Dear MEP, On behalf of more than 46 civil society organisations in Europe representing journalists, judges, whistle-blowers, scientists, unions, associations… I am writing to you to ask you to consider rejecting the current draft text of the Trade Secrets Protection Directive when you will vote it in Strasbourg next Thursday 14 April. Industrial espionage and… Continue reading
Solid, which comes from “social linked data”, is a proposed set of conventions and tools for building decentralized social applications based on Tim Berners-Lee’s Linked Data principles. You can find the project page for the Solid framework here on Github. Solid is a framework in which other applications can be run to create an open p2p social space. Open source software within this framework may, in… Continue reading
A proliferation of atypical forms of work in Europe has become known as ‘The Gig Economy’. For many, a permanent state of social economic uncertainty is the new normal. Casual work, temping, zero hour contracts and diverse forms of self-employment are characteristic of this brave new world of ‘precarious work’. Self-employment has become the new… Continue reading
For those who witnessed the collapse of Argentina in 2001 with millions of citizens taking to the streets to reject neoliberal policies, the recent presidential victory of right wing business tycoon Mauricio Macri may seem incomprehensible. And he has not disappointed. In his first two months in power over 27,000 civil servants have been fired,… Continue reading
A course at the Schumacher College with Andreas Weber and guests David Abram, Stephan Harding, Satish Kumar. Sarah Corbett and David Bollier (by videolink). Course dates: Monday, 18 April, 2016 to Friday, 22 April, 2016 “The current ideology of dead matter, mechanical causality, and the exclusion of experience from descriptions of reality in ecology and… Continue reading
“Working alone can be aspirational, but it can also be lonely and anxious. There is an extraordinary opportunity for new co-operative solutions for self-employed people, giving them the freedom of freelancing with the muscle of mutuality.” Cooperatives UK have just released an in depth report full of examples of best practices for co-operatives collaborating to meet the needs… Continue reading
So technological progress is radically deflationary, and causes more and more areas of economic life to vanish from the cash nexus into the social or p2p economy. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit and Real by Kevin Carson. Read the full series here or scroll down for the PDF. My comments on the counterfeit nature of neoliberal techno-utopianism are… Continue reading
An interview with Christos Giovanopoulos – member of Solidarity for All – conducted by Alexander Kolokotronis. The following interview was excerpted and shortened from the original. “1. How did the solidarity movement start in Greece? The Greek grassroots solidarity movement is the offspring of the Squares’ occupation movement of summer 2011. The Squares’ Movement had… Continue reading
An event organised by D-CENT. 18th April 2016 Conference at 9.00–13.30 Workshops (by invitation only) at 15.00–17.00 Venue: Italian Chamber of Deputies, Palazzo Montecitorio, Sala del mappamondo, Piazza di Monte Citorio, 33 Rome, Italy “Organised on the 18th of April 2016, in Rome, Italy, the Network democracy and new forms of citizen participation event will… Continue reading
The Leninist argument is that imperialism, industrialization, and capitalism were intertwined. It did not make sense to discuss capitalism or industrialization without discussing Empire, and all its crimes. It is also the common argument that land clearances, in which commons rights were taken away from peasants and serfs, often by law and force, were required… Continue reading
Scholars are still trying to figure out why the society on Easter Island collapsed, ending the people famed for their construction of towering stone heads. One interesting theory holds that it had to do with the heads themselves. Somehow, the islanders decided that the giant heads represented power and success, so different groups competed to… Continue reading
Sharing economy companies like Uber and Airbnb aren’t helping local economies — they’re just helping themselves. Tom Slee reports on the dubious PR maneuvers of the Uber and Airbnb. Head on over to Jacobinmag for the full scoop. Silicon Valley “sharing economy” darlings Uber and Airbnb raised mad money in 2015. Dwarfing other “unicorns” (startups… Continue reading
So if networked communication and cybernetic technologies are so potentially liberating, why are they so authoritarian in the forms they currently take? The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci, who died in Mussolini’s prisons in the 1930s, once wrote that “the old world is dying, and the new one struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”. Techno-Utopianism, Counterfeit… Continue reading
Wages of workers are down. The reason for this is increased entropy, which our current system is very bad at handling. Gail Tverberg says: “There are a few winners, and lots of losers, in the current system.” This mean that we cannot handle the problem of squeezed workers within the current system, as this is… Continue reading
It’s time to broaden the debate on how to fund a universal basic income by including options for sharing resource rents, which is a model that can be applied internationally to reform unjust economic systems, reduce extreme poverty and protect the global commons. Few debates highlight the many complex issues around how governments should share… Continue reading
Saying “everything is connected” is pretty popular these days. “Systems thinking” is the discipline du jour. Everyone, it seems, is becoming aware that the challenges we face do not stand alone. Climate change, for example, is not just about carbon emissions, but also about economics, race relations, patriarchy and power. There is no line of… Continue reading