The second annual Bitcoin Conference, and the largest Bitcoin international event yet, is set to begin tomorrow Friday September 14. If you are located in London and wish to pop in, you can get tickets at the door for 80 GBP. Starting Friday and continuing until Sunday, speakers and guests from around the world will… Continue reading
An introduction to the Common Welfare Economy and its metrics – Christian Felber
Very thought out proposal that would make a huge difference in creating a sustainable ethical economy. Watch the very clear video explanation:
3D Printers are not for your home, but for microfactories!
Excerpted from Ryan Whitwam: “No one can deny that 3D printing is really cool from a purely technological standpoint. The idea that physical objects can be rapidly fabricated from digital files is fascinating, and could change the world. However, it’s very possible that we’ve all gotten so caught up in the 3D printing hype that… Continue reading
Bruno Latour: Compositionism as a replacement of critique.
P2P has to be is a reconstructive, post-critical approach. This idea is echoed in the text from Bruno Latour: ‘I have chosen to give this manifesto a worthy banner, the word compositionism. Yes, I would like to be able to write “The Compositionist Manifesto” by reverting to an outmoded genre in the grand style of… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: A critique of the glorification of violence by Zizek
Democracy and Revolution in the Thoughts of Marx and Zizek. Excerpted from Alan Johnson: “In “The Jacobin Spirit” Žižek “Marxified” his argument for terror and dictatorship by radically misconstruing what “Marx’s key insight” was. He claimed Marx understood political democracy to be a mere “democratic illusion” because without economic equality political democracy can only be… Continue reading
Movement of the Day: The Municipal Open Data Movement (U.S.)
The City as a Platform, excerpted from Paul Davies: “In many cases, it’s neither possible nor desirable for government institution to embrace the “fail early and often” approach preferred by tech entrepreneurs. While the process of governance may be painfully slow for technologists, existing policies aren’t always the result of bureaucratic inefficiency. But citizens can… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Insurgent Tactics and their Responses
Interesting: * Article: McAdam, Doug. Tactical innovation and the pace of insurgency. American Sociological Review. 1983 Dec;48(6):735–754. Summary: “Using statistical analysis of newspaper reports from the civil rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s, McAdam makes a case that the cyclical or wave nature of political insurgencies is driven by an iterative process of tactical… Continue reading
James Livingston on capitalism overcoming its own functions
“The upshot of these changes, which I would summarize as the decomposition of capitalism, is a situation in which the extraction of surplus value from labor by capital has lost its investment function, and the production of value by labor has lost its income function. In short, capitalism has stopped making moral sense because it… Continue reading
How Do You Build a [P2P Labour] Union for the 21st Century?
SARA HOROWITZ is the founder of Freelancers Union in the US. She suggests in her below article that replacing the current business like model with more social unionism can be a way for ‘recovering the middle class way of life’. According to the author it can be done by initiating social and nonprofit economy by union owned cooperatives and… Continue reading
Essay of the Day: Capitalism as a Transformation of Slavery
Recommended: * Article: Graeber, David. Turning modes of production inside out: or, why capitalism is a transformation of slavery. Critique of Anthropology. 2006 Mar; 26(1):61–85. Summary: “Graeber makes a case that chattel slavery and capitalist wage slavery both extract surplus value in essentially the same way: by using violent coercion to separate the abstract labor… Continue reading