Kategorie: English

[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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Alstair Parvin on the democratization of production using the example of architecture and Wikihouse.

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

By Jonathan Clyne

In order to change society it is necessary to understand it. Especially new phenomena that can give a hint as to what is in the making. One important new trend has been peer-to peer production, a new voluntary form of cooperation whose products are shared freely. Based on the previous discussion on this website, here is another contribution to the discussion.

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Two and a half years ago, during the (first) International Commons Conference in Berlin, I collected some quotes that I considered insightful or funny. This time, at the Economics and the Commons Conference, I did it again.

Silke Helfrich [DE]:

• The commons as institutions are older than any state in the world.
• Every commons has a material basis. Every commons needs energy, and every commoner needs food. And all the natural commons require knowledge. We have to know how to cultivate a commons. So every commons is a physical commons and a knowledge commons.
• We should wonder whether the commons should really be open to everyone, including the enclosers.
• The commons does not scale up but rather crystallizes, like a crystal of atoms, into a connected pattern. The commons, like crystals, grow into all directions.
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Kester Brewin: »We need a new community of pirates, men and women committed to defending the commons and standing up to the excesses of enclosed wealth. So, put down your iPads and put on your eye patches!«

[On the Economics and the Commons Conference I gave a short input on the topic of demonetization. The following text was written afterwards and generously edited by David Bollier.]

The question of how we deal with and act within the given monetary environment is crucial for the commons movement, since the monetary logic and the commons logic are opposites. Contrary to the claims of mainstream economics, money is not neutral or simply an informational means for mediating transactions. Thus, replacing currencies with alternative currencies of different designs basically does not change the underlying monetary logic. It amounts to changing the tools while keeping the workshop.

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