The P2P Daily

Traditional scientific communication directly threatens the quality of scientific research. Today's system is unreliable -- or worse! Our system of scholarly publishing reliably gives the highest status to research that is most likely to be wrong.

“Dynamic, disruptive and systemic change is presenting businesses and organisations with extraordinary challenges that are economic, technological, societal and cultural ­ all are conjoined and hence complex. How do today⊃1;s organisations innovate to adapt in an uncertain world?

In today’s neo-rentier economy the bottom 99% (labor and consumers) owe the 1% (bondholders, stockholders and property owners). Corporate business and government bodies also are indebted to this 1%. The degree of financial polarization has sharply accelerated as the 1% are making their move to indebt the 99% – along with industry, state, local and federal government – to the point where the entire economic surplus is owed as debt service. The aim is to monopolize the economy, above all the money-creating privilege of supplying the credit that the economy needs to grow and transact business, enabling them to extract interest and other fees for this privilege. The top 1% have nearly succeeded in siphoning off the entire surplus for themselves, receiving 93% of U.S. income growth since September 2008.

Glenn Greenwald: The internet freedom activist committed suicide on Friday at age 26, but his life was driven by courage and passion

In the United States' crypto-dictatorship, activists are bullied by the state until they go bankrupt, are buried under a mountain of legal woes, are publicly discredited or humiliated, or as in the case of activist and Reddit co-founder Aaron Swartz, made to crack under the constant pressure, and commit suicide.

"In the next few days, I want to counterpose some approaches to the tension between individualism and collectivity, in the new types of relationality that I monitoring in our specialized wiki section as well as a special Delicious tag dedicated to P2P-Intersubjectity.

Today, we present what I would guess is a more neoliberal or neoconservative approach, that appeared as a reaction to an essay in Open Democracy. The author is a known critic of Wikipedia governance, and in general, of those features of the new online public sphere, which enhance lowest-common-denominator groupthink, but also the rule of an elite mob of geeks, that emerge out of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness‘. I think there is a lot of value in such a critique, even though I find the approach to be too reactive and one-sided, too much a defense of liberal individualism, unchecked by the balancing factor of community."

“In “The Jacobin Spirit” Žižek “Marxified” his argument for terror and dictatorship by radically misconstruing what “Marx’s key insight” was. He claimed Marx understood political democracy to be a mere “democratic illusion” because without economic equality political democracy can only be a tool of the ruling class, a part of the state apparatus and therefore our “main enemy.” This gets Marx totally wrong. And getting Marx right is not merely an academic exercise. Looking back, what is at stake are those 100 million Communist corpses memorialized by Vasily Grossman in Forever Flowing, with their “crazed eyes; smashed kidneys; skull[s] pierced by a bullet; rotting infected, gangrenous toes; and scurvy racked corpses in log-cabin, dugout morgues.” Looking forward, what is at stake is the possibility of the Left creating more corpses.

Papers available one year after publication, data behind them preserved.

"From its inception in 1999, Napster was pursued by the music industry who succeeded in shutting it down. By doing so, they drove users towards decentralized methods of sharing with no centralized point of weakness. This was made possible network architecture or the so-called 'end-to-end principle'. Swartz outlines how thereafter industry tried other approaches such as digital rights management, which collided with the essential nature of computers as copying machines, and legal threats. While none of these strategies succeeded in stopping sharing, they have impeded the further development of p2p technologies (ion this see also Fred von Lohmann's interview). Arguably these events have encouraged a shift towards web 2.0 sites where users hand over control of their work to centralized sites based on advertising models. Could this trend be reversed in the future?"

Aaron Swartz, now in his early twenties, rose to internet fame as technology whiz kid a couple of years ago, working on such things as W3C standards or the Creative Commons. He was also blogger behind the very successful Google Weblog. Via instant messenger, I interviewed him on Reddit, activism, Google and more.

Aaron Swartz, the babyfaced godfather of free information, champion of the open world, defender of our right to know things, has taken his own life this week. Many in the internet community say that the pressure of an overzealous US prosecution team, seeking to send him to prison for 50 years for the simple crime of downloading some unprotected academic papers with the intent of making them freely available online caused him to do it.

I had the privilege of knowing Aaron Swartz, who passed away yesterday, over the past seven years. He was a truly incredible person, and his work was inspirational to me personally and our non-profit PPF’s mission – and that of our sibling organizations, the Participatory Culture Foundation and Fight For the Future. Aaron was sui generis for real.

I must confess that at first I did not understand what the pioneers of rethinking content’s value—Lawrence Lessig, Joi Ito, Cory Doctorow, Aaron Swartz—had to teach me. When Lessig took to the courts—playing the net’s Quixote to battle Hollywood’s imperialistic expansion of copyright—I wondered whether his side was overreaching by implying that all creation is born of what came before.

This is a panel discussion about applying the concept of inherent rights to the ecosystem as a whole. This is seen by the panelists as a way to fight against the increasing commodification and exploitation of nature in the court of law, as well as a basis for the global environmental movement. Discussing are well-known environmentalists Vandana Shiva, Maude Barlow, Cormac Cullinan and Pablo Solon. David Harveys moderates. The panel was held at the Brecht Forum at CUNY Graduate Center on April 21, 2011.

Marco Berlinguer from the Transform! network maps here some potential points of rupture in our current form of capitalism. Excerpted from his article over at openDemocracy.

The next big idea might very well not be called “Occupy”, which may be a good thing — but the chances are high that, even so, it will be the result of networks that were forged during the Occupy movement.