Essay of the Day: From Product-centered to People-centered economic development. (Michel Bauwens: The following is a crucial distinction to make, we strongly recommend you read this) By Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog and informed in part by collaborations with Steve Bosserman. Production centered supply chain business development depends on: unlimited growthexclusive access to resourcesartificial scarcity around actually abundant resourcespeople filling roles in a linear systemhoarding of surplus This way of operating focuses on what is being produced, and requires people to be largely fixed into roles to serve the linear supply chain model. People and natural systems are generally considered to be “resources” that are raw materials and labor for production and distribution, end-points consumption.
Linearity in this production model leads to seeking more raw materials for more production/distribution/consumption. The organization in this system is around the assumption of unlimited growth. People centered business network ecosystem development Steve Bosserman comments: International scientific community issues first 'State of the Planet Declaration' Scientists issued the first "State of the Planet" declaration at a major gathering of experts on global environmental and social issues in advance of the major UN Summit Rio+20 in June. The declaration opens: "Research now demonstrates that the continued functioning of the Earth system as it has supported the well-being of human civilization in recent centuries is at risk. " It states that consensus is growing that we have driven the planet into a new epoch, the Anthropocene, where many planetary-scale processes are dominated by human activities.
It concludes society must not delay taking urgent and large-scale action. "This is a declaration to our globally interconnected society," said Dr Lidia Brito, director of science policy, natural sciences, UNESCO, and conference co-chair. "Time is the natural resource in shortest supply. Dr Mark Stafford Smith, Planet Under Pressure conference co-chair, said, "In the last decade we have become a highly interconnected society. Netarchical Capitalism. Netarchical capitalism is a hypothesis about the emergence of a new segment of the capitalist class (the owners of financial or other capital), which is no longer dependent on the ownership of intellectual property rights (hypothesis of cognitive capitalism), nor on the control of the media vectors (hypothesis of MacKenzie Wark in his book The Hacker's Manifesto), but rather on the development and control of participatory platforms.
Here's an extensive citation from the manuscript on P2P Theory (see the Foundational Essay): Michel Bauwens, section 3.5: “Above I have summarized the key theses about the new ‘class configuration’. In this section I offer my own take on the matter, since I am convinced that both main interpretations miss something important, that the peer to peer era is creating a new type of capitalists, which are not based on the accumulation of knowledge assets or vectors of information, but on the enablement and ‘exploitation’ of the networks of participatory culture. Academic turns city into a social experiment. Mayor Mockus of Bogotá and his spectacularly applied theory By María Cristina Caballero Special to the Harvard News Office Antanas Mockus had just resigned from the top job of Colombian National University.
A mathematician and philosopher, Mockus looked around for another big challenge and found it: to be in charge of, as he describes it, "a 6.5 million person classroom. " Mockus, who had no political experience, ran for mayor of Bogotá; he was successful mainly because people in Colombia's capital city saw him as an honest guy. With an educator's inventiveness, Mockus turned Bogotá into a social experiment just as the city was choked with violence, lawless traffic, corruption, and gangs of street children who mugged and stole. It was a city perceived by some to be on the verge of chaos. People were desperate for a change, for a moral leader of some sort. A theatrical teacher "The distribution of knowledge is the key contemporary task," Mockus said. Taking a moral stand A bigger classroom? Temporary Jobs at the Permanent Representation of Ireland to the EU.
The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive 'value abundance'? Chiang Mai, Thailand - Does Facebook exploit its users? And where is the $100bn in the company's estimated value coming from? This is not a new debate. It resurfaces regularly in the blogosphere and academic circles, ever since Tiziana Terranova coined the term "Free Labour" to indicate a new form of capitalist exploitation of unpaid labour - firstly referring to the viewers of classic broadcast media, and now to the new generation of social media participants on sites such as Facebook.
The argument can be summarised very succinctly by the catch phrase: "If it's free, then you are the product being sold. " This term was recently relaunched in an article by University of Essex academics Christopher Land and Steffen Böhm, entitled "They are exploiting us! This line of argument is misleading, however, because it conflates two types of value creation that were already recognised as distinct by 18th century political economists.
Engineering scarcity But this is no longer happening. Save the Greeks from their Saviours! says Alain Badiou | European Conference Against Austerity & Privatisation. At this moment, that one out of two Greeks is unemployed, 25.000 homeless wander in the streets of Athens, 30% of the population is living below the poverty line, thousands of families have to put their children in institutions so they won’t die of hunger and cold, and refugees and newly poor citizens struggle for garbage bins in public places, the “saviors” of Greece, under the pretext of the Greeks “not putting lots of effort” impose a new plan of help that doubles the given lethal dose. A plan that eliminates the labor law, and condemns the already poor people to extreme poverty, while vanishing the middle classes. There is no chance this idea is the “salvation” of Greece: all the -worthy of the name- economists agree on that.
The goal is to win time in order to save the creditors while the country is driven to a prescribed bankruptcy. Primarily, the aim is to transform Greece into a laboratory of social transformation that will be generalized later across Europe. Translations: The Penguin and the Leviathan: The Triumph of Cooperation Over Self-Interest. Here’s a quit extensive synthesis of “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions. Human motivation is a subject that ‘makes me tick’. I really enjoyed reading “The Penguin and the Leviathan”, not only because it paints a much nicer picture of “human nature” than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today. Benkler gives a lot of examples, going from Southwest Airlines and Toyota’s shop floor processes to Chicago’s community policing program, Wikipedia and Linux.
The Penguin and the Leviathan – How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest Statements on human nature are always a bit tricky because of the complexity of the subject matter. A Vicious Circle. Michel Bauwens: Life of the Internet or Internet as Our Life? Michel Bauwens Below by Nick Mendoza is recommended! Up front extract: With the decline of state capitalism, capitalist governments and corporations now dream of the internet as the tool for corporate growth through ontological colonialism, free to expand within the mind and the planet, exploiting everyone alike. Metal, code, flesh: Why we need a ‘Rights of the Internet’ declaration The internet, as a living being which is part human, should have rights of its own.
Nicolas Mendoza Nicolas Mendoza is a scholar, artist and researcher in global media from The University of Melbourne. Al Jazeera, 15 February 2012 Click on Image to Enlarge Chiang Mai, Thailand - “OH $%#@!” Larry Downes eloquently describes the January 18 events as “the dramatic introduction of bitroots politics”. For the first time ever, the internet had taken on Hollywood extremists and won. However, the “January 18 blackout” victory guarantees “the internet” nothing. The hard thing is this: get ready, because more is coming. Alive! The Future Now: An Interview with David de Ugarte. In this interview, Shareable publisher Neal Gorenflo, John Robb of Global Guerrillas, and P2P foundation's Michel Bauwens talk to David de Ugarte, one of the originators of the Spanish cyberpunk scene about his more recent work developing a multinational worker cooperative, Las Indias, that is a culmination of his community's thinking and work for the last decade.
Las Indias is the manifestation of a unique socio-economic philosophy that synthesizes many strains of thinking and culture including cyberpunk, anarchism, network thinking, and cooperatives - all with a Spanish twist. It's important because it points to a possible future for those who think outside of national boundaries and desire or need to take control of their own economic destiny. It's a possible future that takes the centuries old logic of cooperatives and remixes it for the urban-centered, global network society we live in today. David de Ugarte: Las Indias is the result of the Spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. How the Rich Can Make the Planet More Sustainable.
Ordinary consumers can be encouraged to behave more sustainably without lowering their quality of life, starting with millennium consumption goals for the rich that parallel the millennium development goals for the poor, writes Prof. Mohan Munasinghe. 20th February 2012 - Published by The Island Millennium consumption goals (MCG) could help make our development path more sustainable, by focusing on the 1.4 billion people in the richest 20 percentile of the world’s population. They consume over 80% of global output, or 60 times more than the poorest 20 percentile. Household consumption drives modern economies, but unsustainable consumption, production and resource exploitation have led to multiple crises that threaten the future survival of humanity.
The MCG pathway There are many advantages to this complementary path to global sustainability. Basically, the MCG approach is only one element (albeit an important one!) Current situation: economic, social and environmental bubbles Sustainomics. A04.pdf (application/pdf Object) Srep00234-s1.pdf (application/pdf Object) The biosolar race is on. Solar panels made of photosynthetic molecules found in plants and bacteria can generate electricity. To boost their efficiency, nanowires like these can increase the surface area of a substrate and expose more of the molecules to sunlight.
Image source: Scientific Reports Within the next decade, people in off-grid villages may be able to make their own solar panels from cheap materials mixed with agricultural waste. MIT researchers who are developing the technology speculate on future do-it-yourself bags of solar panel mix, just add leaves, grass clippings or other waste from the yard or farm. Paint the mix onto a rooftop, connect wires and, voila, instant power.
The biophotovoltaic panels would not be as efficient as today's chlorophyl-free panels, but they would be dirt cheap and universally accessible. Democratizing science To get to that green-roofed future, Mershin and his colleagues are counting on help from solar research labs worldwide. 1. 2. 3. 4. We are looking to define culture as a pipeline area « Building the Symbiotic Fund.
European Union. P2P.