Date archives "August 2018"

Code Podcast: P2P, People to People

The Internet didn’t quite deliver on its original promise and today we’re talking with people who are fixing it.” We’re very glad that Andrey Salomatin, creator of Code podcast (see original post here), got in touch to let us know about this recent podcast on what’s happening lately in P2P decentralized web development. If you’re… Continue reading

Money Matters! Why Monetary Theory and Policy Is a Critical Terrain For the Left

A panel moderated by Gar Alperovitz, Co-Chair of The Next System Project and featuring Pavlina Tcherna (Associate Professor and Chair at the Department of Economics at Bard College), Stephanie Kelton (Professor of Public Policy & Economics at Stony Brook University), Michael Hudson (President of The Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trends (ISLET) and Raúl Carrillo… Continue reading

Art, Debt, Health, and Care: an Interview with Cassie Thornton

Since the financial crash 10 years ago, we’ve learned that it tends to be everyday people, on the ground, who pick up the pieces and not governments. Millions have been dragged into poverty while those who caused the “crisis”, after creating dangerously high levels of private debt, remain unscathed. 1 The UK Conservative government’s response was an… Continue reading

Brett Scott: Hardcoding ethics into fintech – Conscious FinTech Talk

“A significant amount of fintech innovation can best be understood as the automation of traditional finance“ In his talk Brett Scott will present his latest paper called “Hardcoding ethics into fintech” (awarded a “Ethics & Trust in Finance Global Prize”). The paper describes finance as a realm of monetary contracts and reflects on the ethical… Continue reading

Indra Adnan On Is Politics Broken? (And Here Is The Alternative)

https://episodes.castos.com/OuiShare/Indra-and-bernie-finished-1-1-.mp3   Indra Adnan is Co-Initiator of The Alternative UK – part of a global network of political platforms originating with Alternativet in Denmark. Her commitment is to grassroots politics that release the power of people and communities in ways that sustain the planet. She is concurrently a journalist (The Guardian, Huffington Post), a psychotherapist (Human Givens Institute), founder of… Continue reading

The Lucas Plan: a Documentary

The Plan That Came From The Bottom Up 40 years ago a group of skilled engineers at Lucas Aerospace UK, when threatened with redundancy, responded with an ambitious plan to make better use of their talents – designing what they called socially useful and environmentally sustainable alternatives to the military products their company made. THE… Continue reading

Climate breakdown: where is the left?

Republished from New Economics Foundation Climate change is fuelling record temperatures and sweeping fires, but the progressive response is lacking. David Powell, Head of Environment & Green Transition: The newspapers read like something from a dystopian sci-fi film about a world ravaged by climate breakdown. But it’s today, and it’s real. Heat records are being… Continue reading

Essay of the day: Data by the people, for the people: why it’s time for councils to reclaim the smart city

Republished from City Metric Theo Bass: European laws have ushered in a new era in how companies and governments manage and promote responsible use of personal data. Yet it is the city that looks set to be one of the major battlegrounds in a shift towards greater individual rights, where expectations of privacy and fair… Continue reading

Tokens as a Labor Model

Two years ago, we published a report on Value in the Commons Economy, in which we analyzed the value regime of a number of pioneering peer production projects such as Sensorica and Backfeed. In that report, we posited a sphere of ‘value sovereignty’, within the sphere of the commons, and a membrane between the commons… Continue reading

How to Create a Bottom-Up Stimulus Machine to Fix Capitalism

Republished from Evonomics Virtuous rent: a rudder that can transform our economy. Peter Barnes: The London Underground abounds with warnings to “mind the gap,” referring to the space between station platforms and train doors. In our larger society similar warnings could be issued for the gaps between rich and poor and between humans and nature…. Continue reading

Urban DIY Mesh Networks and the Right to the City: An Interview with the Tapullo Collective

Republished from JOPP By Anke Schwarz PART I: Interview with members of the Tapullo collective, Genoa 29 May, 2017 — Building something together is in itself a good way to create a community Wireless community networks have been around for a while, but are regaining some attention these days as means of strengthening local interaction… Continue reading

Guardians of the Property: Pop-up Housing for Pop-up People

Across London and other European cities, a new way of living is taking root: property guardianship. Blocks of flats, police stations, social housing, libraries, offices, warehouses, schools – buildings that have been taken out of use – are occupied by a new anti-squatting measure: people who guard property by living in it. Whilst ostensibly a… Continue reading

Book of the day: Total Urban Mobilisation and the Post-Capitalist City

Michel Bauwens: In the p2p/commons literature of a few years ago, we introduced a way of thinking about the world that challenges the ‘accumulation of capital’ with the ‘accumulation of the common’. There is a tendency to think of this as accumulating simply capital resources of another kind, i.e. for investing (‘transvestment’) in commons-based shared… Continue reading

Deep Adaptation: A Map for Navigating Climate Tragedy

Michel Bauwens: Particularly after this season’s climate issues, the heat wave in Europe, the fires in California, the earlier devastation of Puerto Rico … it becomes harder and harder to deny the reality of the dangers of climate change. But this is not the end of the story as we can expect negative feedback loops… Continue reading

Do the global poor care about climate change?

Do the global poor care about climate change? I was struck by that question at the National Peace Symposium that I attended and wrote about last month. The Caliph of the Ahmadyya Muslim Community spoke about how we need world leaders to prioritize helping the poor out of poverty in the same urgent manner as… Continue reading