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Kurt Laitner

Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views

  • the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
  • I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here
  • The problem is I can only make a living by still working for capital.
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  • We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right
  • A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge
  • We cannot create our own livelihood within that sphere
  • instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.
  • The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
  • then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
  • But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and  principles of the traditional cooperative movement.
  • There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.
  • The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups
  • They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take
  • Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money
  • Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system
  • we don’t have what Marx used to call social reproduction
  • I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op
  • They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
  • Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.
  • Primarily, the co-op is in the service of its immediate members
  • What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community
  • In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops
  • democratically run
  • much more participatory, and a much more engaged model
  • The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates
  • And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services
  • In Québec they’re called Solidarity co-ops
  • So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services
  • This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services
  • This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?
  • we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement
  • I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.
  • In hardware, we don’t see that, because you need to buy material, machines, plastic, metal.
  • Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts
  • democratic foundations like the Apache foundation
  • They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth
  • From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes
  • From a materialist point of view, it becomes  obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth
  • different definition of peer production
  • independent producers collectively sharing a commons of productive assets
  • I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods
  • share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
  • One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
  • Mutualizing unearned income
  • So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
  • This protocol would seek to normalize that, but in a way that doesn’t require administration
  • typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
  • But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class,  which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class
  • So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
  • This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
  • This is not done administratively, this is simply done as a protocol
  • The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and  after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.
  • The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal
  • This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal
  • But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income
  • venture communism doesn’t seek to control the product of the cooperatives
  • It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets
  • On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers
  • how do we get to that stage?
  • other two being counter politics and insurrectionary finance
  • do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
  • pre-figurative politics, versus statist politics
  • My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from
  • I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms
  • To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
  • Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
  • We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
  • We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
  • What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital
  • I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar
  • We have to find ways to create liquidity
  • to deal with economic cycles
  • they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
  • if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?
  • more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
  • idea of venture communism
  • pooling, based on the capture of unearned income
  • in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly
  • The other idea I liked was trying to minimize a management class
  • much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
  • I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda
  • I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that
  • complete rethinking of economics
  • recapture the initiative around vocabulary, and vision, with respect to economics
  • reimagining and reinterpreting, for a popular and common good, the notion of market and capital
  • advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics
  • markets actually belong to communities and people
  • capital wasn’t just an accumulated wealth for the rich
  • I think what we’re potentially  talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
  • The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
  • Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic
  •  
    A lot of really interesting points of discussion in here.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views

  • the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
  • neuromarketing
  • explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force – in opposition to its current dissociative force – in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
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  • find new ways of efficiency
  • arbitration between efficiency and care
  • a global thinking of the problem
  • Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?
  • The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower
  • empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
  • Should marketing stop using psychopower?
  • marketing ethics guidelines
  • transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • putting freedom as a criteria of morality
  • the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom
  • neurotechniques – to capture the attention
  • psychotechniques – to attempt to create motivation
  • Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits
  • advertising
  • denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
  • right to avoid attention capture by advertising
  • progress made in cognitive sciences proving that
  • reward system being abnormally stimulated
  • Advertisements exploit
  • vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors
  • “if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (Veerman et al. 2009)
  • What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
  • liberty of non-reception
  • would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
  • Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm
  • Economy of contribution and peer production
  • An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
  • example
  • is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
  • minimize the gap between the producer and consumer
  • blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs
  • The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm
  • change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
  • consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention
  • with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
  • Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
  • the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones — to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
  • To be free
  • 1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
  • 2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
  • 3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
  • 4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
  • 5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one company’s control.
  • This is a profoundly game-changing approach
  • big data that is the rush for consumers’ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
  • VRM system working as a marketplace
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
  • 3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process
  • Promoting the end of advertisement
  • means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
  • Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
  • But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
  • Empowering groups of citizen doesn’t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
  • a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a “VRM+” system
  • Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customers’ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
  • 3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power
  • Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a “big” would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
  • self-regulative function
  • a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
  • the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
  • Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
  • long-term valuable strategic choice
  • long term satisfyingly high ranking
  • It would be utopic to think that the “being cool” marketing
  • would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.
  • This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
  • the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views

  • reality as an integrated hierarchy of organizations of matter and energy
  • General living systems theory is concerned with a special subset of all systems, the living ones
  • a space is a set of elements which conform to certain postulate
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  • s. Euclidean space
  • metric space
  • topological space
  • Physical space is the extension surrounding a point
  • My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Physical or geographical space
  • Euclidean space
  • distance
  • moving
  • maximum speed
  • objects moving in such space cannot pass through one another
  • friction
  • The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
  • information can flow worldwide almost instantly
  • Physical space is a common space
  • Most people learn that physical space exists, which is not true of many spaces
  • They can give the location of objects in it
  • Conceptual or abstracted spaces
  • Peck order
  • Social class space
  • Social distance
  • Political distance
  • life space
  • semantic space
  • Sociometric space
  • A space of time costs of various modes of transportation
  • space of frequency of trade relations among nations.
  • A space of frequency of intermarriage among ethnic groups.
  • These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
  • Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
  • interpersonal relations
  • one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
  • It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
  • fundamental "fourth dimension" of the physical space-time continuum
  • is the particular instant at which a structure exists or a process occurs
  • or the measured or measurable period over which a structure endures or a process continues.
  • durations
  • speeds
  • rates
  • accelerations
  • irreversible unidirectionality of time
  • thermodynamics
  • negentropy
  • "time's arrow."
  • Matter and energy
  • Matter is anything which has mass (m) and occupies physical space.
  • Energy (E) is defined in physics as the ability to do work.
  • kinetic energy
  • potential energy
  • rest mass energy
  • Mass and energy are equivalent
  • Living systems need specific types of matter-energy in adequate amounts
  • Energy for the processes of living systems is derived from the breakdown of molecules
  • Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
  • It is one form of process.
  • information (H)
  • Transmission of Information
  • Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
  • Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
  • The set of all these possible categories (the alphabet) is called the ensemble or repertoire
  • .) The unit is the binary digit, or bit of information
  • . The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
  • Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
  • [The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
  • meaning cannot be precisely measured
  • Information is the negative of uncertainty.
  • information is the amount of formal patterning or complexity in any system.
  • The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
  • If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
  • Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
  • There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
  • organization is based upon the interrelations among parts.
  • If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
  • The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
  • the statistical measure for the negative of entropy is the same as that for information
  • entropy becomes a measure of the probability
  • Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
  • according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
  • therefore no principle of the conservation of information
  • The total information can be decreased in any system without increasing it elsewhere
  • but it cannot be increased without decreasing it elsewhere
  • . Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
  • transforms information into negative entropy
  • smallest possible amount of energy used in observing one bit of information
  • calculations of the amount of information accumulated by living systems throughout growth.
  • the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
  • in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
  • amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
  • In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
  • the flow of raw materials through societies
  • Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
  • I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
  • Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
  • transformations go on in living systems
  • One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
  • the delivery of "flowers by telegraph."
  • Matter-energy and information always flow together
  • Information is always borne on a marker
  • . Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
  • If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
  • Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
  • example
  • example
  • develop normally
  • have appropriate information inputs in infancy
  • pairs of antonyms
  • one member of which is associated with the concept of information (H)
  • the other member of which is associated with its negative, entropy (S)
  • System
  • A system is a set of interacting units with relationships among them
  • .The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
  • Conceptual system
  • Units
  • terms
  • Relationships
  • a set of pairs of units, each pair being ordered in a similar way
  • expressed by words
  • or by logical or mathematical symbols
  • operations
  • The conceptual systems of science
  • observer
  • selects
  • particular sets to study
  • Variable
  • Each member of such a set becomes a variable of the observer's conceptual system
  • conceptual system may be loose or precise, simple or elaborate
  • Indicator
  • an instrument or technique used to measure fluctuations of variables in concrete systems
  • Function
  • a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
  • Any function is a simple conceptual system
  • Parameter
  • An independent variable through functions of which other functions may be expressed
  • The state of a conceptual system
  • the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
  • Formal identity
  • variables
  • varies comparably to a variable in another system
  • If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
  • Relationships between conceptual and other sorts of systems
  • Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
  • A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • Concrete system
  • a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
  • Units
  • are also concrete systems
  • Relationships
  • spatial
  • temporal
  • spatiotemporal
  • causal
  • Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
  • patterns of relationships or processes
  • The observer of a concrete system
  • distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
  • physical proximity of its units
  • similarity of its units
  • common fate of its units
  • distinct or recognizable patterning of its units.
  • Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
  • Variable of a concrete system
  • Any property of a unit or relationship within a system which can be recognized by an observer
  • which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
  • Examples
  • number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
  • A variable is intrasystemic
  • not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
  • The state of a concrete system
  • its structure
  • represented by the set of values on some scale which its variables have at that instant
  • Open system
  • Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
  • Closed system
  • impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
  • special case
  • No actual concrete system is completely closed
  • In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
  • Nonliving system
  • the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
  • Living system
  • a special subset of the set of all possible concrete systems
  • They all have the following characteristics:
  • open systems
  • inputs
  • throughputs
  • outputs
  • of various sorts of matter-energy and information.
  • maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
  • by taking in inputs
  • higher in complexity or organization or negentropy
  • than their outputs
  • The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
  • In living systems many substances are produced as well as broken down
  • To do this such systems must be open and have continual inputs of matter-energy and information
  • entropy will always increase in walled-off living systems
  • They have more than a certain minimum degree of complexity
  • They either contain genetic material composed of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)
  • or have a charter
  • blueprint
  • program
  • of their structure and process from the moment of their origin
  • may also include nonliving components.
  • They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
  • other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
  • Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
  • They can exist only in a certain environment
  • change in their environment
  • produces stresses
  • Totipotential system
  • capable of carrying out all critical subsystem processes necessary for life is totipotential
  • Partipotential system
  • does not itself carry out all critical subsystem processes is partipotential
  • A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
  • parasitic
  • symbiotic
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      The Exchange fime is a symbiotic system to SENSORICA
  • Fully functioning system
  • when it
  • Partially functioning system
  • it must do its own deciding, or it is not a system
  • Abstracted system
  • Units
  • relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
  • Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
  • Relationships
  • The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
  • these concrete systems are the relationships of abstracted systems.
  • The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
  • An abstracted system differs from an abstraction, which is a concept
  • representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
  • Abstracted systems are much more common in social science theory than in natural science.
  • are oriented toward relationships rather than toward the concrete systems
  • spatial arrangements are not usually emphasized
  • their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
  • important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
  • Most physical and biological hierarchies are described in spatial terms
  • we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
  • intensity of interaction
  • in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
  • To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      This is the case of SENSORICA, built on web-based communication and coordination tools. 
  • PARSONS
  • the unit of a partial social system is a role and not the individual.
  • culture
  • cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
  • The social system is the actual habitual network of communication between people.
  • RUESCH
  • A social system is a behavioral system
  • It is an organized set of behaviors of persons interacting with each other: a pattern of roles.
  • The roles are the units of a social system
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      That is why we need a role system in SENSORICA
  • On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
  • What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
  • To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
  • system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
  • evolution
  • differentiation
  • growth
  • from earlier and simpler forms and functions
  • capacities for specializations and gradients
  • [action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
  • Abstracted versus concrete systems
  • One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
  • A science of abstracted systems certainly is possible and under some conditions may be useful.
  • If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
  • It is of paramount importance for scientists to distinguish clearly between them
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views

  • role of p2p movement
  • historical role
  • horizontalisation of human relationships
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
  • a huge sociological shift
  • new life forms, social practices and human institutions
  • emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
  • ethical revolution
  • openness
  • participation
  • inclusivity
  • cooperation
  • commons
  • the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
  • political expressions
  • the movement has two wings
  • constructive
  • building new tools and practices
  • resistance to neoliberalism
  • we are at a stage of emergence
  • difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
  • At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms ‘capturing that value’, but they both need each other.
  • Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
  • peer producing communities should create their own ‘mission-oriented’ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
  • Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
  • the horizontal meets the vertical
  • mostly hybrid ‘diagonal’ adaptations
  • For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
  • Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
  • In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
  • Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. What’s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
  • requires a clever adaptation
  • use for our own benefit
  • The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
  • platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
  • without network effects, there is no ‘there’ there, just an empty potential platform.
  • p2p activists should work on both fronts
  • using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the ‘long haul’, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
  • The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
  • So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
  • One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
  • we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
  • No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
  • the p2p dynamics
  • the new networked culture
  • the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
  • the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.
  • we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
  • abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
  • open design community
  • will inherently design for sustainability
  • for inclusion
  • conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
  • entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
  • The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that ‘enables and empowers’ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
  • accelerated end of capitalism
  • Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
  • I don’t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

POWER-CURVE SOCIETY: The Future of Innovation, Opportunity and Social Equity in the Eme... - 1 views

  • how technological innovation is restructuring productivity and the social and economic impact resulting from these changes
  • concern about the technological displacement of jobs, stagnant middle class income, and wealth disparities in an emerging "winner-take-all" economy
  • personal data ecosystems that could potentially unlock a revolutionary wave of individual economic empowerment
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • the bell curve described the wealth and income distribution of American society
  • As the technology boom of the 1990s increased productivity, many assumed that the rising water level of the economy was raising all those middle class boats. But a different phenomenon has also occurred. The wealthy have gained substantially over the past two decades while the middle class has remained stagnant in real income, and the poor are simply poorer.
  • America is turning into a power-curve society: one where there are a relative few at the top and a gradually declining curve with a long tail of relatively poorer people.
  • For the first time since the end of World War II, the middle class is apparently doing worse, not better, than previous generations.
  • an alarming trend
  • What is the role of technology in these developments?
  • a sweeping look at the relationship between innovation and productivity
  • New Economy of Personal Information
  • Power-Curve Society
  • the future of jobs
  • the report covers the social, policy and leadership implications of the “Power-Curve Society,”
  • World Wide Web
  • as businesses struggle to come to terms with this revolution, a new set of structural innovations is washing over businesses, organizations and government, forcing near-constant adaptation and change. It is no exaggeration to say that the explosion of innovative technologies and their dense interconnections is inventing a new kind of economy.
  • the new technologies are clearly driving economic growth and higher productivity, the distribution of these benefits is skewed in worrisome ways.
  • the networked economy seems to be producing a “power-curve” distribution, sometimes known as a “winner-take-all” economy
  • Economic and social insecurity is widespread.
  • major component of this new economy, Big Data, and the coming personal data revolution fomenting beneath it that seeks to put individuals, and not companies or governments, at the forefront. Companies in the power-curve economy rely heavily on big databases of personal information to improve their marketing, product design, and corporate strategies. The unanswered question is whether the multiplying reservoirs of personal data will be used to benefit individuals as consumers and citizens, or whether large Internet companies will control and monetize Big Data for their private gain.
  • Why are winner-take-all dynamics so powerful?
  • appear to be eroding the economic security of the middle class
  • A special concern is whether information and communications technologies are actually eliminating more jobs than they are creating—and in what countries and occupations.
  • How is the power-curve economy opening up opportunities or shutting them down?
  • Is it polarizing income and wealth distributions? How is it changing the nature of work and traditional organizations and altering family and personal life?
  • many observers fear a wave of social and political disruption if a society’s basic commitments to fairness, individual opportunity and democratic values cannot be honored
  • what role government should play in balancing these sometimes-conflicting priorities. How might educational policies, research and development, and immigration policies need to be altered?
  • The Innovation Economy
  • Conventional economics says that progress comes from new infusions of capital, whether financial, physical or human. But those are not necessarily the things that drive innovation
  • What drives innovation are new tools and then the use of those new tools in new ways.”
  • at least 50 percent of the acceleration of productivity over these years has been due to ICT
  • economists have developed a number of proxy metrics for innovation, such as research and development expenditures.
  • Atkinson believes that economists both underestimate and overestimate the scale and scope of innovation.
  • Calculating the magnitude of innovation is also difficult because many innovations now require less capital than they did previously.
  • Others scholars
  • see innovation as going in cycles, not steady trajectories.
  • A conventional approach is to see innovation as a linear, exponential phenomenon
  • leads to gross errors
  • Atkinson
  • believes that technological innovation follows the path of an “S-curve,” with a gradual increase accelerating to a rapid, steep increase, before it levels out at a higher level. One implication of this pattern, he said, is that “you maximize the ability to improve technology as it becomes more diffused.” This helps explain why it can take several decades to unlock the full productive potential of an innovation.
  • innovation keeps getting harder. It was pretty easy to invent stuff in your garage back in 1895. But the technical and scientific challenges today are huge.”
  • costs of innovation have plummeted, making it far easier and cheaper for more people to launch their own startup businesses and pursue their unconventional ideas
  • innovation costs are plummeting
  • Atkinson conceded such cost-efficiencies, but wonders if “the real question is that problems are getting more complicated more quickly than the solutions that might enable them.
  • we may need to parse the different stages of innovation: “The cost of innovation generally hasn’t dropped,” he argued. “What has become less expensive is the replication and diffusion of innovation.”
  • what is meant by “innovation,”
  • “invention plus implementation.”
  • A lot of barriers to innovation can be found in the lack of financing, organizational support systems, regulation and public policies.
  • 90 percent of innovation costs involve organizational capital,”
  • there is a serious mismatch between the pace of innovation unleashed by Moore’s Law and our institutional and social capacity to adapt.
  • This raises the question of whether old institutions can adapt—or whether innovation will therefore arise through other channels entirely. “Existing institutions are often run by followers of conventional wisdom,”
  • The best way to identify new sources of innovation, as Arizona State University President Michael Crow has advised, is to “go to the edge and ignore the center.”
  • Paradoxically, one of the most potent barriers to innovation is the accelerating pace of innovation itself.
  • Institutions and social practice cannot keep up with the constant waves of new technologies
  • “We are moving into an era of constant instability,”
  • “and the half-life of a skill today is about five years.”
  • Part of the problem, he continued, is that our economy is based on “push-based models” in which we try to build systems for scalable efficiencies, which in turn demands predictability.
  • The real challenge is how to achieve radical institutional innovations that prepare us to live in periods of constant two- or three-year cycles of change. We have to be able to pick up new ideas all the time.”
  • pace of innovation is a major story in our economy today.
  • The App Economy consists of a core company that creates and maintains a platform (such as Blackberry, Facebook or the iPhone), which in turn spawns an ecosystem of big and small companies that produce apps and/or mobile devices for that platform
  • tied this success back to the open, innovative infrastructure and competition in the U.S. for mobile devices
  • standard
  • The App Economy illustrates the rapid, fluid speed of innovation in a networked environment
  • crowdsourcing model
  • winning submissions are
  • globally distributed in an absolute sense
  • problem-solving is a global, Long Tail phenomenon
  • As a technical matter, then, many of the legacy barriers to innovation are falling.
  • small businesses are becoming more comfortable using such systems to improve their marketing and lower their costs; and, vast new pools of personal data are becoming extremely useful in sharpening business strategies and marketing.
  • Another great boost to innovation in some business sectors is the ability to forge ahead without advance permission or regulation,
  • “In bio-fabs, for example, it’s not the cost of innovation that is high, it’s the cost of regulation,”
  • This notion of “permissionless innovation” is crucial,
  • “In Europe and China, the law holds that unless something is explicitly permitted, it is prohibited. But in the U.S., where common law rather than Continental law prevails, it’s the opposite
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is Shame Necessary? | Conversation | Edge - 0 views

  • What is shame's purpose? Is shame still necessary?
  • Shame is what is supposed to occur after an individual fails to cooperate with the group.
  • Whereas guilt is evoked by an individual's standards, shame is the result of group standards. Therefore, shame, unlike guilt, is felt only in the context of other people.
  • ...53 more annotations...
  • Many animals use visual observations to decide whether to work with others.
  • humans are more cooperative when they sense they're being watched.
  • The feeling of being watched enhances cooperation, and so does the ability to watch others. To try to know what others are doing is a fundamental part of being human
  • Shame serves as a warning to adhere to group standards or be prepared for peer punishment. Many individualistic societies, however, have migrated away from peer punishment toward a third-party penal system
  • Shame has become less relevant in societies where taking the law into one's own hands is viewed as a breach of civility.
  • Many problems, like most concerning the environment, are group problems. Perhaps to solve these problems we need a group emotion. Maybe we need shame.
  • Guilt prevails in many social dilemmas
  • It is perhaps unsurprising that a set of tools has emerged to assuage this guilt
  • Guilt abounds in many situations where conservation is an issue.
  • The problem is that environmental guilt, though it may well lead to conspicuous ecoproducts, does not seem to elicit conspicuous results.
  • The positive effect of idealistic consumers does exist, but it is masked by the rising demand and numbers of other consumers.
  • Guilt is a valuable emotion, but it is felt by individuals and therefore motivates only individuals. Another drawback is that guilt is triggered by an existing value within an individual. If the value does not exist, there is no guilt and hence no action
  • Getting rid of shaming seems like a pretty good thing, especially in regulating individual behavior that does no harm to others. In eschewing public shaming, society has begun to rely more heavily on individual feelings of guilt to enhance cooperation.
  • five thousand years ago, there arose another tool: writing
  • Judges in various states issue shaming punishments,
  • shaming by the state conflicts with the law's obligation to protect citizens from insults to their dignity.
  • What if government is not involved in the shaming?
  • Is this a fair use of shaming? Is it effective?
  • Shaming might work to change behavior in these cases, but in a world of urgent, large-scale problems, changing individual behavior is insignificant
  • vertical agitation
  • Guilt cannot work at the institutional level, since it is evoked by individual scruples, which vary widely
  • But shame is not evoked by scruples alone; since it's a public sentiment, it also affects reputation, which is important to an institution.
  • corporate brand reputation outranked financial performance as the most important measure of success
  • shame and reputation interact
  • in our early evolution we could gauge cooperation only firsthand
  • Shaming, as noted, is unwelcome in regulating personal conduct that doesn't harm others. But what about shaming conduct that does harm others?
  • why we learned to speak.1
  • Language
  • The need to accommodate the increasing number of social connections and monitor one another could be
  • allowed for gossip, a vector of social information.
  • in cooperation games that allowed players to gossip about one another's performance, positive gossip resulted in higher cooperation.
  • Of even greater interest, gossip affected the players' perceptions of others even when they had access to firsthand information.
  • Human society today is so big that its dimensions have outgrown our brains.
  • What tool could help us gossip in a group this size?
  • We can use computers to simulate some of the intimacy of tribal life, but we need humans to evoke the shame that leads to cooperation. The emergence of new tools— language, writing, the Internet—cannot completely replace the eyes. Face-to-face interactions, such as those outside Trader Joe's stores, are still the most impressive form of dissent.
  • what is stopping shame from catalyzing social change? I see three main drawbacks:
  • Today's world is rife with ephemeral, or "one-off," interactions.
  • Research shows, however, that if people know they will interact again, cooperation improves
  • Shame works better if the potential for future interaction is high
  • In a world of one-off interactions, we can try to compensate for anonymity with an image score,
  • which sends a signal to the group about an individual's or institution's degree of cooperation.
  • Today's world allows for amorphous identities
  • It's hard to keep track of who cooperates and who doesn't, especially if it's institutions you're monitoring
  • Shaming's biggest drawback is its insufficiency.
  • Some people have no shame
  • shame does not always encourage cooperation from players who are least cooperative
  • a certain fraction of a given population will always behave shamelessly
  • if the payoff is high enough
  • There was even speculation that publishing individual bankers' bonuses would lead to banker jealousy, not shame
  • shame is not enough to catalyze major social change
  • This is why punishment remains imperative.
  • Even if shaming were enough to bring the behavior of most people into line, governments need a system of punishment to protect the group from the least cooperative players.
  • Today we are faced with the additional challenge of balancing human interests and the interests of nonhuman life.
  •  
    The role of non-rational mechanisms in convergence - social emotions like shame and guilt 
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

INSO-5-2015 - 0 views

  • Scope:  The scope is that of creating a Community, involving social innovators, researchers, citizens, policy makers, which will bring together on the one hand research actions and results and on the other implementation actions, new initiatives, and policy developments.
  • help promote social innovation initiatives
  • increase relevance of policies and actions
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • development of a common understanding
  • evidence and methodologies that contribute to social innovation up-scaling
  • This does not concern only European but also international developments.
  • Such a social innovation community could be seen also as a “network of networks”.
  • Activities should include:
  • rganisation of brokerage events to enhance the networking
  • information and awareness activities t
  • design strategies/activities for ensuring the best possible use of the research results
  • the organisation of events aimed at identifying priorities for collaboration
  • supporting grassroots experiments, replication, incubation and policy uptake of research results
  • setting up of a network of 'Local Facilitators' for a better dissemination and uptake at all levels.
  • EUR 3 million
  • enable convergence towards a common understanding of social innovation as a tool and outcome.
  •  
    "Topic: Social innovation Community INSO-5-2015"
Francois Bergeron

Social Media Management Dashboard - HootSuite - 1 views

shared by Francois Bergeron on 24 Jan 14 - No Cached
  • Manage multiple social networks • Schedule messages and tweets • Track brand mentions • Analyze social media traffic • 8 million+ satisfied users
  •  
    Manage multiple social networks * Schedule messages and tweets * Track brand mentions * Analyze social media traffic * 8 million+ satisfied users
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views

    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      we call this a custodian
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      we call this a custodian
  • So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      so where is direct democracy in all this?
  • ...39 more annotations...
  • In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.
  • becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole
  • phase transition and transformation will need to occur.
  • how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.
  • At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations
  • The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
  • More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.
  • The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature
  • Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.
  • In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.
  • fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics
  • the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.
  • the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
  • retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects
  • the role of the state
  • “the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.
  • trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"
  • the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.
  • stop enclosures
  • peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value
  • communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
  • It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.
  • In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.
  • it fulfills three contradictory functions
  • Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.
  • protect the whole system, under the domination of private business
  • protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements
  • protector of its own independent interests
  • Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.
  • key institutions and forms of property.
  • The state managed a public sector, under its own property.
  • The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.
  • civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
  • Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector
  • However, this configuration is changing,
  • the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
  • participatory politics
  • Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.
  • if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.
Kurt Laitner

The World of Social Objects - 0 views

  •  
    The concept of social objects has provided many insights for me since I stumbled over it years ago. Worth putting in your cognitive tool kit if it isn't there already.
Kurt Laitner

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

  • 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
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  • 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
       
      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
       
      ? 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
       
      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
       
      !!!
  • 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
       
      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
  •  
    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Kurt Laitner

Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out - opinion - 30 July 2012 - New Scientist - 0 views

  • FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn't always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
  • How, then, did we arrive in the age of institutionalised inequality? That has been debated for centuries. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reasoned in 1754 that inequality was rooted in the introduction of private property. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels focused on capitalism and its relation to class struggle. By the late 19th century, social Darwinists claimed that a society split along class lines reflected the natural order of things - as British philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, "the survival of the fittest". (Even into the 1980s there were some anthropologists who held this to be true - arguing that dictators' success was purely Darwinian, providing estimates of the large numbers of offspring sired by the rulers of various despotic societies as support.)
  • But by the mid-20th century a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward, Leslie White and Robert Carneiro offered slightly different versions of the following story: population growth meant we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and the need for managers and specialised roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandising individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus - first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance
  • At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labour allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies
  • From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold - as when uneven resource-distribution benefited one family more than others - it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages.
  • Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?
  • In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments.
  • Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies - exactly what we see as we look back in history.
  • In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural - or physical - extinction of egalitarian societies.
  • Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits.
Kurt Laitner

A StumbleUpon for Design Geeks | Co.Exist: World changing ideas and innovation - 0 views

  • While there’s no "like" button to declare your affection for certain content, the app monitors how much time you spend with an article, whether you scroll all the way down, and whether or not you share it via social media, and makes assessments based on those data points.
  •  
    "While there's no "like" button to declare your affection for certain content, the app monitors how much time you spend with an article, whether you scroll all the way down, and whether or not you share it via social media, and makes assessments based on those data points." An example from a colleague of an application that uses ambient metrics to determine what you like without you needing to explicitly rank it - much more effective and efficient than explicit ranking, they could add _who_ you share it with to further qualify (shared widely, narrowly, to respected peers, social peers, or senior peers, all of which are also ambiently determined, possibly in combination with some user provided metadata through other processes)
sebastianklemm

Stay foundation Stuttgart - Stay Stiftung - 1 views

  •  
    What does the Stay Foundation do once the social enterprises have found each other? In the truest sense of the word development-aid.These local social enterprises lack the financial support to exploit their development potential. The team of the Stay Foundation in Stuttgart is sure that if funds are provided by industrial nations, which are then used for the expansion of existing social enterprises, it is development-aid on an equal footing. The challenge in Germany is therefore to attract companies and private individuals to invest in social enterprises in developing countries. In order to raise awareness of Africa and the local social enterprises which are active there, the team organises events for entrepreneurs, is present at events on the subject of Africa, informs private individuals about the foundation and its objectives, examines possibilities for funding and cooperation with the aim of supporting the remaining development in Africa.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Engaging For the Commons - Global Pull Platform - Helene Finidori - 0 views

  • "activating" human agency and political will and addressing the root causes for power unbalance and resistance to change is at the heart of tomorrow's paradigm shift.
  • action-oriented strategy and process methodology for generating engagement, accountability and outcomes in the political, economic, social and environmental spheres, which may contribute to enable this activation.
  • empowering individuals and communities, nurturing public wisdom
  • ...29 more annotations...
  • The platform is structured around commons, issues of social, environmental, economic nature,
  • treated as social objects: the nodes around which social networks are created, conversations and repeated interactions are initiated, new territories explored, meaning and intents shared, learning achieved.
  • ‘pinging of actors’ by ‘citizen-followers’ creates a pull dynamic
  • will yield conversations, knowledge flow, and feedback loops beneficial to learning, progress visualization, and evaluation
  • reate a context favorable to collaboration, exchange of ideas and know-how.
  • The process consists in letting people/organizations:
  • Select, follow,
  • Keep informed and track progress
  • Self assign actor role and communicate/report on self-activity and impact and status of issue.
  • Share
  • Find solutions and potential collaborators for action
  • Select or refer designated actors to acknowledge or request their engagement and action at various levels
  • participate in the conversation, report on activity and impact
  • evaluate and rate activity/impact of and trust toward actors' activity, impact and progress.
  • organize for collective action
  • garner follower participation
  • Initiate and participate in conversations, debates, deliberations
  • The ecosystem is composed of
  • Common’s spaces
  • Common’s graph
  • Progress & Impact or Situation Dashboard
  • The platform creates a context for the following
  • Curate the knowledge flow and increase learning
  • Connect and interrelate people, stakeholders, issues, and knowledge.
  • Help situate an issue
  • Define boundaries
  • Help situate self and others
  • Identify roles and interdependence between actors and issues.
  • Visualize the emergent bigger picture
Yasir Siddiqui

Klick's Intranet System - Genome - Wins SuperNova Award | Klick Health - 1 views

  • Genome harnesses the data-driven and social technology used in online experiences like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay and Match.com and applies them to how you work
    • Yasir Siddiqui
       
      Relevant to Tactus
  •  
    Genome harnesses the data-driven and social technology used in online experiences like Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, eBay and Match.com and applies them to how you work
Kurt Laitner

Digital Reality | Edge.org - 0 views

  • When you snap the bricks together, you don't need a ruler to play Lego; the geometry comes from the parts
  • first attribute is metrology that comes from the parts
  • digitizing composites into little linked loops of carbon fiber instead of making giant pieces
  • ...75 more annotations...
  • In a 3D printer today, what you can make is limited by the size of the machine. The geometry is external
  • is the Lego tower is more accurate than the child because the constraint of assembling the bricks lets you detect and correct errors
  • That's the exponential scaling for working reliably with unreliable parts
  • Because the parts have a discrete state, it means in joining them you can detect and correct errors
  • detect and correct state to correct errors to get an exponential reduction in error, which gives you an exponential increase in complexity
  • The next one is you can join Lego bricks made out of dissimilar materials.
  • The last one is when you're done with Lego you don't put it in the trash; you take it apart and reuse it because there's state in the materials. In a forest there's no trash; you die and your parts get disassembled and you're made into new stuff. When you make a 3D print or laser cut, when you're done there's recycling attempts but there's no real notion of reusing the parts
  • The metrology coming from the parts, detecting and correcting errors, joining dissimilar materials, disconnecting, reusing the components
  • On the very smallest scale, the most exciting work on digital fabrication is the creation of life from scratch. The cell does everything we're talking about. We've had a great collaboration with the Venter Institute on microfluidic machinery to load designer genomes into cells. One step up from that we're developing tabletop chip fab instead of a billion dollar fab, using discrete assembly of blocks of electronic materials to build things like integrated circuits in a tabletop process
  • a child can make a Lego structure bigger than themself
  • There's a series of books by David Gingery on how to make a machine shop starting with charcoal and iron ore.
  • There are twenty amino acids. With those twenty amino acids you make the motors in the molecular muscles in my arm, you make the light sensors in my eye, you make my neural synapses. The way that works is the twenty amino acids don't encode light sensors, or motors. They’re very basic properties like hydrophobic or hydrophilic. With those twenty properties you can make you. In the same sense, digitizing fabrication in the deep sense means that with about twenty building blocks—conducting, insulating, semiconducting, magnetic, dielectric—you can assemble them to create modern technology
  • By discretizing those three parts we can make all those 500,000 resistors, and with a few more parts everything else.
  • Now, there's a casual sense, which means a computer controls something to make something, and then there's the deep sense, which is coding the materials. Intellectually, that difference is everything but now I'm going to explain why it doesn't matter.
  • Then in turn, the next surprise was they weren't there for research, they weren't there for theses, they wanted to make stuff. I taught additive, subtractive, 2D, 3D, form, function, circuits, programming, all of these skills, not to do the research but just using the existing machines today
  • What they were answering was the killer app for digital fabrication is personal fabrication, meaning, not making what you can buy at Walmart, it’s making what you can't buy in Walmart, making things for a market of one person
  • The minicomputer industry completely misread PCs
  • the Altair was life changing for people like me. It was the first computer you could own as an individual. But it was almost useless
  • It was hard to use but it brought the cost from a million dollars to 100,000 and the size from a warehouse down to a room. What that meant is a workgroup could have one. When a workgroup can have one it meant Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie at Bell Labs could invent UNIX—which all modern operating systems descend from—because they didn't have to get permission from a whole corporation to do it
  • At the PC stage what happened is graphics, storage, processing, IO, all of the subsystems got put in a box
  • To line that up with fabrication, MIT's 1952 NC Mill is similar to the million-dollar machines in my lab today. These are the mainframes of fab. You need a big organization to have them. The fab labs I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of minicomputers. The machines that make machines I'll tell you about are exactly analogous to the cost and complexity of the hobbyist computers. The research we're doing, which is leading up to the Star Trek Replicator, is what leads to the personal fabricator, which is the integrated unit that makes everything
  • conducting, resistive, insulating.
  • The fab lab is 2 tons, a $100,000 investment. It fills a few thousand square feet, 3D scanning and printing, precision machining, you can make circuit boards, molding and casting tooling, computer controlled cutting with a knife, with a laser, large format machining, composite layup, surface mount rework, sensors, actuators, embedded programming— technology to make technology.
  • Ten years you can just plot this doubling. Today, you can send a design to a fab lab and you need ten different machines to turn the data into something. Twenty years from now, all of that will be in one machine that fits in your pocket.
  • We've been living with this notion that making stuff is an illiberal art for commercial gain and it's not part of the means of expression. But, in fact, today, 3D printing, micromachining, and microcontroller programming are as expressive as painting paintings or writing sonnets but they're not means of expression from the Renaissance. We can finally fix that boundary between art and artisans
  • You don't go to a fab lab to get access to the machine; you go to the fab lab to make the machine.
  • Over the next maybe five years we'll be transitioning from buying machines to using machines to make machines. Self-reproducing machines
  • But they still have consumables like the motors, and they still cut or squirt. Then the interesting transition comes when we go from cutting or printing to assembling and disassembling, to moving to discretely assembled materials
  • because if anybody can make anything anywhere, it challenges everything
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      great quote (replace challenges with changes for effect)
  • Now, the biggest surprise for me in this is I thought the research was hard. It's leading to how to make the Star Trek Replicator. The insight now is that's an exercise in embodied computation—computation in materials, programming their construction. Lots of work to come, but we know what to do
  • And that's when you do tabletop chip fab or make airplanes. That's when technical trash goes away because you can disassemble. 
  • irritated by the maker movement for the failure in mentoring
  • At something like a Maker Faire, there's hall after hall of repeated reinventions of bad 3D printers and there isn't an easy process to take people from easy to hard
  • We started a project out of desperation because we kept failing to succeed in working with existing schools, called the Fab Academy. Now, to understand how that works, MIT is based on scarcity. You assume books are scarce, so you have to go there for the library; you assume tools are scarce, so you have to go there for the machines; you assume people are scarce, so you have to go there to see them; and geography is scarce. It adds up to we can fit a few thousand people at a time. For those few thousand people it works really well. But the planet is a few billion people. We're off by six orders of magnitude. 
  • Next year we're starting a new class with George Church that we've called "How to Grow Almost Anything", which is using fab labs to make bio labs and then teach biotech in it. What we're doing is we're making a new global kind of university
  • Amusingly, I went to my friends at Educause about accrediting the Fab Academy and they said, "We love it. Where are you located?" And I said, "Yes" and they said, "No." Meaning, "We're all over the earth." And they said, "We have no mechanism. We're not allowed to do that. There's no notion of global accreditation."
  • Then they said something really helpful: "Pretend."
  • Once you have a basic set of tools, you can make all the rest of the tools
  • The way the Fab Academy works, in computing terms, it's like the Internet. Students have peers in workgroups, with mentors, surrounded by machines in labs locally. Then we connect them globally by video and content sharing and all of that. It's an educational network. There are these critical masses of groups locally and then we connect them globally
  • You still have Microsoft or IBM now but, with all respect to colleagues there, arguably that's the least interesting part of software
  • To understand the economic and social implications, look at software and look at music to understand what's happening now for fabrication
  • There's a core set of skills a place like MIT can do but it alone doesn't scale to a billion people. This is taking the social engineering—the character of MIT—but now doing it on this global scale.
  • Mainframes didn't go away but what opened up is all these tiers of software development that weren't economically viable
  • If you look at music development, the most interesting stuff in music isn't the big labels, it's all the tiers of music that weren't viable before
  • You can make music for yourself, for one, ten, 100, 1,000, a million. If you look at the tracks on your device, music is now in tiers that weren't economically viable before. In that example it's a string of data and it becomes a sound. Now in digital fab, it's a string of data and it becomes a thing.
  • What is work? For the average person—not the people who write for Edge, but just an average person working—you leave home to go to a place you'd rather not be, doing a repetitive operation you'd rather not do, making something designed by somebody you don't know for somebody you'll never see, to get money to then go home and buy something. But what if you could skip that and just make the thing?
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      !!!
  • It took about ten years for the dot com industry to realize pretty much across the board you don't directly sell the thing. You sell the benefits of the thing
  • 2016 it's in Shenzhen because they're pivoting from mass manufacturing to enabling personal fabrication. We've set Shenzhen as the goal in 2016 for Fab Lab 2.0, which is fab labs making fab labs
  • To rewind now, you can send something to Shenzhen and mass manufacture it. There's a more interesting thing you can do, which is you go to market by shipping data and you produce it on demand locally, and so you produce it all around the world.
  • But their point was a lot of printers producing beautiful pages slowly scales if all the pages are different
  • In the same sense it scales to fabricate globally by doing it locally, not by shipping the products but shipping the data.
  • It doesn't replace mass manufacturing but mass manufacturing becomes the least interesting stuff where everybody needs the same thing. Instead, what you open up is all these tiers that weren't viable before
  • There, they consider IKEA the enemy because IKEA defines your taste. Far away they make furniture and flat pack it and send it to a big box store. Great design sense in Barcelona, but 50 percent youth unemployment. A whole generation can't work. Limited jobs. But ships come in from the harbor, you buy stuff in a big box store. And then after a while, trucks go off to a trash dump. They describe it as products in, trash out. Ships come in with products, trash goes out
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      worse actually.. the trash stays
  • The bits come and go, globally connected for knowledge, but the atoms stay in the city.
  • instead of working to get money to buy products made somewhere else, you can make them locally
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      this may solve greece's problem, walk away from debt, you can't buy other people's (country's) stuff anymore, so make it all yourself
  • The biggest tool is a ShotBot 4'x8'x1' NC mill, and you can make beautiful furniture with it. That's what furniture shops use
  • Anything IKEA makes you can make in a fab lab
  • it means you can make many of the things you consume directly rather than this very odd remote economic loop
  • the most interesting part of the DIY phone projects is if you're making a do-it-yourself phone, you can also start to make the things that the phones talk to. You can start to build your own telco providers where the users provide the network rather than spending lots of money on AT&T or whoever
  • Traditional manufacturing is exactly replaying the script of the computer companies saying, "That's a toy," and it's shining a light to say this creates entirely new economic activity. The new jobs don't come back to the old factories. The ability to make stuff on demand is creating entirely new jobs
  • To keep playing that forward, when I was in Barcelona for the meeting of all these labs hosted by the city architect and the city, the mayor, Xavier Trias, pushed a button that started a forty-year countdown to self-sufficiency. Not protectionism
  • I need high-torque efficient motors with integrated lead screws at low cost, custom-produced on demand. All sorts of the building blocks that let us do what I'm doing currently rest on a global supply chain including China's manufacturing agility
  • The short-term answer is you can't get rid of them because we need them in the supply chain. But the long-term answer is Shenzhen sees the future isn't mass producing for everybody. That's a transitional stage to producing locally
  • My description of MIT's core competence is it's a safe place for strange people
  • The real thing ultimately that's driving the fab labs ... the vacuum we filled is a technical one. The means to make stuff. Nobody was providing that. But in turn, the spaces become magnets. Everybody talks about innovation or knowledge economy, but then most things that label that strangle it. The labs become vehicles for bright inventive people who don't fit locally. You can think about the culture of MIT but on this global scale
  • My allegiance isn't to any one border, it's to the brainpower of the planet and this is building the infrastructure to scale to that brainpower
  • If you zoom from transistors to microcode to object code to a program, they don't look like each other. But if we take this room and go from city, state, country, it's hierarchical but you preserve geometry
  • Computation violates geometry unlike most anything else we do
  • The reason that's so important for the digital fabrication piece is once we build molecular assemblers to build arbitrary systems, you don't want to then paste a few lines of code in it. You need to overlay computation with geometry. It's leading to this complete do-over of computer science
  • If you take digital fab, plus the real sense of Internet of Things—not the garbled sense—plus the real future of computing aligning hardware and software, it all adds up to this ability to program reality
  • I run a giant video infrastructure and I have collaborators all over the world that I see more than many of my colleagues at MIT because we're all too busy on campus. The next Silicon Valley is a network, it's not a place. Invention happens in these networks.
  • When Edwin Land was kicked out of Polaroid, he made the Rowland Institute, which was making an ideal research institute with the best facilities and the best people and they could do whatever they want. But almost nothing came from it because there was no turnover of the gene pool, there was no evolutionary pressure.  
  • the wrong way to do research, which is to believe there's a privileged set of people that know more than anybody else and to create a barrier that inhibits communication from the inside to the outside
  • you need evolutionary pressure, you need traffic, you need to be forced to deal with people you don't think you need to encounter, and you need to recognize that to be disruptive it helps to know what people know
  • For me the hardest thing isn't the research. That's humming along nicely. It's that we're finding we have to build a completely new kind of social order and that social entrepreneurship—figuring out how you live, learn, work, play—is hard and there's a very small set of people who can do that kind of organizational creation.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      our challenge in the OVN space
  •  
    what is heavy is local, what is light is global, and increasingly manufacturing is being recreated along this principle
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy - 0 views

  • In the  emerging institutional model of peer production
  • we can distinguish an interplay between three partners
  • a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;
  • ...46 more annotations...
  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players
  • a set of "for-benefit institutions' which manage the 'infrastructure of cooperation'
  • an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;
  • Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy
  • we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
  • The post-democratic logic of community
  • these communities are not democracies
  • because democracy, and the market, and hierarchy, are modes of allocation of scarce resources
  • Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.
  • Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is  matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori'  communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors',  decide
  • These decisions require expertise, not communal consensus
  • tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence
  • allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms
  • The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy,  is a 'distribution of tasks'
  • no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'
  • work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent
  • every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution
  • this new model
  • has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.
  • And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      disagree, there are many ways to ethically distribute governance, not just democracy
  • Hence, an increased exodus of productive  capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetization, which only operates at its margins.
  • Where there is no tension between supply and demand, their can be no market, and no capital accumulation
  • Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly and they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation.
  • Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, there is no return of income for these value creators
  • This means that social media platforms are exposing an important fault line in our system
  • If you did not contribute, you had no say, so engagement was and is necessary.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      key divergence from birth/process citizenship driven democracy
  • ⁃   At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on ⁃   These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production ⁃   Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures ties them to the values and goals of the commons communities, and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximising profit at any cost
  • the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ie value equations..?
  • Today, it is proto-mode of production which is entirely inter-dependent with the system of capital
  • Is there any possibility to create a really autonmous model of peer production, that could create its own cycle of reproduction?
  • contribute
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      defined as?
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "ad hoc": perhaps based on context, needs and everyone's understanding of the situation
  • and whose mission is the support of the commons and its contributors
  • In this way, the social reproduction of commoners would no longer depend on the accumulation cycle of capital, but on its own cycle of value creation and realization
  • Phyles are mission-oriented, purpose-driven, community-supportive entities that operate in the market, on a global scale, but work for the commons.
  • peer production license, which has been proposed by Dmytri Kleiner.
  • Thijs Markus writes  so eloquently about Nike in the Rick Falkvinge blog, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place.
  • Hence the need for SOPA/PIPA , ACTA'S and other attempts to criminalize the right to share.
  • An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a CommonCost are produced together such that the CommonCost is reduced.
  • shared infrastructure costs
  • 2) The current system beliefs that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let's call this feature, enforced 'artificial scarcity'.
  • 1) Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let's call this feature, runaway 'pseudo-abundance'.
  • So what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavours: 1) the mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources 2) the mutualizing of material productive resources
  • how does global governance look like in P2P civilization?
  • conflicts between contributors
  • are not decided by authoritarian fiat, but by 'negotiated coordination'.
Kurt Laitner

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

  • 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.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • 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.
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