The following article explains the radicality of the open value accounting approach as an alternative for the ‘capitalist’ open hardware model. Key question: to split or not to split market and community? 1. So why is the open value network a menace to current OSHW business models? Because by abolishing the distinction between the commercial… Continue reading
Thinking about new p2p forms of habitat
So that’s some of what’s occupying my mind these days. An update from our p2p-urbanistic correspondent Eric Hunting: “Most of my own thinking about urbanism has revolved around the development of new communities and habitats and how we adapt our civilization to the logistics of renewables and the progressively decentralized/de-massified industry and economics of the… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Alternative Economies Resource Guide
A guide to alternative and sustainable urban living and livelyhoods by the Alternative Economies Subgroup of OWS Arts and Labor. The official title is: What Do We Do Now? The group writes: “This list has been compiled collaboratively by members of the OWS Arts & Labor Alternative Economies group to increase the visibility of and… Continue reading
Project of the Day: La Cura, open sourcing individual health efforts for collective benefit
= “La Cura”, a global art performance open sourcing the health efforts of Salvatore Iaconese, diagnosed with a brain tumor. An introduction: “Salvatore was not really satisfied with medicine’s approach to his illness. As he said many times: “I felt as if I disappeared”. Doctors are, obviously, the “good guys”: they are people who save… Continue reading
The Spark: documentary about p2p resilience and thrivability experiments
THE SPARK is a documentary about a genius technologist and a rebel educator, two pioneers from opposite spectrums with one goal in common: Build a sustainable community. Exclusive footage from the Open Source Ecology farm in Missouri and from an urban farming in disadvantaged Afro-American neighborhoods in the U.S. Watch the trailer here: The Spark… Continue reading
Project of the Day: Open Tech Forever
OTF is an open source hardware cooperative that wants to create an ecology for open factories. They´re launching a crowdfunding campaign, see below. Here´s a short intro to their activities: ” We’ll be developing open source hardware, producing and selling some for income, and doing some training and capital assistance programs. Johnathan is starting an… Continue reading
Incredible Edible Todmorden
“A short film highlighting the work of radical new food growing movement ‘Incredible Edible Todmorden’.” Incredible Edible Todmorden from haymedia on Vimeo.
Book of the Day: Greening Through IT
* Book: Greening Through IT: Information Technology for Environmental Sustainability. by Bill Tomlinson. The MIT Press, Cambridge, London, USA, UK, 2010 Review excerpted from Rob Harle: “Greening through IT is well written, incredibly well researched, and most timely. There is no doubt now that the planet is in trouble, and that our present energy consumption… Continue reading
Bitcoin’s Energy Use vs. Internet’s Energy Use
Excerpted from Brad Plumer: “Blockchain.info, a site that tracks data on Bitcoin mining, estimates that in just the last 24 hours, miners used about $147,000 of electricity just to run their hardware, assuming an average price of 15 cents per kilowatt hour … That’s enough to power roughly 31,000 U.S. homes, or about half a… Continue reading
Book of the Day: Land and Resource Scarcity Under Capitalism
* Book: Land and Resource Scarcity: Capitalism, Struggle and Well-Being in a World Without Fossil Fuels”, Routledge, 2013, edited by Exner, Andreas; Fleissner, Peter; Kranzl, Lukas; Zittel, Werner. The book is an outcome of the projects “Save our Surface” and “Feasible Futures” funded by the Austrian Climate and Energy Fund. Here’s a summary: “ This… Continue reading