Group items tagged

what’s dominant is cooperation, not competition, among other things, because the market for automotive parts is not a true market, but rather a oligopsony (there are only a few buyers at the end of the chain).

Competition requires that where one wins, another loses

But are we talking about the same thing? Certainly not.

the zero sum shows up in a large part of exchanges between humans.

Cooperation among big businesses should worry us, not make us happy.

However, a certain degree of cooperation is required, at least on the part of those who are on each side

every exchange that is a zero-sum game is a bad exchange, something that shouldn’t be done because either you lose, or it’s no good at all (when both sides remain the same), or, worse still, if you win at the cost of the other in the exchange, you mine the trust of the other, and you sow an impending, inevitable, and painful betrayal. So, does it really materialize in “a large part of exchanges between humans?”

If we read the paragraph, we realize that the setting Julen is talking about is a well-defined institutional environment: labor scales and classical teaching organizations. We’re far from schools of the commons or cooperation based on the deliberation of a phyle.

The question is whether or not we think that salaried relationships will continue to be the basis of what we call a business, which organizes a good part of the co-opetition between people to reach the market.

Values take hold in different ways, according to the social structures in which we try to develop them. For example, if we put ourselves in the P2P mode of production, the issue is not whether one produces for the commons or for the market, because one will produce with and for both, creating competition and cooperation at the same time, as in the “coming capitalism,” or in every alternative model based on the dissipation of rents.

does it really make sense to propose rule changes in those environments? Is it possible to hack them? Obviously, if we didn’t think so, we wouldn’t be selling consultancy on the market, but if we thought that was enough, we wouldn’t be committed to building alternatives for ourselves and inviting others to make their own.

Because cooperation in that mold creates that whole gamut that Sennet and Julen talk about, and generally, apart from an arduous and conscious battle like ner is fighting,

debate on deeeper cultural values

send salaried work, even if only little by little, to the memory trunk from an inglorious time, and once and for all

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

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.