Here’s a short video from PROCOMUNS, a 3 day event which was held in Barcelona in March, 2016 to discuss commons-oriented approaches to public policy, peer production and the commons collaborative economy. Key goals included proposing public policies and providing technical guidelines to build software platforms for collaborative communities. We’ll be rolling out more Procomuns… Continue reading
Date archives "April 2016"
Connecting the Dots 6: The dot on my forehead: how we understand the crisis is part of the crisis
It was something I heard one dissident professor say when I was an undergraduate studying psychology in a Nigerian university. He didn’t quite say it; he whispered it. When the white men came, they brought us schools and the bible, he intoned. And then we gave them our own stories. That colonial Faustian pact made… Continue reading
Political Philosophy & Public Policy: Exploring the Commons in a Summer School
A summer school in “Political Philosophy & Public Policy”: Exploring the Commons organized by the Political Theory Group of CEHUM, University of Minho (Braga). When: 18-21 July 2016 Where: University of Minho, Braga (Portugal) “Course Description: In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in issues at the intersection of political philosophy and… Continue reading
Freelancers: let’s get organised
Ed Mayo, Secretary General of Co-operatives UK, argues the growing ranks of self-employed workers need to get organised to address their precarious working conditions. Self employment levels used to be a measure of how underdeveloped an economy was. Now, in the form of the ‘gig economy’, it has become something that is celebrated across developed countries…. Continue reading
European Summer School in Classical Architecture in Stockholm
I got the following message from Robert Adam forwarded to me by Audun Engh: “The European Summer School in Classical Architecture has had a good response but there are places left and still bursaries available. This is held in July in idyllic surroundings north-west of Stockholm and finishes in Stockholm. Even without a bursary, the price… Continue reading
Survey: P2P Communities and Value Creation
You are invited to participate in this survey conducted by the research teams from the P2Pvalue project, in which the P2P Foundation is a consortium member. In the research project P2PValue we study what we call peer to peer (P2P) communities. With this we mean networks of people who freely collaborate around a common goal,… Continue reading
Mary Mellor’s “Debt or Democracy”: Why Not Quantitative Easing for People?
Although it is widely assumed that governments are the source of all new money – through “printing it” – the so-called private sector is the source of most new money put into circulation. In one of the most successful enclosures of the commons in our time, commercial finance institutions have captured the power to create… Continue reading
Connecting the Dots 5: What If It’s All Connected? Humanity and the Global Crisis
The 21st Century is a time of great converging challenges—we need to think, feel and act systemically like never before in our history. In reality the threats are all connected, yet we continue to deal with them separately in a piecemeal fashion. This simply will not be good enough. Climate change cannot be addressed in… Continue reading
Vinay Gupta & the Promise of the Blockchain
Vinay Gupta remains an indispensable analyst of the current shift, always interesting and provocative and combining references from a wide variety of fields. According to his own assessment, and we concur that it is an excellent mustwatch video presentation, this is his best introduction to the importance of the blockchain. Thanks for spreading it around,… Continue reading
Project Of The Day: Embassy Network
Have you ever shared a living space with a group of people? Whether for a vacation or as a living arrangement, living with other people can expose you to new ways of doing life. The Embassy Network connects communal and group living spaces. From San Francisco to Costa Rica to Nepal, the network allows member locations… Continue reading
Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real 9: Paul Mason
So compared to that of Bauwens and the Monthly Review Group, Mason’s analysis of the crisis tendencies of late capitalism falls a bit flat. Nevertheless, his general framing has a familiar Marxian ring to it, in the same general tradition we’ve been considering: and become the basis for a fundamentally new system.. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson…. Continue reading
Algo-Robotic Systems: the new wave of automation and what it means for all of us
“If the future of banking is going to be digital, we want it to be populated with those who value the deeper tenets of open source philosophy. Otherwise we could be left with increasingly alienating, exclusive and unaccountable financial surveillance states, presiding over increasingly passive and patronised users.” The following is excerpted from another excellent… Continue reading
The Neurology of Consumer Compulsion
In a provocative new essay on the Great Transition Initiative website, neuroscientist Peter Sterling explores “Why We Consume: Neural Design and Sustainability.” It is an evolutionary scientist’s argument for how human beings are neurologically wired and what we might do about it. What is the biological substrate for our behaviors as homo economicus and as… Continue reading
The Machine Brain vs Garden Brain View of Economics
This excerpt from a discussion by Ken Webster focuses on a necessarily ‘wholistic’ or ‘integrative’ understanding of the circular economy: “Hanauer and Liu (write) on the existing economic story and what they call the “machinebrain” rationalistic approach. It’s fairly standard fare: – Call it the “Machinebrain” picture of the world: markets are perfectly efficient, humans… Continue reading
Inventing the Future Beholden to the Present (a review)
Srnicek & Williams “Inventing the Future” made quite a stir when it was released, as did their Accelerationist manifesto. As usual, when I hear such excitement I am concerned, concerned that a lot of people are getting sidetracked by glamourous, new-sounding formulations, away from the very urgent work at hand, which is to understand, confront… Continue reading
Art and the Blockchain
As the underpinning technology for Bitcoin, the blockchain is widely heralded as the new internet. Alex Puig, CEO of the Digital Currency Summit, calls it the “Internet of Value”. The blockchain is a decentralised infrastructure for automating, monitoring and verifying transactions, and this promises to facilitate the monetisation and marketisation of all things networked. It… Continue reading