Peer2Politics

The case for grassroots archives

The collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 was a shock for many people. For a moment it seemed like capitalism, or at least ‘neoliberal’ capitalism, was on its last legs. But the moment passed and capitalism survived. The combination of huge cash subsidies for Wall Street and austerity for working people revived corporate profitability, trade, and production growth. Yet a sense of crisis and uncertainty remains pervasive in American society and many other countries around the world.

OuiShare Fest is an international gathering in Paris of sharing economy pioneers, enthusiasts and organizers. This year’s fest, which ran May 20-22, featured panels, presentations and discussions that explored numerous aspects of the sharing economy, collaboration, technological developments, and human connectedness. Here are 10 of the top presentations, as chosen by our friends at OuiShare. 1. Nick Grossman: Bringing Collaborative Platforms to Market

Feenberg (2002) analyses technology in terms of managerial autonomy to assert control over and through technological choices, implying the necessity of increased democratisation of technological relations in the workplace in achieving a more participatory and democratic society. I argue that the recent history of the relationship between organised labour and digital technologies has seen a retreat from earlier attempts to assert control over technology, most notably through the Scandinavian traditions of participatory design, to an increasingly tactical and defensive view of these technologies as tools in labour organising and campaigning. This reflects the decreasing power of organised labour in the industrialised West and global North, at least. Simultaneously, the workplace is no longer the only, or even primary, place in which the majority encounter sophisticated digital technologies. The most prominent debates about the use of ICT in social emancipation are largely outside the workplace, concerning for example, debates about surveillance, the technical and economic relations around technological infrastructure (as, for example in the US net neutrality debate), and the role of ICT in social uprisings (see for example, Castells 2012 ).

The third annual OuiShare Fest, hosted with the theme “Lost in Transition” in Paris’ charming Cabaret Sauvage, concluded last Friday. This unique gathering of sharing economy leaders from around the world found itself in at least two ways with their latest edition.

The proliferation of activist initiatives calling for systemic change around the world has never been more impressive. Yet collaborations among like-minded organizations, projects and movements have been disappointingly modest. As neoliberal economics and policies tighten their grip on American society—notwithstanding the dismal misbehavior of financial institutions, corporations and the two political parties—can leading alt-economic and social movements find ways to work more closely together?

Article cross-posted from Bollier.org. It is always refreshing to read Peter Linebaugh’s writings on the commons because he brings such rich historical perspectives to bear, revealing the commons as both strangely alien and utterly familiar. With the added kick that the commoning he describes actually happened, Linebaugh’s journeys into the commons leave readers outraged at enclosures of long ago and inspired to protect today's endangered commons.

With the rise of the sharing economy, people are sharing cars, houses, sports equipment, clothing, toys, meals, surfboards and much more. There's an intuition among sharers that sharing is not only good for the pocketbook, it’s good for the planet. The thinking goes that sharing helps us reduce consumption and keep usable goods out of landfills.

Creating a fair and environmentally sustainable economy is no easy task, nor does it have a certain outcome. It takes vision, commitment, an understanding of how we got into our current state as well as insight into how to get out of it.

Transition Streets is a toolkit for neighborhood transformation—a catalyst for action, dialogue, and community building. A project of Transition US, Transition Streets is as simple as neighbors coming together for seven meetings to explore carbon-saving and resilience-building actions in the areas of food, water, waste, energy, transportation, all the while building relationships with each other and a stronger sense of community.

On November 6-7 in Bologna, Italy, leading scholars, researchers, policymakers, practitioners and social innovators will gather to further the discussion and movement around the urban commons.

Everybody just has a very clear idea that if you have a central square and everybody grazes their crops on the central square, there's no grass left. Unless you control that, either through some cooperative arrangement, or ownership arrangement, you have a tragedy. If data is a non-rival good, where's the tragedy? We can all feed on that central square without impinging in any way on the other's use of that.

Have you started a summer reading list? For those of us interested in the sharing economy, there is no shortage of great reads. Whether your interests lie in collaboration, sustainable cities, community-building, simplicity, or work in the new economy, there is something for everyone. We’ve rounded up the top 21 books for summer to inspire, empower, and inform.

Photo credit: LendingMemo / Foter / CC BY. As the U.S. continues to recover from the financial crisis started over seven years ago, the prospect of "too big to fail" banks still lingers because no real reforms have been made in the financial sector. 

Photo credit: DonkeyHotey / Foter / CC BY. Article cross-posted from On the Commons. Written by Peter Barnes.

Last week, commons advocates the P2P Foundation, Guerilla Translation, and their partners launched Commons Transition, a public forum to further commons-oriented policy-making. Commons Transition is based on the groundbreaking work of the Free/Libre Open Knowledge (FLOK) Society in Ecuador.

Saturday night in the Hongdae district of Seoul. Restaurants, bars, and nightclubs line the streets four stories high for blocks. The crowds in the street cover acres of blacktop. It's nightlife on mega-city scale.