May 2014 - P2P-Foundation - lists.ourproject.org

Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites?
by willi uebelherr 26 May '14

26 May '14

Dear Brian, many thanks for your answer. Never i wanted to devalue you. It was only my reaction to this part of your text. We have to create our local technical infrastructure, that the people can design and construct localy, what they need. We do it on the base: "global thinking, local doing". The first step is our communication system, the InterNet, "the inter-connection of local networks". It is our most important instrument for the free flowing of knowledge, ideas and methods. We know, that all people on our planet have the potential to understand the laws of the nature. We have to open the environment for a free study. But never we can use the education systems or their principles in our environments. This is the general problems of all licences like PPL, GPL or any other. Knowledge is always World-Heritage and we have to accept it. It is a rational process to understand and not a reaction process to the occupy of community ressources. Knowledge is part of the basic community ressources like land, water and frequencies. Of course, we have more. But this are the basics. And with our communication system it is the same. It is always a community instrument. The lifelines of societies. The communication system is the immaterial part of our transport system. And like all living systems our society have also two transport systems: material and immaterial. This jointly developed transport systems are our basic instruments for the development of the independent local economy, based on the local technical infrastructure. And only on this basis we can speak from political independence. Without the independence in the economy, not the distribution system, all speaking of independence and autonomy is a cheap theater. Dear Brian, this are some basics from me. I've invited some friends to read. Or to comment on. I send you my proposal to the www.1net.org and NetMundial in Brasil. But, of course, it is a more technical theme. many greetings, willi Jinotepe, Nicaragua -------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites? Datum: Sun, 25 May 2014 01:06:20 -0500 Von: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> Antwort an: bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com An: willi uebelherr <willi.uebelherr(a)gmail.com>, P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> Kopie (CC): Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan(a)gmail.com>, Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net> Hello Willi, Greetings, thanks for your mail. I find myself here amidst a very interesting set of people and projects of which I am quite ignorant. But I am glad to be learning something. Hopefully some day in the future I will be able to really enage in the debates that occupy you all so passionately. > You wrote: > "What has typically been lacking, among the sectors oriented > toward p2p and the commons, is a real understanding of how important > state institutions and industrial development still is. If we want to > influence the responses to the crisis, we have to be aware of these > things and actively deal with them." > > This is the core of your thinking. You look like the rabbit at the > snake. But if you go more and more inside in the economy, then you > understand, that state institutions and industry are not important. We > don't need it. Well, I can understand why you would say that, though I can only imagine what kinds of thoughts and efforts may lie behind your words. However, I think you do misjudge me, at least a little bit. I write as one who is quite deeply involved in autonomous productive activity. However, I think there is a strong tendency for those engaged in these types of activities to overestimate their own potentials, and severely underestimate that complex set of interlocking social relations which, in a kind of shorthand, is called "the state." in my view, we do so at the peril of becoming simply insignificant. We think we can do everything, that our way is the only way; yet our antagonist most often seems to be the one with the decisive influence on history. Of course there is also a very strong and widespread tendency to overestimate the powers of the capitalist state, and you rightly denounce that. Life is a kind of balancing act between contradictory truths. And at times it is vital to tip that balance in a new direction. Believe me, I am for it! But we do have to know when and where and how to push. Good luck in your efforts, Brian -------- Original-Nachricht -------- Betreff: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites? Datum: Sat, 24 May 2014 20:18:26 -0600 Von: willi uebelherr <willi.uebelherr(a)gmail.com> An: P2P Foundation mailing list <p2p-foundation(a)lists.ourproject.org> Kopie (CC): Kevin Flanagan <kev.flanagan(a)gmail.com>, Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net>, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> Dear Brian, we don't know us. I read your texts in the maillist from P2P Foundation. Never you find a way for any transition from your point of view. You look to the top and not to the base. You wrote: "What has typically been lacking, among the sectors oriented toward p2p and the commons, is a real understanding of how important state institutions and industrial development still is. If we want to influence the responses to the crisis, we have to be aware of these things and actively deal with them." This is the core of your thinking. You look like the rabbit at the snake. But if you go more and more inside in the economy, then you understand, that state institutions and industry are not important. We don't need it. And the actors in this areas know it very clear. The result is the construction of more and more regulation and the propaganda for this instances. In the economy we don't find money. Only in the distribution system. And all, about what you wrote, have only his roots in the distribution system. You have to totally disolve all the dogmas, which you torment. Also the FLOK project in Ecuador can never be effective. This, because the state institutions are the destinations. But this are primarly parasitic institutions. They exist basicly on the extractivism, against the people in Ecuador, against the Indigenas. All this people in the state institutions and FLOK project are hoping for a good income without any working. The only way to change the world are the independent Comunas. Based on a independendent local economy and this is always based on local technical infrastructures. We have to search for ways to create this. It means, to help the local people to create her independent economy. And this include all the decision-making power. Then the states are superfluous. A very good text to the theoretical foundations of the FLOK project and P2P Foundations is the text from Jakob Rigi: The Coming Revolution of Peer Production and Revolutionary Cooperatives. A Response to Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis and Stefan Meretz. http://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC/article/view/486 many greetings, willi Jinotepe, Nicaragua Am 24/05/2014 15:05, schrieb Michel Bauwens: > a mustread of Brian Holmes > > ---------- Forwarded message ---------- > From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> > Date: Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:41 PM > Subject: Re: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area > elites? > To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net>, Jaap van Till < > vantill(a)gmail.com> > > Michel, it's great to hear from you. Your ideas are often on my mind: I > consider you the most precise, most generous and least compromised exponent > of the cooperative economy, which is clearly the best thing to have emerged > out of the short-lived growth surge of the 1990s. It is typical of you to > write immediately whenever someone expresses anything like an idea or a > proposal. Your attentiveness is really much appreciated. > > ...

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Workshop: Marx’s Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age
by Christian Fuchs 26 May '14

26 May '14

Workshop: Marx’s Labour Theory of Value in the Digital Age COST Action IS1202 “Dynamics of Virtual Work”, http://dynamicsofvirtualwork.com/ The Open University of Israel. June 15-17, 2014. Recent developments in digital technology, from “social media”/”web 2.0” such as Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Weibo, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Foursquare, etc to mobile devices, have spurred new forms of production. A variety of terms has been used to describe new production practices and new products enabled by the Internet: participatory culture, co-creation, mass collaboration, social production, commons-based peer production, mass customization, prosumption, produsage, crowdsourcing, open source, social production, user-generated content, user participation, folksonomics, wikinomics, collaborative innovation, open innovation, user innovation. These terms and debates are often over-optimistic, celebratory and lack a critical understanding of “social media” – they do not engage with the social problem-dimension of the “social”. The multiplicity of neologisms is also a symptom of a “technologistic” outlook, which assumes that each technical innovation brings about a paradigmatic change in culture and in society and more democracy and a better society. While such multiplicity of terms attests to a phenomenology of technological innovation and diversity, it is also an analytical and theoretical liability. Concurrent with this dominant approach, there have been attempts for a systematic critical analysis of new forms of online production, digital labour and commodification on social media through the prism of the labour theory of value. Such theoretical approaches attempt to apply a unified conceptual framework in order to gain better understanding of the socio-economic foundations of digital media and the social relations, power relations and class relations that they facilitate. They also help to connect these new productive practices with a longstanding theoretical tradition emerging from Marxian political economy. The role of Marx’s labour theory of value for understanding the political economy of digital and social media has been a topic of intense work and debates in recent years, particularly concerning the appropriateness of using Marxian concepts, such as: value, surplus-value, exploitation, class, abstract and concrete labour, alienation, commodities, the dialectic, work and labour, use- and exchange-value, General Intellect, labour time, labour power, the law of value, necessary and surplus labour time, absolute and relative surplus value production, primitive accumulation, rent, reproductive labour, formal and real subsumption of labour under capital, species-being, collective worker, etc. The critical conceptualization of digital labour has been approached from a variety of critical approaches, such as Marx’s theory, Dallas Smythe’s theory of audience commodification, Critical Theory, Autonomous Marxism, feminist political economy, labour process theory, etc. In this workshop we explore current interventions to the digital labour theory of value. Such interventions propose theoretical and empirical work that contributes to our understanding of the Marx’s labour theory of value, how the nexus of labour and value are transformed under virtual conditions, or they employ the theory in order to shed light on specific practices. The Israeli location will provide an opportunity to explore some issues pertinent to digital technology in the local context, including a lecture on the Palestinian Internet and a tour exploring techniques of separation and control along the separation wall in Jerusalem. Keynote talks: Noam Yoran: The Labour Theory of Television, or, Why is Television Still Around Christian Fuchs: The Digital Labour Theory of Value and Karl Marx in the Age of Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and Weibo Anat Ben David: The Palestinian Internet The programme features the following talks: * Andrea Fumagalli: The concept of life subsumption in cognitive bio-capitalism: valorization and governance * Bingqing Xia: Marx's in Chinese online space: some thoughts on the labour problem in Chinese Internet industries * Brice Nixon: The Exploitation of Audience Labour: A Missing Perspective on Communication and Capital in the Digital Era * Bruce Robinson: Marx's categories of labour, value production and digital work * Eran Fisher: Audience labour: empirical inquiry into the missing link of subjectivity * Frederick Harry Pitts: Form-giving fire: creative industries as Marx’s ‘work of combustion’” * Jakob Rigi: The Crisis of the Law of Value? The Marxian Concept of Rent and a Critique of Antonio Negri`s and his Associates` Approach Towards the Marxian Law of Value * Jernej Prodnik: Media products and (digital) labour in global capitalist accumulation: A preliminary study * Kylie Jarrett: The Uses of Use-Value: A Marxist-Feminist contribution to understanding digital media * Marisol Sandoval: The Dark Side of the Information Age - Arguments for an Extended Definition of Digital Labour * Olivier Frayssé: Cyberspace ground rent, surplus value extraction, realization, and general surplus value apportionment * Sebastian Sevignani: Productive prosumption, primitive accumulation, or rent? Problematising exploitation 2.0 * Thomas Allmer: Digital and Social Media Between Emancipation and Commodification: Dialectical and Critical Perspectives * Yuqi Na: Capital accumulation of targeted advertising-based capitalist social media. What do people in the UK and China think about it and why? A Marxist perspective If you wish to attend the workshop, please contact RSVP Eran Fisher: eranfisher(a)gamil.com

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Fwd: [iMAL news] Connecting Cities Urban Media Symposium (13&14/06), Ateliers numériques d'été (Register now!), FabLab workshops...
by Michel Bauwens 25 May '14

25 May '14

Karthik, are you here, just checking if your sub works ? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: iMAL announce <anons-listeke(a)lists.imal.org> Date: Sun, May 25, 2014 at 7:17 AM Subject: [iMAL news] Connecting Cities Urban Media Symposium (13&14/06), Ateliers numériques d'été (Register now!), FabLab workshops... To: anons-listeke(a)imal.org [image: iMAL.org Newsletter] - • Connecting Cities Urban Media Lab – INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM - 13 & 14 June, Brussels <#14633504c8bd2d0f_imalorg_1> - • Summer Digital Art Workshops – ART OF CODE, PHYSICAL COMPUTING, PURE DATA, FABLAB <#14633504c8bd2d0f_imalorg_2> - • FabLab.iMAL – DIGITAL FABRICATION WORKSHOPS - 04 & 17 June<#14633504c8bd2d0f_imalorg_3> Connecting Cities Urban Media Lab An international symposium on urban media art, smart city and participation 13/06 & 14/06, Brussels <http://www.imal.org/en/urban-media-lab?utm_source=imalnews&utm_medium=email…> [EN] In the framework of our Connecting Cities Urban Media Lab, we invited renowned international thinkers, researchers and artists to come and share their experience and thoughts on urban media and interventions; the smart city and other techno-urban utopias; participation and engagement of citizens; urban devices and interfaces; augmented reality, and more. This two-days symposium is open to all, and free (reservation recommended). [FR] Dans le cadre du Connecting Cities Urban Media Lab, nous invitons des chercheurs et artistes internationaux renommés à venir partager leur expérience et leur réflexions sur les intervention urbaines; la “smart city” (ville intelligente) et d’autres utopies techno-urbaines; la participation et l’implication des citoyens; les interfaces & appareils mobiles urbains; la réalité augmentée, et bien d’autres choses. Ce symposium de deux jours est ouvert à tous et gratuit (réservation recommendée). Les présentations auront lieu en Anglais. [NL] In het kader van Connecting Cities Urban Media Lab nodigen wij onderzoekers en kunstenaars uit om ervaringen te delen en van gedachten te wisselen over het gebruik van nieuwe media in de stad; de “smart city” (de intelligente stad) en andere techno-stedelijke utopieën; betrokkenheid en participatie van stedelingen; interfaces & stedelijke mobiele apparaten; de toegevoegde realiteit etc. Het symposium duurt twee dagen, is gratis en open voor iedereen (vooraf reserveren is sterk aangeraden). De presentaties tijdens het symposium worden in het Engels gegeven. *With:* Katia Truijen <http://www.katiatruijen.com/> (NL), Niels Wouters<http://nwt.rs/>(BE), Mark Shepard <http://www.andinc.org/> (US), Martijn de Waal<http://www.thepublicmatters.eu/>(NL), Michael Smyth <http://www.michael-smyth.co.uk/> (UK), Nanna Verhoeff<http://digitalcartography.eu/>(NL), Ali Momeni <http://alimomeni.net/> (US), Sander Veenhof <http://sndrv.nl/> (NL) and Tobias Revell <http://www.tobiasrevell.com/> (UK). *Schedule / Calendrier / Dienstregeling* *13-14 <13-14> June:* Public symposium (FRI 13: 10:00-18:00, SAT 14: 10:00-14:30) *20 & 21 June:* Public presentation of the projects in the city Register here (limited seats available!) / *Inscrivez-vous ici (places limitées!)* / Meld je aan (de plaatsen zijn beperkt)<http://www.imal.org/en/register/urban-media-lab-symposium-registration?utm_…> *More info & full program me / Plus d’infos et programme complet / Meer info & complete programma: *imal.org<http://www.imal.org/en/urban-media-lab?utm_source=imalnews&utm_medium=email…> Ateliers numériques d'été Art of code, physical computing, realtime sounds & visuals, digital fabrication 15/07 - 15/08 : register now! <http://www.imal.org/fr/activity/summer-digital-art-workshops-2014?utm_sourc…> [EN] Initiated in 2005, the Summer Digital Art Workshops go on with this 10th edition! Join us for an inspiring summer under the digital sun. The various courses address techniques and expressions increasingly used in visual arts, installations, performing arts, audio-visual or digital art (net art, code art, interactivity, ...) and introduce practices based on open source softwares. [FR] Lancés en 2005, les Ateliers Numériques d'été continuent pour la 10ème édition! Rejoignez-nous pour un été inspiré sous le soleil numérique! Les stages proposés abordent des techniques et expressions de plus en plus utilisées dans les arts visuels, les installations, les arts de la scène, les performances audio-visuelles, ou les arts numériques (net art, art du code, interactivité) en introduisant des pratiques basées sur des logiciels libres (open source). [NL] De Digitale Zomerworkshops, die al sinds 2005 bestaan, zijn dit jaar al toe aan hun 10de editie! Een must voor iedereen die een inspirerende zomer onder de digitale zon wil meemaken. De geplande cursussen en modules behandelen technieken die meer en meer gebruikt worden in beeldende kunst, installaties, podiumkunsten, performance en audiovisuele of mediakunst (internetkunst, 'art code', interactiviteit). Hierbij worden ook praktijken geïntroduceerd die gebaseerd zijn op opensourcesoftware. *Les cinq stages* Stage 1 : Introduction à l'Art du Code - Processing<http://www.imal.org/fr/more/processing2014> : 15 - 18 juillet 2014 Stage 2 : Fabrication Numérique - FabLab.iMAL<http://www.imal.org/fr/more/fabrication-numerique-2014> : 22 - 25 juillet 2014 Stage 3 : Introduction au Physical Computing - Arduino<http://www.imal.org/fr/more/arduino2014> : 29 juillet - 1 août 2014 Stage 4 : Introduction son-image temps-réel - PureData I<http://www.imal.org/fr/more/puredata2014> : 5 - 8 août 2014 Stage 5 : Vidéo-3D temps-réel - GEM / PureData II<http://www.imal.org/fr/more/puredata2014> : 12 - 15 août 2014 Courses in French (oral understanding necessary) *Formations en français! (compréhension orale nécessaire)* Opleiding in het Frans (mondeling begrip noodzakelijk) Register here / *Inscrivez-vous ici* / Registreer je hier<http://www.imal.org/fr/register/register-les-ateliers-numeriques-dete-2014?…> *More info / Plus d'info / Meer info *: imal.org<http://www.imal.org/fr/activity/summer-digital-art-workshops-2014?utm_sourc…> FabLab.iMAL Upcoming workshops & public hours 04/06, 18:30 - 21:30 | 17/06, 10:00 - 13:00 <http://www.imal.org/fablab/introworkshop?utm_source=imalnews&utm_medium=ema…> [EN] Discover FabLab.iMAL by following an introductory workshop (open to anyone) or come during the public hours (open to any curious visitors but using the machines is limited to our members). [FR] Découvrez FabLab.iMAL en suivant un des workshops d'introduction (ouvert à tous) ou venez pendant les heures publiques (ouvert à tous les curieux mais l'usage des machines est réservé aux membres). [NL] Ontdek FabLab.iMAL door het volgen van een introductie workshop (open voor iedereen) of kom tijdens de openingsuren (open voor alle nieuwsgierige bezoekers, maar het gebruik van de machines is enkel beperkt tot onze leden). Register here / Inscrivez-vous ici / Schrijf u hier in<http://fablabimal.eventbrite.com/> *Upcoming workshops / Prochains ateliers / Komende workshops * • Wed/*Mer*/Woe 04/06, 18:30 - 21:30 • Tue/*Mar*/Din 17/06, 10:00 - 13:00 *Price / Prix / Prijs :* 40€ (30€ for members/*pour les membres*/voor leden)) Workshops in French / *Les ateliers sont en Français* / Workshops in het Frans *Public hours / Heures publiques / Openbare uur: * • Monday / *Lundi* / Maandag, 18:30 - 22:00 • Wednesday / *Mercredi* / Woensdag, 10:00 - 18:00 *Membership*: 200€/year, 45€/month *More info / Plus d'info / Meer info *: imal.org<http://www.imal.org/fablab/introworkshop?utm_source=imalnews&utm_medium=ema…> *Follow us!* [image: iMAL.org]<http://www.imal.org?utm_source=imalnews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=newsl…> [image: Facebook] <https://www.facebook.com/pages/iMAL/50564320935> [image: Twitter] <http://twitter.com/imalorg> [image: Flick]<http://www.flickr.com/photos/malicy/> [image: Youtube] <http://www.youtube.com/user/imagicy/videos> [image: Ustream] <http://www.ustream.tv/channel/iMAL_live> [image: iMAL.org RSS]<http://www.imal.org/en/rss.xml> iMAL is supported by <http://www.cfwb.be/> To unsubscrite to this newsletter: e-mail to anons-listeke-request(a)lists.imal.org with subject 'unsubscribe' or follow this link <anons-listeke-request(a)lists.imal.org?subject=unsubscribe>. You will receive an e-mail asking to confirm your unsubscription. *Pour se désinscrire de cette newsletter: envoyer un mail à anons-listeke-request(a)lists.imal.org <http://www.imal.org/AteliersArtNum> avec comme sujet le mot 'unsubscribe' (ou suivez ce lien <anons-listeke-request(a)lists.imal.org?subject=unsubscribe>); vous recevrez un mail vous demandant de confirmer votre désinscription.* iMAL - 30 Quai des Charbonnages Koolmijnenkaai - 1080 Bruxelles Brussel - 32 (0)2 410 30 93 - info(a)imal.org _______________________________________________ iMAL announce's mailing list -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Unionwiki
by Michel Bauwens 25 May '14

25 May '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Örsan Şenalp <orsan1234(a)gmail.com> Date: Sun, May 25, 2014 at 7:42 AM Subject: [Networkedlabour] Fwd: Unionwiki To: "networkedlabour(a)lists.contrast.org" <networkedlabour(a)lists.contrast.org > Passing on ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: *Conor Cradden* <conor.cradden(a)gmail.com> Date: Sunday, 25 May 2014 Subject: Unionwiki To: CRITICAL-LABOUR-STUDIES(a)jiscmail.ac.uk Many of you will be interested in this new project launched today by the New Unionism Network and ITF: http://unionwiki.net. As you'll see it picks up the crowdsourcing idea to try to put together some cross-nationally consistent data on union structures, organizing and membership trends. And as you'll also see, it needs more national editors to take on the job of pulling data together from all possible sources, so definitely one to circulate in all of your networks. best Conor Dr Conor Cradden Institut d'études politiques et internationales Géopolis Université de Lausanne CH-1015 Lausanne Switzerland +41(0)21 6923140 +33(0)610 91 22 21 _______________________________________________ NetworkedLabour mailing list NetworkedLabour(a)lists.contrast.org http://lists.contrast.org/mailman/listinfo/networkedlabour -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Re: [P2P-F] Chile students' debts go up in smoke | World news | theguardian.com
by Michel Bauwens 25 May '14

25 May '14

thanks david! On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 8:29 PM, David Week <dew(a)assai.com.au> wrote: > http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/23/chile- > student-loan-debts-fried-potatoes > > :-) > > D > -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: Fwd: Open Source Seed Initiative
by Michel Bauwens 25 May '14

25 May '14

-------- Anfang der weitergeleiteten E-Mail: *Von: *Jack Kloppenburg <jrkloppe(a)wisc.edu <mailto:[email protected]>> > *Datum: *16. Mai 2014 16:47:10 MESZ > *An: *Jack Kloppenburg <jrkloppe(a)wisc.edu <mailto:[email protected]>> > *Betreff: **Open Source Seed Initiative* > > Good friends, > > Thank you all for contacting us about the Open Source Seed Initiative > (OSSI) and our April 17 action. > > I apologize for this impersonal mass mailing. I would have preferred > to contact each of you individually, but the number of you who want to > know what OSSI is doing makes this collective response much more > efficient. That we have heard from so many individuals and > organizations around the world is very exciting - we can be a global > movement to “free the seed”! > > On April 17, 2014, OSSI organized an action on the campus of the > University of Wisconsin in Madison, Wisconsin. We released seed of 36 > cultivars of 14 species, from seven breeders, under an open source > “pledge.” In speeches at the event, OSSI’s “free” seeds were compared > to the “indentured” seeds covered by IPRs. OSSI seed packets were > distributed to the crowd, which then collectively read the pledge aloud. > > We received substantial press coverage. Social media then carried > reports of our action around the world, which is likely how you > learned of OSSI’s work. To learn more about OSSI and our action, go > to OSSI’s web page at www.opensourceseedinitiative.org > or visit us on Facebook at www.facebook.com/opensourceseedinitiative > A set of links to media reports on the April 17 action is on our web > page, and a nice set of images of the April 17 action is available at > http://ecals.cals.wisc.edu/2014/04/18/open-source-seed- > rollout-draws-a-crowd/ > > For more information on the April 17 action, see the attached pdf > documents: > “April 17 press release final” - for a pre-action account, listing of > breeders and cultivars > “April 17 follow-up letter” - for a post-action account > See also an extensive article by journalist Lisa Hamilton in the > /Virginia Quarterly Review/ that has just been published and provides > a third-party analysis of OSSI’s work: > http://www.vqronline.org/reporting-articles/2014/05/linux-lettuce > > For those of you who want to go deeper, I also attach three documents > that - when read in sequence - outline the thinking that has informed > the development of OSSI. The sequence is “Kloppenburg 2010,” > “Kloppenburg 2014,” Kloppenburg et al 2014.” That final document > (“Kloppenburg et al 2014") is quite short and is especially important > since it explains OSSI’s abandonment of efforts to develop a legally > binding license and our subsequent commitment to an ethically > sanctioned “pledge.” > > OK, so what is OSSI about and where are we going, and how might you be > involved? > > The Open Source Seed Initiative (OSSI) was established in May, 2012, > by a group of public plant breeders, small seed company plant > breeders, farmer-breeders, and advocates for seed sovereignty. OSSI > was formed in order to enhance vigorous innovation in plant breeding > by the creation of a licensing framework for germplasm exchange that > would preserve the right to unencumbered use of shared seeds and their > progeny in subsequent use. We had hoped that we could develop a > legally defensible license for germplasm in the way that the free and > open source software movement developed its licenses. > > We spent nearly two years trying to develop a legally defensible > license. While we found that we could write a legally defensible > license, we also found that it would be unworkable for a variety of > reasons (these reasons are outlined in “Kloppenburg et al 2014"). In > summary, the legal requirements of the license are so complex as to > make transmission of the license impractical and unlikely. Second, > drawing as it would on the legal “tools of the master” (see > “Kloppenburg 2014"), a license is philosophically and politically > unacceptable to many organizations, mostly but not entirely in the > Global South (we are especially grateful to colleagues at GRAIN and > ETC Group for helping us understand this perspective). > > In February of 2014, OSSI made the hard but considered decision to > abandon efforts to develop a legally defensible license and to shift > to a pledge. This moves OSSI’s discourse and action from the legal > field to the terrain of norms and ethics. We have found this shift to > be stimulating, reinvigorating, and productive. The licensing > approach was pulling us into a policing and bureaucratic orientation > that was not congenial. Although our pledge is likely not legally > binding, it is easily transmissible, it is viral, it is an > uncompromising commitment to free exchange and use, and it is a very > effective tool for outreach and education. The pledge is printed on > all OSSI-distributed packets and reads: > *“This Open Source Seed Pledge is intended to ensure your freedom to > use the seed contained herein in any way you choose, and to make sure > those freedoms are enjoyed by all subsequent users. By opening this > packet, you pledge that you will not restrict others' use of these > seeds and their derivatives by patents, licenses, or any other means. > You pledge that if you transfer these seeds or their derivatives you > will acknowledge the source of these seeds and accompany your transfer > with this pledge.”** > * > The response to our April 17 action appears to confirm our decision to > go with a pledge rather than a license. Not only have we received > expressions of support from around the world, we have received over > 300 orders for OSSI’s free (as in speech, not as in beer!) seed from > 14 countries. There is clearly substantial interest in the US and > internationally in what OSSI is doing. The potential for advocacy is > enormous. Further, the demand for, and willing ness to pay for, OSSI > seed was unexpected and substantial. This demand is likely not > principally related to the agronomic characteristics of the seed, but > to its sociopolitical content. It would appear that there is very > considerable potential for supplying a market for “free seed” that is > analogous to the market for “fair trade.” The implication is that > carrying “free” seed in a commercial seed catalog can be attractive to > small seed companies. > > OSSI will proceed with its work in the United States. We emphasize > that we have no intention of becoming a seed company or a distributor > of seed. We hope to establish a brand and logo associated with our > pledge. We hope that breeders, seed savers, seed libraries, gardeners, > and farmers will choose to exchange and share materials using our > pledge. We especially hope that small, independent seed companies will > offer OSSI-branded seed as part of their regular product mix (as High > Mowing Organic Seeds is doing now - see > http://www.highmowingseeds.com/organic-seeds-midnight- > lightning-zucchini.html). > OSSI is envisioned as a vehicle for providing the organizing core of a > network of free seed advocates. > > Here in the USA, OSSI intends to proceed now to: > • register OSSI as a nonprofit organization > • develop our web site as a resource for information on open source > seed > • develop an OSSI “brand” > • send mailers of OSSI varieties to prominent people and > organizations as outreach > • plan a second release of OSSI varieties for 2015 > • work with our member seed companies to offer OSSI-branded cultivars > > While OSSI is US-based and US-oriented, there is clearly a large and > global reservoir of interest in and support for “open source seed.” > Can OSSI help facilitate development and growth of a global movement > in support of free and open source seed? > > OSSI understands that thinking about application of open source > mechanisms to seed has been going on all over the world for some time, > and that conditions vary considerably by place and sociopolitics. We > do not propose to insist on any particular approach. We have, however, > engaged and thought through many of the issues - practical and > theoretical - that you are encountering and that you are asking us > about. We hope that our experience will be useful to your own work. > Responding individually to your comments and queries will take come > time. Would it not be cool and productive if a bunch of us could get > together at one place at the same time? Can we find funds to support > an international conference/workshop on free and open source seeds? > > After you process the information in this message and the attached > documents, please let us hear from you. How can OSSI be useful to you? > Can we build an international network? > > Please forward this material to anyone you think may be interested in > OSSI or the movement to free the seed. > > Cheers to all. > > Jack > > > -- > Jack Kloppenburg > Professor, Department of Community and Environmental Sociology > Director, GreenHouse Residential Learning Community > Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies > 340A Agricultural Hall > University of Wisconsin > Madison, WI 53706 USA > jrkloppe(a)wisc.edu > jrkloppe(a)gmail.com > Phone: 608-262-6867 > www.dces.wisc.edu/faculty/kloppenburg/index.php > > "Well," she said, "you have a high tolerance for lunatics, don't you?" > -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites?
by Michel Bauwens 25 May '14

25 May '14

a mustread of Brian Holmes ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com> Date: Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:41 PM Subject: Re: [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites? To: Michel Bauwens <michel(a)p2pfoundation.net>, Jaap van Till < vantill(a)gmail.com> Michel, it's great to hear from you. Your ideas are often on my mind: I consider you the most precise, most generous and least compromised exponent of the cooperative economy, which is clearly the best thing to have emerged out of the short-lived growth surge of the 1990s. It is typical of you to write immediately whenever someone expresses anything like an idea or a proposal. Your attentiveness is really much appreciated. Also I am intrigued about Jaap's presentation on the Eurasian corridors. I would be glad to know more. Please feel free to forward this to the networked labor list. I tried to subscribe but I'm still waiting for the answer. There is so much to say. I'd like to begin answering your questions with a bit of a preamble. It seems to me that whether or not one refers explicitly to Kondratiev, Schumpeter, Mandel, Freeman & Louca, etc, the idea of long cycles of growth punctuated by major crises (40 or 50 years from trough to trough) is widely shared at this point, among state planners, corporate elites, neo-Marxists, technology boosters and probably others as well. And it has been widely shared as far back as the '70s. After all, the lessons of the 1930s, and of the rise of state-orchestrated Fordism in the postwar period, were there for all to see. During the 1970s, in the context of the last long downturn before the present one, these ideas were again debated on the left, particularly due to Mandel. But they were also applied by the state and corporate sectors. I believe we can discern their mainstream influence, due rather to Schumpeter than Mandel, in the support shown by the Reagan adminstration for two key industries: biotech and microprocessors. In both cases, agents of the American state tried very deliberately to prime the pump of a new growth cycle, which could be impelled, in their view, by investment in technological innovation. For the case of biotech I refer you to the brilliant first chapter of Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus. I am unaware of anyone else who has analyzed the pattern of investment in biotech so well. Where microprocessors are concerned, I imagine everyone remembers the massive state investments into microelectronics by way of the US Strategic Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), as well as the knock-on effects that these investments had for the successive period of private-sector investment and development. If that's not clear, look at Castell's chapter on "Welfare to Warfare State," in his book The Informational City (his best, in my view). The point of this whole preamble is to stress the close cooperation of both state and corporate planners in the unleashing of new growth waves. Nonetheless, you and I will agree that the third sector of civil society (however one calls it) is crucial to the whole process. Castells also agrees: "Modes of development emerge from the interaction between scientific and technological discovery and the organizational integration of such discoveries in the processes of production and management... The transition between modes of development is not independent of the historical context; it relies heavily on the social matrix initially framing the transition, as well as on the social conflicts and interests that shape the transformation of that matrix. Therefore, the informational mode of development will emerge from the interaction between its technological and organizational components, and the historically determined process of the restructuring of capitalism." "Historically determined" means that the transition from one cycle of growth to the next will be what all participating social forces make of it; and therefore, that none of them alone will have the decisive word. Carlota Perez has very similar concepts. I guess most everyone who has looked in detail at the way an epoch-defining infrastructure like the Internet has developed would be inclined to agree with some version or twist of this idea. > I see two issues that need to be covered. I share Brian's view of the > possibility of a new kondratieff wave, which I called some years ago, > the 'the high road to p2p' (high, because, even though it is capitalist, > it would be more smoothly creating p2p infrastructures in a context of > growth and redistribution, rather than low: bottom-up survivalist p2p in > the context of global dislocation); such a high road, I argued then, > would necessarily incorporate both green and p2p/distributed elements; Your idea of a "high road" to global growth, containing both green and p2p elements, is spot on, and you really do it honor with your current work, by the way. Again, this idea is widely shared: witness Jeremy Rifkin, who does advise a large number of European governments. However, green policy is not the same as green ideology. The same holds for everything concerning the cooperative economy, and I would imagine that your current work in Ecuador leads to the need for a sharp distinction between lip-service to the commons, and the creation of really usable commons. We can't just be utopian; we also have to be critical. The next growth cycle will happen, in one way or another. But it will not necessarily take the high road. In fact, I quite agree with the following: > however, it is important that such k-wave growth would require at the > same time deep structural reforms, of the kind undertaken by roosevelt > in the 30s and by european post-war govt's after WWII (and now we would > need this type of reconfiguration: > http://p2pfoundation.net/Russia_and_the_Next_Long_Wave) > > Yet, we see nothing on this sort. This could mean that the scenario > would be that following the 1873 meltdown, not a consistent growth, but > a long series of enduring crisis, ultmately leading to world war and the > russian revolution; but the difference is, there are now much more > serious problems to deal with: energy and resource crisis, climate > change, soil depletion and so much more grave social crisis. > What this would mean is that, all the potential for growth that we see > (smart cities, internet of things, etc ..) may actually not be able to > be used by capitalism for a growth wave. But it is also here that I diverge somewhat, concerning your interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I don't think that period resembles the present doldrums. I think it resembles the neoliberal period from which we are now exiting. The thing is that after the long stagnation of 1873-1896, there was tremendous growth in the United States in the period from 1897 to 1929 -- just as there was tremendous growth in both the US and East Asia from the '80s to 2008. To understand the situation of the world economy today, you have to grasp the characteristics and limits of the growth cycle that did occur in the early twentieth century, and see the parallel to the the growth cycle that really did unfold from 1980 to 2008. (I say "really did" because some Marxists, following Robert Brenner, deny it altogether, as though global cities, the cabling of thw world, the rise of East Asia, etc, were just a detail). After the "Great Depression" of 1873-96 (that's exactly what they called it at the time), the new upswing began with the unprecedented merger wave of 1898 to 1902, which institutionalized the vertically integrated, multidivisional corporation. That was somethig new under the sun. I'm talking about US Steel, General Electric, General Mills, Nabisco, and dozens of similar giant corporations, many of which are still around today. Typically their names include the idea of "national" or "general," which signifies the step upward in scale from the regional enterprises that preceded them, and which they absorbed. At the core of this whole development you find a very nasty corporation, Du Pont, along with its stepchild, General Motors, and its emblematic manager, Alfred P. Sloan. They forged the real archetype of the giant corporation. These corporations developed tremendously during the naughts and teens, and then again after WWI. The growth wave happened; and global hegemony was already shifting to the US. But the social order could not absorb the shocks of this development. It could not soften the brutal exploitation of labor and redistribute profits for social reproduction. It could not control the tremendous ecological damage unleashed by oil-powered machinery (in the US, the major ecological issues were water pollution, erosion and flooding, and the dust bowls created by mechanized agriculture). Finally, the institutions of exchange -- the gold standard and high finance -- could not stand the stress brought by America's rise and Britain's decline. This was the triple crisis of labor, land and money in the 1920s and 30s, as described by Karl Polanyi. It was a consequence of erratic, unbalanced capitalist growth, and therefore, as you say, of a long series of unending crises. We know that the period of chaos was followed by one of rationalization and integration in the postwar period. The name of that period is Fordism, because Ford, despite or maybe because of all his managerial violence and crude racism, had a social philosophy. I'm not going to get into the philosophy of Fordism which is developed ad nauseum by whoever you care to read. I'm nauseated because I also know the history of neo-imperialism and of the so-called "Third World" at this time. Let's just say that the recurrent crises of the period between 1897 and 1945 were resolved, temporarily, and at tremendous costs, through the creation of a form of stable growth that sowed the seeds for the kinds of breakdowns that we are experiencing today. Now, here comes the point at which it may be difficult to follow my argument. I want to contend that the period of 1980 to 2008 has _already_ been a long period of both growth and unending crises, comparable in that sense to the early 20th century. These periods are comparable because they both saw the irruption of tremendous and destabilizing productive forces (as destabilizing as the steam engine itself was in its day). The Internet was something new under the sun, and so was the networked firm. Remember those incredible years of the late 1990's, when corporations like Enron and WorldCom burst on the scene? Again there was a tremendous upward scaling, to reach global level; and of course, not all the contenders survived. But today we can see the ones that did: thus the talk about the "new managerialism" of the Bay Area elites. Their modus operandi, as you know, is still the Schumpeterian dogma of disruptive innovation. They are still preaching chaos. Indeed, no one has been willing to see the neoliberal era as in any way similar to the Fordist period that preceded it, especially in terms of stability. No one has called those neoliberal years "the Sunday of life," as the Hegelian philosopher Kojeve described the boom years of the 50s and 60s (which, for Kojeve, marked "the end of history"). Instead, the neoliberal period from 1980 to 2008 has seen continuous social, ecological and monetary crises, which, since the financial crisis and Fukushima, have become very difficult to ignore. Even the hard capitalist right in the US does not ignore them: it very actively denies them. The untenability of the present world order is an open secret. In fact, it's a bleeding wound. I believe that governments and ruling elites in the rest of the world (and even to some extent within the US itself) take the present crisis very seriously indeed, and realize that the creation of a new pattern of development and of governance is now urgent. Not because the productive forces are lacking, but because they cannot find a sustainable "fit" with the current social order. And yet it is not so simple to invent a new one. All the more because the inventor of the last apparently stable order, the US under Roosevelt, is now in the long and protracted process of losing its hegemony, while the rising powers of East Asia, especially China, are not very well positioned to assert their new strengths. In the early 20th century the US had a continent-sized territory for a relatively small population, and it was unmatched in its hemisphere; whereas the Chinese are embroiled in the dense tangle of rivalries left by WWII and the Cold War. So, even though the essential features of this crisis are relatively easy to see, the supposedly happy outcome corresponding to the norm of 1945-73 (if one really believes that was a happy outcome) is not so easy to see. Instead, it's frankly invisible. By the way, I have written at length on the theory of all this, in both English and Spanish: http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/crisis_theory.pdf http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tres_crisis.pdf > So my question to you Brian is: what makes you so sure that this wave of > growth is indeed coming ? Well, if the outcome of a grand crisis truly is historically determined, then we cannot exactly know what is coming; because we ourselves still have to make it happen. Here I would like to point out how unlikely the Fordist expansion of the 50s and 60s looked in the 1930s, or again, how unlikely the network-driven globalization surge seemed in the 1970s and even the 1980s. It's a bitch for an intellectual not to know what is coming, but that's the way it is. I am not at all sure that we will see a growth wave with the characteristics of the postwar period, inspired by the Rooseveltian New Deal. I think that period is wrongly taken as a norm to which society must inevitably return. However, let's face it, the Chinese governing elites are incredibly good students of history, and their every move since 2008 proves this -- whether it's huge state investments in transportation infrastructure, or cornering the markets in wind and solar power, or expanding cooperative relations with other countries, or experimenting with the consequences of popular democracy in Wukan, or investing in the smart power grids touted by Rifkin. They are engaging in major rounds of infrastructural investment, as the US did in the 1930s and the postwar period, in the attempt to stabilize capital accumulation and adjust it to meet society's needs. So we can't just look at the West anymore. We also have to look at what is going on in the East. Now, I am not a Chinese booster, far from it, I have spent enough time there to see how painful life in China can be. But the actions of the Chinese communist elites really make it look as though they spent some time reading Arrighi and Wallerstein on the characteristics of a successful hegemony. Both of these authors (and let's throw in another neo-Gramscian, Robert Cox) stress the way that a would-be hegemon must offer positive advantages to its potential rivals, so that they aspire to emulate rather than reject the new dominant power. China is doing this all over the world, following to some extent (but in its own more forceful and imperious way) the pattern of networked cooperation set earlier by Japan. Of course the offer of cooperation is being taken up by many countries. Germany, in particular, has every interest in emulating and partnering with its biggest customer -- because German growth since 2008 has been predicated on Chinese demand for both sophisticated industrial technology and high-end consumer durables. China's effort since the mid-2000s was already to extend its infrastructural development from the coast to the interior, that was the "Go West" phase. Now, with its Eurasian development corridors and its African and Latin American economic policies, it is trying that on a global scale. And it's doing so for better and for worse: just as the US expansion after WWII was for better and for worse, despite all the enthusiasm that people around the world had for Roosevelt and the Americans in 1945. We are likely to see at least the lineaments of a new China-centric world order, before we all perish from climate change. But anyway, Michel, you have lived in Asia, presumably you have a lot to say about this. I am not naive about China and I think there is quite a good chance that its policies will fail utterly, by foundering on the internal contradictions between savage capitalism and an overdeveloped control apparatus. My point here is merely that if a new growth wave depends in part on the relation between technological development and state policy, and if that is well known by almost everyone, then the least we can do as intellectuals is to observe how certain larger powers are drawing conclusions from those well-known postulates. We are not alone with our theorizing of Kondratiev waves. Further: I do think some kind of investment wave and capitalist growth will happen in the 2020s, beginning perhaps very soon (well, I actually think it has already begun). I think it will also happen in the West, despite everything. However, it may not eventuate in any virtuous spiral with positive effects on social relations. It may be very ugly indeed. I share your worries, believe me. Look at the huge, suicidal investment in shale gas and tar sands oil in North America, and the plans currently afoot to use this deadly energy source as the key factor for the reindustrialization of the continent. Look at Mexican industrial and cognitive-sector growth in the devastating context of the narco-wars. These are terrible signs, not just harbingers but actualities. All the political intelligence of the western hemisphere can at present be found in a few South American countries, and they don't have the power to change things on a geopolitical level. The picture is not rosy, far from it. I hope all of the above lends a little clarity to my brief remarks in the previous post. > The second issue is: do you see Brian, the broad restructuring that is > also taken place from the bottom up ? Yes, indeed, most of the p2p > economy is indeed subsumed to capitalism, but, there is a huge wave of > bottom up innovation, mobilisation and re-invention, on the scale of the > labor movement in the latter half of the 19th cy. If you see it (I do, > as I document it every day), how is this impacting your assessment of > capitalist strategies. I would question any analysis that is exclusively > focused on the internal dynamics of the capital class, and neglects the > counter-movements and counter-restructurings that are taking place. Yes, of course I do see it, this is the impressive thing going on in the world! And it has been going on for quite a while. The thing to realize and to act on is that these counter-dynamics are continuous since the crisis of the Fordist political economy and the beginning of neoliberal restructuring in the 1970s. At that time, a very broad and deep assessment of the dead-ends of capitalist development was shared around the planet, and it went far beyond the legacies of Marx, even though the Marxist inheritance was crucial to the new thinking. I was born in California in '59 and I can attest that counter-cultural ideas and practices have unfolded continuously since the 60s around the world, in rather astonishing ways at differernt periods, not the least of which was the late 90s/early 2000s. However, only now, under the destructuring power of the current crisis, are large numbers of people able to see the stakes of global development as clearly as they did back in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet I think that in certain respects -- and however counter-intuitive this may seem -- we are a good deal more empowered now than dissenting sectors were back then. True, those generations stopped the war in Vietnam and dealt a huge blow to the hegemonic capitalist power by unseating Nixon and ushering in a whole series of social and ecological reforms. But they also launched the complex of ideas and practices which you have been documenting through the p2p foundation, and those usages shaped the social matrix from which the Internet developed, changing the social game decisively. People say the net was created by Darpa. That's superficial and ignorant. The net, as a global infrastructure and social institution, was created in exactly the way that Castells describes, with crucial inputs from the state, the corporations, and civil society. Especially the latter. In the foundational architecture of the TCP/IP stack, and in the subsequent development of GNU/Linux, one can see the imprint of a powerfuly egalitarian ethos, oriented toward use values. In fact, that development vindicates in many ways the vision of the great dissenting American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in his forgotten little book The Engineers and the Price System (1921), which had already sparked a social movement in the 1930s. Veblen understood the core value of the engineers to be cooperation in the development and use of technological systems; and he contrasted that cooperative ethos to the price system of "business enterprise" which, in his view, was all about sabotaging industrial cooperation so as to create monopolies, maintain scarcities, and impose higher prices. Business enterprise cuts productivity to exact higher prices. On the basis of that key insight, which he derived from the sharp recession that followed WWI, Veblen attempted with some success to start a social movement of engineers, in protest against the forms of development that were being imposed by the giant monopoly corporations. Veblen's real inheritance, however, came much later, in the dissenting sociology of people like C. Wright Mills, who inspired the entire New Left, notably people at UC Berkeley. That was the kind of place where, in the 70s and early 80s, the egalitarian potentials of the TCP/IP stack were developed into social practices. Everyone should be aware of the crucial features of TCP/IP, which distinguished it from the X.25 protocol that several European states as well as Japan were working on in the 1970s. X.25 was designed to make the national telcos into gateway providers of informational services, which they would control, meter and price. TCP/IP - that sinister creation of Darpa - was designed to encode and decode whatever message you want, period. No meter, no control, no price. For the early Internet engineers and the top scientists who got first access to the fledgling net, this was elegant, useful, commendable -- just good common sense for smart and privileged people. For the marginalized grad students and counter-cultural hippie types at places like Berkeley, this was a chance to turn idealistic potentials into social realities. The point was to create a communications machine that would be the polar opposite of the three coporate-state TV channels, ABC, NBC and CBS - the Pepsi, Coke and Dr. Pepper of the Fordist mass media. The Internet that we still know today resulted from a complex and contradictory evolution where emancipatory inputs had tremendous relevance. And that kind of process has continued up to this day, from Napster to Global Revolution TV in 2011. Of course I know what has happened in parallel to all that, from Google to NSA. I have analyzed and critiqued the counter offensives of the corporate states, step by step. But I have also participated, step by step, in the unfolding of the emancipatory potentials of the information society, which moved far beyond the US and have largely left that country behind (I am sad to say, since I now live there once again). The important thing to see is that growth waves do have positive sides to them. What was so impressive, in the 90s, was the manner in which a vast, truly global constellation of egalitarian and ecological movements took hold of the emancipatory potentials that were thrown off by the wave of growth that shot through the world system after the Fall of the Wall, and before the state-corporate elites got started on their ill-conceived attempt at imposing a "return to order." I think that going forward, we should really respect all the components of a historically determined process such as the one we are living through. What has typically been lacking, among the sectors oriented toward p2p and the commons, is a real understanding of how important state institutions and industrial development still is. If we want to influence the responses to the crisis, we have to be aware of these things and actively deal with them. > Just for info, if Brian has not seen it, the Commons Transition Plan we > have crafted here in Ecuador, > http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan, with the ToC at bottom. Michel, I was not aware of this. I am moved. This is a tremendous plan. I have followed to some small degree what is going on in Ecuador, notably because I had often crossed paths with Carlos Prieto del Campo some years ago in Spain. But this is fabulous! It is really beautiful, inspiring and encouraging to witness an attempt at turning those vast molecular revolutions into tangible institutional policy. I get what you mean when you talk about contributory comons, the reformed corporations of a solidary economy, and a partner state. Some positive dynamic between those three major social formations is needed to change anything. > Though the actual effect of this plan will be limited in Ecuador, it is > significant that it has been commissioned, and that a global > commons-oriented movement of movements is emerging from which it is > derived and which is looking at it. Lots of the proposals I made a few > years ago (the commons-based reciprocity license, the alliance and > chamber of the commons, the global coalition of the commons), are now > being taking seriously and the subject of actual experimentation on the > ground, along with the thousands of other p2p/sharing/commons > experimentations and projects (I'm not talkng about the business sharing > economy here). Nearly every aspect of the bottom-up p2p economy (from > urban gardening to co-working to rural hackerspaces) is growing > exponentially, along with its capitalist similes .. (this is factually > documented, I'm not just saying this, though of course, it is easier for > emergent phenomena to grow exponentially). Of course it is not only documented, it is visible to anyone with eyes to see. If Jeremy Rifkin can leave the Wharton School of Business to go talk about p2p and decentralized energy grids with EU bureaucrats and German ministers, then something is happening. All the more when similar ideas start to take root in China. The great effort now, across the the three major social formations but especially within civil society, is to make the new technologies viable for social and ecological reproduction. Generally speaking, when you get outside the Anglo-American orbit, the limitations of the price system become clearer. How exactly do you offer hundreds of millions of impoverished people access to culture, energy, development and productivity by way of a monopoly system? Impossible. And even more, how do you offer people in the formerly developed world those same things, at a time when the monopoly system has "progressed" to such a point that even those people are superfluous? It's impossible. Apple and co. are not going to bring progress to the masses. The cooperative economy offers an answer that the capitalist system cannot offer. And yet most of our social institutions are still tragically incapable of even registering either the impossibility of the current social deal, or the proposed reformulation of our productive relations. > So my second question is: how do the new social movements affect > capitalist scenarios ? Well, I am afraid we can see it, no? The capitalist scenarios remain firmly fixed in North America, where they are exacerbated to the point of madness. In Europe, which has partially collapsed, a green-washing p2p rhetoric is applied on top of mounting inequalities, while Germany reconfigures itself to become the continental hegemon and attempt a new partnership with China. Meanwhile China itself, the largest and most productive country on earth, is fixated on a development path that oscillates wildly between excarbated entrepreneurialism and intensified state control. In other words, the rising global hegemon is prey to centripetal and centrifugal forces that constantly threaten to rip it apart, were it not for some fairly amazing efforts to ride the tiger, wherever it may choose to go. The terrible thing is that today, new social movements lend fuel to reactionary forces. In China, 8% growth per annum is considered the minimum necessary to stave off an impending social revolution by the have-nots of the urban peripheries and the vast interior. In Turkey and Brazil it's substantially the same, in Egypt the revolution has already happened. with the results we have before our eyes. My guess is that the peace can't hold much longer in India either. And I have not even mentioned Boko Haram, or the bombs that just wnt off in Urumqi, etc. The dynamic of action and reaction is systemic. Social movements are tremendously powerful, except when you compare them to their dialectical other, the forces of social control. The same dynamic governs cognitive capitalism, in its antagonistic relation to the forces of commons-based peer production. In the deadlock of this global conflict we are definitely looking at triumph of the powers of chaos, comparable in that sense to those that expressed themselves after 1914, when the long breakup of British hegemony began. The sun that finally set on the British Empire is now setting on the American one. And what happens in the twilight hour? That's the question of the present. History would lead us to predict vast wars. I am not so sure that will happen. Again, everyone has had plenty of time to reflect on World Wars I and II. No such conflagration followed the break-up of the Soviet Union. Instead we are hit with climate change and recurrent financial crises. A generalized, low-intensity civil war seems to be the predominant form of violence in our time, rather than cataclysmic wars between nation-states and empires. > My hypothesis is: the next k-wave may well not be coming, and with a > perfect storm of really grave issues risking to coalesce say by 2030, we > may need an integrated alternative, much faster than we expect. I agree with you, Michel. Well, not entirely: I do think there will be some kind of new growth wave, but I don't think it will correspond to any Rooseveltian norm -- and I don't think we should wait for that to happen, as though only a capitalist god could save us now. The worst thing would be to trust in the new growth wave (or ripple) when it finally comes. Anything short of political-economic autonomy is an illusion. And the latter can only be gained by galvanizing and extending the great accumulation of counter-systemic thinking that has been built up across the twentieth century and on into the present. The Saint-Simonian belief that we have to catch the next train of progress is still rampant on the center left, but it's pseudo-historicism, the weak thinking that history always repeats. That's exactly why the critical utopia of the Multitudes journal broke up: some people like Yann Moulier Boutang believed that the contradictions of cognitive capitalism would be overcome in a new growth wave; while others -- like myself and all the Italian emigres -- foresaw that nothing so fortunate was going to happen, and that there would be no "New New Deal." Maybe the postman doesn't always knock twice. Kondratiev waves are like waves on the beach: they always come, but they are not always what you expect. I had a dear friend who was killed in the '80s by a wave on the beach in California, the result of an unexpected tsunami in Asia. What else is new? Fukushima was already your perfect storm: the wave that destroyed any promise that capitalist growth waves can somehow save us. We don't need a new expansion of the death machines. We need a revolution. It's not going to come from some desperate gesture that sparks the fires of reaction. It can only come from the urgent propagation of a critical utopia, in the face of a gathering disaster. You're right, we have to go much faster. And at the same time, we have to hold much closer to the truth of what is really happening in the world. If everyone shares our most basic ideas, than we had better insist on the specific differences. And we had better make those differences into real social practices. thanks for all your work in exactly that direction, Brian > > # 2 Background on the FLOK Project > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Background_on_the_FLOK_Project> > # 3 The Framing of the Proposal > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ Framing_of_the_Proposal> > > > * 3.1 The Three Value Models and the transition to a Social Knowledge > Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Three_ Value_Models_and_the_transition_to_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > > o 3.1.1 The first model: 'Classic' Cognitive Capitalism based on > IP extraction > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_first_ model:_.27Classic.27_Cognitive_Capitalism_based_on_IP_extraction> > o 3.1.2 The second model: Netarchical Capitalism based on the > control of networked platforms > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ second_model:_Netarchical_Capitalism_based_on_the_ control_of_networked_platforms> > > + 3.1.2.1 The Value Crisis under conditions of netarchical > capitalism > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Value_ Crisis_under_conditions_of_netarchical_capitalism> > o 3.1.3 Towards a third model: a mature 'civic' peer-to-peer > economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Towards_a_ third_model:_a_mature_.27civic.27_peer-to-peer_economy> > > + 3.1.3.1 Solving the value crisis through a social knowledge > economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Solving_ the_value_crisis_through_a_social_knowledge_economy> > * 3.2 Four Technology Regimes > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Four_Technology_Regimes> > > o 3.2.1 Netarchical Capitalism as a technological regime: peer to > peer front end, hierarchical back-end > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Netarchical_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_peer_to_peer_front_end.2C_ hierarchical_back-end> > o 3.2.2 Distributed Capitalism as a technological regime: the > commodification of everything > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Distributed_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_the_ commodification_of_everything> > o 3.2.3 Resilience Community Platforms Designed for > Re-Localization > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Resilience_Community_ Platforms_Designed_for_Re-Localization> > o 3.2.4 The Global Commons Scenario as the desired alternative > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ Global_Commons_Scenario_as_the_desired_alternative> > * 3.3 Cognitive/Netarchical Capitalism vs. an Open-Commons based > Knowledge Society > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Cognitive. 2FNetarchical_Capitalism_vs._an_Open-Commons_based_Knowledge_Society> > > o 3.3.1 The Socio-Economic Implications of a Social Knowledge > Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Socio- Economic_Implications_of_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > o 3.3.2 Discussion: IP and patents impede and slow down innovation > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_IP_and_patents_impede_and_slow_down_innovation> > > + 3.3.2.1 Intellectual property rights and their supposed role > in cognitive capitalism > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Intellectual_property_rights_and_their_supposed_role_in_cognitive_capitalism > > + 3.3.2.2 A synopsis of empirical evidence on the effect of > exclusive intellectual property regimes on innovation and > productivity > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_synopsis_of_empirical_ evidence_on_the_effect_of_exclusive_intellectual_property_regimes_on_ innovation_and_productivity> > o 3.3.3 Discussion: the role of Indigenous Peoples and > (Neo)Traditional Knowledge > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Discussion:_the_role_of_ Indigenous_Peoples_and_.28Neo.29Traditional_Knowledge> > > + 3.3.3.1 Arguments for the specific role of (neo)-traditional > knowledge and peoples in a social knowledge transition > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Arguments_ for_the_specific_role_of_.28neo.29-traditional_knowledge_and_peoples_in_a_ social_knowledge_transition> > + 3.3.3.2 The potential role of commons-based reciprocity > licenses to protect traditional knowledge > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ potential_role_of_commons-based_reciprocity_licenses_to_ protect_traditional_knowledge> > o 3.3.4 Discussion: Gender Aspects > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Discussion:_Gender_Aspects > > * 3.4 Introducing the new configuration between State, Civil Society > and the Market > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Introducing_the_new_ configuration_between_State.2C_Civil_Society_and_the_Market> > > o 3.4.1 What can we learn from the already existing social > knowledge economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#What_can_ we_learn_from_the_already_existing_social_knowledge_economy> > o 3.4.2 The new configuration > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_new_configuration> > o 3.4.3 Why is this a post-capitalist scenario? > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_is_ this_a_post-capitalist_scenario.3F> > o 3.4.4 Discussion: The role of the capitalist sector > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_The_role_of_the_capitalist_sector> > * 3.5 A description of the new triarchy of the Partner State, the > Ethical Economy and a Commons-based Civil Society > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_description_of_the_new_ triarchy_of_the_Partner_State.2C_the_Ethical_Economy_and_a_ Commons-based_Civil_Society> > > o 3.5.1 The concept of the partner state and the commonification > of public services > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ concept_of_the_partner_state_and_the_commonification_of_public_services> > o 3.5.2 The Ethical Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy> > > + 3.5.2.1 Discussion: Material and Immaterial Infrastructural > Requirements for the Ethical Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Discussion:_Material_and_ Immaterial_Infrastructural_Requirements_for_the_Ethical_Economy> > o 3.5.3 The Commons-Based Civil Society > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ Commons-Based_Civil_Society> > * 3.6 Beyond the market, beyond planning ? > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Beyond_ the_market.2C_beyond_planning_.3F> > > o 3.6.1 The key role of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_key_ role_of_Commons-Based_Reciprocity_Licenses> > o 3.6.2 Mutual coordination mechanisms in the new 'ethical' > enterpreneurial coalitions: Cybersin redux ? > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Mutual_ coordination_mechanisms_in_the_new_.27ethical.27_ enterpreneurial_coalitions:_Cybersin_redux_.3F> > * 3.7 The historical and present importance of mutualization in times > of increasing resource scarcity > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ historical_and_present_importance_of_mutualization_in_times_of_increasing_ resource_scarcity> > > o 3.7.1 Discussion: The issue of eco-system sustainability > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# Discussion:_The_issue_of_eco-system_sustainability> > > + 3.7.1.1 Why innovation should be located in open design > communities > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_ innovation_should_be_located_in_open_design_communities> > + 3.7.1.2 The role of 'idle-sourcing' and the sharing economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_role_ of_.27idle-sourcing.27_and_the_sharing_economy> > * 3.8 A historical opportunity: The Convergence of Material/Technical > P2P Infrastructures, Digital/Immaterial Commons, and > Commons-Oriented Governance and Ownership Models > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_ historical_opportunity:_The_Convergence_of_Material.2FTechnical_P2P_ Infrastructures.2C_Digital.2FImmaterial_Commons.2C_and_ Commons-Oriented_Governance_and_Ownership_Models> > * 3.9 Elements of Idealized and Integrative Full Transition Plan to a > mature Social Knowledge Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Elements_ of_Idealized_and_Integrative_Full_Transition_Plan_to_a_ mature_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > > o 3.9.1 Analysis > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Analysis> > + 3.9.1.1 1. Under conditions of proprietary (industrial) > capitalism > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#1._Under_ conditions_of_proprietary_.28industrial.29_capitalism> > + 3.9.1.2 2. Under conditions of emerging peer production > under the domination of financial and 'cognitive', > 'netarchical' capitalism > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#2._Under_ conditions_of_emerging_peer_production_under_the_ domination_of_financial_and_.27cognitive.27.2C_.27netarchical.27_capitalism> > + 3.9.1.3 3. Under conditions of strong peer production under > civic dominance > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#3._Under_ conditions_of_strong_peer_production_under_civic_dominance> > o 3.9.2 Transition Dynamic > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Transition_Dynamic> > + 3.9.2.1 The State > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_State> > + 3.9.2.2 The Ethical Economy > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy_2> > + 3.9.2.3 The Commons Sector > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Commons_Sector> > * 3.10 Political reconstruction of social movements in a conjuncture > of post-industrial transformation > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Political_ reconstruction_of_social_movements_in_a_conjuncture_of_ post-industrial_transformation> > -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Re: [P2P-F] [Networkedlabour] <nettime> Consensus within the Bay Area elites?
by Michel Bauwens 24 May '14

24 May '14

Dear Brian, thanks for this extremely interesting and important response; and I'm of course very please that you see a convergence with the Commons Transition Plan we've been working on here in Quito. Of course, a word of warning, it's a plan, and though it informs the 15 policy proposals, it is really uncertain about how much of it will have a real effect here in Ecuador. I think it's real importance is that it is crafted as a first attempt to make concrete the emergent commons thinking of the social movements as actual potential policy. Some more repliles inline, but only where I have something specific to add. I am sharing it with 3 mailings lists who should know about your analysis and insights On Sat, May 24, 2014 at 2:41 PM, Brian Holmes <bhcontinentaldrift(a)gmail.com>wrote: > Michel, it's great to hear from you. Your ideas are often on my mind: I > consider you the most precise, most generous and least compromised exponent > of the cooperative economy, which is clearly the best thing to have emerged > out of the short-lived growth surge of the 1990s. It is typical of you to > write immediately whenever someone expresses anything like an idea or a > proposal. Your attentiveness is really much appreciated. > > Also I am intrigued about Jaap's presentation on the Eurasian corridors. I > would be glad to know more. Please feel free to forward this to the > networked labor list. I tried to subscribe but I'm still waiting for the > answer. > I copied your answer to the list , and to Orsan in particular, who may be able to add you > > There is so much to say. I'd like to begin answering your questions with a > bit of a preamble. It seems to me that whether or not one refers explicitly > to Kondratiev, Schumpeter, Mandel, Freeman & Louca, etc, the idea of long > cycles of growth punctuated by major crises (40 or 50 years from trough to > trough) is widely shared at this point, among state planners, corporate > elites, neo-Marxists, technology boosters and probably others as well. And > it has been widely shared as far back as the '70s. After all, the lessons > of the 1930s, and of the rise of state-orchestrated Fordism in the postwar > period, were there for all to see. During the 1970s, in the context of the > last long downturn before the present one, these ideas were again debated > on the left, particularly due to Mandel. But they were also applied by the > state and corporate sectors. I believe we can discern their mainstream > influence, due rather to Schumpeter than Mandel, in the support shown by > the Reagan adminstration for two key industries: biotech and > microprocessors. In both cases, agents of the American state tried very > deliberately to prime the pump of a new growth cycle, which could be > impelled, in their view, by investment in technological innovation. > > For the case of biotech I refer you to the brilliant first chapter of > Melinda Cooper's Life as Surplus. I am unaware of anyone else who has > analyzed the pattern of investment in biotech so well. a crucial reference I am unaware of, I will look for it > Where microprocessors are concerned, I imagine everyone remembers the > massive state investments into microelectronics by way of the US Strategic > Defense Initiative ("Star Wars"), as well as the knock-on effects that > these investments had for the successive period of private-sector > investment and development. If that's not clear, look at Castell's chapter > on "Welfare to Warfare State," in his book The Informational City (his > best, in my view). The point of this whole preamble is to stress the close > cooperation of both state and corporate planners in the unleashing of new > growth waves. Nonetheless, you and I will agree that the third sector of > civil society (however one calls it) is crucial to the whole process. > Castells also agrees: > > "Modes of development emerge from the interaction between scientific and > technological discovery and the organizational integration of such > discoveries in the processes of production and management... The transition > between modes of development is not independent of the historical context; > it relies heavily on the social matrix initially framing the transition, as > well as on the social conflicts and interests that shape the transformation > of that matrix. Therefore, the informational mode of development will > emerge from the interaction between its technological and organizational > components, and the historically determined process of the restructuring of > capitalism." > > "Historically determined" means that the transition from one cycle of > growth to the next will be what all participating social forces make of it; > and therefore, that none of them alone will have the decisive word. Carlota > Perez has very similar concepts. I guess most everyone who has looked in > detail at the way an epoch-defining infrastructure like the Internet has > developed would be inclined to agree with some version or twist of this > idea. I would argue that there is something fundamentally new today, and I wonder if you agree with it. The thesis is the following: until today, civil society response would either be through social/political movements that needed political power to push through policies, or through alternative economic arrangements which were 'dwarfish forms' (as Marx argued) that could not fundamentally compete with the efficiencies of capitalism. I would argue that today, there is an inversion, millions of people are involved first of all in a great transformation of the mode of production and the relations of production, which though they often (most often) are subsumed under the capitalist economy, are actually hyper-productive and more efficient than capitalism. Hence what is happening now is not just counter-movement, but the actual construction of post-capitalist modes of production. Hence, the p2p-f strategies are designed to move from proto-mode mode of production, to full alternate mode of production, in which the surplus value stays in the social economy, and thus can be the basis, as it was for the 19th cy labour movement, for the creation of a global commons-based social and political movement. It is this movement which may potentially mount a systemic challenge. > > > > I see two issues that need to be covered. I share Brian's view of the > > possibility of a new kondratieff wave, which I called some years ago, > > the 'the high road to p2p' (high, because, even though it is capitalist, > > it would be more smoothly creating p2p infrastructures in a context of > > growth and redistribution, rather than low: bottom-up survivalist p2p in > > the context of global dislocation); such a high road, I argued then, > > would necessarily incorporate both green and p2p/distributed elements; > > Your idea of a "high road" to global growth, containing both green and p2p > elements, is spot on, and you really do it honor with your current work, by > the way. Again, this idea is widely shared: witness Jeremy Rifkin, who does > advise a large number of European governments. However, green policy is not > the same as green ideology. The same holds for everything concerning the > cooperative economy, and I would imagine that your current work in Ecuador > leads to the need for a sharp distinction between lip-service to the > commons, and the creation of really usable commons. We can't just be > utopian; we also have to be critical. The next growth cycle will happen, in > one way or another. But it will not necessarily take the high road. > I am still unsure that it will happen, but am sure that there will be a parallel development of a surging counter-economy. The key is to work either the convergence of the existing social economies, with commons-based peer production, or to create a new wave of commons-producing social economies. Are you familiar with the work of Pat Conaty, Robin Murray, John Restakis and others, remarkable students of the history of the past social economies, and convinced, through dialogue with p2p-f, of the need for this convergence ? > > In fact, I quite agree with the following: > > > > however, it is important that such k-wave growth would require at the > > same time deep structural reforms, of the kind undertaken by roosevelt > > in the 30s and by european post-war govt's after WWII (and now we would > > need this type of reconfiguration: > > http://p2pfoundation.net/Russia_and_the_Next_Long_Wave) > > > > Yet, we see nothing on this sort. This could mean that the scenario > > would be that following the 1873 meltdown, not a consistent growth, but > > a long series of enduring crisis, ultmately leading to world war and the > > russian revolution; but the difference is, there are now much more > > serious problems to deal with: energy and resource crisis, climate > > change, soil depletion and so much more grave social crisis. > > > What this would mean is that, all the potential for growth that we see > > (smart cities, internet of things, etc ..) may actually not be able to > > be used by capitalism for a growth wave. > > But it is also here that I diverge somewhat, concerning your > interpretation of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. I > don't think that period resembles the present doldrums. I think it > resembles the neoliberal period from which we are now exiting. > what you say here below is new to me, and perhaps suggests I have a wrong interpretation of Carlota perez' work, but here is how I see it, or saw it; a high growh period until 73, at which time the mid-term crisis of the K-wave occurs ; at that time, the chip gets invented while the fordist system enters in crisis; financialization occurs because the system cannot really yet adapt to the new, which is the basis not for the declining k-wave, with low-growth in the western world, but for the new k-wave expected after the meltdown of 2008. Do you also distinguish the post-80 globalization as a phase of internetworking of capital, but crucially, I don't think capital has yet understood the huge potential for social business design that is the result of the second wave of massive civic networking. In other words, capital has not yet really incorporated the potential of p2p for the next growth wave. Crowdfunding, social lending, distributed energy, all these things will be the potential basis of the future k-wave. Capitalist globalization was the response to private centrally controlled networks, p2p and its economies is the expression of the 2nd wave of global civic networks. > The thing is that after the long stagnation of 1873-1896, there was > tremendous growth in the United States in the period from 1897 to 1929 -- > just as there was tremendous growth in both the US and East Asia from the > '80s to 2008. To understand the situation of the world economy today, you > have to grasp the characteristics and limits of the growth cycle that did > occur in the early twentieth century, and see the parallel to the the > growth cycle that really did unfold from 1980 to 2008. (I say "really > did" because some Marxists, following Robert Brenner, deny it altogether, > as though global cities, the cabling of thw world, the rise of East Asia, > etc, were just a detail). > any figures on the growth rate of the US, I thought it was pretty similar to the average of 2% per year in europe since the 1980s ? > > After the "Great Depression" of 1873-96 (that's exactly what they called > it at the time), the new upswing began with the unprecedented merger wave > of 1898 to 1902, which institutionalized the vertically integrated, > multidivisional corporation. That was somethig new under the sun. I'm > talking about US Steel, General Electric, General Mills, Nabisco, and > dozens of similar giant corporations, many of which are still around today. > Typically their names include the idea of "national" or "general," which > signifies the step upward in scale from the regional enterprises that > preceded them, and which they absorbed. At the core of this whole > development you find a very nasty corporation, Du Pont, along with its > stepchild, General Motors, and its emblematic manager, Alfred P. Sloan. > They forged the real archetype of the giant corporation. These corporations > developed tremendously during the naughts and teens, and then again after > WWI. The growth wave happened; and global hegemony was already shifting to > the US. But the social order could not absorb the shocks of this > development. It could not soften the brutal exploitation of labor and > redistribute profits for social reproduction. It could not control the > tremendous ecological damage unleashed by oil-powered machinery (in the US, > the major ecological issues were water pollution, erosion and flooding, and > the dust bowls created by mechanized agriculture). Finally, the > institutions of exchange -- the gold standard and high finance -- could not > stand the stress brought by America's rise and Britain's decline. This was > the triple crisis of labor, land and money in the 1920s and 30s, as > described by Karl Polanyi. It was a consequence of erratic, unbalanced > capitalist growth, and therefore, as you say, of a long series of unending > crises. > > We know that the period of chaos was followed by one of rationalization > and integration in the postwar period. The name of that period is Fordism, > because Ford, despite or maybe because of all his managerial violence and > crude racism, had a social philosophy. I'm not going to get into the > philosophy of Fordism which is developed ad nauseum by whoever you care to > read. I'm nauseated because I also know the history of neo-imperialism and > of the so-called "Third World" at this time. Let's just say that the > recurrent crises of the period between 1897 and 1945 were resolved, > temporarily, and at tremendous costs, through the creation of a form of > stable growth that sowed the seeds for the kinds of breakdowns that we are > experiencing today. > > Now, here comes the point at which it may be difficult to follow my > argument. I want to contend that the period of 1980 to 2008 has _already_ > been a long period of both growth and unending crises, comparable in that > sense to the early 20th century. These periods are comparable because they > both saw the irruption of tremendous and destabilizing productive forces > (as destabilizing as the steam engine itself was in its day). The Internet > was something new under the sun, and so was the networked firm. Remember > those incredible years of the late 1990's, when corporations like Enron > and WorldCom burst on the scene? Again there was a tremendous upward > scaling, to reach global level; and of course, not all the contenders > survived. But today we can see the ones that did: thus the talk about the > "new managerialism" of the Bay Area elites. Their modus operandi, as you > know, is still the Schumpeterian dogma of disruptive innovation. They are > still preaching chaos. > > Indeed, no one has been willing to see the neoliberal era as in any way > similar to the Fordist period that preceded it, especially in terms of > stability. No one has called those neoliberal years "the Sunday of life," > as the Hegelian philosopher Kojeve described the boom years of the 50s and > 60s (which, for Kojeve, marked "the end of history"). Instead, the > neoliberal period from 1980 to 2008 has seen continuous social, > ecological and monetary crises, which, since the financial crisis and > Fukushima, have become very difficult to ignore. Even the hard capitalist > right in the US does not ignore them: it very actively denies them. The > untenability of the present world order is an open secret. In fact, it's a > bleeding wound. > > I believe that governments and ruling elites in the rest of the world (and > even to some extent within the US itself) take the present crisis very > seriously indeed, and realize that the creation of a new pattern of > development and of governance is now urgent. Not because the productive > forces are lacking, but because they cannot find a sustainable "fit" with > the current social order. And yet it is not so simple to invent a new one. > All the more because the inventor of the last apparently stable order, the > US under Roosevelt, is now in the long and protracted process of losing its > hegemony, while the rising powers of East Asia, especially China, are not > very well positioned to assert their new strengths. In the early 20th > century the US had a continent-sized territory for a relatively small > population, and it was unmatched in its hemisphere; whereas the Chinese are > embroiled in the dense tangle of rivalries left by WWII and the Cold War. > So, even though the essential features of this crisis are relatively easy > to see, the supposedly happy outcome corresponding to the norm of 1945-73 > (if one really believes that was a happy outcome) is not so easy to see. > Instead, it's frankly invisible. > > By the way, I have written at length on the theory of all this, in both > English and Spanish: > > http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/05/crisis_theory.pdf > > http://brianholmes.files.wordpress.com/2013/04/tres_crisis.pdf > > > > So my question to you Brian is: what makes you so sure that this wave of > > growth is indeed coming ? > > Well, if the outcome of a grand crisis truly is historically determined, > then we cannot exactly know what is coming; because we ourselves still have > to make it happen. Here I would like to point out how unlikely the Fordist > expansion of the 50s and 60s looked in the 1930s, or again, how unlikely > the network-driven globalization surge seemed in the 1970s and even the > 1980s. It's a bitch for an intellectual not to know what is coming, but > that's the way it is. I am not at all sure that we will see a growth wave > with the characteristics of the postwar period, inspired by the > Rooseveltian New Deal. I think that period is wrongly taken as a norm to > which society must inevitably return. However, let's face it, the Chinese > governing elites are incredibly good students of history, and their every > move since 2008 proves this -- whether it's huge state investments in > transportation infrastructure, or cornering the markets in wind and solar > power, or expanding cooperative relations with other countries, or > experimenting with the consequences of popular democracy in Wukan, or > investing in the smart power grids touted by Rifkin. They are engaging in > major rounds of infrastructural investment, as the US did in the 1930s and > the postwar period, in the attempt to stabilize capital accumulation and > adjust it to meet society's needs. So we can't just look at the West > anymore. We also have to look at what is going on in the East. > completely agree with your assessmnt in China .. I have often argued that despite the perversions and exagerrations in China (64 m empty appts. in their ghost cities), the elite still governs the country with a rationale of its longer existence and some version of the public good in mind; by contrast, the US governing structure can't almost not make 'right' decisions anymore, because private interests outweigh the longer term interests of the system (at least for now); European elites are similarly on a destructive path > > Now, I am not a Chinese booster, far from it, I have spent enough time > there to see how painful life in China can be. But the actions of the > Chinese communist elites really make it look as though they spent some time > reading Arrighi and Wallerstein on the characteristics of a successful > hegemony. Both of these authors (and let's throw in another neo-Gramscian, > Robert Cox) stress the way that a would-be hegemon must offer positive > advantages to its potential rivals, so that they aspire to emulate rather > than reject the new dominant power. China is doing this all over the world, > following to some extent (but in its own more forceful and imperious way) > the pattern of networked cooperation set earlier by Japan. Of course the > offer of cooperation is being taken up by many countries. Germany, in > particular, has every interest in emulating and partnering with its biggest > customer -- because German growth since 2008 has been predicated on Chinese > demand for both sophisticated industrial technology and high-end consumer > durables. China's effort since the mid-2000s was already to extend its > infrastructural development from the coast to the interior, that was the > "Go West" phase. Now, with its Eurasian development corridors and its > African and Latin American economic policies, it is trying that on a global > scale. And it's doing so for better and for worse: just as the US expansion > after WWII was for better and for worse, despite all the enthusiasm that > people around the world had for Roosevelt and the Americans in 1945. We > are likely to see at least the lineaments of a new China-centric world > order, before we all perish from climate change. > this is very visible in Ecuador, which is now very dependent on its alignment with China and its extravist and financial support policies > > But anyway, Michel, you have lived in Asia, presumably you have a lot to > say about this. I am not naive about China and I think there is quite a > good chance that its policies will fail utterly, by foundering on the > internal contradictions between savage capitalism and an overdeveloped > control apparatus. My point here is merely that if a new growth wave > depends in part on the relation between technological development and state > policy, and if that is well known by almost everyone, then the least we can > do as intellectuals is to observe how certain larger powers are drawing > conclusions from those well-known postulates. We are not alone with our > theorizing of Kondratiev waves. > the big problem I see in East Asia is the resource and material crisis, there is simply not enough for long-term growth on the current materialist basis. Hence, the potential for huge social rage in this region .. see the perennial sub-civil war in thailand where I live for example, where worker wages have been stagnant for many years .. > > Further: I do think some kind of investment wave and capitalist growth > will happen in the 2020s, beginning perhaps very soon (well, I actually > think it has already begun). I think it will also happen in the West, > despite everything. However, it may not eventuate in any virtuous spiral > with positive effects on social relations. It may be very ugly indeed. I > share your worries, believe me. Look at the huge, suicidal investment in > shale gas and tar sands oil in North America, and the plans currently afoot > to use this deadly energy source as the key factor for the > reindustrialization of the continent. Look at Mexican industrial and > cognitive-sector growth in the devastating context of the narco-wars. These > are terrible signs, not just harbingers but actualities. All the political > intelligence of the western hemisphere can at present be found in a few > South American countries, and they don't have the power to change things on > a geopolitical level. The picture is not rosy, far from it. I hope all of > the above lends a little clarity to my brief remarks in the previous post. good point, I may have naively associated a new k-wave with a renewed social contract. I have this hypothesis that the opposition to the system often saves the system. I believe the potential victory of Syriza in Greece may set off a rejection of austerity throughout Europe, and start a latin american scenario, where since the naughties, pro-social policies have become the norm. In the longer run, I think we need, and thus propose, a re-alignment of progressive forces around the idea of the commons, first through the creation of local alliances and chambers of the commons which produce social charters to reconstitute support to political movements; and second through national and European global coalitions of pro-commons parties (digital, natural, industrial, social-entrepreneurial), which have objectively sociological and demographic majorities (they just don't know it yet) > > > The second issue is: do you see Brian, the broad restructuring that is > > also taken place from the bottom up ? Yes, indeed, most of the p2p > > economy is indeed subsumed to capitalism, but, there is a huge wave of > > bottom up innovation, mobilisation and re-invention, on the scale of the > > labor movement in the latter half of the 19th cy. If you see it (I do, > > as I document it every day), how is this impacting your assessment of > > capitalist strategies. I would question any analysis that is exclusively > > focused on the internal dynamics of the capital class, and neglects the > > counter-movements and counter-restructurings that are taking place. > > Yes, of course I do see it, this is the impressive thing going on in the > world! And it has been going on for quite a while. The thing to realize and > to act on is that these counter-dynamics are continuous since the crisis of > the Fordist political economy and the beginning of neoliberal restructuring > in the 1970s. At that time, a very broad and deep assessment of the > dead-ends of capitalist development was shared around the planet, and it > went far beyond the legacies of Marx, even though the Marxist inheritance > was crucial to the new thinking. I was born in California in '59 and I can > attest that counter-cultural ideas and practices have unfolded continuously > since the 60s around the world, in rather astonishing ways at differernt > periods, not the least of which was the late 90s/early 2000s. However, only > now, under the destructuring power of the current crisis, are large numbers > of people able to see the stakes of global development as clearly as they > did back in the late 60s and early 70s. Yet I think that in certain > respects -- and however counter-intuitive this may seem -- we are a good > deal more empowered now than dissenting sectors were back then. > I agree, but the key for me is access to distributed means of production > > True, those generations stopped the war in Vietnam and dealt a huge blow > to the hegemonic capitalist power by unseating Nixon and ushering in a > whole series of social and ecological reforms. But they also launched the > complex of ideas and practices which you have been documenting through the > p2p foundation, and those usages shaped the social matrix from which the > Internet developed, changing the social game decisively. People say the net > was created by Darpa. That's superficial and ignorant. The net, as a global > infrastructure and social institution, was created in exactly the way that > Castells describes, with crucial inputs from the state, the corporations, > and civil society. Especially the latter. In the foundational architecture > of the TCP/IP stack, and in the subsequent development of GNU/Linux, one > can see the imprint of a powerfuly egalitarian ethos, oriented toward use > values. In fact, that development vindicates in many ways the vision of the > great dissenting American sociologist Thorstein Veblen, in his forgotten > little book The Engineers and the Price System (1921), which had already > sparked a social movement in the 1930s. > > Veblen understood the core value of the engineers to be cooperation in the > development and use of technological systems; and he contrasted that > cooperative ethos to the price system of "business enterprise" which, in > his view, was all about sabotaging industrial cooperation so as to create > monopolies, maintain scarcities, and impose higher prices. Business > enterprise cuts productivity to exact higher prices. On the basis of that > key insight, which he derived from the sharp recession that followed WWI, > Veblen attempted with some success to start a social movement of engineers, > in protest against the forms of development that were being imposed by the > giant monopoly corporations. Veblen's real inheritance, however, came much > later, in the dissenting sociology of people like C. Wright Mills, who > inspired the entire New Left, notably people at UC Berkeley. That was the > kind of place where, in the 70s and early 80s, the egalitarian potentials > of the TCP/IP stack were developed into social practices. > > Everyone should be aware of the crucial features of TCP/IP, which > distinguished it from the X.25 protocol that several European states as > well as Japan were working on in the 1970s. X.25 was designed to make the > national telcos into gateway providers of informational services, which > they would control, meter and price. TCP/IP - that sinister creation of > Darpa - was designed to encode and decode whatever message you want, > period. No meter, no control, no price. For the early Internet engineers > and the top scientists who got first access to the fledgling net, this was > elegant, useful, commendable -- just good common sense for smart and > privileged people. For the marginalized grad students and counter-cultural > hippie types at places like Berkeley, this was a chance to turn idealistic > potentials into social realities. The point was to create a communications > machine that would be the polar opposite of the three coporate-state TV > channels, ABC, NBC and CBS - the Pepsi, Coke and Dr. Pepper of the Fordist > mass media. The Internet that we still know today resulted from a complex > and contradictory evolution where emancipatory inputs had tremendous > relevance. And that kind of process has continued up to this day, from > Napster to Global Revolution TV in 2011. > > Of course I know what has happened in parallel to all that, from Google to > NSA. I have analyzed and critiqued the counter offensives of the corporate > states, step by step. But I have also participated, step by step, in the > unfolding of the emancipatory potentials of the information society, which > moved far beyond the US and have largely left that country behind (I am sad > to say, since I now live there once again). The important thing to see is > that growth waves do have positive sides to them. What was so impressive, > in the 90s, was the manner in which a vast, truly global constellation of > egalitarian and ecological movements took hold of the emancipatory > potentials that were thrown off by the wave of growth that shot through the > world system after the Fall of the Wall, and before the state-corporate > elites got started on their ill-conceived attempt at imposing a "return to > order." I think that going forward, we should really respect all the > components of a historically determined process such as the one we are > living through. What has typically been lacking, among the sectors oriented > toward p2p and the commons, is a real understanding of how important state > institutions and industrial development still is. If we want to influence > the responses to the crisis, we have to be aware of these things and > actively deal with them. I agree with your last assessment in particular, and this is why I think anarcho-capitalism is such a pernicious ideological influence, as is the 'absolutist horizontalism' that is so pervasive. In my mind , they explain partly the relative defeats of the occupy and 15m movements. Our efforts in Ecuador are very much about reconstituting industrial development around p2p dynamics and transforming the state, though the social basis and political will for pushing them through is lacking at present. > > > Just for info, if Brian has not seen it, the Commons Transition Plan we > > have crafted here in Ecuador, > > http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan, with the ToC at bottom. > > Michel, I was not aware of this. I am moved. This is a tremendous plan. I > have followed to some small degree what is going on in Ecuador, notably > because I had often crossed paths with Carlos Prieto del Campo some years > ago in Spain. But this is fabulous! It is really beautiful, inspiring and > encouraging to witness an attempt at turning those vast molecular > revolutions into tangible institutional policy. I get what you mean when > you talk about contributory comons, the reformed corporations of a solidary > economy, and a partner state. Some positive dynamic between those three > major social formations is needed to change anything. really really glad we converge on this > > > > Though the actual effect of this plan will be limited in Ecuador, it is > > significant that it has been commissioned, and that a global > > commons-oriented movement of movements is emerging from which it is > > derived and which is looking at it. Lots of the proposals I made a few > > years ago (the commons-based reciprocity license, the alliance and > > chamber of the commons, the global coalition of the commons), are now > > being taking seriously and the subject of actual experimentation on the > > ground, along with the thousands of other p2p/sharing/commons > > experimentations and projects (I'm not talkng about the business sharing > > economy here). Nearly every aspect of the bottom-up p2p economy (from > > urban gardening to co-working to rural hackerspaces) is growing > > exponentially, along with its capitalist similes .. (this is factually > > documented, I'm not just saying this, though of course, it is easier for > > emergent phenomena to grow exponentially). > > Of course it is not only documented, it is visible to anyone with eyes to > see. If Jeremy Rifkin can leave the Wharton School of Business to go talk > about p2p and decentralized energy grids with EU bureaucrats and German > ministers, then something is happening. All the more when similar ideas > start to take root in China. The great effort now, across the the three > major social formations but especially within civil society, is to make the > new technologies viable for social and ecological reproduction. > yes, do you have any ideas and references on the latter. It is at the core of some of our proposals here in ecuador, in our policy papers on open agriculture and open industry > > Generally speaking, when you get outside the Anglo-American orbit, the > limitations of the price system become clearer. How exactly do you offer > hundreds of millions of impoverished people access to culture, energy, > development and productivity by way of a monopoly system? Impossible. And > even more, how do you offer people in the formerly developed world those > same things, at a time when the monopoly system has "progressed" to such a > point that even those people are superfluous? It's impossible. Apple and > co. are not going to bring progress to the masses. The cooperative economy > offers an answer that the capitalist system cannot offer. And yet most of > our social institutions are still tragically incapable of even registering > either the impossibility of the current social deal, or the proposed > reformulation of our productive relations. agreed, which is why the answer must first come from the grassroots > > > So my second question is: how do the new social movements affect > > capitalist scenarios ? > > Well, I am afraid we can see it, no? The capitalist scenarios remain > firmly fixed in North America, where they are exacerbated to the point of > madness. In Europe, which has partially collapsed, a green-washing p2p > rhetoric is applied on top of mounting inequalities, while Germany > reconfigures itself to become the continental hegemon and attempt a new > partnership with China. Meanwhile China itself, the largest and most > productive country on earth, is fixated on a development path that > oscillates wildly between excarbated entrepreneurialism and intensified > state control. In other words, the rising global hegemon is prey to > centripetal and centrifugal forces that constantly threaten to rip it > apart, were it not for some fairly amazing efforts to ride the tiger, > wherever it may choose to go. > I see the UK and dutch governments as 'right=wing' p2p governments in the sense they use the participatory potential as a weapon to undermine the welfare state (while the spanish govt is consciously anti-p2p and fighting it). I see syriza and perhaps other players as potential canditates for partial 'partner state' experiments > The terrible thing is that today, new social movements lend fuel to > reactionary forces. In China, 8% growth per annum is considered the minimum > necessary to stave off an impending social revolution by the have-nots of > the urban peripheries and the vast interior. In Turkey and Brazil it's > substantially the same, in Egypt the revolution has already happened. with > the results we have before our eyes. My guess is that the peace can't hold > much longer in India either. And I have not even mentioned Boko Haram, or > the bombs that just wnt off in Urumqi, etc. The dynamic of action and > reaction is systemic. Social movements are tremendously powerful, except > when you compare them to their dialectical other, the forces of social > control. The same dynamic governs cognitive capitalism, in its antagonistic > relation to the forces of commons-based peer production. > agreed > > In the deadlock of this global conflict we are definitely looking at > triumph of the powers of chaos, comparable in that sense to those that > expressed themselves after 1914, when the long breakup of British > hegemony began. The sun that finally set on the British Empire is now > setting on the American one. And what happens in the twilight hour? That's > the question of the present. History would lead us to predict vast wars. I > am not so sure that will happen. Again, everyone has had plenty of time to > reflect on World Wars I and II. No such conflagration followed the break-up > of the Soviet Union. Instead we are hit with climate change and recurrent > financial crises. A generalized, low-intensity civil war seems to be the > predominant form of violence in our time, rather than cataclysmic wars > between nation-states and empires. > > > > My hypothesis is: the next k-wave may well not be coming, and with a > > perfect storm of really grave issues risking to coalesce say by 2030, we > > may need an integrated alternative, much faster than we expect. > > I agree with you, Michel. Well, not entirely: I do think there will be > some kind of new growth wave, but I don't think it will correspond to any > Rooseveltian norm -- and I don't think we should wait for that to happen, > as though only a capitalist god could save us now. The worst thing would be > to trust in the new growth wave (or ripple) when it finally comes. Anything > short of political-economic autonomy is an illusion. And the latter can > only be gained by galvanizing and extending the great accumulation of > counter-systemic thinking that has been built up across the twentieth > century and on into the present. I think this is what the p2p-f is working on, i.e. cultivating, catalysing and internetworking seeds of the new in the chaos > The Saint-Simonian belief that we have to catch the ays repeats. That's > exactly why the critical utopia of the Multitudes journal broke up: some > people like Yann Moulier Boutang believed that the contradictions of > cognitive capitalism would be overcome in a new growth wave; while others > -- like myself and all the Italian emigres -- foresaw that nothing so > fortunate was going to happen, and that there would be no "New New Deal." > Maybe the postman doesn't always knock twice. Kondratiev waves are like > waves on the beach: they always come, but they are not always what you > expect. > > I had a dear friend who was killed in the '80s by a wave on the beach in > California, the result of an unexpected tsunami in Asia. What else is new? > Fukushima was already your perfect storm: the wave that destroyed any > promise that capitalist growth waves can somehow save us. We don't need a > new expansion of the death machines. We need a revolution. It's not going > to come from some desperate gesture that sparks the fires of reaction. It > can only come from the urgent propagation of a critical utopia, in the face > of a gathering disaster. You're right, we have to go much faster. And at > the same time, we have to hold much closer to the truth of what is really > happening in the world. If everyone shares our most basic ideas, than we > had better insist on the specific differences. And we had better make those > differences into real social practices. > > thanks for all your work in exactly that direction, Brian > yes, we have to boldly see the upcoming train wreck, and you help us with that, and, having lost all hope, we must nevertheless build the alternative, and the social movements that will be needed to defend and expand it, until the moment of victory and the phase transition, Michel > > > > > # 2 Background on the FLOK Project > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Background_on_the_FLOK_Project> > > # 3 The Framing of the Proposal > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > Framing_of_the_Proposal> > > > > > > * 3.1 The Three Value Models and the transition to a Social Knowledge > > Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Three_ > Value_Models_and_the_transition_to_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > > > > o 3.1.1 The first model: 'Classic' Cognitive Capitalism based on > > IP extraction > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_first_ > model:_.27Classic.27_Cognitive_Capitalism_based_on_IP_extraction> > > o 3.1.2 The second model: Netarchical Capitalism based on the > > control of networked platforms > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > second_model:_Netarchical_Capitalism_based_on_the_ > control_of_networked_platforms> > > > > + 3.1.2.1 The Value Crisis under conditions of netarchical > > capitalism > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Value_ > Crisis_under_conditions_of_netarchical_capitalism> > > o 3.1.3 Towards a third model: a mature 'civic' peer-to-peer > > economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Towards_a_ > third_model:_a_mature_.27civic.27_peer-to-peer_economy> > > > > + 3.1.3.1 Solving the value crisis through a social knowledge > > economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Solving_ > the_value_crisis_through_a_social_knowledge_economy> > > * 3.2 Four Technology Regimes > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Four_Technology_Regimes> > > > > o 3.2.1 Netarchical Capitalism as a technological regime: peer to > > > peer front end, hierarchical back-end > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Netarchical_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_peer_to_ > peer_front_end.2C_hierarchical_back-end> > > o 3.2.2 Distributed Capitalism as a technological regime: the > > commodification of everything > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Distributed_Capitalism_as_a_technological_regime:_the_ > commodification_of_everything> > > o 3.2.3 Resilience Community Platforms Designed for > > Re-Localization > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Resilience_Community_ > Platforms_Designed_for_Re-Localization> > > o 3.2.4 The Global Commons Scenario as the desired alternative > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > Global_Commons_Scenario_as_the_desired_alternative> > > * 3.3 Cognitive/Netarchical Capitalism vs. an Open-Commons based > > Knowledge Society > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Cognitive. > 2FNetarchical_Capitalism_vs._an_Open-Commons_based_Knowledge_Society> > > > > o 3.3.1 The Socio-Economic Implications of a Social Knowledge > > Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Socio- > Economic_Implications_of_a_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > > o 3.3.2 Discussion: IP and patents impede and slow down innovation > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Discussion:_IP_and_patents_impede_and_slow_down_innovation> > > > > + 3.3.2.1 Intellectual property rights and their supposed role > > in cognitive capitalism > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Intellectual_property_rights_and_their_supposed_role_in_ > cognitive_capitalism> > > + 3.3.2.2 A synopsis of empirical evidence on the effect of > > > exclusive intellectual property regimes on innovation and > > productivity > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_synopsis_of_empirical_ > evidence_on_the_effect_of_exclusive_intellectual_property_regimes_on_ > innovation_and_productivity> > > o 3.3.3 Discussion: the role of Indigenous Peoples and > > (Neo)Traditional Knowledge > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Discussion:_the_role_of_ > Indigenous_Peoples_and_.28Neo.29Traditional_Knowledge> > > > > + 3.3.3.1 Arguments for the specific role of (neo)-traditional > > > knowledge and peoples in a social knowledge transition > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Arguments_ > for_the_specific_role_of_.28neo.29-traditional_knowledge_and_peoples_in_a_ > social_knowledge_transition> > > + 3.3.3.2 The potential role of commons-based reciprocity > > > licenses to protect traditional knowledge > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > potential_role_of_commons-based_reciprocity_licenses_to_ > protect_traditional_knowledge> > > o 3.3.4 Discussion: Gender Aspects > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Discussion:_Gender_Aspects> > > * 3.4 Introducing the new configuration between State, Civil Society > > and the Market > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Introducing_the_new_ > configuration_between_State.2C_Civil_Society_and_the_Market> > > > > o 3.4.1 What can we learn from the already existing social > > knowledge economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#What_can_ > we_learn_from_the_already_existing_social_knowledge_economy> > > o 3.4.2 The new configuration > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_new_configuration> > > o 3.4.3 Why is this a post-capitalist scenario? > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_is_ > this_a_post-capitalist_scenario.3F> > > o 3.4.4 Discussion: The role of the capitalist sector > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Discussion:_The_role_of_the_capitalist_sector> > > * 3.5 A description of the new triarchy of the Partner State, the > > > Ethical Economy and a Commons-based Civil Society > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_ > description_of_the_new_triarchy_of_the_Partner_State. > 2C_the_Ethical_Economy_and_a_Commons-based_Civil_Society> > > > > o 3.5.1 The concept of the partner state and the commonification > > of public services > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > concept_of_the_partner_state_and_the_commonification_of_public_services> > > o 3.5.2 The Ethical Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy> > > > > + 3.5.2.1 Discussion: Material and Immaterial Infrastructural > > > Requirements for the Ethical Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Discussion:_Material_and_Immaterial_Infrastructural_ > Requirements_for_the_Ethical_Economy> > > o 3.5.3 The Commons-Based Civil Society > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > Commons-Based_Civil_Society> > > * 3.6 Beyond the market, beyond planning ? > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Beyond_ > the_market.2C_beyond_planning_.3F> > > > > o 3.6.1 The key role of Commons-Based Reciprocity Licenses > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_key_ > role_of_Commons-Based_Reciprocity_Licenses> > > o 3.6.2 Mutual coordination mechanisms in the new 'ethical' > > > enterpreneurial coalitions: Cybersin redux ? > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Mutual_ > coordination_mechanisms_in_the_new_.27ethical.27_ > enterpreneurial_coalitions:_Cybersin_redux_.3F> > > * 3.7 The historical and present importance of mutualization in times > > of increasing resource scarcity > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_ > historical_and_present_importance_of_mutualization_in_times_of_increasing_ > resource_scarcity> > > > > o 3.7.1 Discussion: The issue of eco-system sustainability > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan# > Discussion:_The_issue_of_eco-system_sustainability> > > > > + 3.7.1.1 Why innovation should be located in open design > > communities > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Why_ > innovation_should_be_located_in_open_design_communities> > > + 3.7.1.2 The role of 'idle-sourcing' and the sharing economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_role_ > of_.27idle-sourcing.27_and_the_sharing_economy> > > * 3.8 A historical opportunity: The Convergence of Material/Technical > > > P2P Infrastructures, Digital/Immaterial Commons, and > > Commons-Oriented Governance and Ownership Models > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#A_ > historical_opportunity:_The_Convergence_of_Material.2FTechnical_P2P_ > Infrastructures.2C_Digital.2FImmaterial_Commons.2C_and_ > Commons-Oriented_Governance_and_Ownership_Models> > > * 3.9 Elements of Idealized and Integrative Full Transition Plan to a > > mature Social Knowledge Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Elements_ > of_Idealized_and_Integrative_Full_Transition_Plan_to_a_ > mature_Social_Knowledge_Economy> > > > > o 3.9.1 Analysis > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Analysis> > > + 3.9.1.1 1. Under conditions of proprietary (industrial) > > capitalism > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#1._Under_ > conditions_of_proprietary_.28industrial.29_capitalism> > > + 3.9.1.2 2. Under conditions of emerging peer production > > > under the domination of financial and 'cognitive', > > 'netarchical' capitalism > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#2._Under_ > conditions_of_emerging_peer_production_under_the_ > domination_of_financial_and_.27cognitive.27.2C_. > 27netarchical.27_capitalism> > > + 3.9.1.3 3. Under conditions of strong peer production under > > civic dominance > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#3._Under_ > conditions_of_strong_peer_production_under_civic_dominance> > > o 3.9.2 Transition Dynamic > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Transition_Dynamic> > > + 3.9.2.1 The State > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_State> > > + 3.9.2.2 The Ethical Economy > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Ethical_Economy_2> > > + 3.9.2.3 The Commons Sector > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#The_Commons_Sector> > > * 3.10 Political reconstruction of social movements in a conjuncture > > of post-industrial transformation > > <http://en.wiki.floksociety.org/w/Research_Plan#Political_ > reconstruction_of_social_movements_in_a_conjuncture_of_ > post-industrial_transformation> > > > -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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Fwd: The Centre for Internet and Society - Bulletin - April '14
by Michel Bauwens 24 May '14

24 May '14

---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Prasad Krishna <prasad(a)cis-india.org> Date: Sat, May 24, 2014 at 7:06 AM Subject: The Centre for Internet and Society - Bulletin - April '14 To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004(a)gmail.com> We at the Centre for Internet & Society (CIS) welcome you to the fourth issue of the newsletter (April) for the year 2014. Archives of our newsletters can be accessed at: http://cis-india.org/about/newsletters ------------------------------- Highlights ------------------------------- - We have published a compilation of the various central government schemes in a blog post as part of our National Resource Kit project. - The 27th session of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights (WIPO-SCCR) was held in Geneva from April 28 to May 2, 2014. Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event. CIS made its statements on Technological Measures of Protection on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, Orphan Works, Retracted and Withdrawn Works, and Works out of Commerce on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives, and on the WIPO Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations. - CIS signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Mysore University for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU. - A two-day global stakeholder meeting on future of internet governance (NETmundial) was organized by the Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in partnership with /1Net at Sao Paulo in Brazil on April 23 and 24, 2014. Achal Prabhala participated in the event. As part of its research to enable productive discussions of the critical internet governance issues at the meeting and elsewhere CIS published a total of 16 blog entries. - We conducted an empirical study of five separate and diverse banks (State Bank of India, Central Bank of India, ICICI Bank, IndusInd Bank, and Standard Chartered Bank) to gain a practical perspective on the existing banking practices and policies in India, and published a Banking Policy Guide. - As part of the Making Change project Denisse Albornoz interviewed Tuhin Paul, an artist and storyteller behind Menstrupedia, an India-based social venture creating comics to shatter the myths and misunderstandings surrounding menstruation around the world. Denisse provides an analysis of ‘menstrual activism’ — a movement that despite its trajectory in feminism remains unnoticed in most accounts of traditional and digital activism. - Six research studies were commissioned by HEIRA-CSCS (over November 2013-March 2014) as part of the collaborative exercise with CIS to map the Digital Humanities within a broad rubric of exploring changes at the intersection of youth, technology and higher education in India. P.P.Sneha in her blog post presents a broad overview of some of the key learnings from these projects. ----------------------------------------------- Jobs <http://../../jobs>----------------------------------------------- CIS is seeking applications for the post of Programme Officer<http://../../jobs/programme-officer-access-to-knowledge-and-openness>(Access to Knowledge). There are two vacancies for this post one in Delhi and one in Bangalore. To apply, please send your resume to Sunil Abraham ( sunil(a)cis-india.org) Nirmita Narasimhan (nirmita(a)cis-india.org) and Pranesh Prakash (pranesh(a)cis-india.org) with three writing samples of which at least one demonstrates your analytic skills, and one that shows your ability to simplify complex policy issues. ---------------------------------------------- Accessibility and Inclusion <http://../../accessibility>---------------------------------------------- Under a grant from the Hans Foundation we are doing two projects. The first project is on creating a national resource kit of state-wise laws, policies and programmes on issues relating to persons with disabilities in India. We compiled the first draft of the kit (29 states and 6 union territories). The chapters along with the quarterly reports can be accessed on the project page <http://../../accessibility/resources/national-resource-kit-project>. The second project is on developing text-to-speech software for 15 Indian languages. The progress made so far in the project can be accessed here<http://../../accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer> . ►NVDA # Monthly Update - NVDA e-Speak Text-to-Speech Project Update<http://../../accessibility/resources/nvda-text-to-speech-synthesizer>(by Suman Dogra, April 28, 2014). ► National Resource Kit # Blog Entry - Central Government Schemes<http://../../accessibility/blog/central-government-schemes>(by Anandhi Viswanathan and CLPR, April 27, 2014). ►Other # Blog Entry - Polling Pains <http://../../accessibility/blog/polling-pains> (by Amba Salelkar, April 30, 2014). # Media Coverage - Are Elections Fair to People With Special Needs?<http://../../news/new-indian-express-april-8-2014-papiya-bhattacharya-are-elections-fair-to-people-with-special-needs>(by Papiya Bhattacharya, New Indian Express, April 8, 2014). - Enabling Elections<http://../../news/vijay-karnataka-april-9-2014-enabling-elections>(Vijay Karnataka, April 9, 2014). This was published in Kannada. ----------------------------------------------------------- Access to Knowledge <http://../../a2k> ----------------------------------------------------------- As part of the Access to Knowledge programme we are doing two projects. The first one (Pervasive Technologies) under a grant from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) is for research on the complex interplay between pervasive technologies and intellectual property to support intellectual property norms that encourage the proliferation and development of such technologies as a social good. The second one (Wikipedia) under a grant from the Wikimedia Foundation is for the growth of Indic language communities and projects by designing community collaborations and partnerships that recruit and cultivate new editors and explore innovative approaches to building projects. ►WIPO SCCR # Participation in Events - Standing Committee on Copyright and Related Rights: Twenty-Seventh Session (organized by WIPO, Geneva, April 28 – May 2, 2014). Nehaa Chaudhari participated in the event. France, Greece, India and the European Union signed the Marrakesh Treaty<http://../../a2k/blog/france-greece-india-eu-sign-marrakesh-treaty>. CIS delivered statements on Technological Measures of Protection on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives<http://../../a2k/blog/cis-statement-on-technological-measures-of-protection-27-sccr-on-limitations-exceptions-for-libraries-and-archives>, Orphan Works, Retracted and Withdrawn Works, and Works out of Commerce on Limitations and Exceptions for Libraries and Archives<http://../../a2k/blog/cis-statement-orphan-works-retracted-withdrawn-works-and-works-out-of-commerce-at-27-sccr-on-limitations-and-exceptions-for-libraries-and-archives>, and on the WIPO Proposed Treaty for the Protection of Broadcasting Organizations<http://../../a2k/blog/cis-statement-27-sccr-on-wipo-proposed-treaty-for-protection-of-broadcasting-organizations>. Transcripts of the discussions can be accessed here<http://../../a2k/blog/wipo-sccr-27-discussions-transcripts> . # Blog Entries - Report on CDIP-12 <http://../../a2k/blog/report-on-cpdip-2> (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 22, 2014). - Signing and Ratification of the Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons who are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled<http://../../a2k/blog/signing-and-ratification-of-marrakesh-treaty-to-facilitate-access-to-published-works-for-persons-blind-visually-impaired-print-disabled>(by Nehaa Chaudhari, April 25, 2014). - Report on the WIPO Director General’s Meeting with NGO’s<http://../../a2k/blog/report-on-wipo-director-general-meeting-with-ngos>(by Puneeth Nagraj, April 30, 2014). # Media Coverage - Is the WIPO Treaty for Broadcasters Moving Forward at SCCR 27?<http://../../news/knowledge-ecology-international-manon-ress-april-29-2014-is-wipo-treaty-for-broadcasters-moving-forward-at-sccr-27>(by Manon Ress, Knowledge Ecology International, April 29, 2014). - At WIPO, Authors, Civil Society Watchful of Rights for Broadcasters<http://../../news/ip-watch-catherine-saez-may-1-2014-wipo-authors-civil-society-watchful-of-rights-for-broadcasters>(by Catherine Saez, IP Watch, May 1, 2014). ►Other # Event Organized - NASA International Space Apps Challenge 2014<http://../../openness/events/nasa-international-space-apps-challenge-2014>(CIS, Bangalore, April 12 – 13, 2014). # Blog Entries - Online Survey for Indian Mobile App Developer Startups & Enterprises<http://../../a2k/blog/online-survey-for-indian-mobile-app-developer-enterprise>(by Samantha Cassar, April 9, 2014). - App Developers Series: Services, Products, Dichotomy & IP – Part I<http://../../a2k/blog/app-developers-series-services-products-dichotomy-ip-2013-part-i>(by Samantha Cassar, April 10, 2014). - Report on CDIP-12 <http://../../a2k/blog/report-on-cpdip-2> (by Puneeth Nagraj, April 22, 2014). - Report on the 31st Session of the Standing Committee on Trademarks<http://../../a2k/blog/report-on-31-session-of-standing-committee-on-trademarks>(by Puneeth Nagraj, April 29, 2014). ►Wikipedia The following has been done under grant from the Wikimedia Foundation<http://../../a2k/access-to-knowledge-program-plan> : # Announcement - CIS Signs MoU with Mysore University<http://../../openness/blog/cis-signs-mou-with-mysore-university>(by Dr. U.B.Pavanaja, April 16, 2014): for converting to Unicode and re-releasing their encyclopaedia under Creative Commons License. Dr. U.B. Pavanaja on behalf of the CIS-A2K team signed the MoU. The signing event took place earlier on February 22, 2014. # Articles - Vachana Sanchaya: Bringing Access to 11th century Kannada Literature<http://../../openness/blog/openaccessweek-april-3-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-vachana-sanchaya>(by Subhashish Panigrahi, April 3, 2014) - ୭୯ ବର୍ଷରେ ସ୍ୱତନ୍ତ୍ର ଓଡ଼ିଶା: ଶାସ୍ତ୍ରୀୟ ଓଡ଼ିଆ ଓ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟରରେ ଏହାର ବ୍ୟବ‌ହାର<http://../../openness/blog/subhashish-panigrahi-article-in-amalekha>(by Subhashish Panigrahi, Amalekha, April 4, 2014). - ଓଡ଼ିଅା ଭାଷାର ବିକାଶ ଓ କମ୍ପ୍ୟୁଟର<http://../../openness/blog/kadambini-april-8-2014-subhashish-panigrahi-odia-language-and-development-in-digital-era>(by Subhashish Panigrahi, The Kadambini, April 8, 2014). - Report from India: Relicensing books under CC<http://../../openness/blog/creative-commons-subhashish-panigrahi-april-18-2014-report-from-india-relicensing-books-under-creative-commons>(by Subhashish Panigrahi, Creative Commons Blog, April 19, 2014). - 14 Odia books re-released under Creative Commons license<http://../../openness/blog/dna-rohini-lakshane-april-26-2014-14-books-re-released-under-creative-commons-license>(by Subhashish Panigrahi, DNA, April 26, 2014). The article was edited by Rohini Lakshane. # Events Organized - Tulu Wikipedia Workshop<http://../../openness/events/tulu-wikipedia-workshop>(organized by CIS-A2K, Balmatta Computer Centre, Mangalore, April 5, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop. - Konkani Wikipedia Workshop<http://../../news/daijiworld-april-6-2014-mangalore-wikipedia-workshop-held-for-konkani-writers>(co-organized by All India Konkani Writers Organization and CIS-A2K, Kalaangann Shaktinagar, April 6, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop. - Tulu Wikipedia Editathon<http://../../openness/events/tulu-wikipedia-editathon>(co-organized by Karnataka Theological College and CIS-A2K, Mangalore, April 19, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja conducted the workshop. # Participation in Events - Wikipedia Session for Trainee Journos<http://../../news/wiki-session-for-prajavani-journalists>(organized by Prajavani, Bangalore, April 28, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja took a session for the trainee journalists of Prajavani Kannada daily on Wikipedia. - World Book Day <http://../../news/world-book-day> (organized by Karnataka Publishers’ Association, Indian Institute of World Culture, Basavanagudi, Bangalore, April 23, 2014). Dr. U.B.Pavanaja was a speaker. - Relevance of Bhagabat Tungi in the evolution of Odia language from Buddha era to digital age<http://../../news/relevance-of-bhagabat-tungi-in-evolution-of-odia-language?searchterm=Relevance+of+Bhagabat+Tungi+in+the+evolution+of+Odia+language+from+Buddha+era+to+digital+age>(organized by The Intellects, Shree Jagannath Mandir and Odisha Art and Cultural Center, New Delhi, April 24, 2014). Subhashish Panigrahi participated in the event. # Media Coverage CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage: - M'lore: Wikipedia Workshop held for Konkani writers<http://../../news/daijiworld-april-6-2014-mangalore-wikipedia-workshop-held-for-konkani-writers>(Daijiworld, April 6, 2014). - Odia Loves Wikipedia<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…>(Rising Voices, April 10, 2014). This was also published in Spanish<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…>and in Russian<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…> . - International Book Day<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…>(The Hindu, April 21, 2014). - Books are a bridge between generations<http://../../news/deccan-herald-april-23-2014-books-are-a-bridge-between-generations>(The Deccan Herald, April 23, 2014). - World Book Day Report<http://../../news/vijayavani-april-23-2014-world-book-day>(Vijaywani, April 23, 2014). - Seminar on Odia Language in New Delhi by the Intellects<http://../../news/eodishasamacharseminar-on-odia-language-in-new-delhi-by-the-intellects>(Odisha Samachar, April 24, 2014). - Delhi meet focuses on Bhagabat Tungi revival<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…>(The Pioneer, April 26, 2014). ----------------------------------------------- Internet Governance <http://../../internet-governance> ----------------------------------------------- As part of its research on privacy and free speech, CIS is engaged with two different projects. The first one (under a grant from Privacy International and International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) is on surveillance and freedom of expression (SAFEGUARDS). The second one (under a grant from MacArthur Foundation) is on studying the restrictions placed on freedom of expression online by the Indian government. ► NETmundial As part of its participation in the NETmundial event organized in Brazil by Brazilian Internet Steering Committee in partnership with /1Net at Sao Paulo on April 23 and 24, 2014 CIS produced a total of 16 outputs: - Sumandro Chattapadhyay produced these visual representations: Comparing Appearance of Fifty Most Frequent Words<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-comparing-appearance-of-fifty-most-frequent-words>, Contributions by Countries of Origin<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-countries-of-origin>, Contributions by Types of Organisation<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-contributions-by-types-of-organisation>, Which Countries Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-countries-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial>, Which Governments Have Not Submitted Contributions to NETmundial?<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-which-governments-have-not-contributed-to-net-mundial>, Word Clouds of Contributions by Types of Organisation<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-word-clouds-of-contributions-by-types-of-organisation>and Tracking *Multistakeholder* across Contributions<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-tracking-multi-stakeholder-across-contributions>. Achal Prabhala participated in the event and wrote these: Day 0<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-day-0>, Day 1 <http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-day-1>, and Day 2 <http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-day-2>. Transcript of the NETmundial<http://../../internet-governance/blog/netmundial-transcript-archive>for archival purposes was made available by Pranesh Prakash. Smarika Kumar produced two research outputs: NETmundial and Suggestions for IANA Administration<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-and-suggestions-for-iana-administration>and Accountability of ICANN <http://../../internet-governance/blog/accountability-of-icann>. Geetha Hariharan wrote two blog posts: Marco Civil da Internet: Brazil’s ‘Internet Constitution’<http://../../internet-governance/blog/marco-civil-da-internet>and Brazil passes Marco Civil; the US-FCC Alters its Stance on Net Neutrality<http://../../internet-governance/blog/brazil-passes-marco-civil-us-fcc-alters-stance-on-net-neutrality>. Jyoti Panday wrote one blog post: NETmundial Roadmap: Defining the Roles of Stakeholders in Multistakeholderism<http://../../internet-governance/blog/net-mundial-roadmap-defining-roles-of-stakeholders-in-multistakeholderism> . ►Privacy # Analyses - Report of the Group of Experts on Privacy vs. The Leaked 2014 Privacy Bill<http://../../internet-governance/blog/report-of-group-of-experts-on-privacy-vs-leaked-2014-privacy-bill>(by Elonnai Hickok, April 14, 2014). - Banking Policy Guide<http://../../internet-governance/blog/banking-policy-guide>(by Elonnai Hickok, April 22, 2014). - The Embodiment of the Right to Privacy within Domestic Legislation<http://../../internet-governance/blog/the-embodiment-of-right-to-privacy-within-domestic-legislation>(by Tanvi Mani, April 29, 2014). # Articles - Who Governs the Internet? Implications for Freedom and National Security<http://../../internet-governance/blog/yojana-april-2014-sunil-abraham-who-governs-the-internet-implications-for-freedom-and-national-security>(by Sunil Abraham, Yojana, April 4, 2014). - Privacy Law in India: A Muddled Field – I<http://../../internet-governance/blog/the-hoot-bhairav-acharya-april-15-2014-privacy-law-in-india-a-muddled-field-1>(by Bhairav Acharya, The Hoot, April 15, 2014). - Very Big Brother<http://../../internet-governance/blog/council-for-responsible-genetics-april-2014-sunil-abraham-very-big-brother>(by Sunil Abraham, GeneWatch, January – April 2014 Issue). # Blog Entry - South African Protection of Personal Information Act, 2013<http://../../internet-governance/blog/south-african-protection-personal-information-act-2013>(by Divij Joshi, April 16, 2014). # Participation in Events - Milton Wolf Seminar on Media and Diplomacy: The Third Man Theme Revisited: Foreign Policies of the Internet in a Time Of Surveillance and Disclosure<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…>(jointly organized by the Center for Global Communication Studies (CGCS) at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, the American Austrian Foundation (AAF), and the Diplomatic Academy of Vienna (DA), Vienna, March 30 – April 1, 2014). Nishant Shah participated in the event as a panelist. - GSMA Partners Meeting <http://../../news/gsma-partners-meeting>(organized by Privacy International, London, April 9, 2014). Elonnai Hickok participated in this meeting. - The Critical Life of Information<http://../../news/critical-life-of-information>(organized by Yale University, 100 Wall Street, April 11, 2014). Nishant Shah spoke in the panel on Big Data and Governance. Malavika Jayaram spoke in the panel on Big Data and the Arts. - Round-table on User Safety on the Internet<http://../../news/round-table-on-user-safety-on-internet>(organized by Consumer Voice and Google, Infantry Road, Bangalore, April 24, 2014). - 6th Biannual Surveillance and Society Conference<http://../../news/ssn-2014-sixth-biannual-surveillance-and-society-conference>(organized by Eticas Research and Consulting, University of Barcelona and CCCB, April 26 – 24, 2014). Malavika Jayaram gave a talk on “Biometrics in beta: experimenting on a nation (while normalising surveillance for 1.2 billion people)”. ► Other # Articles - Between the Local and the Global: Notes Towards Thinking the Nature of Internet Policy<http://../../internet-governance/blog/cgcs-nishant-shah-april-1-2014-between-the-local-and-the-global>(by Nishant Shah, cgcsblog, April 1, 2014). - Networks: What You Don’t See is What You (for)Get<http://../../internet-governance/blog/dml-central-april-17-2014-nishant-shah-networks-what-you-dont-see-is-what-you-for-get>(by Nishant Shah, April 17, 2014). -------------------------------- News & Media Coverage <http://../../news> -------------------------------- CIS gave its inputs to the following media coverage: - Two Indians in Global Commission on Web Governance<http://../../news/outlook-april-1-2014-two-indians-in-global-commission-on-web-governance>(April 1, 2014): Sunil Abraham was named as one of the experts. This was published in Outlook<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…>, Economic Times<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…>, and in Matters India<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…> . - The Take Down of Free Speech Online<http://../../news/newslaundry-april-1-2014-somi-das-the-take-down-of-free-speech-online>(Newslaundry, April 1, 2014): CIS research on Intermediary Liabilities is quoted. - The politics of Facebook<http://../../news/livemint-april-1-2014-shweta-taneja-the-politics-of-facebook>(by Shweta Tiwari, April 1, 2014). - New privacy Bill more refined & has wider ambit, say experts<http://../../news/business-standard-april-3-2014-surabhi-agarwal-new-privacy-bill-more-refined-has-wider-ambit-say-experts>(by Surabhi Agarwal, Business Standard, April 2, 2014). - Should Nandan Nilekani's Aadhaar project, for identity proof and welfare delivery, exist at all?<http://../../news/economic-times-april-3-2014-m-rajshekhar-should-nandan-nilekani-aadhar-project-for-identity-proof-and-welfare-delivery-exist>(by M. Rajshekhar, April 3, 2014). - Lok sabha polls: Social media companies launch special pages for polls<http://../../news/economic-times-april-10-2014-varuni-khosla-lok-sabha-polls>(by Varuni Khosla, Economic Times, April 10, 2014). - Parties give short shrift to privacy<http://../../news/governance-now-april-12-2014-pratap-vikram-singh-parties-give-short-shrift-to-privacy>(by Pratap Vikram Singh, GovernanceNow.com, April 12, 2014). - No party's got a clear stand, Aadhaar's fate hangs in balance<http://../../news/governance-now-april-13-2014-pratap-vikram-singh-no-party-has-got-clear-stand-aadhaar-fate-hangs-in-balance>(by Pratap Vikram Singh, GovernanceNow.com, April 13, 2014). - 'India wants core internet infrastructure'<http://../../news/the-times-of-india-april-24-2014-india-wants-core-internet-infrastructure>(by Indrani Bagchi, April 24, 2014). - India for inclusive internet governance<http://../../news/the-times-of-india-april-25-indrani-bagchi-india-for-inclusive-internet-governance>(by Indrani Bagchi, April 25, 2014). - Facebook launches FB Newswire for journalists; loses part of its immunity under IT Act 2000<http://../../news/dna-amrita-madhukalya-april-26-2014-facebook-launches-fb-newswire-for-journalists-loses-part-of-its-immunity-under-it-act-2000>(by Amrita Madhukalya, DNA, April 26, 2014). -------------------------------- Digital Humanities <http://../../raw/digital-humanities> -------------------------------- CIS is building research clusters in the field of Digital Humanities. The Digital will be used as a way of unpacking the debates in humanities and social sciences and look at the new frameworks, concepts and ideas that emerge in our engagement with the digital. The clusters aim to produce and document new conversations and debates that shape the contours of Digital Humanities in Asia: # Blog Entries - Confession in the Digital Age<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/confession-in-digital-age>(by Rimi Nandy, April 14, 2014). - Animating the Archive – A Survey of Printed Digitized Materials in Bengali and their Use in Higher Education<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/animating-the-archive>(by Saidul Haque, April 14, 2014). - ‘Doing’ Digital Humanities: Reflections on a project on Online Feminism in India<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/doing-digital-humanities>(by Sujatha Subramanian, April 14, 2014). - The Machinistic Paradigm Collapse<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/the-machinistic-paradigm-collapse>(by Anirudh Sridhar, April 14, 2014). - Exploring the Digital Landscape: An Overview<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/exploring-the-digital-landscape>(by P.P.Sneha, April 14, 2014). - Digital Humanities and the Problem of Definition<http://../../raw/digital-humanities/digital-humanities-problem-of-definition>(by P.P.Sneha, April 25, 2014). -------------------------------- Digital Natives <http://../../digital-natives>-------------------------------- CIS is doing a research project titled “Making Change”. The project will explore new ways of defining, locating, and understanding change in network societies. Having the thought piece 'Whose Change is it Anyway' as an entry point for discussion and reflection, the project will feature profiles, interviews and responses of change-makers to questions around current mechanisms and practices of change in South Asia and South East Asia: ►Making Change Project # Blog Entry - Multimedia Storytellers: Panel Discussion<http://../../digital-natives/making-change/multimedia-storytellers>(by Denisse Albornoz, April 16, 2014). - From Taboo to Beautiful – Menstrupedia<http://../../digital-natives/making-change/menstrupedia-taboo-beautiful>(by Denisse Albornoz, April 30, 2014). -------------------------------- Telecom <http://../../telecom> -------------------------------- CIS is involved in promoting access and accessibility to telecommunications services and resources and has provided inputs to ongoing policy discussions and consultation papers published by TRAI. It has prepared reports on unlicensed spectrum and accessibility of mobile phones for persons with disabilities and also works with the USOF to include funding projects for persons with disabilities in its mandate: # Event Organized - Tech Talk: Landscape of Wireless Communications & Electromagnetic Spectrum<http://../../events/tech-talk-landscape-of-wireless-communications-and-electromagnetic-spectrum>(CIS, Bangalore, April 28, 2014). A. Radha Krishna gave a talk on wireless communication technologies. ----------------------------------------------------- About CIS <http://../../> ----------------------------------------------------- The Centre for Internet and Society is a non-profit research organization that works on policy issues relating to freedom of expression, privacy, accessibility for persons with disabilities, access to knowledge and IPR reform, and openness (including open government, FOSS, open standards, etc.), and engages in academic research on digital natives and digital humanities. ► Follow us elsewhere - Twitter: <http://cis-india.us8.list-manage2.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…> https://twitter.com/CISA2K<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…> - Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/cisa2k<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…> - Visit us at: <http://cis-india.us8.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/India_Access_To_Knowledge<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/track/click?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2…> - E-mail: a2k(a)cis-india.org ► Support Us Please help us defend consumer / citizen rights on the Internet! Write a cheque in favour of ‘The Centre for Internet and Society’ and mail it to us at No. 194, 2nd ‘C’ Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bengaluru – 5600 71. ► Request for Collaboration: We invite researchers, practitioners, and theoreticians, both organisationally and as individuals, to collaboratively engage with Internet and society and improve our understanding of this new field. To discuss the research collaborations, write to Sunil Abraham, Executive Director, at sunil(a)cis-india.org or Nishant Shah, Director – Research, at nishant(a)cis-india.org. To discuss collaborations on Indic language Wikipedia, write to T. Vishnu Vardhan, Programme Director, A2K, at vishnu(a)cis-india.org. ------------------------------ *CIS is grateful to its primary donor the Kusuma Trust founded by Anurag Dikshit and Soma Pujari, philanthropists of Indian origin for its core funding and support for most of its projects. CIS is also grateful to its other donors, Wikimedia Foundation, Ford Foundation, Privacy International, UK, Hans Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, and IDRC for funding its various projects.* This email was sent to michelsub2004(a)gmail.com *why did I get this?*<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage.com/about?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2e&id=9…> unsubscribe from this list<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c…> update subscription preferences<http://cis-india.us8.list-manage2.com/profile?u=412f3688a5fdafc4ddde25c2e&i…> Centre for Internet and Society · No. 194, 2nd 'C' Cross, Domlur, 2nd Stage, Bangalore - 560071 · Bangalore 560071 · India -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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new flok sites for the summit
by Michel Bauwens 24 May '14

24 May '14

Here you have some info: http://floksociety.org/2014/05/23/metodologia-y-participantes-de-las-mesas-… Also in the web of summit: http://cumbredelbuenconocer.ec/#schedule -- *Please note an intrusion wiped out my inbox on February 8; I have no record of previous communication, proposals, etc ..* P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/

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