Though described as a two-part introduction to dialectics, this is actually a very interesting treatment of science and power throughout history, showing a great erudition and passion. One of the things mentioned at the beginning is how Caribbean cigar workers used to educate themselves by hiring teachers to read aloud on history and science while… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Sauti Ya Wakulima in Tanzania
Sauti ya wakulima, “The voice of the farmers”, is a collaborative knowledge base created by farmers from the Chambezi region of the Bagamoyo District in Tanzania by gathering audiovisual evidence of their practices using smartphones to publish images and voice recordings on the Internet. The project website explains what it is about: ‘The participants of… Continue reading
Book of the Day: The Intention Economy
* Book: Doc Searls. The Intention Economy. Excerpted from an in-depth review by John Hagel: “We’ve long known that customers are gaining power in markets around the world as they tap into the twin forces of digital technology and economic liberalization. They are able to access more and more information about products and vendors and… Continue reading
The P2P Revolution in Transportation (2): moving things
“The Autonomous Roadless Intelligent Array (ARIA) is an open source autonomous logistics infrastructure that leapfrogs traditional road infrastructure”. At Burning Man 2012 and after: “ARIA and ReAllocate.org are developing an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS). We will be delivering a system that is capable of tracking a person (via GPS-enabled tracker) and delivering a payload to… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Banco Palmas in Brazil
The Banco Palmas in the Palmeira precinct of Fortaleza/Brazil is a bank that emits a local currency. The bank offers credits in the local currency (interest-free) and in Brazil’s national currency (interest rate 2%). For a fee of 1%, amounts in local currency can be swapped with the national currency (ratio 2:1). Stemming from a… Continue reading
The P2P Revolution in Transportation (1): moving people
If citizens can’t get the transportation systems they need from governments, we’ll have no choice to make new ones ourselves. A good summary of what’s happening in the field of transportation (U.S. examples), mostly through enterpreneurial initiatives, excerpted from SEMIL SHAH: “A decade into the 21st Century, oftentimes it feels easier to get from JFK… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Inside the Global Cyber Insurgency
* Book: We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World of LulzSec, Anonymous and the Global Cyber Insurgency. Parmy Olson. “Journalist Parmy Olson spent a year researching Anonymous, the loosely defined hacker collective that’s antagonized everyone from the Church of Scientology to PayPal to the CIA. Her new book, We Are Anonymous: Inside the Hacker World… Continue reading
Consent cannot justify human exploitation!
An important argument, excerpted from David Ellerman: A critique of the consent versus coercion framing In many debates of a political or economic nature, I find myself again and again arguing with people on both the left and right who take the consent-vs.-coercion framing of political and economic issues as fundamental. Those on the right… Continue reading
Project of the Day: the Great Lakes Commons Map
‘I can’t help but think that future adaptations of the Ushahidi platform could help commoners elswhere recover their stewardship rights over nature. The Balkans, Africa and Latin America spring to mind. The software has a wonderful capacity to aggregate a dispersed public that otherwise has few opportunities to come together as a self-aware, deliberative body… Continue reading
Time wars: our finite lives frittered away by the neoliberal machine
Cory Doctorow introduces the remarkable essay, Time-wars’ by Mark Fisher: The system distributes the gains of automation so unevenly that a tragically overworked class is pitted against a tragically unemployed class. Meanwhile, the only resource that is truly non-renewable — the time of our lives — is frittered away in “work” that we do because… Continue reading
Towards a civic membership model for newspapers
Though based on the U.S. situation, this Al Jazeera conversation on the future of newspaper, featuring Clay Shirky, is interesting and sees Shirky arguing for going from a ‘product sale’ vision of newspaper production, to one with a civic membership orientation. Watch the video here:
Book of the Day: How Networks Can Revolutionise the World
Network effects, the fact that a person can and often does decide to change his or her preferences simply on the basis of what others do, pervade the modern world. * Book: Positive Linking: How Networks Can Revolutionise the World. By Paul Ormerod. Faber and Faber, 2012. Here is the publisher’s summary: ‘According to Paul… Continue reading
Towards a Legal Framework for the Commons
As proposed by Tommaso Fattori, ‘Commons: towards a legal framework‘: “It is commonly acknowledged that there is a legislative gap concerning the protection and recognition of the sphere of Commons (1). The consequence of these inadequate legal guarantees is the extreme vulnerability of Commons, which remain without protection from processes of “enclosure”, due both to… Continue reading
Terrace-Type Organisations and other p2p intuitions from the world of marketing
Interesting vision of the coming p2p society from a Dutch trendwatcher working to prepare corporations for what’s coming, by Lidewij Edelkoort:
Book of the Day: What Ecology Can Teach Us about Responsible Media Practice
The French theologian Pierre Teilhard de Chardin argued that if the biosphere is all that contains life on Earth, then a noosphere contains our collective consciousness. The semiotic version of a noosphere is the semiosphere, which is the totality of human signs and symbols. Anthropologist Wade Davis envisions an ethnosphere, which contains the totality of… Continue reading
The Public – Commons Partnership and the Commonification of that which is “Public”
A crucial intervention by Tommaso Fattori: (this is the future of p2p politics and commons policy making!) “The field of Commons can be for the most part identified with a public but not-state arena, in which the actions of the individuals who collectively take care of, produce and share the Commons are decisive and fundamental…. Continue reading