Cross-posted from Shareable. The oceans were the original global commons, shed and navigated for ages. But new technologies have added numerous challenges to sustaining our oceans: offshore oil drilling, deep-sea mining, and overfishing. However, it’s crucial that water, both freshwater and saltwater, remains a commons and held in the public trust, because access to clean… Continue reading
Douglas Rushkoff: Last year, I got invited to a super-deluxe private resort to deliver a keynote speech to what I assumed would be a hundred or so investment bankers. It was by far the largest fee I had ever been offered for a talk — about half my annual professor’s salary — all to deliver some insight on the… Continue reading
Originally published on The Conversation Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran: There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable? We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens: When we look at the emerging crypto economy, it is very important to disentangle the two co-mingled and contradictory aspirations that it can represent. We said this at the very beginning from bitcoin: it represents the first socially sovereign currency at scale, and moreover it is strongly based on open source / commons… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens: This is probably the best overview essay to understand the socio-political implications of blockchain designs. Sarah Manski describes seven technological characteristics that are seed forms for different socio-technical systems and societies, which we will publish separately in a second installment. At the P2P Foundation we strongly believe in the necessity of a commons-centric… Continue reading
The Rise of the Data Oligarchs: Power and Accountability in the Digital Economy Part I: Data Collection New technology isn’t disrupting power – it’s reinforcing it Republished from New Economics Foundation Duncan McCann: A new economy is emerging. And this new economy is powered by a new type of fuel: data. As the data economy… Continue reading
Exhibition Furtherfield Gallery Saturday 14 Jul until Sunday 19 Aug 2018 Open Sat – Sun, 11:00 – 17:00 or by appointment – Admission Free Would you like to monetise your social relations? Learn from hostile designs? Take part in (unwitting) data extractions in exchange for public services? Examining the way that the boundaries between ‘play’… Continue reading
Marxist authors often misunderstand us, because the P2P Foundation uses a socially reconstructive approach, rather than a critical approach, and subsumes conflict to reconstruction. It absolutely does NOT mean we ignore or deny conflict, but rather that we play a specialized role accompanying the reconstructive moment, which will always co-exist with the conflictual forces that… Continue reading
Originally published as work in progress, in FoP RoP – Forces of production, relations of production. Mike Hales: Here’s a libertarian socialist addressing a pluriverse1: • Many co-existing forms of commoning, in a world of profuse and inescapable difference/diversity; also, of abundance not scarcity. • Seeing commoning as a material relation that communities and resources… Continue reading
Amador Fernández-Savater speaks to Catalan-Mexican writer and activist Guiomar Rovira about collective action, technologies, the online, “off-life” divide and more. After the fall of the Soviet Union in the mid-nineties, there was much talk of pensée unique, singlemindedness or “single thought”[1]: a discourse affirming market democracy as the only imaginable and discernable framework for common… Continue reading
There are very few shelters for homeless people in India, and those that do exist are primarily for men. In 2001 ActionAid India launched Aashray Adhikar Abhiyan – an intervention to create a nationwide network of homeless shelters that has pushed the number of shelters in Delhi from 10 to 269. In India, homeless people… Continue reading
In the face of environmental crises and global inequality, how can we work together for more sustainable futures? What can we learn from great transitions and transformations of the past? How did we do that? The possibility of Rapid Transition, by Andrew Simms and Peter Newell, STEPS Centre & New Weather Institute, 2017 shows what… Continue reading
Martijn Arets: At the Open Coop conference in London I interviewed Maru Bautista, Director of the Cooperative Development Program at the Center for Family Life in Brooklyn, New York. For the past 5 years, she has worked with her team and the Sunset Park community to strengthen immigrant-led worker cooperatives in New York City. She… Continue reading
Republished from Aral Balkan Mariana Mazzucato1 has an article in MIT Technology Review titled Let’s make private data into a public good. Let’s not. While Mariana’s criticisms of surveillance capitalism are spot on, her proposed remedy is as far from the mark as it possibly could be. Yes, surveillance capitalism is bad Mariana starts off… Continue reading
Republished from Stop.zona-m.net with the author’s permission Marco Fioretti: A landmark legal decision makes it possible for everybody to make their own, untraceable assault rifles at home. What now? Radical gunsmith Cody Wilson, says Wired, just “won the right to distribute digital blueprints for DIY untraceable weapons -including AR-15s. Now anyone can make them”. What… Continue reading
By Calimaq; original article in French translated by Maïa Dereva (with DeepL) and edited by Ann Marie Utratel Last week, Katherine Maher, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, published a rather surprising article on the Wired site entitled: “Facebook and Google must do more to support Wikipedia”. The starting point of her reasoning was… Continue reading