We have an epic choice before us between platform coops and Death Star platforms, and the time to decide is now. It might be the most important economic decision we ever make, but most of us don't even know we have a choice. 

And just what is a Death Star platform? Bill Johnson of StructureC3 referred to Uber and Airbnb as Death Star platforms in a recent chat. The label struck me as surprisingly apt: it reflects the raw ambition and focused power of these platforms, particularly Uber. 

Uber’s big bet is global monopoly or bust. They’ve raised over $8 billion in venture capital, are on track to do over $10 billion in revenue this year, and have over one million drivers who are destroying the taxi industry in over 300 cities worldwide. They’ve done all this in just over five years. In fact, they reached a $51 billion valuation faster than Facebook, and plan to raise even more money. If they’re successful, they’ll become the most valuable startup in history. Airbnb is nearly as big and ambitious. 

Platform coops are the alternative to Death Stars. As Lisa Gansky urged, these platforms share value with the people who make them valuable. Platform coops combine a cooperative business structure with an online platform to deliver a real-world service.

What if Uber was owned and governed by its drivers?

What if Airbnb was owned and governed by its hosts?

That’s what an emerging movement is exploring for the entire sharing economy in an upcoming conference, Platform Cooperativism.

As he prepares to launch a new, pan-European movement for change, Yanis Varoufakis sits down with Can Europe make it? to discuss democracy in Europe, Brexit, and the other part of Plan X.

Wireless internet access is on the rise in both modern consumer societies and in the developing world. In rich countries, however, the focus is on always-on connectivity and ever higher access speeds. In poor countries, on the other hand, connectivity is achieved through much more low-tech, often asynchronous networks. While the high-tech approach pushes the costs and energy use of the internet higher and higher, the low-tech alternatives result in much cheaper and very energy efficient networks that combine well with renewable power production and are resistant to disruptions....

Liquid Democracy is one of the boldest contemporary innovations in democratic decision-making. The idea uses web technology that allows users to interact in new ways. Its primary innovators are located in Berlin, and Germany has been the first to adopt and apply Liquid Democracy systems in the context of political parties, parliamentary processes, and some organisations. 

The idea for Liquid Democracy is not new. Lewis Carroll, the British author of Alice in Wonderland, was the first to propose the idea for transitive voting in a thesis titled “The Principles of Parliamentary Representation.” Only with the advent of computer technology, however, has the technical necessities for creating such a complex and dynamic decision-making system become possible. 

The success of the Pirate Party after the 2011 state and regional elections was bolstered by their avowed use of Liquid Feedback. This set them apart from other parties and, as a result, Liquid Feedback software is often confused as Pirate Party software. 

In addition to its application within political parties, Liquid Feedback has also been used at the county municipal level in a region of Germany called Friesland and in the Italian Five-Star Movement. With 25% of the national vote, the Five-Star Movement is currently a significant political force for change and a serious adopter of Liquid Feedback.

Shock and austerity. Stock market instability. Stagnant wages and the decline of purchasing power. War. Climate change. Despite these multiplying crises, capitalism retains an essential tool that allows it to perpetuate itself on a global level despite its internal contradictions: the ability to leverage technological developments to liquidate the political power of those who would oppose it.

At such a crossroads, when labor as an organized force is being dissolved into flexible precarity, how does one attempt to tip the scales and reverse our accelerating fragility?

The answer lies in a shift of focus, from a politics of power to a politics that looks critically at infrastructure, a politics of re-purpose, (re-)design, appropriation and the reclamation of space, and of new forms of economic expression.

Whatever the future will be, or whatever name we want to label the path to it, there is one realization that is facing us: it must be post-capitalist. We firmly believe that another world is possible, but it must be built, and the rules and programs for this construction are still largely unwritten...

A mesh network creates reliable and redundant wireless internet access. Instead of relying on a wired access point to the internet like a traditional network, a mesh network uses wireless radio nodes that speak to each other, thus creating decentralized wireless access points.

Because a mesh network does not have to communicate through a central organization (like an ISP), if one node goes down the network will self heal — allowing service to continue without interruption.

Within a mesh network, only one node needs to be hardwired. All the other nodes, of which there could be hundreds, do not require direct access to the internet, just access to the mesh network itself.

Powered by radios in trees, homegrown network serves 50 houses on Orcas Island. 

Faced with a local ISP that couldn’t provide modern broadband, Orcas Island residents designed their own network and built it themselves. The nonprofit Doe Bay Internet Users Association (DBIUA), founded by Sutton, Brems, and a few friends, now provide Internet service to a portion of the island.

It’s a wireless network with radios installed on trees and houses in the Doe Bay portion of Orcas Island. Those radios get signals from radios on top of a water tower, which in turn receive a signal from a microwave tower across the water in Mount Vernon, Washington. 

Unlike many satellite and cellular networks, there is no monthly data cap for DBIUA users. 

Sutton, a software developer who has experience in server and network management, says he’s amazed how rare projects like DBIUA are, claiming “it wasn’t that hard.” But from what he and Brems told Ars, it seems like it took a lot of work and creative thinking to get DBIUA off the ground. 

“The part of Orcas Island we're on looks back toward the mainland,” Sutton said. “We can see these towers that are 10 miles away, and you realize, ‘hey, can't we just get our own microwave link up here to us from down there, and then do this little hop from house to house to house via wireless stuff?’”

In a new study, the University of Pennsylvania's Damon Centola shows how social networks form and what that means for the ideas that will spread across them. 

Counterintuitively, he finds that breaking down group boundaries to increase the spread of knowledge across populations may ultimately result in less-effective knowledge sharing. Instead, his research shows that best practices and complex ideas are more readily integrated across populations if some degree of group boundaries is preserved.

In a series of global big bang moments, each loosely organized around one strategic demand, we will transform the way our global system is run. 

On December 19, we call for a 1% tax on all stock market transactions and currency trades. We slow down fast money in the global casino. 

On April 1, 2016 or some other date of our choosing, we march again. This time our one demand is a three-strikes-you're-out law for corporate criminals. We begin to shift the power balance between civil society and corporations. 

On September 17, 2016 - the fifth anniversary of Occupy Wall Street - a multitude of us will rise up to demand sunshine laws against secrecy. In country after country and at the United Nations, we open up secret political processes and let the light shine in. 

Then, on December 19, 2016, we'll pull off one more massive, globally coordinated march. This time we demand a transition toward a true-cost global marketplace in which the price of every product tells the ecological truth. We shift the theoretical foundations of economic science.

George Galloway, London, U.K. mayoral candidate who is using block chain technology in running his 2016 campaign, has called for the city to adopt block chain technology to provide full public accountability of government business.

“Since governments spend public funds on shared public resources, the public has a right to transparency,” Galloway said in his prepared remarks.

• "Now, for the first time, the radically disruptive technology of block chains can provide a technological backbone for true, 100 percent transparency. Political accountability, it seems, is about to take on a whole new meaning." 
   
• "In a word, blockchains make direct democracy possible in ways that were not previously imaginable, and radically empower the public."

The connections between the nodes of GNU social are established by the users who follow each other. Through these “following” relationships, all nodes can communicate and form a network. It’s what’s known as “federation,” and could be understood as a network of agreements.

We believe it would be a mistake to replicate the centralized model and its culture. That would serve information without agreements between people, and therefore, approve of irresponsibility and encourage confrontation.

For us, GNU social’s priority should be on becoming the “Swiss Army knife” of distributed networks based on sharing, by developing a culture of socialization based on trust within the nodes and the responsibility for understanding what is being talked about when someone joins a conversation. And for that, the key is to connect through federation, as has been done so far, on the basis of the minimum responsibility that comes with the fact that, to be an equal on another node, someone from that node has to considers what I say interesting enough to follow me.