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
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
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
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
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
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? 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
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