How extreme rigtht-wing U.S. billionaires are paying people to rewrite the Wikipedia:
Value in Prosumer practices- and in the Information Economy
Lately there have been many attempts to theorize and criticize value creation in online prosumer practices. A lot of people have proposed some version of the Marxian labor theory of value, whereby they have suggested that online content creation should be seen as a form of labor, and that consequently, social media sites like Facebook,… Continue reading
Degrowth in a context of infinite growth
A critique of the degrowth movement for skirting the issue that we live in a system that is predicated on infinite growth: Excerpted from John Bellamy Foster: 1. “What is known as “degrowth economics,” associated with the work of Serge Latouche in particular, emerged as a major European intellectual movement in 2008 with the historic… Continue reading
The 20th anniversary of Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons
Vol 5, No 1 (2011) of the International Journal of the Commons is dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Ostrom’s landmark book. Excerpted from the editorial by editors Frank van Laerhoven and Erling Berge: (the original has tables and links) “Elinor Ostrom’s Governing the Commons (Ostrom 1990) celebrated its 20th anniversary in 2010. Since its… Continue reading
The Spirit of Davos vs. the Spirit of Porto Alegre
After an interesting and ‘must-read’ analysis of the current world situation and the prospects for change, Immanuel Wallerstein posits the dual alternative that the world population will have to choose from: “All in all, it is not a pretty picture, and brings us to the political question, What can we do in this kind of… Continue reading
Should we worry about capitalist commons?
There is a particular strand of thinking, which we have featured on occasion on our blog, with authors such as Massimo de Angelis of The Commoner, Sylvia Federici and George Caffentzis of Midnight Notes, and Martin Pedersen, who particularly stress the need to be wary, and denounce, tendencies towards ‘capitalist commons’, which in there mind,… Continue reading
The Wisconsin tipping point: rousing speech by Dennis Kucinich in Madison
Worth watching, the rebirth of a mass movement for civic rights in the U.S.: (this point is made explicitely by Kucinich: economic democracy is a precondition to political democracy.) * Video 1: * Video 2: See also: Riz Khan (Al Jazeera) on the attacks on U.S. labour rights, with Ralph Nader:
Chrematistics are masquerading as economics
* Book: Wendell Berry. What Matters? Economics for a Renewed Commonwealth. The following excerpt, which distinguishes chrematistics, the study of individual accumulation, from oikonomia, the study of collective provisioning, is from the foreword by Herman Daly: “What do we economists have to learn from Wendell Berry? Many things, but here I will mention only two…. Continue reading
A serious problem with BitCoin: it wastes energy
Excerpted from Xfin: “With the EFF’s announcement that they would being accepting BitCoin donations, the alternative money community began to take a larger interest. I certainly did, and found that there are good and bad things about this form of money. In the end, BitCoins create a perverse incentive to consume energy to “create money.”… Continue reading
Homebrew Industrial Revolution: Chapter Six, First Excerpt
[Michel Bauwens has kindly invited me to serialize excerpts from my recently published book The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto (you can check it out for free online here). Over the next several weeks, I will conclude with the last series of two excerpts each from Chapters Six and Seven.] Chapter Six. Resilient Communities… Continue reading
Son of ACTA: meet the next secret copyright treaty
So many countries in need of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, so little time! The US government, still trying to secure final passage for the drafted-in-secret Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), has already turned its attention to a new multilateral trade agreement that will bring the wonders of the DMCA to countries like Australia, Brunei, Chile,… Continue reading
P2P and Deliberative Democracy approaches compared
Excerpted from an article Michael Brooks with as main theme: “what’s needs to be done in terms of social change”: “Michel Bauwens, an independent writer and researcher based in Chiang Mai, Thailand, articulates an open peer-to-peer (P2P) politics that extends the practices of open information cultures to a broader political project. P2P politics builds on… Continue reading
Book of the Week: Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution
* Book: Sparking A Worldwide Energy Revolution. Social Struggles in a Transition to a Post-Petrol World. Ed. by Kolya Abramsky. AK Press, 2010 The above is really comprehensive book with many excellent chapters on social movements related to equitable energy provisioning: “a major contribution to the movement working for a transition from carbon capitalism to… Continue reading
The disintegration of work
Mark Pesce predicts that online supply and demand applications will destructure the labor market: “For many years, economists and futurists have discussed the fragmentation and disintegration of the labour market. We’ve seen a steady increase in casual work over the past generation, but we’re at a precipice, about to take a plunge downward, into the… Continue reading
Academic MindTrek 2011
Call for Papers, Posters, Tutorials, Demos, and Workshops 28th-30th September, 2011 Tampere, Finland In cooperation with ACM, ACM SIGMM and ACM SIGCHI publications will be published in the ACM digital library and a selected set of high-level contributions will published as book chapters or in journals We are pleased to invite you to the Academic… Continue reading
An update on collapse thinking and preparedness
Kunstler suggests that “cheap abundant energy” has facilitated ever-increasing industrialization for centuries. But now that society is in a period of self-destructive capital accumulation, he expects debt to increase as abundance in energy drops. The tremendous amount of accumulated debt, “a by-product of cheap abundant energy,” will mean that in the future governments will be… Continue reading