So my first point is the importance of recognizing the commons as a distinct sector for creating value. It can be difficult to recognize this reality because we don’t have an agreed-upon language or taxonomy for talking about the value-proposition of the commons. The phenomenon is still too novel.
For many people, it is difficult to accept that value can exist without the sanction of money or private property rights—that value that is intangible and unquantifiable can actually matter. Cold, hard cash is nearly always seen as more valuable than something as amorphous and non-physical as an online community
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Commons Law Project - 0 views
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"If Planet Earth is to survive in the coming decades as we know it, we must find new ways to protect our planet from the unsustainable growth imperatives of neoliberal economics and politics. This will require a new architecture of "green governance"―laws, public policies, and social practices that can honor human rights and commons-based management of natural resources large and small"
OnTheCommons.org - The commons as a new sector of value-creation - 0 views
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I call these epochal changes in economic and cultural production The Great Value Shift. In the networked environment that is becoming pervasive, we are being forced to recognize that markets—or at least, traditional hierarchical institutions such as the corporation—do not have a monopoly on the ability to generate value.
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If you can acknowledge this fact, then it follows that we should take affirmative steps to preserve the commons and the special types of value that it produces. Let me conclude by suggesting four general strategies.
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1. protect integrity of commons 2. new models for understanding value 3. invent new hybrids 4. active government support of commns
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Keynote by David Bollier at Economies of the Commons Conference, April 12, 2008, Amsterdam.
OnTheCommons.org - The economics of online commons - 0 views
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The focus of many presentations was how to organize the production and distribution of new creative works in a world where free/cheap digital transmission is the norm. It turns out that many established institutions—if they are going to come to terms with the Internet—are going to have to seriously transform themselves in order to survive.
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Key summary of the conference in Amsterdam.
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If you want to see the future, one of the best places to look is the freeboot innovators of the underground. They are always the ones who tried out the new ideas that later ripen into market opportunities. Think how hip-hop emerged from record-scratchers in Brooklyn basements and how the hobbyists of the Homebrew Computer Club pioneered many of the early innovations in computing.
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The idea of “culture without property” seems just too radical and counter-intuitive for some folks to get (or they get it only too well, because it jeopardizes their established business model). But this is not actually such a radical vision. There are already all sorts of profit-making enterprises that are building business models around open, non-proprietary platforms. IBM’s embrace of GNU Linux, the open-source operating system, is one of many prominent examples. So is Flickr, the photo-sharing website.
OnTheCommons.org » Risk, Inequality and the Economics of Disaster - 0 views
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Marcellus Andrews explains how climate change will force us to confront the inequalities that market fundamentalism produces.
Op-Ed Columnist - Where Sweatshops Are a Dream - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York times writes in praise of third world sweatshops. I swear I'm not making this up, and he does an excellent job of selling something truly monstrous to those who think that Economics is a science. Found on Furl.
Is the collaborative economy only for the privileged? - 2 views
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"While we can always argue about the terms that are used, what's more important is to identify the different motivations and abilities people have, and the differences coming from their different backgrounds and capabilities. How can we create a new collaborative economy that is equally beneficial for everyone, no matter where they come from?"
On the Commons: A Public Interview with Massimo De Angelis and Stavros Stavrides | e-flux - 0 views
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The identification of “new enclosures” in contemporary capitalist dynamics urged us to reconsider traditional Marxist discourse on this point. What the Marxist literature failed to understand is that primitive accumulation is a continuous process of capitalist development that is also necessary for the preservation of advanced forms of capitalism for two reasons. Firstly, because capital seeks boundless expansion, and therefore always needs new spheres and dimensions of life to turn into commodities. Secondly, because social conflict is at the heart of capitalist processes—this means that people do reconstitute commons anew, and they do it all the time. These commons help to re-weave the social fabric threatened by previous phases of deep commodification and at the same time provide potential new ground for the next phase of enclosures.
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Commons are not simply resources we share—conceptualizing the commons involves three things at the same time. First, all commons involve some sort of common pool of resources, understood as non-commodified means of fulfilling peoples needs. Second, the commons are necessarily created and sustained by communities—this of course is a very problematic term and topic, but nonetheless we have to think about it. Communities are sets of commoners who share these resources and who define for themselves the rules according to which they are accessed and used. Communities, however, do not necessarily have to be bound to a locality, they could also operate through translocal spaces. They also need not be understood as “homogeneous” in their cultural and material features. In addition to these two elements—the pool of resources and the set of communities—the third and most important element in terms of conceptualizing the commons is the verb “to common”—the social process that creates and reproduces the commons.
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Stavros Stavrides: First, I would like to bring to the discussion a comparison between the concept of the commons based on the idea of a community and the concept of the public. The community refers to an entity, mainly to a homogeneous group of people, whereas the idea of the public puts an emphasis on the relation between different communities. The public realm can be considered as the actual or virtual space where strangers and different people or groups with diverging forms of life can meet. The notion of the public urges our thinking about the commons to become more complex. The possibility of encounter in the realm of the public has an effect on how we conceptualize commoning and sharing. We have to acknowledge the difficulties of sharing as well as the contests and negotiations that are necessarily connected with the prospect of sharing.
Share or Die, the Book | David Bollier - 1 views
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Shareable Magazine has just released a lively book that provides a few answers. It doesn't offer any grand manifestos so much as a series of highly personal, evocative testimonies filled with rays of hope. Share or Die: Voices of the Get Lost Generation in the Age of Crisis, is an eclectic collection of essays about the ways that young people are trying to build happier, wholesome, workable lives for themselves as the edifice of late-stage capitalism begins to implode.
The Commons Blog - 0 views
The Digital Library of the Commons - 0 views
Taking Responsibility for the Commons - Economix Blog - NYTimes.com - 0 views
OnTheCommons.org » Michel Bauwens and the Peer Production Economy - 0 views
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Peer production thus abandons "credentialism" - a system of control used in modernity to protect information within a group, said Bauwens. Guilds, churches and universities are examples. In a p2p network, however, instead of making selections about work at the beginning, based on credentials, selection comes at the end, based on collective judgments.
OnTheCommons.org » Caught in a Money Trap - 0 views
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Connecting art funding to Theater de la Jeune Lune.