Every day, the U.S. government sweeps up the emails, text messages, and other online communications of millions of innocent Americans. Congress has a chance to rein in this unconstitutional spying when a key surveillance authority expires at the end of this year. An important campaign by our friends at the EFF. Read this article for… Continue reading
The Charter of the Forest was sealed 800 years ago. Its defence of the property-less and of ‘the commons’, means the Right would prefer to ignore it – and progressives need to celebrate and renew it. Dr. Guy Standing talks about the Charter of the Forest and its relevance 800 years on. Originally published in… Continue reading
I want to learn how to do more effective political organising, so I’m exploring how social change happens in spaces that don’t look much like meetings. I’m thinking of the punks in the 70s, or the hackathons I visited in Taiwan as 1000s of young people successfully rewrote the political logic of their nation. Not… Continue reading
Given the material abundance made possible by the replicator, how would it be possible to maintain a system based on money, profit, and class power? It doesn’t get much more dystopian than this: what if all distributed manufacturing technologies are enclosed by the logic of netarchical capitalism? This is no fantasy. In their 2017 report,… Continue reading
“University-wide decisions should be made through collective councils of students, faculty, staff, and members of our communities; Finances should be determined through participatory budgeting processes. A co-op college would center supporting students, faculty, and community leaders with the understanding that once they’re taken care of, incredible, creative projects and research will flourish.” Trebor Scholz interviews… Continue reading
Join us at 42 Acres Shoreditch for our on-going Social Change series, where economist, international journalist, and host of the Upstream Podcast Della Z Duncan will take us on a journey upstream as we explore how we can reclaim the field of economics and radically transform our current economic system. The world is undergoing a… Continue reading
Enric Senabre Hidalgo: If there were to be a formula to describe Goteo, an online platform based in Barcelona with European and Latin American scope, it could be expressed simply: Hacktivism + crowdfunding + wide social collaboration = the building of new commons Each of these activities has always existed separately, of course, but it was… Continue reading
I’ve just spent 5 days at Web of Change: a gathering of 80 progressive organisers and political technologists in Klahoose territory in British Columbia. They call it a conference, but I’d call it a retreat: a mini utopia set apart from our everyday reality. It was profound, complex, moving. I formed extraordinary bonds with people,… Continue reading
The Catalan Integral Cooperative (CIC) has been a great source of inspiration for a new generation of cooperative projects around the world, which want to build an autonomous (from the state and capitalist market) economy by adapting the ‘CIC model’ to their local needs. A characteristic example is the Integral Cooperative of Heraklion (ICH) in… Continue reading
Making Crypto Safe for the Mainstream I’ve been thinking a lot about how to make ICOs really solid, ethical, lasting sources of good. However, at the heart of an ICO is the “C” — the cryptocurrency which is being offered. How can we really get to ethical ICOs when cryptocurrencies themselves aren’t ready to serve mainstream needs?… Continue reading
Jason Hickel: Earlier this summer, a paper published in the journal Nature captured headlines with a rather bleak forecast. Our chances of keeping global warming below the 2C danger threshold are very, very small: only about 5%. The reason, according to the paper’s authors, is that the cuts we’re making to greenhouse gas emissions are being cancelled… Continue reading
This year’s Platform Cooperativism conference is titled “The People’s Disruption: Platform Co-ops for Global Challenges” and will take place at the New School in New York City on November 10th and 11th. On its eve we’d like to present some of the outcomes of last year’s conference “Building the Cooperative Internet“. The following content was originally published… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Aaron Fernando: The staff at the nonprofit organization HullCoin has done something very unusual in the city of Hull in northeast United Kingdom. Residents of Hull can earn HullCoins, which can be used at various places around the city. It’s an innovative model. But how exactly does it work? To learn more… Continue reading
Like every healthy movement, the Social & Solidarity Economy (SSE) needs structures and tools that promote its principles and ensure its autonomy. Unfortunately, with regard to the tools it uses, it remains captive to the various ‘closed’ technologies it is supplied with by mainstream companies. To realize how important that is, one must take into… Continue reading
The way ahead will be based on a combination of knowledge obtained remotely, using modern tools and devices, and ways of knowing that are local, experienced directly, contextual, and embodied. When we connect with living systems emotionally, and not just rationally, and focus on the informal, the local and the conversational – things will really… Continue reading
One way to empower local communities and their regional economies to manifest their visions of a better future is to re-localize production and consumption and thereby strengthen regional economies. There is an important role for international trade and global exchange of goods and services, but not when it comes to meeting basic regional needs. Wherever… Continue reading