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Kurt Laitner

The Energy Efficiency of Trust & Vulnerability: A Conversation | Switch and Shift - 0 views

switchandshift.com/t-vulnerability-a-conversation

*trust discussion contextual

shared by Kurt Laitner on 30 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • trusting people because of who they are personally vs. who they are professionally
  • also need to trust systems
  • our own resources
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • How much we need to trust others depends on the context,
  • how much we trust ourselves,
  • our ability to understand the context we are in
  • When we trust, we re-allocate that energy and time to getting things done and making an impact
  • the more information and/or experience we have, the better we can decide whether or not to trust
  • Trust is a tool to assess and manage (reduce and/or increase) risk, depending on the situation.
  • Trusting someone implies making oneself more vulnerable
  • When we don’t trust, we exert a lot of energy to keep up our guard, to continually assess and verify.  This uses a lot of energy and time.
  • If the alternative is worse, we might opt for no trust
  • As we let ourselves be vulnerable, we also leave ourselves more open to new ideas, new ways of thinking which leads to empathy and innovation.
  • the more we can focus on the scope and achievement of our goals
  • trusting is efficient….and effective
  • Being vulnerable is a way to preserve energy
  • It lets us reallocate our resources to what matters and utilize our skills and those around us to increase effectiveness…impact.
  • If we are working together, we need to agree on the meaning of ‘done’.  When are we done, what does that look like?
  • “Control is for Beginners”
  • Strategic sloppiness is a way to preserve energy
  • Build on the same shared mental models
  • use the same language
  • As the ability to replicate something has become more of a commodity, we are increasingly seeing that complex interactions are the way to create ‘value from difference’ (as opposed to ‘value from sameness’).
  • allow for larger margins of error in our response and our acceptance of others
  • higher perfection slows down the tempo
  • We can’t minimize the need to be effective.
  • Efficient systems are great at dealing with complicated things – things that have many parts and sequences, but they fall flat dealing with complex systems, which is most of world today.
  • make sure we hear and see the same thing (reduce buffers around our response)
  • timing
  • intuition
  • judgment
  • experience
  • ability to look at things from many different perspective
  • to discover, uncover, understand and empathize is critical
  • focus on meaning and purpose for work (outcomes) instead of just money and profit (outputs)
  • When we have a common goal of WHY we want to do something, we are better able to trust
  • When we never do the same thing or have the same conversation twice, it becomes much more important to figure out why and what we do than how we do it (process, which is a given)
  • Kurt Laitner on 30 Jan 14
     
    spot on conversation on *trust, I see creating a trustful environment quickly among strangers as a key capability of an OVN, we need to quickly get past the need to protect and verify and move on to making purpose and goals happen
Kurt Laitner

The Implications of Crypto Assets Part 3: Distributed Autonomous Corporations - 0 views

newswax.com/...ibuted-autonomous-corporations

shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Namecoins are mined in the same manner as bitcoins
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      Major problem here, as described by Michel Bauwens - bitcoin is libertarian and hyper exploitative and bitcoin has been captured by 7 people who can release currency into circulation - the problem is the computer is the peer, and computers cost money
  • The idea of distributed autonomous corporations already exists, so now we just have to wait for the programmers and entrepreneurs to create the applications that build on the original thought.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 11 Feb 14
       
      not sure how they exist then...?
  • little to no profit incentive for the developers and supporters of the projects. You can only go so far with donations
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • When you can create an encrypted email DAC that focuses on privacy and providing a quality product that can rival Gmail, it becomes much easier for the general public to care about computer security.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Heretic's Guide to Global Finance: Hacking the Future of Money: Peer-to-Peer Review... - 0 views

suitpossum.blogspot.co.uk/...academic-bitcoin-research.html

OVNi infrastructure bitcoin

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Jan 15
     
    repository of academic papers on cryptocurrency.
chrisaiki

Free currency - 0 views

The free currency produced by the Duniter open software will solve Sensorica sharing value problem. Everybody will receive an universal dividend (ie a medium income, a kind of basic income compute ...

opensource free currency

started by chrisaiki on 26 May 16 no follow-up yet
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

'Anti-Troll' Marblar Unites NASA Patents, Samsung to Crowdsource New Products - 1 views

gma.yahoo.com/9304--abc-news-topstories.html

article paper IP

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • can be found in NASA technology, and the new crowdsourcing website Marblar is taking advantage of that to find the next big thing.
  • The site Wednesday announced that several hundred patents from NASA and other organizations would be available for its users to play with.
  • many companies' research and development departments spend millions of dollars on such patents, more than 95 percent of them sit unused.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • what if people saw the patents
  • aying dormant
  • new ways that we can incorporate these patents into new products?"
  • Marblar also obtained access to many patents from the University of Pennsylvania and from ETRI,
  • The site also partnered with Samsung,
  • or its potential to bring the patents of Marblar users to life.
  • Any idea that Samsung likes could find its way into Samsung technology, with 10 percent of the royalties going to the Marblar users who brought it to life
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 13
       
      Samsong decides what to develop or not... this is still top down, when it comes to choosing the technology to be developed. But at least the list of ideas has been curated and refined.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 13
       
      Using the crowd to curate and refine ideas/inventions
  • The contributors to a Marblar project might be helping an inventor out of the goodness of their heart, but they also stand to gain if a particular product gets the green light. Marblar rewards users who provide useful data or information by giving them "marbles," the websites namesake currency.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 13
       
      They do have some sort of value accounting system in place. See the open value network model http://valuenetwork.referata.com/wiki/Value_accounting_system 
  • In the spirit of crowdsourcing, other Marblar users can help out a particular inventor whose idea they want to see come to life.
  • "As you submit product ideas and contribute market data or technical data, you get more marbles," Perez said.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
      Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 30 Oct 13
       
      Quirky developed prototyping, manufacturing and distribution capabilities
  • The more marbles a person earns, the bigger the cut he or she gets in the royalty check if the product makes it to market.
  • Another website, Quirky
  • have a store dedicated to selling its users products
  • patents have become more associated with litigation than productivity.
  • "Patent trolls buy up patents to extract money, with no intention of actually creating a product," he said. "Marblar is like the anti-troll. We're looking for new ways to commercialize."
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

thebaffler.com/...the_meme_hustler

O'Reilly paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 06 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
  • the O’Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
  • ...139 more annotations...
  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • “Open source software” was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team O’Reill
  • It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • “free software.”
  • association with “freedom” rather than “free beer”
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallman’s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • “open source”
  • The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • “open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallman’s efforts centered on software licenses
  • O’Reilly’s bet wa
  • the “cloud”
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not “freedom”
  • O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
  • O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.”
  • The right thing to do, according to O’Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developers’ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallman’s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • “open to intellectual exchange”
  • “open to competition”
  • “For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
  • “Open” allowed O’Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and O’Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • “If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything else—via open source.
  • The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The “infoware” buzzword didn’t catch on, so O’Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of “collective intelligence”
  • in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, O’Reilly readily admitted that “Web 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for what’s happening.”
  • O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call “Internet-centrism.”
  • “Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per se—Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the “consciousness of abstraction.”
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybski’s theories
  • but his basic question
  • “What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
  • Tim O’Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybski’s theories today.
  • O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • “the skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think”
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, O’Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that O’Reilly is right in claiming that “open source” has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, O’Reilly’s activities look far more sinister.
  • His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
  • Or take O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. “A big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,”
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
Kurt Laitner

The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...12

Michel Bauwens p2p economy civil society partner state paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • under the ‘leadership’ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
  • Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
  • in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
  • ...22 more annotations...
  • everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
  • continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life
  • Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
  • consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
  • infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’
  • democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      hmm
  • which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.
  • civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
  • democratically decide
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      ? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
  • the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      there is no such thing
  • The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      !!!
  • Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
  • true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
    • Kurt Laitner
      Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
       
      really?
  • Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
  • Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
  • designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
  • mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
  • surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
  • ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.
  • because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
  • A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
  • mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract
  • Kurt Laitner on 22 Jul 14
     
    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Kurt Laitner

The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views

www.domusweb.it/...the-revolution-at-hand

manifesto Simone Cicero p2p design IPR analysis paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 26 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
  • We have produced artificial needs for years under this mantra
  • creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
  • Mediocrity is obsolete
  • Money has become absurdly limited
  • unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
  • design becomes a political tool
  • Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
  • If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
  • Production will occur only when there is a demand — and not a moment before
  • We need a new cultural infrastructure
  • A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
  • design itself must be independent from specific materials
  • We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
  • "The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How The Blockchain Will Transform Everything From Banking To Government To Our Identities - 1 views

www.forbes.com/...o-government-to-our-identities

blockchainaccess_project paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • The first generation of the Internet was a great tool for communicating, collaborating and connecting online, but it was not ideal for business. When you send and share information on the Internet, you’re not sending an original but a copy. That’s good for information — it means people have a printing press for information and that information becomes democratized — but if you want to send an asset, it’s a problem. If I send you $100 online, you need to be sure you have it and I don’t, and that I can’t spend the same $100 somewhere else. As a result, we need intermediaries to perform critical roles — to establish identity between two parties in a transaction, and to do all the settlement transaction logic, which includes record-keeping.
  • With blockchain, for the first time, we have a new digital medium for value where anyone can access anything of value — stocks, bonds, money, digital property, titles, deeds — and even things like identity and votes can be moved, stored and managed securely and privately. Trust is not established though a third party but with clever code and mass consensus using a network. That’s got huge implications for intermediaries and businesses and society at large
  • And also with government, as a central repository of information an entity that delivers services.
  • ...35 more annotations...
  • There’s an opportunity to disrupt how those organizations work. Intermediaries, though they do a good job, have a few problems — they’re centralized, which makes them vulnerable to attack or failure
  • They tax the system
  • They capture data
  • They exclude billions of people from the global economy
  • internet of value
  • With blockchain, we can go from redistributing wealth to distributing value and opportunity value fairly a priori, from cradle to grave.
  • creating a true sharing economy by replacing service aggregators like Uber with distributed applications on the blockchain
  • unleashing a new age of entrepreneurship
  • build accountable governments through transparency, smart contracts and revitalized models of democracy.
  • The virtual you is owned by large intermediaries
  • This virtual you knows more about you than you do sometimes
  • So there’s a strange phenomenon from the first generation of the Internet where the most important asset class that’s been created is data —and we don’t control it or own it.
  • individuals taking back their identity through your own personal avatar
  • The financial services industry
  • antiquated
  • a complicated machine that does a simple thing
  • settlement
  • an opportunity to profoundly change the nature of the entire industry. The Starbucks transaction should be instant.
  • At the heart of it, the financial services industry moves value.
  • so this is both an existential threat to the financial services industry and an historic opportunity.
  • Banks trade on trust
  • Within the decade, every single financial asset, which is really just a contract
  • will all move to a blockchain-based format
  • In the accounting world, a lot of firms rely on costly audits to drive their profits
  • With blockchain, you could have a third entry time-stamped in a distributed ledger that could be acceptable to any relevant stakeholders from regulators to shareholders, giving you a perfect record of the truth and thus the financial health of an organization.
  • Nobel-winning economist Ronald Coase argued that firms exist because transaction costs in an open market are greater than the cost of doing things inside the boundaries of the corporation.
  • four costs — of search, coordination, contracting and establishing trust
  • Blockchains will profoundly affect all of these.
  • you can now synthesize trust on an open platform and people who’ve never met can trust each other to do certain things. So this results in a whole number of new business models
  • It turns out the Internet of Everything needs a Ledger of Everything, because a lightbulb buying power from your neighbor’s solar panel definitely won’t use banks or the Visa network
  • Right now, governments take tax revenue from corporations, individuals, licenses and so on. All of that can change. We can first of all have transparency in a radical sense because sunlight is the best disinfectant. Secondly, we can open up governments in a different sense of sharing data.
  • governments can enable self-organization to occur in society where companies, civil society organizations, NGOs, academics, foundations, and government agencies and individual citizens ought to use this data to self-organize and create what we used to call services or forms of public value. The third one has to do with the relationship between citizens and their governments.
  • There are more opportunities to create government by the people for the people
  • Electronic voting won’t be delivered by traditional server technology because it won’t be trusted by citizens
Kurt Laitner

Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views

www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing

ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15 - No Cached
  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
  • Their main contribution to society has been facilitating new kinds of transactions
  • The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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  • Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how
  • Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
  • once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • “We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
  • From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together
  • The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
  • And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
  • Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
  • “People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
  • As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
  • The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 
  • His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
  • Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
  • Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
  • It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
  • all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
  • A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
  • For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
  • For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
  • Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
  • A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
  • In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Kurt Laitner

How Many Kinds of Property are There? - 0 views

www.nakedcapitalism.com/...-kinds-property-two-three.html

property governance paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Whenever a group of people depend on a resource that everybody uses but nobody owns, and where one person’s use effects another person’s ability to use the resource, either the population fails to provide the resource, overconsumes and/or fails to replenish it, or they construct an institution for undertaking and managing collective action.
  • Common-pool resources may be owned by national, regional, or local [1]governments; by [2] communal groups; by [3] private individuals or corporations; or used as open access resources by whomever can gain access
  • Based on her survey, Ostrom distilled this list of common design principles from the experience of successful governance institutions: Clearly defined boundaries. Individuals or households who have rights to withdraw resource units from the CPR must be clearly defined, as must the boundaries of the CPR itself. Congruence between appropriation and provision rules and local conditions. Appropriation rules restricting time, place, technology, and/or quantity of resource units are related to local conditions and to provision rules requiring labour, material, and/or money. Collective-choice arrangements. Most individuals affected by the operational rules can participate in modifying the operational rules [how refreshing. Standing!]. Monitoring. Monitors, who actively audit CPR conditions and appropriator behavior, are accountable to the appropriators or are the appropriators. Graduated sanctions. Appropriators who violate operational rules are likely to be assessed graduated sanctions (depending on the seriousness and context of the offence) by other appropriators, by officials accountable to these appropriators, or by both. Conflict-resolution mechanisms. Appropriators and their officials have rapid access to low-cost local arenas to resolve conflicts among appropriators or between appropriators and officials. Minimal recognition of rights to organize. The rights of appropriators to devise their own institutions are not challenged by external governmental authorities. For CPRs that are parts of larger systems: Nested enterprises. Appropriation, provision, monitoring, enforcement, conflict resolution, and governance activities are organized in multiple layers of nested enterprises.
  • Kurt Laitner on 03 Feb 14
     
    Good review of Ostrom and Bollier's definitions of commons and governance approaches to this property class
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 07 Feb 23
     
    This paper is mostly about commons... the title is misleading.
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