Salvatore Iaconesi (of ‘Art is Open Source’ and the ‘Ubiquitous Commons’ project is interviewed by La scuola open source:
* How do you envision an “open source school”?
Well, now you are going to hate me, but it doesn’t matter. In my opinion an “open source school” does not exist. According to what I’ve said above, an “open source school” should coincide with the whole world. In an Open Source School new aesthetics, new beauties, new desires and new relational opportunities, and even a new kind of awareness should join new tools and methodologies, so that they will change the way we consider time (more Kairos and less Kronos) and the wish to make perceptible, legible and available knowledge.
A third space between Apollo and Dionysus.
An “open source school” should be ubiquitous. It is a mental state, not a project.
It is magic, telepathy, poetry, body.
We talk a lot about hackers, makers, creative people. But we rarely wonder which role magic, poetry, telepathy could play in social innovation and change.
We must realize that hackers, makers and creative people are already part of the industrial economy and, therefore, they are at the service (mostly unpaid) of other interests.
A friend told me that the… Continue reading »
A summary from the Commons Strategies Group recent event in Berlin. Originally published in the Böll Foundation website.
Two noted activists, David Bollier and Michel Bauwens of the Commons Strategies Group/P2P Foundation, discussed the role of the commons and peer to peer production in meeting people’s needs and the many enclosures of the commons that are abridging their fundamental rights on September 8th 2015 in Berlin.
The two talks also describe a wide variety of legal innovations that commoners are inventing to fulfill the principles of Magna Carta and build a new socio-economic order by constituting new rules and norms for their common production, governance and property modalities. We have documented their lectures and the discussion:
Excerpted from Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider:
(The authors are co-organizers of “Platform Cooperativism: The Internet, Ownership, Democracy” at the New School on November 13-14.)
“Companies like Uber now tend to describe what they do as the “on-demand economy” rather than “sharing.” But there is also a movement underway to create a real sharing economy online, one in which people can truly co-own and cogovern the platforms they rely on. This means bringing together new technology with the long history of democratic, cooperative enterprise. This movement, which we call “platform cooperativism,” is something to which Mr. De Blasio might say yes. And in New York this November, we’re gathering the movement’s leaders for the first time.
Taxi drivers in Denver and the suburbs of D.C., for instance, have set up cooperative companies and control their own hailing apps. In New Zealand, the worker-owners of Loomio produce a decision-making platform now being used by governments, schools, and communities around the world. With the help of Janelle Orsi of the Sustainable Economies Law Center, a company called Loconomics is building a worker-owned alternative to TaskRabbit. Home-care workers throughout the five boroughs, in an industry increasingly reliant on online platforms, are talking about creating… Continue reading »
We called it the “League of the Anchovy,” because we thought that it would develop, above all, as a way of working among groups to join resources and reach concrete accomplishments. Our main contribution at that time was to bring the development of Bazar towards… Continue reading »
We exceptionally republish the whole article by Marcelo Rinesi:
“Volkswagen didn’t make a faulty car: they programmed it to cheat intelligently. The difference isn’t semantics, it’s game-theoretical (and it borders on applied demonology).
Regulatory practices assume untrustworthy humans living in a reliable universe. People will be tempted to lie if they think the benefits outweigh the risks, but objects won’t. Ask a person if they promise to always wear their seat belt, and the answer will be at best suspect. Test the energy efficiency of a lamp, and you’ll get an honest response from it. Objects fail, and sometimes behave unpredictably, but they aren’t strategic, they don’t choose their behavior dynamically in order to fool you. Matter isn’t evil.
But that was before. Things now have software in them, and software encodes game-theoretical strategies as well as it encodes any other form of applied mathematics, and the temptation to teach products to lie strategically will be as impossible to resist for companies in the near future as it has been to VW, steep as their punishment seems to be. As it has always happened (and always will) in the area of financial fraud, they’ll just find ways to do it better.
This past weekend at the Berlin Future Forum (BFF), a conference bringing together creative artists and entrepreneurs, technologists and spiritualists, an agenda crystallized for me that has been nagging at me for some time: what are the conditions for a more intentional technology movement?
As some of you know, for the past few years I’ve been wandering around start-up conferences dressed up as “The Amish Futurist” prodding digital technology evangelicals with moral and Luddite instincts around the “why” of innovation. Through gentle, Socratic probing I’ve heard many first hand accounts of the errors of the Silicon Valley elite, confessions of techno-phobia from some of the most advanced start-up founders, and first-hand user accounts of the ills of modern technology on wellbeing.
For a summary of some of these explorations, please see inspiration below:
Searching for the Soul of Startups: “At times, the startup scene seems utterly myopic: everyone trying to imitate a tired Zuckerberg-inspired formula: drop out of school, wear a hoodie, learn to code, start a company. But… Continue reading »
Challenging and entertaining presentation by Alexa Clay, the ‘Amish Futurist’ and friends, about the need for soul in technology and despite technology.
One of the interesting talks at the IdeaCamp 2015, dedicated to the urban commons and organized by the European Cultural Foundation:
“During the 2015 edition of the Idea Camp, Dr. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe has given an Idea Talk entitled ‘When Commoning Strategies Travel’.
Dr. Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe, a London-born urban anthropologist with Nigerian-Irish/English-Guyanese roots, dedicates her research and teaching to global expressive cultures as forms of resistance, migration and belonging. Jayne has given an Idea Talk on the relationship between the commons and migration in Europe – now, how urgent is that?”
“This is huge: Hertz renting cars becomes free of charge ridesharing cars – and Skjutsgruppen becomes a first of its kind search engine in Europe!
We’ve been working with this for a couple of months and it’s rolling out right now. We want to be modest with saying “Europe” instead of “The world”, since we’re not sure if anything similiar has been done in the US or other places.
For the first time in Europe: public transportation, ridesharing and free renting cars in the same search engine.
Since earlier the non-profit ridesharing movement Skjutsgruppen has shown both public transportation and privately owned vehicles in the same search engine. Now, for the first time in Europe, the renting cars of Hertz Sweden will become free of charge ridesharing cars. From this October private individuals are offered to drive back the renting cars for free – and by the philosophy of Skjutsgruppen fill up all empty seats. And besides this, everybody that rent a car from Hertz will be offered the chance to fill up the rest of the seats with ridesharers.
– Our cars need to go back to their point of origin and usually have four or more… Continue reading »
“At the moment of the demise of the New Economy, a new cycle started with new projects and new ideas. In London in the year 2000, and in Athens independently from London, two years later, movements started to build wireless community networks. Using a license exempt part of the electromagnetic spectrum and Wifi – Wireless Local Area Networks — network enthusiasts built their own networks. Based on the property of the Internet protocols that allow creativity at the edges, they could create networks of their own. Athens Wireless Metropolitan Network was initially started mainly by technology experts. They knew about other initiatives, such as Seattle Wireless, but developed their own “technological style”. Using the urban topology of Athens with its hills and cooperation with radio amateurs, they could create a network that covered a vast area, the Attica peninsula and beyond. The social model was based on the liberal utopia of individual ownership. Each node was built and maintained by its users, all the nodes together formed – and continue to do so – a network commons. The particular idea of AWMN was that it did not offer Internet access. Some nodes were connected to… Continue reading »
A little more than a year ago, we took a radical turn: we refounded our life-long association, the Library of the Indies. With 