Kategorie: English

[Reposted from Elevate-Website]

by David Charles

Stefan Meretz strode onto the stage, eyes blazing, promising fire and brimstone. Channelling the revolutionary power of his medieval countryman, Martin Luther, Stefan proceeded to nail his iconoclastic theses to the door of the Elevate church.

A talk of Michel Bauwens at QuiShare Conference on four Scenarios for P2P developments. Click on the small righthand image, to view the table Michel is showing in his talk, which you cannot read very well in the movie.

[Part 1 / Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.]

Meshes and Routes

Re/production used to be a burden which kept countless people busy for most of their lives. No longer. It has become a relatively easy and mostly pleasant affair, not least because of our reliance on mesh networks. Decentralized mesh networks allow everyone to participate. They are organized in ways that avoid asymmetric dependencies and ensure that nobody can acquire a specifically privileged position.

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[Diesen Artikel gibt es auch auf Deutsch.]

[This text was first published in German in a collection on utopian thinking and social emancipation edited by the Berlin jour fixe initiative. “The most tangible utopia of this volume,” the editors write. “Christian Siefkes gives his voice to somebody who lives in a not-too-distant future, where the ideas of commons-based peer production have spread beyond the Internet to re-organize production and reproduction in all areas of life on the basis of decentralized, non-hierarchical, voluntary self-organization.” Technologically, not much utopian thinking was needed – all the technologies I describe already exist today, if sometimes in more basic forms. The social changes, however, are radical. License: CC-BY-SA. You can also read the complete article as PDF or EPUB.]

Kitchen Fabrication

We produce in the kitchen or in the bathroom. Most people have some fabrication bots at home. The popular 3D printer/mill combines a 3D printer with a computer-controlled milling machine. 3D printers produce three-dimensional objects by printing multiple layers of bioplastics, metal, or ceramic on top of each other, until the desired object is complete. Within several hours, typical home 3D printers can print objects up to 50 by 40 by 30 centimeters large. That’s big enough to print most durable households items, whether crockery, cutlery, games and toys, or tools. Electrical and electronic appliances are made in the same way, except for the actual electric or lighting elements. It’s also common to print replacement parts if something breaks down or doesn’t fit.

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It is always fun to watch and listen to Slavoj Žižek. But more than that, in the following snippet he addresses the important question of the potential to generalize self-organization. Watch it:

Some remarks (mehr …)

[Repost with permission (ask here) from a series of articles on P2P & Marxism: part 3, also read part 1 and part 2]

By Jonathan Clyne

In the previous parts of this article, peer-to-peer production was presented as a radical new way of organising production and different from other forms of collaboration. Instead of following the instructions of a top-down hierarchy working in a competitive environment, which is the norm in most businesses, people who felt passionately about a particular project got together on a voluntary basis to create something that was available for anybody who wishes to use it, as long as they did not turn it into private property. That is, it remains in the commons.

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[Repost from Shareable, License CC-by]

An Interview with David Bollier

by Cat Johnson

David Bollier is no stranger to politics. The author, activist and independent commons scholar worked for Ralph Nader in the late-’70s and early-’80s, he’s a policy strategist and he has participated in or founded numerous public interest projects. But, over the years, he found himself increasingly disillusioned with political activism.

“I’d sort of been a good activist liberal,” he says. “But by the late-‘90s I had come to realize that liberalism and traditional civic activism and political activism, even within conventional NGOs, was not going to do the trick.”

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[Repost with permission (ask here) from a series of articles on P2P & Marxism: part 2, read part 1 here]

By Jonathan Clyne

Collaboration has existed before P2P production and many different forms continue to exist side by side with it. It could therefore be easy to dismiss P2P as nothing new under the sun. Yet that would be a mistake. Several things make P2P unique. In order to understand that it is worth comparing with other forms of collaboration.

The most common form of collaboration, outside the private sphere, exists at any workplace. Simply in order to get the work done people must collaborate. Superficially, it would be easy to identify the difference between P2P and other collaboration on the work place by saying that collaboration at a workplace is based upon bosses deciding and ‘creating’ a team. Formally speaking that is true, but in practice, collaboration at most workplaces is, like P2P, more of a bottom up collaboration.
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EN: Clay Shirky’s talk from 2010 is still valid: What do we do with 3 Trillion hours of spare time? Changing society!

DE: Clay Shirkys Vortrag von 2010 ist aktuell: Was machen wir mit 3 Millarden Stunden freier Zeit? Gesellschaft verändern!

The new issue of the Journal of Peer Production has been released with the title »The Critical Power of Free Software: from Intellectual Property to Epistemologies?« The issue explores the ability of FLOSS to constitute an epistemological and material critique of contemporary societies.

Content:

Editorial Notes – by Maurizio Teli and Vincenzo D’Andrea

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