2015 was a year of groundbreaking work and whirlwind travel for the P2P Foundation. Here are some of last year’s highlights. Our New Organizational Structure We’re pleased to announce that the P2P Foundation’s structure has recently been reorganized around three distinct operational hubs. Given the nature of our work, the distinction between them may be… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2016"
The working life of ‘logged labor’
Logged labor is becoming the new norm. Excerpted from Ursula Huws: “It appears a new kind of working life is emerging. It is a life in which who you are and what you can do are displayed to the world in the form of a standardized profile: your skills and the tasks you can perform… Continue reading
On the politics of powerlessness (2): how to undo it
“When I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of ourselves.” Excerpted from Yotam Marom: (this is… Continue reading
Robert Jensen on the Colors of Change
Excerpted from Robert Jensen: “When we come to terms with these challenges – when we face up to the fact that the human species now faces problems that likely have no solutions, at least no solutions that allow us to continue living as we have – then we will not be deterred by the resistance… Continue reading
A Special Issue on Commoning
Commoning: The Production of Common Worlds. Commons – Practices, boundaries and thresholds. Edited by Giacomo D’Alisa & Cristina Mattiucci. Quadernos, Explorations in Space and Society No. 30 – December 2013 Extract from the editorial by Giacomo D’Alisa and Cristina Mattiucci: “Commons is becoming an increasingly crucial topic in the political arena. On one hand, academic… Continue reading
The World Post COP — System Reboot Not Plug-and-play -part one
The SDGs and COP21 raise more questions than they answer — 2016 will need to shift the debate to wider system change. The current policy landscape “Woo mercy, mercy me, mercy father Ah things ain’t what they used to be, no no Oil wasted on the ocean and upon our seas Fish full of… Continue reading
Rebooting Work: Programming the Economy for People
For me, the first two months of this year will be about seeding the world with memes from my upcoming book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus: How Growth Became the Enemy of Prosperity, which will be published on March 1. I humbly ask you to pre-order the book or the Kindle. The great thing… Continue reading
The Matrix of Economic Evolution
The Presencing Institute and Otto Scharmer have produced an evolutionary matrix of economic systems which posits a commons-centric economy as the next step, echoing the theses of Jeremy Rifkin, Paul Mason and the P2P Foundation. For a background explanation, go here.
Can bottom-up citizen science challenge the authority of Big Science ?
Excerpted from Dan McQuillan: “There are interesting weaknesses at the core of scientific hegemony. While most scientists choose to present their practice publicly as an infallible machine for the production of truths, the opinions behind the curtain are far more mixed, and for good reason. Even hard science is not immune to distortion by group-think… Continue reading
On the politics of powerlessness: was the failure of Occupy primarily due to faulty internal dynamics ?
When I think about the politics of powerlessness, it feels clear as day to me that the source of all of it is fear. Fear of leaders, of the enemy, of the possibility of having to govern, of the stakes of winning and losing, of each other, of ourselves. Excerpted from Yotam Marom: (we will… Continue reading
Case study: Creating use value while making a living in egalitarian communities
“If one wanted to crush and destroy a man entirely, to mete out to him the most terrible punishment … all one would have to do would be to make him do work that was completely and utterly devoid of usefulness and meaning.” Fyodor Dostoyevsky in The House of the Dead I observe a lot… Continue reading
Sarantaporo residents create Commons in rural Greece through a DIY wireless mesh network
An article by Jeffrey Andreoni at shareable.net The story of Sarantaporo’s DIY wireless network is one worth telling and sharing. Filmmaking collective Personal Cinema is attempting to do just that. It is very close to successfully completing their crowdfunding campaign needed to finish their documentary about a mesh network deep in rural Greece. The film, Building Communities of Commons in Greece, aims to… Continue reading
Initial design schematic of a new Commons game
Jose Ramons in Melbourne is developing a new “commons game” – which is in the design phase. The purpose of the game is to 1) teach people about the commons / commoning and 2) enact a community of commoners / commoning. It is part of the futureslab initiative, as an open design process where you… Continue reading
Nothing Times Nothing: Are We Really Nearing the End of Capitalism?
Okay. As in all good blues songs, this story starts with ‘woke up this mornin’…’ and goes on to bemoan conditions of the storyteller’s life. We then go on to tie in an excellent critique by Stephanie McMillan of Paul Mason’s views on Post-Capitalism and why she thinks he is wrong to claim that it… Continue reading
Capitalism, and its problem with the World-Ecological Surplus
McKenzie Wark on Jason W. Moore‘s concept: “There’s a role then for what Moore calls the world-ecological surplus. He sketches an interesting view of the crisis of capital as related to the energy returned on capital invested. Expansions of labor productivity required expansions of ecological surplus appropriated from frontier territories. Moore also gestures to this… Continue reading
The need for transparency in social relationships and real hierarchies (Tamera 5)
This is excerpted from a book originally published 30 years ago, by Dieter Duhm, initiator of the Tamera community in Portugal. This is the final excerpt in this serialization of Dieter Duhm: “Building a humane community usually means confronting difficulties that are deeply rooted in the character structures of modern man and especially in the… Continue reading