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
Essay of the Day: The Problem of Economic Calculability
* Essay: The Functionalist Theory of Society and the Problem of Socialist Economic Calculability. (A Rejoinder to Professor L. von Mises and Dr. Feliz Weil). By Karl Polanyi. Archiv fur Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik, Vol. LII, 1924, pp. 218-227. Market, planning or mutual coordination? An early classic on the topic. This goes back to the time… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Rosetta Languages Preservation Project
Rosetta Languages Preservation Project By Michele Lent Hirsch: “Several people-powered efforts come out of the Long Now Foundation’s Rosetta Project (which is not related to the Rosetta Stone software, though that company does have an endangered languages program). One is called a Record-a-Thon. In this grassroots series of events, community members gather together to record the… Continue reading