Adam Arvidsson: Social innovation in Malmo

Via. Adam Arvidsson: “In modern society we were used to thinking of culture and its production as business of specialized institutions of groups. Indeed the progressive disappearance of spontaneous popular culture, and the concomitant institutionalization of mass culture, were understood to be to central tendencies within the modernization process. “Spontankultur” Since the post-War years this… Continue reading

Not An Employee

In keeping with the recent focus on Johan Söderberg’s Hacking Capitalism as well as Clay Shirky’s recent “Here Comes Everybody” blog and book , I would like to call attention to what I think is an important venture, and, moreover, what I hope is merely one of many similar initiatives to come. Not An Employee… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Hacking Capitalism. Part Three: From class struggle to play struggle

We continue our presentation of Johan Soderbergh’s book with a last excerpt about perhaps the key concept of the book: Play Struggle. Johan Soderbergh: “The notion of hackers becoming ‘revolutionaries just for fun’ would have appealed to the eighteenth century poet Friedrich Schiller. Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution, he sat down to… Continue reading

Stan Rhodes: Advertising is waste

Republished from Stan Rhodes: You’d think that everyone that’s ever seen an advertisement would know this, but no one seems to want to say it. We’re all thinking it, aren’t we? Advertising, at its root, is waste. Advertisements are waste. Right now, we have an arms race between what a person wants to pay attention… Continue reading

Book of the Week: Hacking Capitalism. Part Two: Hacking as a labour movement

Book: Johan Söderberg. Hacking Capitalism: The Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) Movement. Routledge, 2007 We continue our presentation with an excerpt on the topic of “Hacking and Capitalism”, which stresses the continuation between the hackers and the labour movement. Johan Soderbergh: “The skirmishes between the hacker movement and corporations and governments have deeper roots… Continue reading

Chris Cook’s critique of Carbon Trading : If you want to keep a donkey healthy, you don’t regulate what comes out of it, but what goes in

From the very beginning of our work at the P2P Foundation, we were in touch with Chris Cook, who has been working on open capital formats, a kind of peer to peer based market reform, which could be enabled by new methods of corporate governance, such as the UK-based Limited Liability Partnerships. I’m must admit… Continue reading