Philosophy
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Becoming ‘multi-temporal’, rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don’t bind us to anything in particular. We don’t have a coherent outlook or interest that can enslave us. This means we are closer to a potentially objective history than anybody has ever been.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Surviving the atemporality of internet technology by becoming multi-temporal
The low-tech vibe, partly born out of a structural necessity, has come to be symbolic of the movement itself. If Occupy is a thought experiment in questioning society and envisioning new possibilities, then the story of technology and Occupy is also about questioning the role modern technology has in our lives. Excerpted from Nathan Jurgenson : “The prevalence of smartphones, social media, videostreams and the like may be the dominant technological narrative told about Occupy Wall Street, but to focus only on high-tech is to tell a very incomplete story.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The Implicit Critique of Technology in the #OccupyWallStreet movement (1): combining hi and low tech
“How does the Occupy Wall Street movement move from “the outrage phase” to the “hope phase,” and imagine a new economic model? In a Democracy Now! special broadcast, we bring you excerpts from a recent event that examined this question and much more.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Occupy Everywhere: Michael Moore, Naomi Klein on Next Steps for the #OccupyWallStreet Movement
Peter Marcuse: The Purpose of the Occupation Movement and the Danger of Fetishizing Space | The New Significance
The Occupation movement that is spreading across the country has a number of purposes, plays a number of different roles, in the struggle for justice and a better life in our world. A confrontation function, taking the struggle to the enemy’s territory, confronting, potentially disrupting, the operations at the center of the problem. It has the potential to disrupt Wall Street, by occupying space Wall Street needs to function; symbolically, hyperbolically, it waves a pointed knife over the heart of the economic beast. But it must be admitted that there is little push to actualize the potential; only in Oakland, thus far, has there been significant interference with the normal conduct of mainstream business. When neighbors complain about the noise and unpleasantness of Liberty Park’s occupiers in New York City, it is in their capacities as residents, not as business people, that they complain.
Occupiers by OC The Occupy Revolution is clearly a force to be reckoned with in our culture. Even at this early stage the battle lines are being drawn. Many cities are resisting this new people-powered movement, as it feels threatening to status quo politicians and the 1%, so influential in the current political climate. This in spite of the glaring corruption and inequality of the old system.
Article: Five Principles - Occupy Cincinnati
The United States is drowning in a sea of red ink from coast to coast and most Americans have absolutely no idea what is about to happen. Hopefully you have started to prepare for the coming U.S. financial crisis. If not, hopefully this article will be a wake up call for you. Right now, governments all over Europe are on the verge of financial implosion. Most Americans aren't paying much attention to that, but they should be, because what is happening to Greece and Italy right now will eventually be happening here. Just recently, the U.S. national debt passed the 15 trillion dollar mark.
1 Through 30 – The Coming U.S. Financial Crisis By The Numbers
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » #OccupyWallStreet as the start of a new Progressive era, or is it a Revolution?
“OCCUPY WALL STREET and its allied movements around the country are more than a walk in the park. They are most likely the start of a new era in America. Historians have noted that American politics moves in long swings.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (3): Visioning Emergent Leadership
Anyone who has come to my workshops over the past ten years knows I’ve been an advocate of “Emergence” – defined as “leaderless distributed networks of information and power”. In an Emergence, it is the system that learns, grows and adapts… without any kind of “authority” telling the various agents what to do.When it happens, it is startling, it is beautiful, and it is POWERFUL. So, the question of whether OT needs “leadership” is tied to the question: “Is OT an Emergence?” The answer to that question is a firm “NOT YET”.
(background: the first axial age occurred the 6th B.C. and gave birth to the major world religions and Greek philosophy, as identified by Karl Jaspers) “In Crosscurrent, I argued that we are living in an age of dramatically accelerated cultural evolution. Such transitions— I call them ‘sea changes’—are powerful and progressive unfoldings, marked by the movement of humankind’s dominant values toward a closer fit with reality. Sea changes affect almost every dimension of human experience and endeavor and they are extremely rare.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The Second Axial Age: Beginning to recognize our roles as global beings.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (4): benefits of slow speech
Excerpted from Matthew Remski , on the #OccupyWallStreet Human Microphone System : Of the countless intersubjective graces unfolding in Zuccotti Park and around the Occupy world, the “human microphone” is recapturing something as old as human learning. This is something sacred: a repurposing of voice, ear, and content that may serve no less than the remembering of a more coherent human consciousness. Watch Slavoj Zizek to see how it works. Every Occupy Wall Street orator, prohibited by permit laws from amplification (and lights when night falls), stands on a box and delivers his sentences one at a time, each followed by a pause, during which the surrounding ring of listeners, perhaps 20 deep, repeats the sentence verbatim. The repeaters, unburdened by the anxiety of creation, actually improve the clarity of the orator’s rhythm and intonation as they fall into a shared pulse.
P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » P2P history (3): Rick Falkvinge on the three historical origins of the Pirate Party
The first development was the fight against software patents in the European Parliament, where corporations tried to buy themselves monopoly laws to the ability to destroy innovative startups that threatened the status quo. In a vote early July 2005, the software patent monopoly lobby lost, but by a very, very narrow margin from a game point of view. This had consumed all activist resources for some considerable time in Europe, and set me thinking that this was simply too close. There must be a better way to do this, a better way to ensure innovation can continue unhampered by colossi who prefer lawyers over engineers to win a market. (Our Member of European Parliament was an activist in Brussels during this fight. How fitting that he has now returned to parliament with voting privileges.)P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Discussing the Assemblies and Consensus of #OccupyWallStreet (2): Consensus is not Self-Management
Excerpted from Michael Albert: “In Greece and Spain, a single message predominated. It had nothing to do with analyses of capitalism or other analytic focuses. Instead, Greek and Spanish activists reported that they had massive assemblies in widespread cities and their occupations grew, grew, grew, so that assemblies were up to 12,000, 15,000 – and then they shrunk, shrunk, shrunk, so that assemblies are now not meeting, or are meeting in the hundreds, or less. Yet I heard, time after time, that nothing had diminished regarding the population’s rejection of unfolding injustices. The people remain fed up in huge numbers and still turn out massively for demonstrations, marches, and strikes.The New Progressive Movement - NYTimes.com
Thirty years ago, a newly elected Ronald Reagan made a fateful judgment: “Government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.” Taxes for the rich were slashed, as were outlays on public services and investments as a share of national income. Only the military and a few big transfer programs like , , and veterans’ benefits were exempted from the squeeze.Excerpted from Alpha Lo : “One of the compelling attractions of Occupy is that it is modeling a possible socio-economic-political paradigm for how society can run. It is a model the whole world is beginning to watch. For those who come and participate in it, its a learning experience, a training in this new paradigm. Occupy’s general assemblies model a participatory democratic method.
Occupy as a New Societal Model
“One of the major themes raised by the Occupy movement is the increasing power of large corporations over more and more aspects of our lives. We spend the hour looking into the issue of the corporate control of life itself. Our guest, Harriet Washington, is a medical ethicist and has just published a book that examines the extent to which what she calls the medical-industrial complex has come to control human life.