12th Meet, share ideas and build tools that help workers organise The aim is to provide a forum where people can meet, share ideas and start building some apps that will help workers to organise. Although there is limited space at… Continue reading
Dangers of the Sharing Economy (2): Power to the People (Not the Platform)
by Nathan Schneider for THE NATION It took me a while, at first, to understand. I was sharing an Airbnb apartment in Paris a few months ago with the Catalan activist (and fugitive) Enric Duran, trying to understand the details of his latest hacktivist scheme,FairCoop. The idea is to build a new global financial system… Continue reading
Bay Area counts a community of democratically run tech cooperatives
Excerpted\ from Ned Resnikoff: (Part seven of a seven-part series in which Al Jazeera looked at how California’s tech boom affects the working class) “After nearly 12 years of bouncing around various Bay Area startups, Taran Ramage was feeling burned out. A corporate IT technician who had been working in San Francisco since 1996, he… Continue reading
Musings about the Future at FutureFest
Five minute atmospherics of the FutureFest 2015 conference and festival organized by Nesta in London, and in which I participated. I’m intervening after the fourth minute. Thanks to Nefula for this short but well-done video:
Dangers of the sharing economy (1): Is Your Digital Boss Cheating You?
From a series of five contributions for The Nation. by Frank Pasquale for THE NATION Imagine if you never had to deal with a human boss again. Work projects would flow to your inbox seamlessly. You could take them or leave them as you chose. Want a day off? Just don’t answer email. Freed from… Continue reading