Peer2Politics

Suddenly, there is a new economist making waves – and he is not on the right. At the conference of the Institute of New Economic Thinking in Toronto last week, Thomas Piketty's book Capital in the Twenty-First Century got at least one mention at every session I attended. You have to go back to the 1970s and Milton Friedman for a single economist to have had such an impact.

There is a standing presumption when one backs a Kickstarter project: you may lose your money. But there's a new—or at least now proven—angle to consider, in light of Facebook's acquisition of the virtual reality company Oculus: people may use your money to make a lot more money without ever properly starting a successful company in the first place.

I’ve been hearing about this documentary for a while now but I’ve only had the chance to watch it recently. According to the blurb in Renegade Economist’s You Tube Channel, Four Horsemen “…is an award winning independent feature documentary which lifts the lid on how the world really works.” Talking heads include Noam Chomsky, Herman Daly, Joseph Stiglitz, John Perkins, Gillian Tett and others.

“In the current debate concerning the rise and consequences of “cognitive capitalism”, a new discourse is developing around the concept of a “social knowledge economy”. But what does a social knowledge economy mean and what are its implications for the ways in which a society and an economy are ordered?

Extracted from Andrew Jackon’s and Ben Dyson’s book, Modernising Money. The authors analyse the current situation: Money created as interest-bearing debt will always necessitate more growth, at the expense of our rapidly decaying living systems. There are, however, plenty of solutions being put forward to end this vicious cycle of destruction.

“There’s a small city in California called Lancaster. They’ve got a dynamic mayor that’s geared up to do something to reverse his community’s slide into economic oblivion (a trend across the US and Europe).

“The familiar framing of submission to various forms of online monitoring in terms of the logic of exchange (we submit to the collection of information about ourselves in return for access to “free” goods and services) needs further interrogation: not just in terms of what information is collected vs. what information we consciously disclose about ourselves, and not just in terms of the economic and social relations that structure the “free” exchange, but also, perhaps, in terms of the split between the forms of gratification associated with online services and the data gathered about us. These might be seen, increasingly, as overlapping categories.

“The favelas are emerging as “symbolic capital”, as “wealth”, and as “commodities” in cities like Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are no longer the place of “excluded” non-subjects, as in some imaginaries and discourses, but rather a cyber-periphery, a place of “wealth in poverty” fought over by Nike, Globo Network Television, and the State, as well as laboratories for subjective production. The black bodies of the favelas, the possibilities for co-operation without hierarchy, the invention of other times and spaces (on the streets, in dancehalls, LAN centers, and rooftops) are all subjected to forms of appropriation, just like anything else in capitalism. However, the favelas are no longer seen simply as “poverty factories”, but rather a form of capital in the market of symbolic national and local values, having been able to convert the most hostile forces (poverty, violence, states of emergency) into a process of creation and cultural invention.”

Uber of course is a cab service that lets you order a cab from your smartphone via an App. It’s really neat, you get to watch the cab approach on a map, the payment is automatically applied so you don’t have to even deal with the transaction itself. The company is now taking its approach to logistics, and moving to ‘disrupt’ the delivery industry as well, competing with courier services, UPS, Fedex, and the Post Office. It’ll be interesting to see what happens there.

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.

Avoiding the use of the factory as metaphor, Raunig nevertheless argues that the university retains three crucial qualities that also made the factory a key site of social struggle in previous generations. He argues that the qualities of condensation, assembly and re-territorialisation make the university a ‘becoming factory’ of new economic and social assemblages today. He argues for the specific resonance and possibilities embedded in these qualities in the context of our increasingly precarious and dispersed social life. The university as factory offers, in his view, a concentration and assembly of bodies and knowledge that have the potential to re-territorialise and valorise other forms of labour, life and resistance.*

The “sharing economy” has seen a rapid slide away from collaborative sharing towards further deregulated and precarious employment — the direct consequence of venture capital funding and the growth imperatives that come with that money. Such a project won’t bring us any closer to the more equitable society we want to see any time soon.

“KMO welcomes Michael Goodwin, author of Economix: How Our Economy Works (And Doesn’t Work) In Words and Pictures to the C-Realm to talk about money, history, the interplay between corporations and government, and Adam Smith’s actual words on the trustworthiness of capitalists. The conversation touches on the NYC soda ban, which Michael favors and KMO disdains. Michael will be the featured speaker at the third Full Circle Series event. KMO concludes with some remarks about the struggles of a small hog farmer in Michigan who is fighting against the Michigan state government, which favors corporate CAFO over the humane animal husbandry of small”

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

“The co-operative movement and the open source movement both create complex, world-class organisations motivated by social rather than financial goals. From Wikipedia and Linux to Mondragon and the Co-operative Bank, both movements offer coherent alternatives to the kind of business-as-usual profit-seeking structures which are driving the world to the brink of ecological collapse.

This is from the Final Report on the Economics and the Commons Conference, crafted by David Bollier, and as republished by Mike Linksvayer. We reprint the part on the Knowledge Stream, first the keynote, then the deliberations and finally the conclusions by the streamleader.