Article: P2P in the anthropocene, with the Convergence gathering as a case study. Victor MacGill. ISSS paper. 2015 For excerpts, see below after the abstract. From the Abstract: “There are many threats as we move deeper into the anthropocene age. The dominance based hierarchies that have become an unquestioned part of 21st century life are… Continue reading
Do your friends think OuiShare is a site for posting photos? Do you know people who believe “the commons” is a book written by Karl Marx? Have you ever shocked people by suggesting AirBnB and Uber might be evil? As an open economy neophyte, I’ll admit some of the concepts can be confusing. Yet with encouragement from… Continue reading
Capitalism loves a good crisis. It produces crises plentifully; it takes advantage of them gleefully. A crisis is an opportunity to throw pesky rules out the window—like workers’ rights or environmental responsibility—and carry out some brutal structural adjustment for the sake of capital. Can the co-op movement take advantage of crisis, too? Often, it has…. Continue reading
As a partner in the upcoming Synergia Summer Institute the P2P Foundation will over the coming month feature a series of interviews, articles and videos by the course’s tutors on key themes that inform the program on “Transition to Co-operative Commonwealth: Pathways to a new political economy”. Places on the Synergia Summer Institute’s 3 week… Continue reading
The war on cannabis that began in the 1930s seems to be coming to an end. Research shows that this natural plant, rather than posing a deadly danger to health, has a wide range of therapeutic benefits. But skeptics question the sudden push for legalization, which is largely funded by wealthy investors linked to Big… Continue reading
On June 21, I gave a presentation to a number of staffers and others at the Agence Française de Développement in Paris outlining my vision of the commons as an alternative vision of “development.” The talk was entitled “Beyond Development: The Commons as a New/Old Paradigm of Human Flourishing.” Here are my prepared remarks: I… Continue reading
The following article, originally published at “Motherboard – The VICE channels”, presents the first 3D printer made from e-waste: “Members of the WoeLab community have invented the world’s first 3D printer made almost entirely from e-waste, built computers with discarded electronics inside plastic jerry cans, and are in the process of repurposing a discarded fridge… Continue reading
The second part of an interview on Credit Commons conducted by Bruno Chies on 29 May 2016. Find part 1 here. “Bruno Chies: Let me go back to complementary and alternative currencies. Do you mean they are a way to empower people directly on a local level? Matthew Slater: If they would work, they would… Continue reading
A new report by leading sustainability experts has reaffirmed the case for a paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversified agroecological systems – fundamental to which is a call for redistributing power back into the hands of those who feed the world. An alternative vision of farming and food systems has long been upheld by… Continue reading
Written by Cat Johnson and cross-posted from Shareable In a recent essay, Frances Moore Lappé, author of Diet for a Small Planet and co-founder of Food First, the Institute for Food and Development Policy, and the Small Planet Institute, argues that the primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system… Continue reading
Now here’s a fun audio experience – a 56-minute podcast, “The Deeper Magic of the Commons,” which functions as a kind of introduction to the commons by several eminent commons historians and commentators George Caffentzis, Massimo de Angelis,Peter Linebaugh, along with Dr. Bones, and yours truly. Besides conveying some great history, the podcast is an… Continue reading
One of the questions that often comes up when we talk about “platform cooperativism” is, “What do we mean by platform?” For some, this is obvious: It’s a thing, a place on the internet where people connect with each other. It includes a website, probably some mobile apps, and ideally a good API. It’s not… Continue reading
The following article by Curtis Yarvin was originally published at urbit.org Every network is a state, and thus, it needs a government What’s the right lesson for the decentralization community to learn from the collapse of the DAO? Perhaps the simplest lesson is that even decentralized networks need governments, and have governments. Every network is… Continue reading
“How does an economy work to satisfy basic livelihood within a cooperative? What are Time Banks and Mutual Credit? How does a Sociocracy operate? How is Money administrated in a Mutual Aid Cooperative? How can work and value be redefined when working in collaborative networks? How are the lives of people joining this sharing economy… Continue reading
Austin voters, in a referendum last month, rejected a measure to overturn local regulations of so-called “ride-sharing” services. Although the main backing for the regulations was the legacy taxicab monopolies (which resented having to compete with even proprietary monopolies like Uber and Lyft), the result of leaving them in place has been to promote the… Continue reading
An interview on the Credit Commons project conducted by Bruno Chies on 29 May 2016, Paris, France. Biography Matthew Slater is a software developer and has been involved with complementary currencies for at least 8 years, since the crash of 2008. He is the co-founder and main developer of Community Forge, a platform for complementary… Continue reading