On the eve of the European Commons Assembly held in Madrid this week, we asked the participants to introduce themselves and their projects. Click on the titles below to jump to the different sections and join us at the assembly, if possible. Demetra Commons Josaphat Ministry of Space Groupe Chronos MediaLab-UGR Tenants Union Madrid Don’t… Continue reading
Short-term campaigns versus building the beloved community: what are the real costs and benefits of pre-figurative politics? Mark and Paul Engler explore the tensions – and joys – of prefigurative politics. Originally published in Waging Nonviolence. Mark Engler and Paul Engler: It is an old question in social movements: Should we fight the system or “be… Continue reading
Something is deeply wrong with the way the world works. You know it, and I know it. We are told everyday that unfettered economic growth and the accumulation of personal wealth is desirable, yet, though we may not always have the words to challenge it, we know the mantra ‘greed is good’ cannot be true:… Continue reading
In this Upstream Conversation we spoke with author Alex S. Vitale about his new book, “The End of Policing,” which was published by Verso Books on October 10th, 2017. Alex Vitale’s work is based on a deep examination and structural critique of the fundamental nature of policing. Vitale stresses that it’s not enough to enact… Continue reading
In the essay below, Yochai Benkler answers convincingly in our opinion, to some standard critiques such as 1) that peer production did not occur or ‘failed’ and 2) that Yochai Benkler’s writings ignored power and 3) insufficiently predicted the emergence of new market powers. In his response, Prof. Benkler shows that the emergence of peer… Continue reading
Nathan Schneider is interviewed on Platform Cooperativism for the book Tech Against Trump. This excerpt was originally published in Logic Magazine: Over the past few years, journalist Nathan Schneider has become a leading advocate for “platform cooperativism.” Together with the scholar and activist Trebor Scholz, Nathan co-organized the first conference on platform cooperativism at the… Continue reading
The policy of guaranteeing every citizen a universal basic income is gaining support around the world, as automation increasingly makes jobs obsolete. But can it be funded without raising taxes or triggering hyperinflation? In a panel I was on at the NexusEarth cryptocurrency conference in Aspen September 21-23rd, most participants said no. This is my… Continue reading
Jukka Peltokoski, Niklas Toivakainen, Tero Toivanen and Ruby van der Wekken: In October 2009, while expecting another futile climate summit in nearby Copenhagen, a small group of friends in the Kumpula neighborhood of Helsinki got together to discuss practical alternatives. Surely there was something that could be done by people themselves! The result of that… Continue reading
Vasilis Kostakis and Jose Ramos: What if globally designed products could radically change how we work, produce and consume? Several examples across continents show the way we are producing and consuming goods could be improved by relying on globally shared digital resources, such as design, knowledge and software. Imagine a prosthetic hand designed by geographically… Continue reading
Jason Hickel: You can almost feel the planet writhing. This summer brought some of the biggest, most destructive storms in recorded history: Harvey laid waste to huge swathes of Texas; Irma left Barbuda virtually uninhabitable; Maria ravaged Dominica and plunged Puerto Rico into darkness. The images we see in the media are almost too violent to… Continue reading
Traditional anti-capitalism focused on the ownership of the means of production, yet the modern capitalist doesn’t even want to own the means of production, they want to own the very right to produce. To control the ideas required to produce and simply charge rents for these ideas. This short text by Dmytri Kleiner was originally… Continue reading
What we are adept at is digital labor (consider the time and effort we have already put into this posting without recompense), but we have yet to define or form much of an identity around our input or output of information labor. Information may ‘want to be free’, but information labor wants be rewarded in… Continue reading
Our colleagues at Furtherfield have a new book out on the Blockchain, its social implications and its role as an artistic subject. Check it out here. Description The blockchain is widely heralded as the new internet – another dimension in an ever-faster, ever-more-powerful interlocking of ideas, actions and values. Principally the blockchain is a ledger… Continue reading
The crisis of the European Union begs for new, unifying and constructive narratives – alternatives to the right-wing populist and nationalist wave getting fiercer every day. A commons approach holds the potential for a unified vision towards an alternative economy, a Europe from the bottom up and an ecological economy and way of life. The… Continue reading
Mix Irving: I believe in a free and open web. Over the past 3 years, friends and I have been growing and shaping an ecosystem for that purpose — for many, it’s now our primary way of communicating. It’s built with cryptography and is p2p. The result is a system with fundamentally different behaviours than the old web…. Continue reading
There is a genre of landscape painting from the 17th and 18th centuries that ought to give us cause for reflection. They are paintings of Italian landscapes where goatherds and their flocks wander amongst the ruins of Roman aqueducts, bridges and temples. The fascinating thing about them is that they depict a European society which, more than… Continue reading