In recent times I am finding myself caught between a sort of extreme techno-optimism inspired by new developments in technology which allow non-hierarchical organisation such as blockchain, Liquid Democracy or Loomio – and a kind of despair that the apocalypse is unfolding around us in the shape of the collapse of industrial civilisation and we… Continue reading
As used by right-wing apologists for “free market capitalism” (an oxymoron if ever there was one), capitalism is the source of everything good in the world — but also something that never existed. And it switches repeatedly back and forth from one to the other, every couple of sentences, in the same argument. I learned… Continue reading
In the first of an occasional series, Sophie Jerram considers the history and current practice of commoning in New Zealand. New Zealand was the last English-speaking country to be settled in the world, and has become caught up in a narrative around scarcity that started in 19th Century England. From the country In New Zealand,… Continue reading
A coalition headed by the French banking whistleblower Hervé Falciani is proposing a new decentralised ‘PayPal-like’ network: A prominent French whistleblower and Spanish anti-corruption activists who triggered an investigation of a former International Monetary Fund chief announced Thursday they are designing a digital payment system aimed at excluding middlemen companies that make money from online purchases…. Continue reading
I’d like to share an excerpt of the book I’m working on. It is from the beginning… (It is a first draft so be gentle!) For me it came at about the age of seven or eight, when I was outside with my father watching a large flock of starlings fly past. “That’s a big… Continue reading
The backlash to the corporate “sharing economy” is gaining momentum, and one key player is the movement to develop “platform cooperativism.” The New York Office of Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung has released a report critiquing the “sharing economy” and describing the alternatives. It’s called “Platform Cooperativism: Challenging the Corporate Sharing Economy” (pdf file). and it’s written… Continue reading
(republished from the ESA RN18 site) ESA RN18 Mid-Term Conference Rethinking Power in Communicative Capitalism Critical Perspectives on Media, Culture and Society ISCTE-IUL, Lisbon September 8-10, 2016 European Sociological Association (ESA) – Research Network 18: Sociology of Communications and Media Research in cooperation with: ISCTE IUL – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa Fundação para a Ciência… Continue reading
Based on Mason’s preview of Postcapitalism in his article at The Guardian, I was predisposed to like it. And having read the book itself, I can’t say I’ve changed my mind much. And there is indeed a great deal of good analysis in this book. There is also some not so good. Probably the weakest… Continue reading
* Article: Resource Rents, Redistribution, and Halving Global Poverty: The Resource Dividend. Paul Segal. World Development, Volume 39, Issue 4, April 2011, Pages 475–489 From the Abstract: “This paper considers the proposal that each country distributes its resource rents directly to citizens as a universal and unconditional cash transfer, or Resource Dividend, and estimates its… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis will rewrite and update Michel’s 2005 seminal manifesto “P2P and Human Evolution”. This will serve as the anchoring essay in Erik Olin Wright’s Real Utopias book series to be published by Verso. Short summary Peer-to-Peer, mostly known to technologically oriented people as P2P, is the decentralized form of networking computers… Continue reading
As if Thomas Sowell weren’t sufficient to demonstrate the intellectual bankruptcy of pro-capitalist apologetics, we now have corporate apologists trolling the #ResistCapitalism hashtag on Twitter. Although most of the people using it today seem to think it’s an original piece of wit they just came up with on their own, the “Lookit them tweeting #ResistCapitalism… Continue reading
From the Coala website: “COALA is an international multidisciplinary collaborative research and development initiative that endeavors to bring clarity in the field of blockchain technologies, smart contracts and decentralized autonomous applications. COALA is named as the “Dynamic Coalition on Blockchain Technologies” at the UN ( see http://www.intgovforum.org/ ), as well the W3C’s Working Group on… Continue reading
As part of STWR’s ‘global call for sharing’ campaign, we periodically highlight the growing public debate on the need for wealth, power and resources to be shared more equitably both within countries and internationally. This debate is becoming more prominent by the day, although it is often framed in an implicit context without directly acknowledging how… Continue reading
The climate crisis and the insidious hold of dispensationalism You’ve heard it before: Things have to get worse before they can get better. It’s a doctrine many of us learn first from our parents, as children, when they’re trying to teach us the unintuitive notion of delayed gratification. Tighten your belt, build character, learn your… Continue reading
“The intuitive idea that the patrimony of a country belongs to all citizens has a long history. In this paper I presented a version of this idea in which it is the rents due to natural resources to which all citizens have an equal claim, and this claim is satisfied by a universal, unconditional cash… Continue reading
Any one who thinks putting a panel on every Australian rooftop just makes sense. Solar Citizens Australia wants to “ensure that all Australians have the ability to access clean, safe, affordable power”. Their website explains: “Australia is one of the sunniest continents on earth, so producing power from the sun just makes sense. 1.4 million… Continue reading