Bernie Sanders supporters are flocking to Jill Stein, the presumptive Green Party presidential candidate, with donations to her campaign exploding nearly 1000% after he endorsed Hillary Clinton. Stein salutes Sanders for the progressive populist movement he began and says it is up to her to carry the baton. Can she do it? Critics say her radical… Continue reading
This post by Lena Gravis on Energy and Material Flows originally appeared on circulatenews.org How does a country go through a renewable energy transition? Well, no country has done it before and there is no blue print to follow, but Germany is leading the world in this front. In this episode Patrick Graichen provides a… Continue reading
Anna Bergren Miller: In a presentation to D-CENT’s international conference in late May, civic hacktivist and programming consultant Audrey Tang called Uber “the virtual epidemic that’s paralyzed all the governments around the globe.” Tang’s hyperbole is not too far off the mark: if conventional taxi services and hotels are the well-known bacteria of urban life… Continue reading
“Super-Competent Democracies will emerge when the people, their leaders and the technical professionals learn how to use ensembles of participative, management cybernetic and soft-systems processes (i.e. ‘Super-Competencies) to .” * This approach here from a Brazilian group looks to be very compatible with the partner state: First, their key argument: “If we look at societies… Continue reading
Originally published (in a modified form) on the MAPS Bulletin (Spring 2016) Many arguments for the legalization of cannabis and psychedelics draw on their relative harmlessness. Countering the rationale of prohibition, we can point out that compared to legal drugs like alcohol and tobacco, psychedelics are extremely safe. Given statistics comparing the annual number of… Continue reading
Fifteen years after embarking on its largely ineffective quantitative easing program, Japan appears poised to try the form recommended by Ben Bernanke in his notorious “helicopter money” speech in 2002. The Japanese test case could finally resolve a longstanding dispute between monetarists and money reformers over the economic effects of government-issued money. When then-Fed Governor… Continue reading
One of the most interesting autonomous projects associated with the Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) is Calafou, the self-proclaimed “post-capitalist colony” which settled in 2011 in the ruins of an abandoned industrial village in the Catalan county of l’Anoia, about 65km away from Barcelona. The colony was set up with the participation of several CIC members… Continue reading
Efficiency is the spiritual practice of the religion of scientific management. Under its spell, we have not only privatized once abundant shared natural resources, but we have also privatized our intellectual and cultural commons Chris Corrigan questions the mantra of market efficiency, offsetting it against commoning: This morning, I’m reading this article. It’s a review… Continue reading
An interview between these two thinkers where they discuss finance, value, business and the Commons including a historical perspective. What follows is a list of items covered during the discussion. 00:00 Douglas Rushkoff 1:52 Michel Bauwens 3:13 Michel asks Doug about the evolution of society and guilds. 4:09 Guilds: “the wheels of commerce”, Fernand Braudel’s… Continue reading
One of the most important languages for expressing the values of the commons, I have come to realize, is art. It can often express visceral knowledge more effectively than words and give those insights a more powerful cultural reality. Those were my thoughts when I saw “Seeing Wetiko,” an “online gallery” of artworks, music and… Continue reading
Robert Balthazar. The Discrete Charm of Economic Growth. Part I: The Bilinguals; Part II: The Making of an Overriding Collective Preference (2016). At the outset Balthazar briefly summarizes his own intellectual journey as an economist, looking back on his earlier assumption that the economy as a whole was the spontaneous result of innumerable interacting trends… Continue reading
Reflecting on the quote from well-known anarchist and purveyor of ‘maybe logic’ Robert Anton Wilson: “The Right’s view of government and the Left’s view of big business are both correct”, it seems self-evident that what they have in common is that they are hierarchical bureaucracies that have grown so big that the majority of the… Continue reading
We have been insisting for some time that people should be aware of the political and social values that are inherent in techno-social systems, and in particular in the technologies that have a close relationships to the philosophy of anarcho-capitalism, which has some, if not all of it strands, strongly opposed to democracy and popular… Continue reading
This month a civic-minded photographer, Carol M. Highsmith, filed a lawsuit against Getty Images. Highsmith has donated her work to the public domain via the Library of Congress. Consequently, it was a surprise to her to receive an infringement notice for using one of her own photographs. Getty Images, a corporate stock photo cite, hosts a… Continue reading
An article by Theodoros Karyotis, originally published at ROAR Magazine. “In the early morning of July 27, refugee families and supporters who were sleeping at Thessaloniki’s three occupied refugee shelters — Nikis, Orfanotrofeio and Hurriya — were woken up by police in riot gear. In a well-orchestrated police operation, hundreds of people were detained. Most… Continue reading
“If we say that money comes from ecological function instead from extraction, manufacturing buying and selling, then we have a system in which all human efforts go toward restoring, protecting and preserving ecological function. That is what we need to mitigate and adapt to climate change, to ensure food security, to ensure that human civilizations… Continue reading