Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Stacco Troncoso Beyond critiques of the Silicon Valley-style “sharing economy”, Open Cooperativism questions the dominance of capital in the free and open source software economy, and suggests P2P-empowered digital solutions in order to lower the transactional costs of networked cooperative production.
There will be light posting from 20th April to 5th May due to editorial vacations. Regular posting will resume on 8th May. Teaser photo credit: By ClemRutter, Rochester, Kent. – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2163988
Growth of production is central to the core ideology of the current economic system, to the idea of “development” and “progress”. It is central to the legitimacy of the people who run the global economy. Without it there is a legitimacy crisis.
The stories in this series come from a small town in the United Kingdom called Frome, but the themes and topics explored are global in scale, ranging from the Americas to the Himalayas. Despite its unique setting, nestled in the sleepy countryside of southeast England, Frome is a microcosm of much of what is taking place in towns and cities through the world.
Governments should recognize that cooperative platforms will mean more wealth staying in their communities and serving their constituents. Rather than trying (and failing) to say “no” to the likes of Uber, platform co-ops are something public institutions can say “yes” to.
The cost of allowing global temperature to rise to 2C, rather than capping warming at 1.5C, is an area of permafrost the size of Mexico, according to new research. The study, carried out by a team of scientists from Sweden, Norway and the UK, is the first to work out what the ambitious targets contained in the Paris Agreement mean for permafrost loss.
For the ecomodernists, the world presents itself predominantly as a set of technical challenges – how to feed the world, how to power it, and so forth. The mood is optimism, the modus operandi is solutionism.
How does resource sharing affect biodiversity? How does knowledge exchange drive community resilience? How is information access—delivered via technologies—an equalizer among the underrepresented, marginalized, and oppressed? How does our ability to feed a growing planet depend on a culture of openness?
The climate crisis presents a challenge that justifies a vast mobilization of the public as much as the Great Depression did. One means of doing this would be to form a National Community Resilience Corps (NCRC), which would harness the untapped passion, creativity, and labor of millions of young people to implement projects to grow resilience and build sustainability in tens of thousands of communities across the country.
We study environmental politics, and believe the health care debate holds an important lesson for green advocates: Policies that create concrete benefits for specific constituencies are hard to discontinue.
Meals on Wheels delivers freshly made, healthy meals to seniors and other homebound persons across the United States. Operating through a network of more than 5,000 local groups, Meals on Wheels is able to provide 218 million meals to over 2.4 million people annually.
Living Energy Farm (Louisa, Virginia) is a community of people who support themselves without the use of fossil fuel. Our project has been built at modest cost so it can be replicated around the world. Living Energy Farm is a fully operational farm and community, not just an idea.
