David Bollier: What is “value” and how shall we protect it? It’s a simple question for which we don’t have a satisfactory answer. For conventional economists and politicians, the answer is simple: value is essentially the same as price. Value results when private property and “free markets” condense countless individual preferences and purchases into a… Continue reading
Europe wants Internet companies to filter all of your uploads. (It is a censorship machine.) An upload filter can’t recognize your legal use of copyrighted content. (Like parody, citations and – oh, noes! – memes.) And you will have no meaningful protection from unfair deletion. (So, the proposed safeguards will not save you.) This needs… Continue reading
A basic income could defeat the scarcity mindset, instill a sense of solidarity and even ease the anxieties that gave us Brexit and Trump. Jason Hickel: Every student learns about Magna Carta, the ancient scroll that enshrined the rights of barons against the arbitrary authority of England’s monarchs. But most have never heard of its… Continue reading
The folks at Davos this week are trying to behave as if everything is normal. Sure, England is Brexiting from Europe and the United States appears to be retreating from the global stage altogether. But somehow the word from Switzerland is that a mix of the right interest rates, investment strategies, and business optimism will… Continue reading
The P2P Foundation is serializing video highlights from last year’s Platform Cooperativism conference. Click here to see all conference videos. (12 mins) Silvia Zuur — . At its heart, it’s a group of people who want to co-create an encouraging, diverse community of people trying to make a difference.
We recently received this message from Birgit Dalbert on behalf of Shayda Naficy and the citizens of Lagos, who logically wish to keep self-governing and distributing their water supply: Shayda Naficy: Dear friends and allies: I am writing today to ask you to urgently add your organization’s name to a sign-on letter we are circulating… Continue reading
Rio on Watch/Anna Cash: When one stops to consider Rio’s hundreds of favelas for their plurality, with a lens of recognizing assets instead of just highlighting problems, one common thread is clear: In the face of public neglect, favela residents are expert at doing things for themselves, many times coming together to do so collectively…. Continue reading
We got this message from Friederike Habermann, an economist, historian and great supporter of the Commons. “In the line of your discussions during the Deep Dive on value, I thought this might be of interest. In Germany something fascinating has started: while different very small movements who organize themselves according to “unconditional sharing” or “living… Continue reading
If the Greek experience of the past two years shows anything, it is that conventional Left politics, even with massive electoral support and control of the government, cannot prevail against finance capital and its international allies. European creditors continue to force Greek citizens to endure the punishing trauma of austerity politics with no credible scenario… Continue reading
“With tech leaders swiftly capitulating to Trump, tech workers are building a rank-and-file movement against Trumpism” Excerpted from Rebecca Solnit: “One of the loudest voices in this movement belongs to Maciej Ceglowski, a Polish-American developer and entrepreneur. Ceglowski has long enjoyed a loyal following for his sharp insider critiques of Silicon Valley. Since the election,… Continue reading
“In a way we need to stop looking for definitions of the commons as a notion, as a concept. Because in fact it’s not about a thing. It’s not about a concept. It’s not about something separated from us. It’s another way of being in the world. It’s another way of thinking about the world,… Continue reading
In his remarkably comprehensive and insightful book The Passion of the Western Mind — Understanding the ideas that have shaped our world view, Professor Richard Tarnas (1996) of the California Institute of Integral Studies explores how our conception and perception of nature and our relationship to nature has changed since the time of early Greek… Continue reading
On the evening of the 15th of November – as a kick off to the first European Commons Assembly- a conversation took place between commoners and DiEM25. The conversation explores what it means for the commons movement to become political and how the potential synergies between the commons movement and DiEm25 could look like. On… Continue reading
By Pål Steigan Globalized capitalism has inflicted so many defeats upon the working class and people all over the world that it’s hard to give an account of them. Still, everything isn’t sad. In the middle of all this misery there are glimpses of light – if you know where to look for them. In… Continue reading