Three items here. First a summary of Evgeny Morozov’s treatment of Tim O’Reilly as the bogeyman that distorted “open government” into a dystopia. Amidst the mischaracterisations and polarization features that are the hallmark of Morozov’s interventions, there lies a good point that standard open government approaches may be too reformist and simplyfying. But I fundamentally… Continue reading
A critique of Strategic-Instrumental Rationality
Excerpted from JOE CORBETT: “In his theory of communicative action, Jurgen Habermas spoke of ‘the grammars of the forms of life’, the human socio-cultural expressions of these emergent quantum-archetypal forms, which are the aesthetic-expressive (beauty), moral-communal (goodness), instrumental-technical (truth), and strategic-political (justice) forms of rationality that constitute human psychological, cultural, and social existence. Strategic-instrumental rationality… Continue reading
Chris Cook: P2P Exchanges should be distinguished from peer production, but both are p2p
Chris Cook has respnded to my thesis that P2P Marketplaces are not “peer to peer” as I understand it, which requires the common construction of value. He writes in various comments: 1. “Peer to Peer exchange (which may or may not involve the time delay and credit which gives rise to a monetary relationship) is… Continue reading
On the viral spread of the Brazilian protests
Excerpted from the New Scientist, where Debora MacKenzie writes that the “Brazil uprising points to rise of leaderless networks“: (the original article has links) “Brazil’s uprising came “totally out of the blue”, says Marcus de Aguiar at the University of Campinas in São Paulo, Brazil. “We never had anything like this before.” It began when… Continue reading
Against spiritual authoritarianism (1): Andrew Cohen steps down ?
One of my personal interests related to the P2P philosophy is the fight against spiritual authoritarianism. In this context, the stepping down of the abusive guru Andrew Cohen, seems like a piece of hopeful news. We reproduce in full the article by Hal Blacker, founder of the critical What Enlightenment blog which first collected the… Continue reading
Against Jaron Lanier: financing the commons without commodifying it
I must make a confession, I have not yet read Jaron Lanier, and I am reluctant to do so. The two ‘trivial’ reasons are that 1) I remember Lanier’s inane comments on digital maoism 2) he continuously uses the straw men argument that “information wants to be free”, means gratis, and that has of course,… Continue reading
Enlightenment Era Coffeehouses as Social Network Sites
Excerpted from Tom Standage: “Like coffee itself, coffeehouses were an import from the Arab world. England’s first coffeehouse opened in Oxford in the early 1650s, and hundreds of similar establishments sprang up in London and other cities in the following years. People went to coffeehouses not just to drink coffee, but to read and discuss… Continue reading
Public Education as a Commons
Public education should not be over-centralized, argues John Michael Greer, in the context of the USA: “There are a few—a very few—things that can usefully be done for education at the national level. One of them is to make sure that the child in Lincoln is not denied equal access to education because of her… Continue reading
Brazil: from a consumer inclusion model to a citizen inclusion model
We salute the protests, because the streets are the cradle of democracy. In History, the streets are the place where struggles are born and end up not only reaching the epicenter of political power, but also alternating the arenas and political agendas, forcing everyone of us to revisit our practices and proposals. On democratic regimes,… Continue reading
A social-democratic(ish) response to Kevin Carson’s anarcho-libertarian P2P-ism
Patrick S. had an interesting reaction to an earlier posting by Kevin Carson: “As usual, Kevin makes some very strong points, but as usual, I feel he also tends to overstate his anarcho-libertarian case in a few places in a way that I feel deserves a (hopefully not over-long) response. I do agree with aspects… Continue reading