This is from the official announcement on my cooperation with this great and important project, which aims to create transition policies for the Ecuadorian people and government: Via Bethany Horne, FLOK Society: “The FLOK Society welcomes Michel Bauwens to Ecuador. Bauwens, a founder of the P2P Foundation, flew into Quito on Sept. 17 to begin… Continue reading
Imagining the real when the real is imaginary/1
About the Authors: Jim Fearnley and Chris Pinchen are miners at the rock-face of the excavation of the Northwest Passage. Jim can be found on twitter and facebook This 2-part piece aims to locate cybernetic systems theory and digital developments within the context of the now-structural economic ‘crisis’ and project of world libertarian communism, or… Continue reading
How private capital erodes the commons, both online and offline (1)
Excerpted from Tom Slee: (in the second installment, Tom Slee looks at 3 mechanisms of appropriation) “Cities have long been sites of commons and commerce: full of trade and private enterprise but shaped by parks and streetscapes, neighborhoods and rhythms of daily life that grow from non-commodified sharing. In his 2012 book Rebel Cities, David… Continue reading
Proposal: A Cooperative Strategy for Distributed Renewable Energy (1)
Excerpted from Kevin Carson and Keith Taylor: “”A public policy geared toward the public good whether it comes from the government, business or local level communities, would seek to mitigate neoliberal development models which act more like leaches than community symbiots. Public policy should not be used to privilege the existent destructive corporate order, but… Continue reading
Why the win-win tactics of the green movement is leading to a Big (strategic) Loss on climate change
Excerpts from a hard-hitting interview with Naomi Klein. Interview conducted by JASON MARK. “* Why do you think that some environmentalists are resistant to grappling with climate change’s implications for the market and for economics? Well, I think there is a very deep denialism in the environmental movement among the Big Green groups. And to… Continue reading
When Ephemeralization is Hard to Tell from Catabolic Collapse
My main problem with the Jared Diamond/John Michael Greer/William Kunstler theory of “catabolic collapse” is that ignores one of the most central distinguishing characteristics of our technology: ephemerality. Thanks to technological change, over the past few decades the capital-intensiveness of emerging successor infrastructures has been collapsing faster than the existing infrastructure itself. The classic example,… Continue reading
Current capitalism as an enclosure of labor
Excerpted from Kevin Carson, reacting to the attacks of Eric Raymond on the striking fast food workers: “Labor is different from other factors of production in one regard. Owners of land and capital will dispose of their full supply, guided only by one consideration: Revenue maximization. If labor were governed by the same law, workers… Continue reading
How does extreme manufacturing work
Jeff Sutherland explains the methodological ideas behind the Xtreme Manufacturing process used to design the WikiSpeed cars: First have a look at this graphic: “The diagram on your right shows the elements Joe combines to generate the process efficiencies XM achieves. As you can see most of the concepts like iterative development, continuous improvement and… Continue reading
Loomio’s Ben Knight on How Technology Can Transform Democracy
“Ben Knight is part of a cooperative social enterprise building Loomio, an online tool for collaborative decision-making being used by thousands of people in more than 20 countries. Ben will be picking through ideas around how technology can enable everyday democracy.” Watch the video here:
Project of the Day: Panthbadodiya Basic Income
Panthbadodiya Basic Income by Benjamin Fernandez The village of Panthbadodiya lies 30km south of Indore, in Madhya Pradesh. Known as the “Heart of India”, this central state has the country’s highest levels of malnutrition and largest tribal population. The ethnic majority here are the Bhil: under the classification system inherited from the British administration they… Continue reading