Today, in the better economy we’re building, less carbon emitted does add to national wealth. And that’s exactly why Cash for Clunkers matters. Cash for Clunkers isn’t perfect — but it’s a promising start. It’s the kind of economic reform that’s sparking a revolution in Constructive Capitalism. I missed a bunch of interesting blog articles… Continue reading
How California could solve its fiscal crisis through sovereign credit
Could California learn from Guernsey in the 19th century, Germany in the thirties, and China today? A state-owned bank could be fast-tracked into operation in a matter of weeks. With over $17 billion available to deposit in its own bank, California could create $170 billion or more in credit — enough not only to meet… Continue reading
Book of the Week (3): Activist lifestyles
Book: David Graeber. Direct Action, an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009 In this third and last series of excerpts from David Graeber’s book, we turn to chapter 6, which is a review, critique, and defense, of activist lifestyles and cultures. We choose some not necessarily connected paragraphs, to give an idea of the richness of the… Continue reading
Planning through the market?
Excerpt from a contribution to thinking about political strategy, by G. William Domhoff: (Article: Planning Through the Market: More Equality Through the Market System) “If non-market planning is a disaster and markets are primarily instruments for exploitation, then it is no wonder that leftists have not been able to project the necessary vision of a… Continue reading
What property rights in virtual resources might look like
Important essay: John W. Nelson. 2009. “The Virtual Property Problem: What property rights in virtual resources might look like, how they might work, and why they are a bad idea” Summary: “Virtual property’ is a solution looking for a problem. Arguments justifying ‘virtual property’ lie among three common themes — Lockean labor theory, theft protection… Continue reading
MAGHRIBIS & P2P: ON THE BOUNDARIES OF THE DEFINITION
A re-post from the Golpe de Estado blog: Maghribi traders organization system is similar to current P2P processes, maybe similar enough to consider them P2P pioneers (Maghribis I). However Maghribis suffered from intrinsic disadvantages that deterred their expansion and success (Maghribis II). Maghribis succumbed to history while Genoese, a proto-capitalist society survived stabilising the foundational… Continue reading
The Power shift at Wikipedia and its deterrent effect on participation
Via Slashdot: “The Guardian reports that a study by Ed H Chi demonstrates that the character of Wikipedia has changed significantly since Wikipedia’s first burst of activity between 2004 and 2007. While the encyclopedia is still growing overall, the number of articles being added has reduced from an average of 2,200 a day in July… Continue reading
The meltdown of the state under neoliberalism through New Public Management
Essay: The Rise and Demise of the New Public Management. By Wolfgang Drechsler (University of Tartu and Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia), 2005 From 2005, but still a crucial critique of the neoliberal approaches to the state. Summary: “Within the public sphere, the most important reform movement of the last quarter of a century has… Continue reading
Book of the Week (2): Direct action and direct democracy
Book: David Graeber. Direct Action, an Ethnography. AK Press, 2009 In this second excerpt of David Graeber’s new book and analysis of the alterglobalization movement, he focuses, in chapter 5, on the linkage between direct action and direct democracy. The excerpt focuses on the evolution between the feminist moment to the emergence, ‘seemingly out of… Continue reading
Five Geopolitical Feedback-Loops in Peak Oil
Though this analysis appeared in the April 23, 2007 issue of Energy Intelligence Note, it really explains a lot of the current geopolitical situation, so I’m reproducing it in full. Jeff Vail: “It is quite common to hear “experts” explain that the current tight oil markets are due to “above-ground factors,” and not a result… Continue reading
From corporate publishing, via self-publishing, to cloud publishing
Book Oven is constructing tools and processes for the collective and independent production of books. In a thoughtful, but really hard to summarize blog entry, the concept of self-publishing is rejected, in favour of ‘cloud publishing’. Read the whole article here. Just the definition: “Cloud-publishing will provide the tools to allow groups of people to… Continue reading
A new book on Independent Media in Chinese Societies
Via Iam-Chong Ip: “Hong Kong In-media is a non-profit organization advocating blogger journalism and media activism in Hong Kong. Recently we’ve published a book titled Info-Rhizome: Report on Independent Media in the Chinese-speaking World. This book is about the recent development of independent media (including small activist media, community radio, blogger, media activist, etc) in… Continue reading
Should a free RSS Cloud replace Twitter?
Twitter — or, rather, the idea of a pervasive, public short messaging network — could be too important to be left under one entity’s control. The people behind the OpenMicroBlogging (OMB) movement say it’s time for the 140-character, publicly-subscribable format pioneered by Twitter to become an open standard, in part because, as last week’s attack… Continue reading
Open Source Wikipolitics
Our Greek friend Vasilis Kostakis has produced a presentation with the basic concepts of “open source politics”. Open Source and Wikipolitics View more presentations from Vasilis Kostakis.
Douglas Rushkoff on the end of movements
We covered the tension between prefigurative and instrumental politics before, and in our mind, both are needed, even as the p2p movement is now too weak to have powerful social movements. So we disagree with the argument below, but it is a provocative thesis that needs to be addressed: are social movements really obsolete? Douglas… Continue reading
Crisis at the Factor E Farm (2): Stefan Meretz
The following is the point of view of Stefan Meretz about the recent crisis at the Factor E Farm: The project »Factor E Farm« (FeF, also »Open Source Ecology«, OSE) has crashed now. Publicly, which is good. The FeF-project has become a somewhat show-case with regard to transfering cultural peer production approaches to the physical… Continue reading