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Jukka Peltokoski

The Indies and the Indianos, ten years later - 0 views

english.lasindias.com/d-the-indianos-ten-years-later

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 20 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • October second of this year will be the tenth anniversary of the Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas, the founding business of the Grupo Cooperativo de las Indias. Even though it only had three members back then — Natalia Fernández, Juan Urrutia, and me — “the Indies,” as it soon became known, was the result of a long evolutionary process in the cyberpunk movement in Spanish
  • The objective of the business was never to get rich, but rather to gain autonomy experiencing and living the new possibilities we perceived and theorized about on the network in a new field: the market.
  • It was result of our experience: just one month earlier, the three of us had closed Piensa en Red! [Think in Networks!], our first business.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • And we learned an important lesson: internal democracy doesn’t work without a true community.
  • the dream was abundance
  • we started calling the Internet “the Electronic Indies.”
  • In Iberian history, “the Indies” was the name of the new territories, of the New World discovered by Columbus and soon conceived of, because of its abundance, as the “original paradise.”
  • In 2001, Juan Urrutia had published his well-known essay “Networks of people, the Internet, and the Logic of Abundance” in the theoretical magazine Ekonomiaz. Distributed networks appeared as the basis of new P2P relationships and an ever-growing diversity
  • But we didn’t have money
  • We began to write, and on the seventh of October, 2002, el Correo de las Indias [the Indies Mail] was born, with Bitácora de las Indias [Log of the Indies] in the masthead.
  • The blog was the way we found our clients, but, more importantly over time, the current indianos.
  • The business would be the economic structure of the community we were creating, and as such, would have all of the the sources of wealth and income; we would not have — and still don’t have — savings, properties, or personal clients. The cooperative is our community savings and the only owner of all that we enjoy.
  • In short: economically, we’re closer to a kibbutz than to the big cooperatives at Mondragon.
  • Understanding the power of network topologies was our principal point of differentiation, both in theory –in dialogue or as cyberactivists — and also in the market.
  • Later, each cooperative in the group strengthened the model. Today, the consulting business is the group’s main source of financing. And creating and organizing new cooperatives and businesses constitutes our principal activity.
Jukka Peltokoski

Sao Paulo and Istanbul: a visitor's guide to the coming social mobilization - 0 views

english.lasindias.com/the-coming-social-mobilization

lasindias uusi liike istanbul Sao Paolo Las Indias

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 19 Jun 13 - No Cached
  • Today, the Turkish press opened with the news of the final clearing of Gezi park, after a night of pitched urban battles. The world comments while the mobilizations in Sao Paulo grow in intensity.
  • But, what’s new? These are urban mobilizations, both of which are about resistance to municipal decisions, which, never the less, quickly involved the State and became part of the news agenda because they are a concrete example of a specific and understandable demand: rejection of global state politics.
  • It’s no coincidence that they are happening in the heart of two “emerging” states that try to follow alternative models and social discourse, and try to combine a strong internal nationalism with a policy of regional hegemony.
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  • This is about remarking on the battleground itself: big cities, not nations, as the symbolic and political space for the network society.
  • But the leaders — and beneficiaries — of this growth, a precarious first generation of a new middle class, lives a hard, intense life, between low-paying jobs and constant training.
  • they don’t see themselves reflected or recognized in the social discourse, which is now outdated. The struggles for public space in Istanbul or for access to transportation in Sao Paulo are a lot more than mere municipal policies
  • In SP, and especially in Istanbul, the mobilizations have had a clear discourse on the development of state authoritarianism
  • This authoritarian drift, paired with a reactionary discourse on intellectual property that criminalizes a generation which has made P2P culture a mark of daily identity, seems to be the only way the nation-state knows how to react technological change, trying to exclude, both in the present and in the future, those who somehow feel they could share as they build.
  • movements on the digital, social and even geographic periphery, have created their own centrality and their own logic, which we can summarize in three points as we look to the future:
  • The starting point and point of conflict with power is in the closest urban policies.
  • The demands are concrete and clear, and could, in fact, be satisfied by a local administration, but they summarize a much broader social situation
  • the debate
  • turns toward the authoritarian development of the nation-state
  • Istanbul and Sao Paulo are a step into a new phase of distributed social movements
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