One of the great economists of the twentieth century had the misfortune of publishing his magnum opus, The Great Transformation, in 1944, months before the inauguration of a new era of postwar economic growth and consumer culture. Few people in the 1940s or 1950s wanted to hear piercing criticisms of “free markets,” let alone consider… Continue reading
Date archives "September 2015"
Six reasons you should spend a weekend in October in #Gijón, Spain
The leaders of the Sharing Cities Network will share in participatory workshops how citizen change was built in cities like Seoul, Cleveland or Bologna.. Experts from the UME will explain what social and physical infrastructure is most helpful for the resilience of cities when disasters occur, and will teach us to design services and infrastructures… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The cooperative University of Mondragon
David Matthews reviews the experience of the cooperative university of the Mondragon in the Basque country (excerpts): “Can the University of Mondragon, an established higher education cooperative in the lush green mountains of the Basque Country in northern Spain, offer any answers for academies elsewhere? Founded in 1997 from a collection of co-ops dating back… Continue reading
Responding to concerns about negative interest rate money (aka ‘speed money’ or ‘demurrage’)
Shann Turnbull responds to the concerns of Ellen Brown on negative interest money (i.e. Demurrage-based): “The evidence of history is inconsistent with your concern that people would not use depreciating speed money. It was called speed money because according to Professor Fisher (1933: 14) it circulated four times faster than US dollars in normal times… Continue reading
A history of abundance
A brief tour of the imagining of abundance throughout history, from the Golden Age of the ancients to the P2P production of the current generation. Few ideas have been as powerful and subversive as abundance. For thousands of years, we humans have projected our desires onto it, we’ve been inspired by it to transform our… Continue reading
Women in P2P: Francesca Musiani
Francesca Musiani interviewed by Rachel O’Dwyer Interview with Francesca Musiani on Internet governance and the role of the p2p practices Bio Francesca Musiani is a researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC), a research unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris-Sorbonne, and University Pierre and Marie Curie. She is also… Continue reading
Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds (cont.), Part III of Law for the Commons
Today’s post is the third in a four-part series derived from my strategy memo, “Reinventing Law for the Commons.” This excerpt continues with Part II, “Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds,” with “clusters” #5 through #9. The collection of entries here are now posted on a Commons for the Law wiki hosted by the Commons… Continue reading
The Impending Liberation of “Happy Birthday”
If the culture industries wonder why people have so little respect for copyright law these days, they need look no further than the Warner Music Group’s claimed copyright of the song “Happy Birthday.” It’s a grotesque mockery of the avowed principles of copyright law and a scam on the public that has persisted for decades. … Continue reading
Reclaiming the Economic Surplus by Liberating the Economic Commons
This impromptu article by Raymond Aitken, i.e. Reclaiming the economic surplus by liberating the Economic Commons, reflects an informal email discussion between open cooperativists, which took place in July-August 2015: “We need “not only recovering money as as part of the economic commons, but also our innate human creative faculties (human capital), and the natural… Continue reading
Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds: Part II of Law for the Commons
Below, a continuation of yesterday’s post from the strategy memo, “Reinventing Law for the Commons,” Part II of the four-part piece. II. Legal Innovations in Beating the Bounds: Nine Promising Fields of Action Part II surveys the enormous amount of legal innovation going on in various commons-related fields of action. The point of this section… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Kythnos Island Community Microgrid Project
A case study presented by George Dafermos et al. in the context of transition projects towards renewable energy infrastructures: “Kythnos is a small island in the Aegean sea in Greece. As is typical of islands in general, Kythnos is cut off from the national grid on mainland Greece. It has its own island grid, but… Continue reading
800 Years of Commons: The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons and Peer-to-Peer Production
* Event in Berlin, September 8: 800 Years of Commons: The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons, Peer-to-Peer-Production and Their Legal Protection in Our Times Via David Bollier: If you’re in or near Berlin on September 8, please come to the public talk, “800 Years of Commons: The Meaning of Magna Carta, Commons, Peer-to-Peer Production and… Continue reading
Reinventing Law for the Commons, Part I
One of the most devastating and recurring problems that virtually every commons faces is market enclosure – the privatization and marketization of shared resources by businesses, investors and speculators, often in collusion with government. What’s really remarkable is that legislatures and courts so often declare that enclosures are legal because they supposedly contribute to economic… Continue reading
Sharing is a glimpse of abundance
Collaborative consumption should be understood, above all and beyond increases in efficiency in consumption, as an element of cultural change, as the experience of a possible world… which, however, is being decided upon and built somewhere else. To understand the relationship of abundance to marginal cost allows us to see “collaborative consumption” from a new… Continue reading
The Commons and EU Knowledge Policies
One of the great advantages of a commons analysis is its ability to deconstruct the prevailing myths of “intellectual property” as a wholly private “product” – and then to reconstruct it as knowledge and culture that lives and breathes only in a social context, among real people. This opens up a new conversation about if… Continue reading
The Uber/Airbnb “sharing economy” model is unsustainable
Excerpted from Kevin Carson: “An article at Medium (Tim O’Reilly, “Networks and the Nature of the Firm — What’s the Future of Work?” August 14) describes Uber and Airbnb as “textbook examples” of “the way that networks trump traditional forms of corporate organization, and how they are changing traditional ways of managing that organization.” Um,… Continue reading