February 2011 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Re: [P2P-F] New release Zeitgeist movie big success
by Eric Hunting 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

I downloaded and watched this movie last week. I found it far superior to the earlier movies in that it was less focused on the hackneyed theme of a grand class conspiracy and, instead, focused on characterizing the global economic/cultural situation as a social pathology that, while exploited for the benefit of some, is less conspiracy and more evolutionary. This is more in line with how Fresco himself has characterized this in his writing. The film also made the movement's best attempt yet at specifically defining the nature of a resource based economic system. This was a breakthrough as the concept has never been present well in the Venus Project's own video media and has only ever been offered to the world in various written works. It's still going to be a difficult concept for many because there are few to no historic examples that the public has any collective memory of. And the notion of automating the management of world resources is quite alien to a society quite ignorant of just how automated economics already is today. So the concept is going to remain a hard sell. It seems, though, that, with this film, this Zeitgeist movement has moved beyond a class protest concerned with stimulating fear and anger for sake of public attention to what could be called an economic atheism with a potentially more coherent ideology -and potential for much greater credibility. I see that as significant progress. However, as with the past films and as with the Venus Project in general, we're still left with no specific plans of action. No presentation of anything the audience is supposed to actually do about the dysfunctional status quo but embrace the suppressed reality of the situation. We are given an emotional impression of a fanciful near future global mass social uprising resulting from a spontaneous mass epiphany triggered by a 'tipping point' in economic failure and social strife. But nowhere are we told how to functionally prepare for this imagined event. As a conclusion to the description of the new economic model we are presented with Fresco's model city of the future as an example of the rational habitat and its superlative lifestyle such a scientific approach to global resource management would produce. But, beautiful as it is, frankly, it's very much a Greek Temple on a Golf Course. A Neo-EPCOT. A scientifically engineered urban megastructure of the classic Modernist sort that exists as a set-piece of architecture, presumably springing from the aether fully formed and inhabited and devoid of the organic evolution that characterizes any real city. It is, on the face of it, implausible because it can only exist and function in its finished full-scale form and would require a kind of nation-scale public works project of the likes -and time frame- of the Great Wall of China to create. If this is a suggestion of an objective, it's not a good one. Where would you start? (this is a problem I understand well from my work on The Millennial Project and the problem of Marshal Savage's similarly anachronistic notion of marine arcologies -which in turn relates to Paulo Soleri's similarly flawed arcologies) Real cities are organic constructs. Emergent phenomenon. They are not planned but rather generated by an attractor formed by the convergence of interests on a geographically strategic location. They grow incrementally and must be functional and habitable at every stage of growth. One of the minor contradictions in the Venus Project vision is the way Fresco's mid-century Big Machine model of technology and architecture contradicts the core paradigms of a Post-Industrial culture and the contemporary trends in technological evolution he is otherwise advocating. The Venus Project needs a more 21st century urban theory to compliment its economic theory. Maybe then it will have a functional model for a habitat it can actually aspire to build now, today, as an example for its new way of life. Still, overall this movie seems like real progress for this movement. Eric Hunting erichunting(a)gmail.com On Jan 21, 2011, at 4:15 AM, p2p-foundation-request(a)lists.ourproject.org wrote: > From: robin <robokow(a)gmail.com> > Date: January 21, 2011 4:02:23 AM MST > To: p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org > Subject: [P2P-F] > Reply-To: robino(a)robokow.net, P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> > > > Heya, > > wrote about zeitgeist/venus project on the list before (in a pretty > biased way) and things are moving forward with the zeitgeist movement. > I am thinking about a possibly somewhat balanced blog-post, but I am > not sure yet. > > Haven't seen this new movie yet which as far as I've understood/ heard > is less superficial than the ones before. Anyone went to see it? > > Robin.

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Fwd: <edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits ofCollaboration
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 8:36 PM Subject: Fwd: <edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits ofCollaboration To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> Found the following thread ( Jan 2008 ) when searching in my archives... Are you in touch with Ned Rossiter ? http://nedrossiter.org/ <http://nedrossiter.org/> Forwarded conversation Subject: <edu-factory> A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration ------------------------ From: *Ned Rossiter* <ned(a)nedrossiter.org> Date: Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 4:20 PM To: edufactory(a)listcultures.org A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration Ned Rossiter The edu-factory organizers invited me to comment on the passage from hierarchisation to autonomous institutions. Indeed, I think it appropriate to maintain the connection between hierarchy and autonomy. This constitutive tension is apparent in the political economy and social-technical dimensions of both open source and proprietary software that provides the architecture for communicative relations. And it manifests on multiple fronts in the modalities of organization that attend the creation of autonomous spaces and times of radical or alternative research and education projects, experiments and agendas. There is no absolute autonomy, but rather a complex field of forces and relations that hold the potential for partial autonomy, or 'the difference which makes a difference' (Bateson). How to move and direct such complexities in such a way that make possible autonomous education is what I understand to be the program of edu-factory. And in such guidance - a combination of collective investigation and top-down decision-making - one finds the movement between hierarchy and autonomy. This is a matter of governance for networks. Protocols come in to play, and dispute, disagreement and alliance shape the culture of networks in singular ways. At the technical level there are some near universal features of networks: TCP/IP, location of root-servers according to the geo-politics of information, adoption of open source and/or proprietary software, allocation of domain names, etc. But as the debates around the UN's World Summit on the Information Society (2003-2005) amply demonstrated, it quickly becomes analytically and politically implausible to separate the technical aspects of information from social and culture conditions. Autonomous education that makes use of ICTs will always be situated within a geography of uneven information. Hierarchies will always prevail. The possibility of transnational collaboration that aspires to autonomous education thus becomes a problem of translation, as Jon Solomon and others have discussed in rich ways on this list. There will be no 'construction on an autonomous global university'. How, then, might autonomous education initiatives engage in scalar transformation in such a way that makes transnational relations possible? This seems to be the ambition of the edu-factory. But what is the desire for transnational connection? Why not keep things local, rooted in the geographies of the city, neighborhood or village? Who is the subject of, let us say, not a global but transnational education project that resides sufficiently outside the corporate university? Part of the brilliance of the edu-Summit held in Berlin last May was to finally break with the anti- or alter-globalization cycle of staging protests according to the diary of the WTO, G8, etc.[1] Autonomy begins with invention that is co-emergent with conflict, crisis, frustration, curiosity, depression, wild utopian desires, boredom, etc. The sites of conflict are multiple: individual, institutional, social/collective, corporeal, affective, ecological, cultural, geopolitical, governmental, etc. Underscored by heterolingual tensions and incommensurabilities, the edu-factory organizers' call for and presupposition of 'the realization of our collective project' is nothing short of complex (a problematic acknowledged by edu-factory organizers and participants). What is the situation of autonomous institutions? Paolo Do: 'Talking about an autonomous university is to find a starting-point to attack and to occupy the spaces belonging to the enemy'.[2] Such an approach is a reactionary one if it is to be reduced to a takeover, say, of the institutional spaces of the university. The conservatism in such a move lies in a responsive mechanism determined by the space and time of 'the enemy', or hegemonic institution (the university as we know it). To simply occupy the spaces of the enemy is to repeat the failure Foucault saw of revolution: the end-result is a reproduction of the same. This amounts to a reformist agenda and, in the case of the transformation of universities over the past 20 or so years, succeeds in the production and proliferation of managerial subjectivities. There are, however, different registers of occupation, and I will assume this to be the interest of Paolo. A good example can be found in the case of domestic workers in Hong Kong and their invention of new institutional forms that arise through the practice of occupation. The potential for commonalities across labouring bodies is undoubtedly a complex and often fraught subjective and institutional process or formation. The fractured nature of working times, places and practices makes political organization highly difficult. Where this does happen, there are often ethnic affinities coalesced around specific sectors - here, we are thinking of examples such as the 'Justice for Janitors' movement in the U.S., a largely Latino immigrant experience of self-organization.[3] In Hong Kong, domestic workers gather on Sundays within non-spaces such as road fly-overs, under pedestrian bridges and in public parks. The domestics are female workers for the most part, initially from the Philippines with a new wave of workers in recent years from Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand.[4] And as cultural critic Helen Grace notes, 'there are also mainland migrant workers with limited rights, working in all sorts of low-paid jobs, moving backwards and forwards and living with great precarity'.[5] The domestic workers transform the status of social-ethnic borders by occupying spaces from which they are usually excluded due to the spatial and temporal constraints of labour. Sunday is the day off for domestic workers, and they don't want to stay at home, nor do their employers wish to have them about the house. The Norman Foster designed headquarters for HSBC bank located in Central district nicely encapsulates the relation between domestic workers and capital and the disconnection between state and citizen. This bank is just one of many instances found globally where the corporate sector makes available public spaces in the constitution of an 'entrepreneurial city'.[6] Yet the actions of undocumented workers mark a distinction from the entrepreneurial city and its inter-scalar strategies of capital accumulation in the form of property development and business, financial, IT and tourist services. With a first floor of public space, workers engage in praying and study groups reading the Koran, singing songs, labour organization, cutting hair and dancing while finance capital is transferred in floors above the floating ceiling of the HSBC bank. Used in innovative ways that conflict with or at least depart from how these spaces usually function, there is a correspondence here with what Grace calls a 'horizontal monumentality', 'making highly visible - and public - a particular aspect of otherwise privatized labour and domestic space'.[7] Not described in tourist guides and absent from policy and corporate narratives of entrepreneurial innovation and development, the domestic worker is a public without a discourse. For many Hong Kong residents their visibility is undesirable, yet these workers make a significant contribution to the city's imaginary: their visibility of Sundays signals that the lustre of entrepreneurialism is underpinned by highly insecure and low-paid forms of work performed by non- citizens. The domestic worker also instantiates less glamorous but nonetheless innovative forms of entrepreneurialism. An obvious example here consists of the small business initiatives such as restaurants, deli's and small-scale repairs and manufacturing that some migrant workers go on to develop, making way for new intakes of domestic workers in the process and redefining the ethnic composition of the city. Such industriousness provides an important service to local residents and contributes in key ways to the social-cultural fabric of the city. The competition of urban space - particularly the *use* of urban space - by the domestic worker also comprises an especially innovative act: the invention of a new institutional form, one that we call the 'organized network'. The transnational dimension of the domestic workers is both external and internal. External, in their return home every year or two for a week or so - a passage determined by the time of labour and festivity (there is little need for domestics during the Chinese New Year). There also consists of what Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra in their posting called 'a multiplicity of overlapping sites that are themselves internally heterogeneous'.[8] Here, I am thinking of the borders of sociality that compose the gathering of domestics in one urban setting or another - as mentioned above, some choose to sing, engage in labour organization, hold study groups, etc. Ethnic and linguistic differences also underscore the internal borders of the group. Can the example of domestic workers in Hong Kong be understood in terms of a transnational organized network? I suspect not. The domestics only meet in particular times and spaces (Sunday in urban non-spaces). Such a form of localization obviously does not lend itself to transnational connection. Perhaps NGOs and social movements that rally around the conditions of domestic workers communicate within a transnational network of organizations engaged in similar advocacy work. But if this is the case, then we are speaking of a different register of subjectivity and labour - one defined by the option of expanded choice and self-determination. In this sense, we can identify a hierarchy of networks whose incommensurabilities are of a scalar nature: local as distinct from transnational. For domestic workers, much of this has to do with external conditions over which they have little control: Sunday is the day off work, exile from their country of origin is shaped by lack of economic options and the forces of global capital, their status as undocumented or temporary workers prevents equivalent freedom of movement and political rights afforded by Hong Kong citizens, etc. But within these constraints, invention is possible. Part one of this second round of discussions on the edu-factory mailing list identified many of the conditions at work that shape the differential experience of labour and practices of education. How to make the transition to institution strikes me as the task now at hand. Notes: Parts of this text are drawn from an article currently in progress with Brett Neilson. 1. Summit: Non-Aligned Initiatives in Education Culture, Berlin, 24-28 May, 2007, http://summit.kein.org 2. Paolo Do, 'Open University', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 14 January, 2008, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=89&Itemid=41 3. See Florian Schneider, 'Organizing the Unorganizables', 2002, http://wastun.org/v2v/Organizing_the_Unorganizable 4. See Nicole Constable, 'At Home but Not at Home: Filipina Narratives of Ambivalent Returns', Cultural Anthropology 14.2 (1999): 203-228 and Lisa Law, 'Defying Disappearance: Cosmopolitan Public Spaces in Hong Kong', Urban Studies 39.9 (2002): 1625-1646. [both articles available online - do a search] 5. Helen Grace, personal email, 15 January, 2008. 6. See Bob Jessop and Ngai-Ling Sum, 'An Entrepreneurial City in Action: Hong Kong's Emerging Strategies in and for (Inter-)Urban Competition', (no date), http://www2.cddc.vt.edu/digitalfordism/ fordism_materials/jessop.htm 7. Helen Grace, 'Monuments and the Face of Time: Distortions of Scale and Asynchrony in Postcolonial Hong Kong', Postcolonial Studies 10.4 (2007): 469. 8. Brett Neilson and Sandro Mezzadra, 'Border as Method or the Multiplication of Labor', posting to edu-factory mailing list, 27 December, 2007, http://www.edu-factory.org/index.php? option=com_content&task=view&id=83&Itemid=41 _______________________________________________ edufactory mailing list edufactory(a)listcultures.org http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org ---------- From: *Jon Solomon Su Zhe-an* <areality(a)mail.tku.edu.tw> Date: Wed, Jan 23, 2008 at 12:16 PM To: edufactory(a)listcultures.org I do not think that the relation between hierarchy, knowledge and translation at the forefront of recent discussions is simply fortuitous or accidental. I have several remarks to share: 1) The hierarchies at issue occur on two very different levels, the social and the cognitive, to speak in crude terms. In other words, there are social hierarchies (class and culture repeatedly come up here, but there have been significant references to gender, language, ethnicity, and sexuality), and there are hierarchies in the order of knowledge. Each has it own specifities, yet we are still very far from understanding how the relationship between the two may in fact determine the way we understand each individually. Composite or quasi-objects that straddle both the social and the cognitive are key sites of intervention into the composition and reproduction of hierarchies. 2) One of the reasons why the university is a crucial site of intervention is because its very nature is to institutionalize and regulate the ratio between the paradigmatic quasi-object of modernity: i.e., the complex models of thought + world that we call "regions". The ratio between thought and world-the magic bullet of modern social theory in general-is what is generally called "rationality". It is no accident-only a catastrophe!-that the dominant image of rationality in modernity is a quasi-object that combines both hierarchies of knowledge and social organization in a single geo-cultural unit called, quite notoriously, "the West". In fact, as we have discovered, it is impossible to consider the ratio beteween thought and world accumulating, in primitive fashion, to the "West" without encountering the problem of ressentiment. The various postcolonial, postmodern and feminist critiques of "western rationality" have the signal merit showing us that ressentiment is the repressed other of this particular form of rationality. 3) Ned's work has gone farther than anybody else I can think of to show how the new forms of dis/organized networks are not just displacing the quasi-objects of high modernity known as geo-cultural regions but are in fact posing entirely novel ratios between the social and the cognitive. Evidently, the displacement of modernity's geo-cultural regions by the postmodern network does not mean that we have found our way out of the quandary of quasi-objects! On the contrary, the entire problem of regions as composite or amphibological models of transcendental and empirical, cognitive and social, levels is only further exacerbated by the essentially epidemic nature of postmodern sociality and knowledge. 4) One of the challenges posed by this displacement is that it is occurring before we have had sufficient time to fully critique in a bilateral way the colonial and anthropological legacy of geo-cultural regions and to produce thereby entirely new understandings of "regions" based on alternative terms of comparison. In fact, given the new, "proactive" interventionism of U.S. imperial-nationalism and the rise of resentment-based geo-cultural politics of "return to the West, return to the East" today, such critique is becoming ever more difficult to imagine. As a result, the new rationality being promoted by the displacement of regions-as-networks bears within it an important contradiction that blocks the passage to alternative pasts as well as futures. 5) The opportunity offered by "translation"-as a mode of social praxis rather than a mode of epistemological mapping-is the chance to think in terms of relationships, rather than discrete identities. This means that the relationship takes priority in a temporal sense: the identities (at least as far as we normally talk about them) are formed only after the relational encounter. To take but one example, it would make little sense to talk of/critique the West as a specific identity or amalgam of defining traits, since its very formation (as a mode of translation-and certainly not the only mode possible!) determines both what we know and who knows it. The types of critique that assume the identity of the West at the expense of seeing the "Western relation" will be easily recuperated into the intrinsically-hierarchical structure (no matter what the reversals and permutations may be) of "the West and its others". 6) We are in need of a new kind of social movement that addresses this ratio or relationship in an integral way, producing an alternative rationality that allows new social and cognitive relations to take place in ways that completely redefine what "regions" mean. The fact that such massive reorganization is currently underway is everywhere in evidence today. The question is whether it will be guided by destructive forces of self-immunization/overexposure that lead to catastrophe, or whether we can together reappropriate these transformations for the better? 7) The process of this alternative rationality produces a temporal schism that necessitates two movements, one towards the past, the other towards the future. On the one hand, it demands a radical rewriting of past history and the terms of comparison that ground humanistic knowledge. The flawed Marxist project of rewriting world history on the basis of class rather than nation or civilization is but a caricature of the kind of project required, yet it can serve, in spite of its fatal flaws, as an emblem of the possibility ahead. On the other hand, the question "Who are we?" formerly central to modernity will be replaced by the question "What are we becoming? and, What can we become instead?". 8) Thinking/acting in terms of relationships produces its own special kind of resistance, some of which we have already discussed on this list. This forum is obviously not the place to resolve these questions, but to the extent we bear in mind that resistance corresponds to invention, we are on the right track, I think. ---------- From: *Nagarjuna N* <nagarjuna1960(a)yahoo.com> Date: Thu, Jan 24, 2008 at 1:34 PM To: Jon Solomon Su Zhe-an <areality(a)mail.tku.edu.tw>, "info(a)edu-factory.org" <info(a)edu-factory.org>, EF ListCultures <edufactory(a)listcultures.org>, List EduFactory <list(a)edu-factory.org> Dear All, I have found the comments of both Ned and Jon regarding "A Hierarchy of Networks?, or, Geo-Culturally Differentiated Networks and the Limits of Collaboration" very illuminating. I do feel that Jon's comments are very appropriate, regarding Ned's comments on dis/organized networks replacing the desire of Edu-Factory agenda - "not just displacing the quasi-objects of high modernity known as geo-cultural regions but are in fact posing entirely novel ratios between the social and the cognitive. Evidently, the displacement of modernity's geo-cultural regions by the postmodern network does not mean that we have found our way out of the quandary of quasi-objects !" I had initially expressed my skepticism about the bio politics concept mentioned by Jon and translation as a way forward for Edu-Factory, as he further elaborates .. "The opportunity offered by "translation"-as a mode of social praxis rather than a mode of epistemological mapping-is the chance to think in terms of relationships, rather than discrete identities. This means that the relationship takes priority in a temporal sense: the identities (at least as far as we normally talk about them) are formed only after the relational encounter. " Ben had of course mentioned the issue of open source software as a possible post Marxian model to consider, but we had not gone further in discussing these as diffuse networks, but instead the discussions had taken the form of a debate on rationality (western vs Eastern, science vs humanties, original spirit of software hackers vs original spirit of Edu-Factory initiators, or however else one may put it) of open source software and whether or not it could be blocked by network / legal controls and legislative fiats, goodness or badness of FOSS, whether IBM / Ubuntu gangs are making money from open source software and services in the guise of a new business model, etc. In this sense, yet another possibility to consider, in my opinion, in terms other than what Jon is suggesting (bio politics and translation as praxis), in more concrete terms may be the concept of software patterns and the work of the Gang of Four in mapping the "quasi objects of modernity vis a vis their interactive relationships. " This may entail a lot of reading up and preparations, and sometimes the risk will be seen that the discussions tend to veer off into supra theoretical, but I feel, the software world has its ideological pinnacles not in the open software enterprise, dissolution of hierarchies, commons spaces as an arena for conflict, community participation or the "hack of the GPL", but rather in the Design Patterns of software - where also, some of the most intense thought of the last four decades, of the originality of Western scientific thought, has gone into, also a key element of why sciences are outstripping humanities in competition for surplus funds and stable economic environment. The scientific academia, able to keep its eyes on the ball, is always able to turn, any and every, social, human and global crisis, into a corporate economic opportunity, which the humanities have not been able to. Tracking these software patterns, their theory and assumptions, and how they have played out in corporate Western and globalized post Davos world (G8 countries and the auxiliary G8 BRIC economies, being invited to be part of "stable" global economic order), may be more revealing for the Edu-Factory project as a transnational loose dis/organized network, rather than simple goodness or badness of FOSS et all, I feel. I agree with Jon that .. " I do not think that the relation between hierarchy, knowledge and translation at the forefront of recent discussions is simply fortuitous or accidental. " Regards, Nagarjuna ------------------------------ Never miss a thing. Make Yahoo your homepage.<http://us.rd.yahoo.com/evt=51438/*http://www.yahoo.com/r/hs> _______________________________________________ edufactory mailing list edufactory(a)listcultures.org http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/edufactory_listcultures.org -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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The Political Principles of Peer-to-Peer Advocacy
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

The Political Principles of Peer-to-Peer Advocacy http://p2pfoundation.net/The_Political_Principles_of_Peer-to-Peer_Advocacy Dear Sam/Paul/Richard, I have been ill today and yesterday afternoon, and behind in my emails, is this a finished product, or a draft? Michel -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Fwd: [fcf_discussion] epfsug ftw!
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: stef <stefan.marsiske(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, Feb 5, 2011 at 11:30 PM Subject: [fcf_discussion] epfsug ftw! To: fcforum_discussion <fcforum_discussion(a)list.fcforum.net> Cc: JOSEFSSON Erik <erik.josefsson(a)europarl.europa.eu> Ma'ms/Sirs! let me endorse the European Parlament Free Software User Group: http://epfsug.eu our goal is to get a bunch of voluntary supporters proficient in supporting MEPs and staff with becoming the target of envy, not an annoyance for their closed source colleagues. pls distribute and if you happen to know someone who is social and proficient enough, let that someone please know about your respect and this usergroup. :) i think this might be also useful later, when there are personal contacts between MEPs and supporters to raise awareness and educate in general. cheers,s -- gpg: https://www.ctrlc.hu/~stef/stef.gpg<https://www.ctrlc.hu/%7Estef/stef.gpg> gpg fp: F617 AC77 6E86 5830 08B8 BB96 E7A4 C6CF A84A 7140 ----- +info http://list.fcforum.net/wws/info/fcforum_discussion ---- -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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Would you like to write about how to set up a mesh network
by Neal Gorenflo 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

Hi p2p friends, We at Shareable are looking for someone to write a how-to article about how to set up a neighborhood mesh network so neighbors can share Internet access. Please contact me if you're interested or know someone who could do a good job at it. What's especially appreciated is someone who has actually set one up or knows someone who has that can be a source. The article would add to our library of around 80 how-to share guides including how to start a housing coop, a chicken coop, hold a free market, share a vegetable garden, start a farmers market and more: http://shareable.net/how-to-share Neal -- Neal Gorenflo | Publisher, http://Shareable.net <http://shareable.net/> | 415.867.0429

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Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason
by Kevin Flanagan 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere - Paul Mason http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/newsnight/paulmason/2011/02/twenty_reasons_why_i… We've had revolution in Tunisia, Egypt's Mubarak is teetering; in Yemen, Jordan and Syria suddenly protests have appeared. In Ireland young techno-savvy professionals are agitating for a "Second Republic"; in France the youth from banlieues battled police on the streets to defend the retirement rights of 60-year olds; in Greece striking and rioting have become a national pastime. And in Britain we've had riots and student occupations that changed the political mood. What's going on? What's the wider social dynamic? My editors yesterday asked me put some bullet points down for a discussion on the programme that then didn't happen but I am throwing them into the mix here, on the basis of various conversations with academics who study this and also the participants themselves. At the heart of it all are young people, obviously; students; westernised; secularised. They use social media - as the mainstream media has now woken up to - but this obsession with reporting "they use twitter" is missing the point of what they use it for. In so far as there are common threads to be found in these different situation, here's 20 things I have spotted: 1. At the heart if it all is a new sociological type: the graduate with no future 2. ...with access to social media, such as Facebook, Twitter and eg Yfrog so they can express themselves in a variety of situations ranging from parliamentary democracy to tyrrany. 3. Therefore truth moves faster than lies, and propaganda becomes flammable. 4. They are not prone to traditional and endemic ideologies: Labourism, Islamism, Fianna Fail Catholicism etc... in fact hermetic ideologies of all forms are rejected. 5. Women very numerous as the backbone of movements. After twenty years of modernised labour markets and higher-education access the "archetypal" protest leader, organizer, facilitator, spokesperson now is an educated young woman. 6. Horizontalism has become endemic because technology makes it easy: it kills vertical hierarchies spontaneously, whereas before - and the quintessential experience of the 20th century - was the killing of dissent within movements, the channeling of movements and their bureaucratisaton. 7. Memes: "A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes, in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures." (Wikipedia) - so what happens is that ideas arise, are very quickly "market tested" and either take off, bubble under, insinuate themselves or if they are deemed no good they disappear. Ideas self-replicate like genes. Prior to the internet this theory (see Richard Dawkins, 1976) seemed an over-statement but you can now clearly trace the evolution of memes. 8. They all seem to know each other: not only is the network more powerful than the hierarchy - but the ad-hoc network has become easier to form. So if you "follow" somebody from the UCL occupation on Twitter, as I have done, you can easily run into a radical blogger from Egypt, or a lecturer in peaceful resistance in California who mainly does work on Burma so then there are the Burmese tweets to follow. During the early 20th century people would ride hanging on the undersides of train carriages across borders just to make links like these. 9. The specifics of economic failure: the rise of mass access to university-level education is a given. Maybe soon even 50% in higher education will be not enough. In most of the world this is being funded by personal indebtedess - so people are making a rational judgement to go into debt so they will be better paid later. However the prospect of ten years of fiscal retrenchment in some countries means they now know they will be poorer than their parents. And the effect has been like throwing a light switch; the prosperity story is replaced with the doom story, even if for individuals reality will be more complex, and not as bad as they expect. 10.This evaporation of a promise is compounded in the more repressive societies and emerging markets because - even where you get rapid economic growth - it cannot absorb the demographic bulge of young people fast enough to deliver rising living standards for enough of them. 11.To amplify: I can't find the quote but one of the historians of the French Revolution of 1789 wrote that it was not the product of poor people but of poor lawyers. You can have political/economic setups that disappoint the poor for generations - but if lawyers, teachers and doctors are sitting in their garrets freezing and starving you get revolution. Now, in their garrets, they have a laptop and broadband connection. 12.The weakness of organised labour means there's a changed relationship between the radicalized middle class, the poor and the organised workforce. The world looks more like 19th century Paris - heavy predomination of the "progressive" intelligentsia, intermixing with the slum-dwellers at numerous social interfaces (cabarets in the 19C, raves now); huge social fear of the excluded poor but also many rags to riches stories celebrated in the media (Fifty Cent etc); meanwhile the solidaristic culture and respectability of organized labour is still there but, as in Egypt, they find themselves a "stage army" to be marched on and off the scene of history. 13.This leads to a loss of fear among the young radicals of any movement: they can pick and choose; there is no confrontation they can't retreat from. They can "have a day off" from protesting, occupying: whereas twith he old working-class based movements, their place in the ranks of battle was determined and they couldn't retreat once things started. You couldn't "have a day off" from the miners' strike if you lived in a pit village. 14.In addition to a day off, you can "mix and match": I have met people who do community organizing one day, and the next are on a flotilla to Gaza; then they pop up working for a think tank on sustainable energy; then they're writing a book about something completely different. I was astonished to find people I had interviewed inside the UCL occupation blogging from Tahrir Square this week. 15. People just know more than they used to. Dictatorships rely not just on the suppression of news but on the suppression of narratives and truth. More or less everything you need to know to make sense of the world is available as freely downloadable content on the internet: and it's not pre-digested for you by your teachers, parents, priests, imams. For example there are huge numbers of facts available to me now about the subjects I studied at university that were not known when I was there in the 1980s. Then whole academic terms would be spent disputing basic facts, or trying to research them. Now that is still true but the plane of reasoning can be more complex because people have an instant reference source for the undisputed premises of arguments. It's as if physics has been replaced by quantum physics, but in every discipline. 16.There is no Cold War, and the War on Terror is not as effective as the Cold War was in solidifying elites against change. Egypt is proving to be a worked example of this: though it is highly likely things will spiral out of control, post Mubarak - as in all the colour revolutons - the dire warnings of the US right that this will lead to Islamism are a "meme" that has not taken off. In fact you could make an interesting study of how the meme starts, blossoms and fades away over the space of 12 days. To be clear: I am not saying they are wrong - only that the fear of an Islamist takeover in Egypt has not been strong enough to swing the US presidency or the media behind Mubarak. 17. It is - with international pressure and some powerful NGOs - possible to bring down a repressive government without having to spend years in the jungle as a guerilla, or years in the urban underground: instead the oppositional youth - both in the west in repressive regimes like Tunisia/Egypt, and above all in China - live in a virtual undergrowth online and through digital comms networks. The internet is not key here - it is for example the things people swap by text message, the music they swap with each other etc: the hidden meanings in graffiti, street art etc which those in authority fail to spot. 18. People have a better understanding of power. The activists have read their Chomsky and their Hardt-Negri, but the ideas therein have become mimetic: young people believe the issues are no longer class and economics but simply power: they are clever to the point of expertise in knowing how to mess up hierarchies and see the various "revolutions" in their own lives as part of an "exodus" from oppression, not - as previous generations did - as a "diversion into the personal". While Foucault could tell Gilles Deleuze: "We had to wait until the nineteenth century before we began to understand the nature of exploitation, and to this day, we have yet to fully comprehend the nature of power",- that's probably changed. 19. As the algebraic sum of all these factors it feels like the protest "meme" that is sweeping the world - if that premise is indeed true - is profoundly less radical on economics than the one that swept the world in the 1910s and 1920s; they don't seek a total overturn: they seek a moderation of excesses. However on politics the common theme is the dissolution of centralized power and the demand for "autonomy" and personal freedom in addition to formal democracy and an end to corrupt, family based power-elites. 20. Technology has - in many ways, from the contraceptive pill to the iPod, the blog and the CCTV camera - expanded the space and power of the individual. Some complications.... a) all of the above are generalisations: and have to be read as such. b) are these methods replicable by their opponents? Clearly up to a point they are. So the assumption in the global progressive movement that their values are aligned with that of the networked world may be wrong. Also we have yet to see what happens to all this social networking if a state ever seriously pulls the plug on the technology: switches the mobile network off, censors the internet, cyber-attacks the protesters. c) China is the laboratory here, where the Internet Police are paid to go online and foment pro-government "memes" to counteract the oppositional ones. The Egyptian leftist blogger Arabawy.org says on his website that : "in a dictatorship, independent journalism by default becomes a form of activism, and the spread of information is essentially an act of agitation." But independent journalism is suppressed in many parts of the world. d) what happens to this new, fluffy global zeitgeist when it runs up against the old-style hierarchical dictatorship in a death match, where the latter has about 300 Abrams tanks? We may be about to find out. e) - and this one is troubling for mainstream politics: are we creating a complete disconnect between the values and language of the state and those of the educated young? Egypt is a classic example - if you hear the NDP officials there is a time-warped aspect to their language compared to that of young doctors and lawyers on the Square. But there are also examples in the UK: much of the political discourse - on both sides of the House of Commons - is treated by many young people as a barely intelligible "noise" - and this goes wider than just the protesters. (For example: I'm finding it common among non-politicos these days that whenever you mention the "Big Society" there's a shrug and a suppressed laugh - yet if you move into the warren of thinktanks around Westminster, it's treated deadly seriously. Dissing the Big Society has quickly become a "meme" that crosses political tribal boundaries under the Coalition, yet most professional politicians are deaf to "memes" as the youth are to the contents of Hansard.) That's it - as I say, these are just my thoughts on it all and not researched other than through experience: there are probably whole PhD theses about some of this so feel free to hit the comments. Likewise if you think it is all balderdash, and if you are over 40 you may, vent your analog-era spleen below.

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Fwd: We Can Fix Our Economy!
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

hi thomas, are you familiar with this? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Stephen Clark <realityofmoney(a)yahoo.com> Date: Sun, Feb 6, 2011 at 10:39 AM Subject: We Can Fix Our Economy! To: realityofmoney(a)yahoo.com *Hello,* *The New Book <http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397> Provides a Wake-up Call to Americans in a declining economy.* *Reality Of Money and The Federal Reserve<http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397>b **y Stephen Clark and Frank Wallace explores the prime cause for America’s national debt and outlines the steps needed to reverse it.* *If knowledge truly is power, then this book<http://www.amazon.com/product/dp/1450553397>carries more than its fair share to inform the American people on the alarming pattern of corruption and unfair usury practiced in the United States each and every day.* *Here are a few of the documented potential benefits of government issued, debt-free **money spent, not loaned into circulation:* *1. **Usury (unfair, scripturally immoral, compounded, ballooning or excessive interest) will be abolished and the banking industry will be like any other business in a truly free enterprise system, practicing competitive banking.* *** * *2. Public debt will eventually be reduced to zero with governments earning interest on account balances rather than paying interest on debt. * * * *3. Boom and bust cycles will permanently disappear.* *4. **Bankruptcies, foreclosures, business failures, and unemployment will no longer be the tools used to balance prosperity.* *5. **Graduating students will not be forced to start their lives saddled with thousands of dollars of debt, which actually can remove the incentive to get an education. * *6. **Universal health care will be a reality. No one will lose their home going bankrupt over medical bills. * * * *7. **The national public infrastructure of roads, bridges, levees, dams, transportation, education and information systems, the space program, the arts and the military can all be adequately funded. * * * *8. **Relief can be provided for those affected by the occurrence of natural and other disasters without increasing their debt.* * * *9. **All working people will benefit by being able to afford homes and cars and will enjoy a comfortable and dignified retirement. * * * *10. **Unlimited opportunities for jobs will be created.* *When the American people understand the proper function of government issued, debt-free money that is spent, not loaned with interest into circulation for the common good, and act to politically secure it, this nation, under moral right, will finally have a new birth of freedom and a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. * * * *This is the true American Dream as envisioned by the Founders in the Constitution.** * * * *If you want to help please forward this message along to all of the people in your address book, because we can fix our economy! * * * *Please visit the website, Reality of Money <http://www.realityofmoney.org/>, to learn more. **www.RealityofMoney.org* P.S. Please give this serious consideration. This book will help any person with or without a degree in economics to understand our country's monetary system and what we as a group need to do to fix it. When we all stand together we will make our voices heard. Sincerely, Belinda Clark ** ------------------------------ avast! Antivirus <http://www.avast.com>: Outbound message clean. Virus Database (VPS): 101129-1, 11/29/2010 Tested on: 11/29/2010 8:28:48 PM avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2010 ALWIL Software. -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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non-us centric sharing
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

http://www.dnaindia.com/speakup/report_innovating-to-connect-the-dots-for-s… -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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wealth of nature
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

Hi Bill, if you ever read this and take notes, I'd love to publish them: http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4093 -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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quoting sepp on open mesh progress
by Michel Bauwens 06 Feb '11

06 Feb '11

http://boomeroo.org/?p=5032 -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens; http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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