Excerpted from Matthew Heskin : “Competition does not support sharing. Competition suggests that there is scarcity and supports a scarcity mindset. History has already proven that the “pie” is not a fixed size. Our “know how” changes the size of the pie even in the face of rapid population growth. We like to look at… Continue reading
Date archives "January 2016"
‘Star Trek’ Axanar: ‘Distributed Davids Against an Ageing Goliath’
An interesting situation has developed with the proposed Star Trek ‘fan film’ Axanar which may highlight how we find ourselves in a transition period between two eras: the old era which relies on ‘Intellectual Property’ (IP), heavyweight corporate power and lawyers; against a new agile era based on crowdfunding and free access to information. hollywoodreporter.com… Continue reading
Paul Mason on the Need for Modelling Complexity in a Post-Capitalist Economy
Excerpted from Paul Mason‘s latest book on Post-Capitalism (selection by Nathan Cravens): “Given that we are decades into the info-tech era, it is startling that – as Oxford maths professor J. Doyne Farmer points out – there are no models that capture economic complexity in the way computers are used to simulate weather, population, epidemics… Continue reading
The ‘bank bail-ins’ have begun, private savings in banks are no longer safe
“Once your money is deposited in the bank, it legally becomes the property of the bank … If you bank with one of the country’s biggest banks, who collectively have trillions of dollars of derivatives they hold “off balance sheet” (meaning those debts aren’t recorded on banks’ GAAP balance sheets), those debt bets have a… Continue reading
Open modelling against extractive contracts
“More contract disclosure will not necessarily result in greater understanding of the economic implications of fiscal terms. The terms only become meaningful when their interactions are understood alongside relevant national tax laws and regulations. So to make real sense of the economic implications, the fiscal terms must be considered under varying scenarios of production, price… Continue reading
Democracy needs mature individuals (Tamera 4)
This is excerpted from a book originally published 30 years ago, by Dieter Duhm, initiator of the Tamera community in Portugal. Dieter Duhm: “Democracy is a question neither of verbal commitment nor of the outer political form of a system. Rather it is a question mainly of the emotional state and structure of drives in… Continue reading
Can we own our big data ourselves ?
Can the commons serve as an alternative to the corporate or state domination of big data, the lifeblood of this dawning digital world? Can it serve as the foundation for collective empowerment? Can it provide a means of criticizing the IT corporations’ perception of themselves? From the Berliner Gazette, presenting the project, ‘Big Data in… Continue reading
The Top Ten P2P Trends of 2015
We live in a contradictory world, just as it is undoubtedly true that problems are worsening in the dominant system — including ecological destruction, increased social inequality, and increased state repression — just as true is the fact that there is an exponential rise in the creation of non-state, non-corporate initiatives in which citizens the world over are taking matters… Continue reading
Paul Mason: the P2P Movement has paid insufficient attention to the state
This excerpt, chosen and provided to us by Nathan Cravens, is from Paul Mason’s latest book on PostCapitalism: “At present, the community of thinkers and activists around the peer-to-peer movement are heavily focused on experimental, small-scale projects – credit unions or co-ops, for example. When they think about the state, it is at the level… Continue reading
Video: How public start-up funding is part of the corporate nanny state
“The start up scene has turned into an indirect wealth transfer where taxpayers are constantly putting more and more money into the pockets of the people who have access to high net worth individuals and private equity.” The Meet the Renegades series talks with tech entrepreneur Andrew Walker about what’s next for the internet, and… Continue reading
Robin Murray on Platform Capitalism, Platform Cooperativism, and Civil Socialisation
From an in-depth conversation of Robin Murray with Jeremy Gilbert and Andrew Goffey for New Formations magazine: (Note from editor Michel Bauwens: please note that Robin here confuses our concept of Netarchical Capitalism with that of anarcho-capitalism or distributed capitalism) Robin Murray: “Platforms are a new kind of economy, in which you can talk about… Continue reading
Freedom within evolution (Tamera 3)
This is excerpted from a book originally published 30 years ago, by Dieter Duhm, initiator of the Tamera community in Portugal. Dieter Duhm on EVOLUTION AND GROWING FREEDOM: The idea of evolution is that the totality of life on Earth is in a constant process of becoming. From the first cell to the human being… Continue reading
“Build the City”: The Critical Role of Art, Culture & Commoning Wed
A new anthology of essays, Build the City: Perspectives on Commons and Culture,powerfully confirms that the “city as a commons” meme is surging. This carefully edited, beautifully designed collection of 38 essays shows the depth and range of thinking now underway. The book was published by Krytyka Polityczna and the European Cultural Foundation in September… Continue reading
We need a ‘soft energy path’ for the transition, not a hard one
Excerpted from Keith Parkins: “The current energy path is a hard path. Hard paths are brittle. Brittle paths cannot survive sudden shocks and are liable to break. A soft energy path is one that is pliable, one that matches the energy source to the energy demand. Consumers don’t demand energy, they demand goods and services…. Continue reading
Video: Pia Mancini on p2p democratic activism in Argentina and beyond
Pia Mancini on the motivation for her work on the DemocracyOS and other projects, and where they need to go. She strongly calls for ‘shared protocols’. Interview from the OuishareFest 2015:
STWR at the World Goodwill seminar 2015: Rebuilding the shrine of human living
During an interview and discussion with the audience at the annual World Goodwill seminar in London, STWR highlighted the increasingly urgent need for concerned citizens to demand that governments enact the pressing structural reforms needed to address interconnected social, political and environmental crises. On 14th November 2015, World Goodwill – a global network of citizens… Continue reading