Peer2Politics

“The more you disrupt banking, or trading, or asset management, the cheaper and easier it becomes for anyone to set themselves as a bank or trading shop. That makes it much more profitable for a far greater number of individual firms to enter the rent extraction business. The size of the rent extraction footprint doesn’t …

* Essay: Repurposing the hacker. Three temporalities of recuperation. By Delfanti, Alessandro, and Söderberg, Johan. This essay describes the recuperation of hackerdom by capitalist society in three different stages. When on of the the authors, Johan, sent me the as yet unpublished draft for commentary, I wrote the following: “Two suggestions, one, I think there …

The application of big data to talent processes raises many ethical questions.

“The current crisis is accelerating the oligarchical counter-revolution that began in the 1970s. On the other, the crisis of salaried work is not limited to one possible outcome. It contains different possibilities, some of which favor well-being and social or individual autonomy.” * Book: La Fábrica del Emprendedor: Trabajo y política en la empresa-mundo (The …

David Solomonoff, who monitors the intersection between the real and the virtual, cites the article by David Morris (in Aeon magazine) who writes about the Decentralized Autonomous Corporations that operate with minimal human intervention after being put in motion:

Excerpted from Dizzynomics: “The digital economy, like the financial industry, has been profoundly useful in encouraging smarter distribution and matching of other people’s specialisations vis-a-vis their wants and needs. When done well, this becomes a service that allows society to organise itself more efficiently, growing the pie for everyone. It — the service — even …

The internet and technology are often essentialized which then results in versions of technological gnosticism, where technology is either seen as a false god that inevitably plays an evil role in human society, or the different forms of cyber-utopianism. In its most recent iterations, the dark vision takes root in the revelations of Edgar Snowden about NSA and other surveillance, to argue that the internet has become a tool of control and oppression; while for example the bitcoin enthusiasts often see the mis-identified ‘peer to peer’ currency as the tool that will bring down governments and large banks to usher in a anarcho-capitalist utopia.