Group items tagged

rust vs. Mistrust by media source How to know? Who to believe? The new-media revolution has subverted as well as expanded the possibilities of knowledge-based understanding. Tony Curzon Price presents openDemocracy’s response to a crisis of trust. The Enlightenment faith that knowledge will lead to understanding, and understanding to a better world, is central to openDemocracy's being. It informs both what we publish - in-depth analysis and commentary by public intellectuals, professionals, writers, academics and activists - and how we view ourselves: the product, process and the purpose alike.

Community, as in freedom. This is an answer to Tony Curzon Price's article about the need for scarcity.After a few opening shots, Tony puts forward the following argument: “The commons have always been sustained by communities, and the digital commons, embodied in the iCommons movement, will be the same. Communities both pay for and give life to endeavours in the public space. They supply both sense and cents.”

Wow. Tony, thanks so much for taking the time to comment on my post!! I didn’t say so in the original posy but wanted to comment on the stones it took to pen an article that flies so much in the face of “revolutionary orthodoxy”. I agree with you that the situation of the republished articles is different from a straight up barter in as much as a barter arraignment is usually (always?) entered consciously. What you described in “Scarcity” is more of an “accidental” value transaction and so more difficult to quantify.

I like OpenDemocracy. It has some interesting articles, very often on areas about which I know little. But I do have to wonder, sometimes, whether the minds there are quite as open to new ideas as they seem to be:

Creating a wider conversation really means expanding our love. Thinking harder really means building trust. It is an economy of exchange and a performance whose purpose is to reveal something transforming. Unlike Rousseau at openDemocracy, I am not interested in generating agreement and discovering the "General Will." Rather, it is discovering the fact that we are all sharing a room together and we have to learn how to get along.