At a recent Oakland City Council meeting, Wilson Riles, a community leader and former City Councilmember, reminded us why Wall Street is so-called: it actually had a wall built around it in the 17th century to keep out Native tribes displaced by early colonists. It’s also worth remembering that Wall Street was the site of… Continue reading
Mary Lou Forward: While the world has become increasingly digital, most formal educational systems have not taken full advantage of what the new technologies can provide. – books, articles, databases, videos and other curricular materials. By using open networks and open content, Open Education also lets students and teachers separated by great distances interact with… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Nithin Coca: For Socorro Aguirre Cruz, a home care worker in Staten Island, New York, with nearly 50 years of cleaning experience, many of the challenges faced by gig workers today have been part of her life for decades. Work has been precarious for her long before the emergence of massive, venture… Continue reading
The following is an important overview of recent studies relating the energy and materials crisis to the economy, and the deep structural crisis that this represents. This post by Nafeez Ahmed was originally published on Insurge Intelligence, Medium.com Inside the new economic science of capitalism’s slow-burn energy collapse And why the struggle for a new economic… Continue reading
Hubs of commerce and culture. Seats of geopolitical power. Throughout history they’ve been pulling country folk to seek their fortunes with these massive magical concrete magnets. In pre-industrial times, cities were still the cores of political power and the economy, but less so. More people lived and worked in the surrounding countryside. That trend has… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Neal Gorenflo: When I began writing about the sharing economy in 2009, the eclectic array of struggling, communitarian-minded tech start-ups in San Francisco, California, were just one small part of a vast number of sharing innovations that made up what we at Shareable saw as an era-defining transformation in how people create… Continue reading
By Irmi Salzer and Julianna Fehlinger // Translated by Santiago Killing-Stringer. Originally posted on Degrowth.de About the authors and their positions We see ourselves as part of the movement for food sovereignty and are writing from the perspective of the Österreichische Berg- und Kleinbäuer_innenvereinigung ÖBV – Via Campesina Austria1(Irmi Salzer) and the agro-political group AgrarAttac… Continue reading
Reposted from ecologicalcitizen.net, The Ecological Citizen Vol 1 No 2 2018: epub-008 [online first] Shann Turnbull: The survival of society may depend upon it becoming governed by the nature of its host bioregions, as occurred in pre-modern times with Australian Aboriginals. The three most important requirements for establishing a decentralized, locally governed ecocentric society are to:… Continue reading
Local initiatives can lead to modest gains in sustainability, but not the large-scale transformation we need. Meeting that challenge will require, among other critical factors, substantial changes in how we create and use money. As its history demonstrates, money is a social and political construct. It is the privatization of money—and not money itself—that has… Continue reading
Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis: What would it mean to go beyond the traditional models of the state, including the redistributionist welfare state, to a state that could create the conditions for the creative autonomy of citizens to play a far greater role in their collective flourishing? The social knowledge economy, rooted in an already-existing… Continue reading
The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons This article looks at three crucial insights for the future of economics: Complex adaptive systems How technologies of cooperation enable commons-based peer-to-peer networks Why we need complex adaptive systems to understand new economies Complex Adaptive Systems The Edge of Chaos Complex adaptive systems has enjoyed considerable attention in recent decades…. Continue reading
Mike Linksvayer: Since the early 1990s Microsoft has held a lucrative near-monopoly in “office suite” software for word processing, spreadsheets, slide presentations and databases. In 2013 alone, Microsoft’s business division made US$16 billion profit on sales revenues of US$24 billion – an astounding upward transfer of wealth from software users to Microsoft made possible by… Continue reading
Most people don’t really understand how money is created and what political choices are embedded in that process. As a result, the privatization of money-creation is largely invisible to public view, and the anti-social, anti-ecological effects of privately created, debt-based money go unchallenged. Mary Mellor, professor emerita at Northumbira University in the UK, wants to… Continue reading
This post by Mark Boas is reposted from Medium.com It’s funny how things turn out. Six years ago when I decided to blog about my thoughts about a ‘radically new’ and decentralised web; snappily titled “P2P Web Apps — Brace yourselves, everything is about to change”, I thought decentralisation was imminent. It wasn’t. And when I say… Continue reading
As an alternative that has been tried and tested in practice by communities past and present, the paradigm of the commons goes beyond the state and the market and implies the radical self-instituting of society, allowing citizens to directly manage their shared resources. Yavor Tarinski, writing for New Compass, shares a great overview of the… Continue reading
Cross-posted from Shareable. Mai Sutton: Urban commons initiatives are booming in the Belgian city of Ghent, according to a new report. One of the researchers behind the study, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation, says that “the ecosystem of commons-based initiatives in Ghent is quite exemplary precisely because it covers an ecosystem in an area that… Continue reading