* Essay: Digital Workers of the World Unite! A Framework for Critically Theorising and Analysing Digital Labour. By Christian Fuchs and Marisol Sandoval. Triple C, Vol 12, No 2 (2014) From the Abstract: “The overall task of this paper is to elaborate a typology of the forms of labour that are needed for the production,… Continue reading
Date archives "October 2015"
Celebrating the Future at Bristol’s New Economy Summit
Jules Peck reports from Bristols’ recent New Economy Summit. This week I had the great pleasure to be one of the hosts of a wonderfully energetic and creative two-day summit on the new economy in Bristol, asking what the future could look like for money, business, ownership, cities and much more. The event drew 180… Continue reading
Highly Recommended Book of the Day:: Capra & Mattei’s “The Ecology of Law”
An important new book offering a vision of commons-based law has just arrived! The Ecology of Law: Toward a Legal System in Tune with Nature and Community, argues that we need to reconceptualize law itself and formally recognize commoning if we are going to address our many environmental problems. The book is the work of… Continue reading
Video of the Day: The future of work/State of the Net 2015
A panel on the future of work and whether machines will really make workers obsolete. Featuring David Orban, entrepreneur, advisor and member of the Faculty of the Singularity University, Lee Bryant, cofounder POST*SHIFT, Vinay Gupta, release coordinator for the Ethereum programmable blockchain platform and Euan Semple, consultant.
Douglas Rushkoff: The trivialisation of news through social media
Via Douglas Rushkoff: (received via email) “I have become fascinated and concerned by the efforts of social media companies to become news services. Facebook, Twitter, and even Snapchat are now competing to be the way we find news stories. Is that because these companies are so very committed to making sure their users are informed?… Continue reading
Policy Paper: Reclaiming Land and Natural Resource Governance from the Market
* Briefing Paper: Keeping Land Local. Reclaiming Governance from the Market. Land Struggles III: LRAN Briefing Paper Series, Saturday 25 October 2014 Here’s a summary: “The governance of land, forests, water bodies and associated “natural resources” has always been a deeply contested terrain, and one that has frequently resulted in conflicts among different actors who… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: the Concept of a Transnational Capitalist Class
* Essay: THE TRANSFORMATION OF CONTEMPORARY CAPITALISM AND THE CONCEPT OF A TRANSNATIONAL CAPITALIST CLASS: A CRITICAL REVIEW IN NEO-POULANTZIAN PERSPECTIVE. By Joachim Hirsch and Jens Wissel. From the abstract: “In the last 40 years, various authors have argued that a new transnational capitalist class (TCC) has emerged, which operates across the borders of national… Continue reading
The rebirth of the guilds: Prime Produce, Enspiral, Las Indias, Sensorica, the Ethos Foundation …
Just as I am mentioning in my talks and conversations that Enspiral.org (New Zealand and beyond), las indias (Spanish-speaking world), the Ethos Foundation (UK), and Sensorica are a new kind of guild for our age, Nathan Schneider produces a interesting article for the New Yorker on the very subject, describing the co-working collective Prime Produce… Continue reading
#GlobalGoals? The truth about poverty and how to address it
It’s high time UN agencies and the mainstream media acknowledge the true scale of global poverty and engage in a long overdue public debate on how ambitious and transformative the international development agenda really is. As the star-studded endorsements and media hype surrounding the all-pervasive Global Goals campaign begins to subside, a very different truth… Continue reading
P2P Lab’s Plans for 2016
Our 2015 research has mostly been theory-driven, focused on transitional scenarios and visions for a commons-oriented society and economy. In 2016, P2P lab collaborators will try to ground these arguments and the, currently, tentative policy proposals on strong empirical evidence towards a more rigorous scientific treatment of the topic. Our first and foremost goal is… Continue reading
The Commons Law Perspective, Open Hardware and Digital DIY
Wouter Tebbens, from the Free Knowledge Institute, interviews our colleague David Bollier. You can find the original here. On October 1st I had an interview with David Bollier. Given his decade long work on the commons, as researcher and activist, author of books like Viral Spiral and in particular his work on Laws and the… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Build the City – Perspectives on Commons and Culture
“The freedom to make and remake our cities and ourselves is one of the most precious yet most neglected of our human rights.” – David Harvey, The Right to the City To accompany the IdeaCamp in Stockholm the European Cultural Foundation have released this collection of essays, extracts and interviews Build the City: Perspectives on Commons… Continue reading
How might a common wealth dividend system work at the national level?
Excerpted from Peter Barnes: “How might a common wealth dividend system work at the national level? The easy part is distributing the dividends. As in Alaska, enrollment could be done online and payments could wired electronically at a cost of pennies per transaction. The Social Security Administration could set that up in a jiffy. The… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Peasant Sovereignty
* Article: Peasant Sovereignty? by Evaggelos Vallianatos. Independent Science News, March 2015 Here’s the summary: “Peasant and small-scale farming is increasingly being recognised as more productive, as more sustainable, and as democratically superior in comparison with most livelihoods and with most other forms of agriculture. This recognition is being enhanced by the concept of “food… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens on the Commons and the City at the Idea Camp 2015
The European Cultural Foundation and it’s partners the Connected Action for the Commons Network brought 50 idea makers together to Subtopia in Stockholm last month for their annual Idea Camp. Michel and I among others were invited to discuss and contribute ideas to creative projects of activists and artists from across Europe.
Thesis: Internet Security and the Limits of Open Source and Peer Production
“It is commonly asserted that almost any societal activity could benefit from distributed, bottom-up collaboration — by making societal interaction more open, more social, and more democratic. However, we also need to be mindful of the limits of these models. How could they function in environments hostile to openness?” * Doctoral Thesis: Secrecy vs. Openness…. Continue reading