Peer2Politics

“We are, it would seem, in the midst of a historical crisis of the capitalist system. As the dynamo effects of the sub-prime collapse ripple through the economy, from financial markets to consumer spending and industrial production, it has become common to point at how our present capitalist system lacks long-term sustainability. If this used to be the privilege of a handful of left-leaning economists like André Gunder Frank (2005) or Robert Brenner (2004), economists, politicians and business leaders who used to be more than happy with the existing order of things have now joined the ranks. Even Richard Florida, whose theories of the ‘creative class’ stood at the heart of the gentrification-driven real estate boom that preceded the present crisis now proclaims that ‘[t]he housing bubble was the ultimate expression, and perhaps the last gasp, of an economic system some 80 years in the making, and now well past its “sell-by date” (Florida, 2009:9).

Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong (formerly of Facebook) is doing the right thing. He’s planning to make Reddit’s users into owners, depending on their contribution to the site. There’s a way to create a form of liquid ownership that doesn’t require Wall Street. This new method is based on the bitcoin blockchain. That technology makes it possible to issue ownership to contributors in a decentralized and trusted way. The combination of blockchain stock, Yishan’s example, and the experience of participants will set in motion a wave of change in Silicon Valley. The message is: if you want to build an online company, you better find a way to make your customers/contributors owners.*

Back in the days, one of the proposed demands of the Free Culture Forum in Barcelona, was for proprietary platforms to re-invest 15% of profit back into the community of contributors, but without turning the contributions into commodities, to avoid a return to pure production for money.

Some technology critics, with their laments of cultural decline enabled by Twitter and e-books, are partly to blame. Instead of engaging with attention and distraction socio-economically — as was done with earlier media by Walter Benjamin and Sigfried Kracauer — we get Nicholas Carr, with his embrace of neuroscience, or Douglas Rushkoff, with his biophysiological critique of acceleration (8). Whatever the salience of such interventions, they end up decoupling the technological from the economic, so that we end up debating how the screens of our iPads condition the cognition of our brains — instead of debating how the information gathered by our iPhones conditions the austerity measures of our governments. To be critical of technology today should mean questioning how it and its boosters let the current system buy more time, and stave off an even more existential crisis.

When marketing executives at “values-led” companies try to cultivate communities around ethical consumerism, it creates a new class of problems. Much like religious cults, cult brands manipulate their customers’ emotional and psychological needs and encourage them to construct their identities and lives around the brand. The collapse of the ideal would be felt as a personal catastrophe for its community, so the brand becomes practically immune to criticism.

Continuing our serialization of Penny Nelson’s  interview with Douglas Rushkoff for HiLobrow magazine, this week the conversation turns to the emotional components of debt, the inherent structures of corporations and why men must be kept busy with the front lawn.   We recommend that you read the first part if you haven’t already, to get some context. Please, check back on Friday for the third and final installment.

Reposted from the New Economics Foundation website. Here, Alice Martin explores the rising concern about the preponderance of neoclassical economic models in higher education curricula, and what’s being done about it.

At this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner — the annual opportunity for the President to engage directly, and humorously, with reporters who cover him — it was expected that most of the jibes would be aimed at Barack Obama. Sure, he gets the chance to defend himself, but it’s pretty much a roast: A leading comedian is invited every year to make jokes, while the commander in chief tries to laugh instead of squirm.

“The past decade has seen a growing emphasis on the social and juridical implications of peer production, commons-based property regimes and the nonrivalrous circulation of immaterial content in the online domain, leading some theorists to posit a digital communism. An acquisitive logic, however, continues to operate through intellectual property rights, in the underlying architecture that supports the circulation of content and in the logical apparatuses for the aggregation and extraction of metadata. The digital commons emerges, not as a virtual space unfettered by material exploitation, but as a highly conflictive terrain, situated at the centre of a mode of capitalism that seeks valorisation for the owners of network infrastructure, online platforms and digital content.

Reddit’s CEO, Yishan Wong (formerly of Facebook) is doing the right thing. He’s planning to make Reddit’s users into owners, depending on their contribution to the site. There’s a way to create a form of liquid ownership that doesn’t require Wall Street. This new method is based on the bitcoin blockchain. That technology makes it possible to issue ownership to contributors in a decentralized and trusted way. The combination of blockchain stock, Yishan’s example, and the experience of participants will set in motion a wave of change in Silicon Valley. The message is: if you want to build an online company, you better find a way to make your customers/contributors owners.*

The ongoing Snowden revelations about NSA surveillance have all sorts of implications for the rule of law, constitutional democracy, geopolitical alignments, human rights and much else.  The disclosures deserve our closest attention for these reasons alone.  But what do these revelations have to do with the commons?

In the beginning, there was sharing. That, at least, is the story according to Dominik Wind, a German environmental activist with a genial smile and a cycling cap whom I met in Paris while attending a conference earlier this month about the sharing economy. Years ago, out of curiosity, Wind visited Samoa for half a year; he found that people shared tools, provisions and even sexual partners with their neighbors. Less encumbered by industrial civilization, they appeared to share with an ease and forthrightness long forgotten in the world Wind knew back home.

The voluntariat performs skilled work that might still command a wage without compensation, allegedly for the sake of the public good, regardless of the fact that it also contributes directly and unambiguously to the profitability of a corporation. Like the proletariat, then, the voluntariat permits the extraction of surplus value through its labor.