[P2P-F] P2P-Foundation Digest, Vol 58, Issue 12

Wed Oct 14 17:33:53 CEST 2015

This is a very nicely designed site and the lab looks very elegant and 
professional. The photos are excellent. But it may be worth considering 
noting the location of the lab more prominently. People in this forum 
might easily deduce this project being in Greece, having heard much 
about the activity and folks involved previously, but the random visitor 
will only be able to find the location noted on the 'contacts' page. It 
might help to note location on a few more pages, particularly on the 
'about' and 'facilities' pages.

I'm very interested in the 'design global, manufacture local' aspect of 
the planned research and am wondering if there are project plans for 
local experimental implementation in Greece or if the plan is, for now, 
just to document projects of other organizations and programs. My own 
Open House project ( 
http://www.appropedia.org/Open_House:_Building_an_Open_Source_Lifestyle 
) is looking to do something similar or related by cataloging, and 
eventually showcasing with a video documentary, the open source designs 
necessary for a functional owner/local-built lifestyle. There's a 
certain focus on personal 'unplugging' in this (ie. the use of new 
production on the household/personal level to unplug from market 
dependency) but I also intend to illustrate the potential in the 
community context as well. It's one of a number of concepts I've been 
exploring recently to apply the approach of 'living museums' (like the 
many viking or bronze age village re-creations in Europe or the colonial 
era villages in the US) to the exhibition of future culture and 
lifestyle rather than their usual focus on the distant past.

I think that one of the key things that could facilitate a grounding of 
theory into practice is to look at the logistics of lifestyle; how our 
daily routine actually works as a system to meet our needs at a given 
standard-of-living. Those living museums go to great lengths to 
illustrate for the public how past, pre-industrial, lifestyle 
functioned, but, ironically, we generally have a very dim awareness of 
how our lifestyles actually work in the present, let alone the near 
future. This is because the market system conceals its workings from 
us--now putting much of them in other distant countries--leaving us 
industrially illiterate and unable to imagine viable alternatives. And 
so we interface to the market as though it were an enormous vending 
machine, its inner workings mysterious and locked away, our means of 
interaction strictly limited to just a coin slot and some buttons as 
designed by--and suiting the interests of--whoever built this thing. As 
I often say, as far as the average American is concerned, the 
supermarket gets restocked each night by Santa Claus and his Chinese 
elves. And this results in a lot of difficulty when we try to implement 
alternative infrastructures or attempt to create intentional 
communities. People are always underestimating just how much goes into 
maintaining their standard of living since they've never seen anything 
but the front end of that great vending machine and rely largely on 
fractured and romanticized myths about life in the past to imagine some 
'simpler' life without it. People are always thinking living off the 
land is as easy as a cob cottage with a victory garden until that day 
they're drawing straws to see who gets to give the axe to one of the 
chickens they named. Maybe we should be reverse-engineering our 
lifestyles as a start to hacking that machine, revealing its inner 
workings, and re-engineering it to suit our interests.

> Subject:
> [P2P-F] Fwd: P2P Lab: Papers, Call & Plans for 2016
> From:
> Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net>
> Date:
> 10/13/15, 8:32 AM
>
> To:
> p2p-foundation <p2p-foundation at lists.ourproject.org>
>
>
>
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> From: *Vasilis Kostakis* <kostakis.b at gmail.com 
> <mailto:kostakis.b at gmail.com>>
> Date: Tue, Oct 13, 2015 at 8:18 PM
> Subject: P2P Lab: Papers, Call & Plans for 2016
> To:
>
>
>  
> Dear colleagues and friends,
>
> In this email you may find links to the published work of the P2P Lab 
> collaborators & fellows for 2015. You may also find of interest our 
> call for visiting scholars as well as our plans for 2016.
>
> Best,
> Vasilis Kostakis
> *------------*

-- 
Eric Hunting
erichunting at gmail.com

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://lists.ourproject.org/pipermail/p2p-foundation/attachments/20151014/6dcf9a4e/attachment.htm 