The excerpt is part of a must-read analysis of the neoliberal neo-environmentalist movement, which unfortunately sees no alternative between the dead-end of commodifying nature and green defeatist survivalism. Midway in the essay, author Paul Kingsnorth discusses the important notion of the ‘progress trap’: “IN HIS BOOK A Short History of Progress, Ronald Wright coins the… Continue reading
How deterritorialized idea communities challenge geographic democracies
Republished from Tiago Peixoto, who has a really excellent blog on the challenges of participatory democracy: “It is easy to identify an existent and increasing disjunction between representation based on territorial constituencies and the preferences of citizens that, many times, are not circumscribed by any territory. In practice, such a fact leads to a representation… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Keith Hart’s Manifesto for a Human Economy
Excerpted from Keith Hart: “Ronald Coase won a Nobel prize in economics for inventing the idea of transaction costs in his famous paper “The nature of the firm” (1937). He has just announced his desire, with Ning Wang, to found a new journal called “Man and the economy”. Their manifesto, “Saving economics from the economists”,… Continue reading
Support Parltrack, an open data tool for European citizens
Parltrack is free software that liberates a lot of hard to process data from the European Parliament (like PDFs, word docs, and HTML pages) as reusable open data and presents this as a kind of dashboard for activists, providing fresh and relevant data not only for the concerned but the curious citizen as well. Stefan… Continue reading
Answering both ‘conservative’ and ‘progressive’ critiques to the p2p approach
I’m republishing this May 17, 2010 mini-essay entitled: “Is the p2p approach utopian?”. Text: ‘he critique that the P2P approach that we are defending in these pages is utopian can come from two different quarters. One is the obvious one, the conservative side. This approach suggests that humans are very flawed, and that our societies… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Sacred Economics with Charles Eisenstein – A Short Film
“Sacred Economics traces the history of money from ancient gift economies to modern capitalism, revealing how the money system has contributed to alienation, competition, and scarcity, destroyed community, and necessitated endless growth. Today, these trends have reached their extreme – but in the wake of their collapse, we may find great opportunity to transition to… Continue reading
Chris Cook on the gas currency as the money of the future: From the Bondapocalypse to energy diplomacy
Outlining the post-dollar world: This Max Keiser report, always informative AND entertaining, has two parts. In the first part, Max Keiser and Stacy Herbert discuss the “bond bubble” (i.e. the problem); in the second part, an interview with ‘open capital’ expert Chris Cook, they discuss the solution, “energy diplomacy”. Watch the video here:
Mapping the emerging alternative finance system
This alternative finance system was designed with the purpose to engage a debate and give a head start in mapping the new financial system that is currently emerging. All Street, the portal for alternative finance and crowdfunding, introduces its graphical overview: “New forms of finance powered by technological changes and higher social and environmental awareness… Continue reading
P2P money transfer to occupy banks’ lucrative international transfer business
Could exorbitant fees and bad exchange rates for international bank transfers soon be a thing of the past? TransferWise (http://transferwise.com/) and CurrencyFair (http://CurrencyFair.com/) are two internet-based money transfer services which openly compete with banks for the lucrative business of transferring money from one country to another. The services are modeled on the technology that powers… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Code Forking and Governance in Open Source Software
the authors argue that forking need not be seen as negative behaviour; rather, it can be a way of building long-term sustainability * Essay: Code Forking, Governance, and Sustainability in Open Source Software. Technology Innovation Management Review, January 2013. Linus Nyman and Juho Lindman discuss Code Forking in the Context of the Three Levels of… Continue reading