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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views

wirearchy.com/...he-dominant-cultural-framework

paper Wirearchy John Husband

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 18 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • more open people processes
  • Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles
  • Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • maker faires
  • community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising
  • The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological
  • Technological
  • information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web
  • appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
  • Sociological
  • People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
  • get informed and take action
  • Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes
  • play and work together
  • rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
  • The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
  • Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation
  • What’s coming along next ?  “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
  • Shorter cycle-based development and release
  • Agile development
  • It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT)
  • clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
  • experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
  • The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data
  • ethical, political and social impact policy decisions
  • that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
  • ‘we’ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies
  • participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the ‘new rules’
  • What the Future May Hold
  • the ‘scenario planning’ approach
  • world’s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy
  • A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation
  • Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
  • are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
  • The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
  • cultural ‘mutation’
  • Wirearchy
  • a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
  • the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
  • The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
  • Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
  • Participative Work Design – The Six Criteria
  • in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
  • contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
  • peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world
  • Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
  • But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
Kurt Laitner

Forget the Foundations - In These Times - 0 views

inthesetimes.com/...forget_the_foundations

Madonna Thunderhawk financing foundation activism paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 06 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • Their “actions” didn’t involve writing grant proposals, discussing their concerns with a board of directors or contacting state agencies. They tested water samples themselves, and, in 1979, produced a study revealing high levels of radioactive contamination, a high percentage of pregnancies complicated by excessive bleeding or terminated in abortion and large numbers of children born with birth defects. Despite their work, the Centers for Disease Control and Indian Health Services discredited the study, and WARN wasn’t vindicated until the South Dakota School of Mines substantiated their claims that same year.
  • But unlike Erin Brockovich, this tale of local activists fighting against faceless institutions doesn’t have a happy ending: The Nuclear Regulatory Commission simply raised the level of “acceptable contamination,” and Indian Health Services started providing bottled water in one area. Congress authorized a new water pipeline to the reservation in 2002–only to have the funding diverted by the financial demands of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
  • who defer responsibility onto do-nothing organizations, only later to complain about their lack of agency
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • that foundations perpetuate First World interests and free-market capitalism, thus preserving many of the problems radical activists wish to eradicate, such as the unregulated concentration of wealth.
  • Foundations were created in the early 20th century by multimillionaire robber barons, such as John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie, to evade corporate and estate taxes.
  • foundations divert money away from the collective tax base
  • who are more interested in supporting milquetoast reformers than social-justice organizations
  • federal and state funding for education and healthcare has shrunk
  • This is a culture of noblesse oblige, Ahn writes, where the “privileged are obliged to help those less fortunate, without examining how that wealth was created or the dangerous implications of conceding such power to the wealthy.”
  • is the power those with money wield over community leaders.
  • consequently realigning their interests (i.e., maintaining their jobs) with maintaining the system
  • This allegiance keeps community leaders from challenging the root causes of social inequities–the social-change work–at the same time that they pedal to keep up by providing for the needs of individuals devastated by institutional exploitation.
  • Kivel concedes this is valuable work, but points out the inherent injustice of this paradigm: “When temporary shelter becomes a substitute for permanent housing, emergency food a substitute for a decent job … we have shifted our attention from the redistribution of wealth to the temporary provision of social services to keep people alive.”
  • University of Southern California Professor Ruth Wilson Gilmore urges contemporary grassroots activists to stop seeking a “pure way of doing things.” “Many are looking for an organizational structure and a resource capability that will somehow be impervious to co-optation,”
  • transitioning from foundation support to a volunteer collective reliant solely on grassroots dollars
Kurt Laitner

Crisis of Value Theory - P2P Foundation - 0 views

p2pfoundation.net/Crisis_of_Value_Theory

Michel Bauwens Kevin Carson capitalism alternative economy paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Jul 12 - Cached
  • accumulation of knowledge assets
  • a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information
  • In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • But notice that to do this, the system had to change, the core logic was no longer the same.
  • The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.
  • capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence
  • 1) The creation of non-monetary value is exponential 2) The monetization of such value is linear
  • What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.
  • more and more positive externalizations are created from the social field
  • “the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”
  • This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy
  • crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners
  • The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.
  • We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.
  • Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.
  • The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “
  • increasing untenability of property rights in the information realm
  • there is no more outside.
  • one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means
  • Innovation is becoming social and diffuse, an emergent property of the networks
  • failure of artificial abundance
  • failure of artificial scarcity
  • Kurt Laitner on 11 Jul 12
     
    the passing of the capitalist age
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Welcome to the new reputation economy (Wired UK) - 1 views

www.wired.co.uk/...-to-the-new-reputation-economy

economy Reputation paper

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan
  • headhunters hire you based on the expertise you've demonstrated on online forums
  • reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • At the heart of Movenbank is a concept call CRED.
  • The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.
  • An aggregated online reputation having a real-world value holds enormous potential
  • peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.
  • opportunity to reinvent the way people found jobs through online reputation
  • "It's not about your credit, but your credibility," King says.
  • But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?
  • "People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."
  • Social scientists have long been trying to quantify the value of reputation.
  • Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, the researchers monitored brain activity
  • "The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
  • Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
  • Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.
  • When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
  • Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
  • Presently, reputation data doesn't transfer between verticals.
  • A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.
  • His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."
  • PeerIndex, Kred and Klout,
  • are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"
  • "Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"
  • Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.
  • Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.
  • reputation is a measure of knowledge
  • a measure of trust
  • a measure of propensity to pay
  • measure of influence
  • Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.
  • It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.
  • The most basic level is verification of your true identity
  • reliability and helpfulness
  • do what we say we are going to do
  • respect another person's property
  • trusted to pay on time
  • we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.
  • idea of global reputation
  • By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.
Kurt Laitner

Prototyping and infrastructuring in design for social innovation | prototyping alternat... - 0 views

prototypingalternativefutures.wordpress.com/...n-design-for-social-innovation

prototyping infrastructure social innovation white paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 28 Mar 13 - No Cached
  • Kurt Laitner on 28 Mar 13
     
    May have some relevance, did not read past abstract
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Nightweb - 0 views

nightweb.net

p2p social network infrastructure possible collaborator

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jul 13 - No Cached
  • Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Jul 13
     
    This is a p2p social network running on bit torrent
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...26

commons law project governance legal David Bollier Michel Bauwens

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 27 May 12 - No Cached
  • “commons law” (not to be confused with common law)
  • Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
  • Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
  • reframe the very notion of “the economy” to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.
  • we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
  • the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the world’s ecosystems
  • We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
  • An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead end—literally.
  • Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
  • We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
  • The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
  • These are, however, precisely the attributes of natural systems.
  • Exchange value is the primary if not the exclusive concern.
  • anything that does not have a price and exists ‘outside’ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
  • industry lobbies have captured if not corrupted the legislative process
  • regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
  • we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
  • it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
  • It requires that we enlarge our understanding of ‘value’ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
  • articulate and foster a coherent new paradigm
  • deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

PeerPoint « Poor Richard's Almanack 2010 - 1 views

almanac2010.wordpress.com/...peerpoint

p2p peer-to-peer infrastructure network

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 29 May 12 - No Cached
  • Each PeerPoint is an autonomous node on a p2p network with no centralized corporate  infrastructure.
  • The PeerPoint will be connected between the user’s pc, home network, or mobile device and the ISP connection.
  • The PeerPoint is designed to Occupy the Internet.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • provide greater user value
  • For numerous reasons the services provided by the commercial companies do not adequately meet the creative, social, political, and financial needs of the 99%
  • allows self-selected individuals to coalesce into powerful workgroups, forums, and movements.
  • With the PeerPoint approach, each user will own her own inexpensive internet appliance and all the data and content she creates
  • If a FreedomBox were used as a starting platform, the PeerPoint application package would be added on top of the FreedomBox security stack.
  • The common requirements for each PeerPoint app are: world class, best-of-breed open source p2p architecture consistent, granular, user-customizable security management and identity protection integrated with other apps in the suite via a common distributed database and/or “data bus” architecture. consistent, user-customizable large, medium, and small-screen (mobile device) user interfaces ability to interface with its corresponding major-market-share service (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) GPS enabled
  • First tier applications: distributed database social networking  (comparison of distributed social network applications) trust/reputation metrics crowdsourcing: content collaboration & management  (wiki, Google Docs, or better) project management/workflow data visualization (data sets, projects, networks, etc.) user-customizable complementary currency and barter exchange (Community Forge or better) crowd funding (http://www.quora.com/Is-there-an-open-source-crowdfunding-platform) voting (LiquidFeedback or better) universal search across all PeerPoint data/content and world wide web content
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Is it time to change the way we work? | What Would The Internet Do? - 2 views

www.wwtid.com/...time-to-change-the-way-we-work

document post blog value networks new economy

shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 09 Jul 12 - No Cached
  • company culture
  • how important some values are for them to prosper and generate value
  • We are seeing some organization being more successful in creating a culture than others
  • ...24 more annotations...
  • some of the principles of the Internet culture are actually becoming critical in creating successful organizations
  • the Internet culture is setting the foundation for a different way of generating economic and social value.
  • set of values that I believe are relevant for all organization wishing to reinvent their model to be more successful, attract talent and be more sustainable.
  • Resilience
  • more chances to successfully face complexity, speed and unpredictability
  • Bouncing back is more valuable than being tough.
  • establish a circle of trust
  • resources from your network, from outside, rather than stocking them.
  • Compasses (instead of maps)
  • through clear principles and transparency.
  • Pull (instead of push)/ Smart crowd (instead of experts)
  • post-sale structure
  • Portfolios (instead of planning)/ Practice (instead of theory)
  • Prototype, and leverage the ecosystem to fail fast (or scale rapidly).
  • testing less than perfect products into a receptive and responsive ecosystem
  • Systems (instead of objects)
  • the social components, and the interdependence of people, groups and objects.
  • a new set of currency that will merge the intrinsic value with the extrinsic social components associated with it.
  • groups of people can produce a better outcome than single individuals.
  • planning everything excludes the unexpected
  • keeping the eyes open
  • Encourage rebellion (instead of compliance)/Constant learning (instead of education)
  • asking questions and not accepting the traditional answers as given
  • structurally encouraged to question in order to guarantee future development and innovation
Yasir Siddiqui

Support MediaGoblin | MediaGoblin - 2 views

mediagoblin.org/...campaign.html

opensource social media facebook flickr CMS infrastructure collaboration

shared by Yasir Siddiqui on 01 Mar 14 - No Cached
  • Yasir Siddiqui on 01 Mar 14
     
    Open source integrated social media platform
Steve Bosserman

Scale of Social Structures - Tibi's Philosophy - 3 views

sites.google.com/...p2p-economics

philosophy p2p tibi sensorica open_networks benefits contributions value

shared by Steve Bosserman on 17 Apr 16 - No Cached
  • Steve Bosserman on 17 Apr 16
     
    "In April 2015 I was asked by Christine Koehler to write an article on value. She contacted me because she come across my work on open value networks, about a new organizational model that may be well-adapted to support large scale peer production of material goods. I accepted the challenge as an exercise to formalize the tacit knowledge that I have accumulated since 2008, when I became interested in the relation between the new digital technology and the shift of power structures in our modern society. I advise the reader not to consider this paper as a theoretical essay. This is only my effort to bring to my own consciousness the tacit knowledge that I am using in my efforts to help the development of the open value network model, and of the SENSORICA.co network/community, which is an instantiation of this model. As I get better at surfacing and formalizing these ideas, I also invite the reader to understand the heuristics behind my work. I let the reader place a judgment on the success of my work, which will make these heuristics and models that I am trying to expose here more or less interesting. Start with Scale of social structures and follow the links. "
sebastianklemm

Social Impact Network - 0 views

social-impact.network

greens_for_good funding platform

shared by sebastianklemm on 25 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • sebastianklemm on 25 Jun 21
     
    The "Social Impact Network" approach will be a combination of a crowd based impact investment infrastructure, onboarded international aid organisation as stakeholders and local project coordinators for the implementation of impact projects in local communities in need. The platform will start with Photovoltaic projects in Lebanon, with UNDP Lebanon Country Office as first main stakeholder that reviews the PV projects & identifies project coordinators. This approach can also work to help implement the "Greens for Good" solution.
Kurt Laitner

What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into tod... - 0 views

blogs.valvesoftware.com/...it-into-todays-corporate-world

valve management structure company paper

shared by Kurt Laitner on 07 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
  • Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
  • the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
  • they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism
  • The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
  • The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
  • Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
  • Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
  • The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
  • Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
  • In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
  • Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
  • One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
  • He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero 
  • As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
  • Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
  • Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
  • Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
  • In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
  • There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

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O'Reilly paper

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