Excerpted from RYAN SINGEL: “Say you have a gallery of photos of human rights abuses that you uploaded to Facebook – and that you want the world to see, and newspapers to print. Well, there’s no option for that on Facebook. Try to license an Instagram photo via Creative Commons. It’s not that CC isn’t… Continue reading
Marjorie Kelly on the Emergent Ownership Revolution
Can we sustain a low-growth or no-growth economy indefinitely without changing dominant ownership designs? That seems unlikely. Probably impossible. How, then, do we make the turn? How can we design economic architectures that are self-organized not around profit maximization, but around serving the needs of life? * Marjorie Kelly presents her important new book, The… Continue reading
Double Book Review: the Great Unrest of 2011-2014
The following is excerpted from a double book review by Chris Carlsson. It discusses: * Paul Mason’s The New Global Revolutions * Franco Bifo Berardi’s Global Uprising Chris Carlsson: “The Marxian concept of General Intellect has been inspiring to me for a while already. I wrote about it at length in Nowtopia, using the concept… Continue reading
The Occupy Homes Movement One Year After
Excerpted from Laura Gottesdiener: “On December 6, the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Homes movement, Meusa and Wheeler were only two among thousands of people who gathered for coordinated direct actions focused on the human right to housing. Building on a year filled with eviction blockades, house takeovers, bank protest and singing auction blockades, the… Continue reading
An assessment of the emerging global sharing movement
Excerpted from Cat Johnson: “As I spoke with sharing advocates and evangelists from Spain, Finland, the UK, France, New York, San Francisco and more, a picture started forming that these groups, while all working toward the same vision of a shareable life, are all very different. Share Tompkins in Ithaca, New York, among other things,… Continue reading
Why Market Prices Don’t Work in a Service Economy
It’s hard to overstate the importance of the book/manuscript, The End of the Market (Author unknown?), from which this text is excerpted. It’s at the heart of the post-market logic of the p2p economy as well. Value creation in a service transaction “Tangibles are invariably produced through a value chain. For example, iron ore is… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Clay Shirky on the New Digitally Social Urbanism
Excerpted from Clay Shirky‘s presentation at the Social Computing Symposium 2012 James Brown explains: “Clay Shirky on social spaces and the changing urban environment: The old stores gone out of business are not going to be replaced by new ones.Rather, the space occupied by the building structures are going to be claimed by new groups… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: the CLASSE student movement in Quebec
CLASSE is/was the student movement against tuition hikes in Quebec which obtained a dramatic victory in 2012 Suresh Fernando explains their governance methods, based on conversations with Gabriel Nadeau-Dubois, the ex-spokesperson of CLASSE: “There were a few key points that Gabriel made that I think are worthy of emphasizing: structure is essential if you want… Continue reading
Project of the Day: The Open Structures Project
“While eBay provides a circulation of objects, and cradle-to-cradle provides a circulation of materials, modular construction systems provide a circulation of parts and components. Our ambition is to create puzzles instead of static objects. The system should generate objects of which it is not entirely clear anymore who designed them. An object evolves as it… Continue reading
Video of the Day: Jerry Michalski on Designing Systems on the Basis of Trust
“Many institutions we take for granted are designed from a basis of mistrust. Skip school too often? Go to jail. Run that red light, even when nobody is around for blocks? Ticket. Movements around the world are finding new ways, flipping the model, building practices and institutions based on the initial gesture of trust. Building… Continue reading