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Intervention in an important debate on what is value in the context of peer production. Rigi and Prey argue that the labor theory of value is still operable, contra Fuchs and Negri. * Article: Value, Rent, and The Political Economy of Social Media. Jakob Rigi and Robert Prey. The Information Society 2015, October, Issue 5.... Continue reading →
Ecosystems are defined as the third pillar of organizational theory, and they need to be addressed differently from markets and hierarchies
This is an article in the amazing Pirate Book! Marie Lechner explains: “Liang claims that piracy makes cultural products otherwise inaccessible to most of the population available to the greatest number of users, but also offers the possibility of an “infrastructure for cultural production.” The case of the parallel film industry based in Malegaon is …
Design global, manufacture local: Exploring the contours of an emerging productive model. By Vasilis Kostakis, Vasilis Niaros, George Dafermos, Michel Bauwens. Futures, Volume 73, October 2015, Pages 126–135. Abstract This article aims to contribute to the ongoing dialogue on post-capitalist construction by exploring the contours of a commons-oriented productive model. On the basis of this …
“The hacker drive for de-alienated self-empowerment throws up tricky issues. As people with a hacker impulse gain confidence, they can become increasingly intolerant towards conventions, but also towards institutions like large welfare systems, which are viewed as being alienating in their own way. When combined with the individualistic streak, this can make for a libertarian political impulse. At its best, that can be a left-leaning libertarianism concerned with how to empower the underdog from the bottom up, showing solidarity with those in less empowered positions, similar to anarchist mutual aid. In its negative incarnation, though, hacker culture can fetishise personal liberty, a conservative ‘don’t tell me what to do’ libertarianism associated with people who already have power and who do not particularly go out of their way to help spread it. We see this in the likes of libertarian activist Adam Kokesh, who says ‘fuck you’ to authorities, but without really offering much empathy to those who are not empowered, skilled, or connected enough to be as bold as he.”
The latest issue of Boston Review has a lively forum on the growing power of network platform based businesses such as Amazon, Uber and Airbnb.
“Critiquing ‘free culture’ as a utopian gesture that fails to engage with the material circuits of cognitive capitalism, this paper proposes a political economy attendant to the circulation of capital at all layers of the communications network. Applying the newly invigorated theories of ‘rent’ to the shifting commons/property dialectics of the information economy, we explore the role of network infrastructure in the extraction of surplus. How is surplus from the digital commons channelled through a material substrate? How is network infrastructure transforming in response to the fluid and fluctuating dynamics of cognitive capitalism? Finally, what possibilities for political engagement and material exploit are emerging?”
In order not to yield to technological messianism, we should however be aware of the obstacles that the diffusion of these technologies is likely to meet, starting with those posed by the various actors who have opposite interests to their development, and those resulting from ecological constraints and the availability of resources.
The still raging financial crisis of 2007–2008 has enabled the emergence of several alternative practices concerning the production, circulation and use of money. This essay explores the political economy of the Bitcoin ecosystem. Specifically, we examine the context in which this digital currency is emerging as well as its nature, dynamics, advantages, and disadvantages. We conclude that Bitcoin, a truly interesting experiment, exemplifies “distributed capitalism” and should be mostly seen as a technological innovation. Rather than providing pragmatic answers and solutions to the current views on the financial crisis, Bitcoin provides some useful and timely questions about the principles and bases of the dominant political economy.
“This paper reflects a long tradition of utopian thought in engineering, a tradition in which the progressive application of human reason to nature is projected to make the market obsolete. This promise comes in at least two versions. One tendency, epitomised by the ‘red cyberneticists’ in the Soviet Union, primarily objects to the irrationality of the price mechanism, and strives to replace the market with computers as a means of allocating resources (Dyer-Witheford, 2013). The second tendency, to which Rep-rap project arguably belongs, looks forward to the day when wealth is so abundant that scarcity will have been superseded, and markets with it.
“How can we build an economy of abundance, that seeks to create the condition of abundance when all people, regardless of their background, now and in the future, are enabled to thrive ² and numerous animal and plants species can likewise thrive?I present here a strategy that seeks to literally make place for abundance. Countless initiatives that promote abundance already exist, but they seem hopelessly small in comparison to ´the economyµ which pushes us toward ever-increasing resource consumption, competition,and conflict. It is therefore essential that numerous abundance-supporting ventures be networked in order to gain strength. One of the most important ways to build networks is to focus on places where they are already strong and have potential to grow. ´Place’ in this context refers not just to some area that can be defined on a map or marked on the ground, but to a place with cultural significance, where people have a sense of identity and of home connected with that place, and where people continue to work together and with the natural environment in order to enhance its desired qualities. ´
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If the future of finance is going to be digital, we want it to be populated with those who value the deeper tenets of open source philosophy
The distribution of resource dividends is always and everywhere a political decision, not an economic outcome.
The Sustainable Development Goals do not constitute a transformative agenda for meeting the basic needs of all people within the means of our shared planet.
A brief tour of the imagining of abundance throughout history, from the Golden Age of the ancients to the P2P production of the current generation.
Since the Greek crisis is one of the hottest topics globally and in the light of the Greek Debt Committee’s declaration that all debt is “illegal, illegitimate, and odious”, it might be interesting to remember Tim Jones’s article on the Greek debt which was published the day after Syriza’s victory in the elections. In a …
* Article: If ‘Well-Being’ is the Key Concept in Political Economy… By Claudio Gnesutta. Economic Thought Vol 3, No 2, 2014 From the Abstract: “If ‘well-being’ is to be the key concept in political economy, then economists are placed, from a methodological viewpoint, in an uncomfortable position. A well-being approach requires consideration of several non-economic …
“This paper is the first attempt to formalize a new field of economics; studding the Intangibles Goods available on the Internet. We are taking advantage of the digital world’s specific rules, in particular the zero marginal cost, to propose a theory of trading & sharing unified. A function based money is created as a world-wide currency; (pronounced /k2p/). We argue that our system discourage speculation activities while it makes easy captured taxes for governments. Next step will be the propagation of the network application and we expect many shared benefits for the whole economics development.”
“The political economy of the information machine is discussed within the Marxist tradition of Italian operaismo by posing the hypothesis of an informational turn already at work in the age of the industrial revolution. The idea of valorizing information introduced by Alquati (1963) in a pioneering Marxist approach to cybernetics is used to examine the paradigms of mass intellectuality, immaterial labour and cognitive capitalism developed by Lazzarato, Marazzi, Negri, Vercellone and Virno since the 1990s. The concept of machinic by Deleuze and Guattari (1972, 1980) is then adopted to extend Marx’s analysis of the industrial machine to the algorithms of digital machines. If the industrial machine can be described as a bifurcation of the domains of energy and information, this essay proposes to conceive the information machine itself as a further bifurcation between information and metadata. In conclusion, the hypothesis of the society of metadata is outlined as the current evolution of that society of control pictured by Deleuze (1990) in relation to the power embodied in databases.”
secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
This collection includes two provocative essays by contemporary mutualist writer Kevin Carson. “Who Owns the Benefit? The Free Market as Full Communism,” explores the radical possibilities for market exchange and competition freed from capitalistic privilege and the burdens of artificial scarcity. “Capitalism Without Capitalists?” asks whether mutualistic markets will be driven to recreate the capitalist model by competitive logic, or whether peer production, decentralized ownership and unprivileged market exchange can bring about alternative incentives, and dynamics that disperse, rather than concentrating, wealth and progress.
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