Slavoj Zizek, making a lot of sense as usual. Watch the video here:
Book of the Day: Re-Thinking Social Protection as a Commons
* Book: Francine Mestrum: Building Another World: Re-thinking Social Protection. Global Social Justice, 2013 Francine Mestrum writes: “It is a proposal for a new concept of social protection, which is particularly important at the moment that international organizations start to make their proposals for ‘social protection’. The ILO came out with its ‘social protection floors’,… Continue reading
MOOCs and Big Data vs. Labor and Gender Discrimination
“Soon, your MOOC performance will be sold to online recruiters taking advantage of the kinds of information that big data allows—fine distinctions not only on content assimilation but also participation, contribution to, and status within associated online communities. But what if these new possibilities—used by recruiters and managers to efficiently and objectively get the best… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations
Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations * Article: Spooky Business: Corporate Espionage Against Nonprofit Organizations. By Gary Ruskin – Essential Information, 2013. Report on corporate espionage/surveillance of nonprofit advocacy groups. Executive Summary “This report is an effort to document something we know little about: corporate espionage against nonprofit organizations. The entire subject is veiled in secrecy. In… Continue reading
Creating buildings and environments that support life (Interview with Nikos Salingaros)
Click on the play button below to listen to the interview: Interview with Nikos Salingaros by James Alexander Arnfinsen, originally published by Levevei.no Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 1:07:46 — 62.0MB) “In this episode I have the delight of connecting with Nikos Salingaros, who is a Professor in Mathematics, an Urbanist and Architectural Theorist. He is originally from Greece, but… Continue reading
Restructuring the economy with empathy as its center
Democracy is lost unless we re-structure our economies, and re-structuring our economies requires a new operating system based on different values. That’s what empathy provides, not in its “thin” form as a vague appreciation of peoples’ feelings, but in its “thick” form that commits everyone to foster the wellbeing of others, and do no harm…. Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Economy of Contribution in the Digital Commons
* Article: Andreas Wittel (2013) Counter-commodification: The economy of contribution in the digital commons, Culture and Organization, 19:4, 314-331 (a free downloadable copy is available here) Andreas Wittel writes: “I have recently published an article where I try to explain why the difficulties in building the digital commons are not due to the exploitation of free… Continue reading
The Vacation Credit Labor System as the Benedictine Rule for emerging post-capitalist times
“Now with the vacation-credit labor system, secular communal society has what Catholic monasticism has had with Benedict’s Rule, a means of organizing a communal, labor-sharing economy without the use of money, and in the case of egalitarian community, with a participatory as opposed to an authoritarian form of governance. Kat Kinkade’s labor system innovation may… Continue reading
There is no such thing as a sharing economy
My neighbor and I share a snow shovel because we share some stairs that need to be shoveled when it snows and we share responsibility for doing the work. If I owned the stairs and charged him a small fee every time he walked in our out of the house, that would be the opposite… Continue reading
Co-operative place making and the capturing of land value for the 21st century
* Report: Commons Sense: Co-operative place making and the capturing of land value for 21st century Garden Cities. Mike Lewis and Pat Conaty. Co-operatives UK, 2013. David Bollier discusses the findings and recommendations of this report: “By converting land into commonwealth – capturing escalating land values for everyone’s benefit – it is possible to make… Continue reading
Book of the Day: How to Build Your Own Hardware and Reduce Research Costs
“It is a basic how to manual for young faculty and I am not exaggerating on the cost savings – for example to outfit an undergrad optics lab the costs drop from $15,000 to about $500 for equipment of equal performance. Research grade equipment cost savings are even more substantial. As a scientist and a… Continue reading
Selected Citations on Peer to Peer Media
For the sources, see here: * Algorithmic Authority Algorithmic authority is the decision to regard as authoritative an unmanaged process of extracting value from diverse, untrustworthy sources, without any human standing beside the result saying “Trust this because you trust me.” This model of authority differs from personal or institutional authority. … Algorithmic authority handles… Continue reading
Julian Assange’s Christmas address from Ecuador embassy in London
To watch without fail, inspiring: (it’s from last year, but still as fresh as then)
Indy Johar on the Future of Capitalism and the Firm
How we moved from deskilling, diseconomies of scale, and centralized economic processes towards distributed knowledge, and what does it mean for the corporate forms that we need? Watch the video here:
The time has come to socialize social media as the public utilities that they are!
Social media services can ultimately be run as public utilities, ad-free, at cost, in a democratic spirit and for social ends, in their enormous variety—or else digital society can become ever more subservient to the single end of the accumulation of private capital. The choice is between social life as an advertising platform and socialized… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Buerger Energie Berlin (Berlin Energy Co-op)
Buerger Energie Berlin (Berlin Energy Co-op) [link above in German] Buerger Energie Berlin is a citizen run cooperative project to take the operation of the Berlin electricity grid under citizen control. The Guardian, Suzanne Goldberg writes: “Arwen Colell was cycling down a Berlin street one afternoon when a friend from her choir group called her… Continue reading