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If we can harness our empathic sensibility to establish a new global ethic that recognizes and acts to harmonize the many relationships that make up the life-sustaining forces of the planet, we will have moved beyond the detached, self-interested and utilitarian philosophical assumptions that accompanied national markets and nation state governance and into a new era of biosphere consciousness. We leave the old world of geopolitics behind and enter into a new world of biosphere politics, with new forms of governance emerging to accompany our new biosphere awareness.

The book describes the evolution of the Italian hacktivism and net culture from the 1980s till today and it is a reconstruction of the history of artistic networking in Italy and of the Italian hacker community.

This page should be covering Spanish-language resources on P2P, participatory, open, and commons-related movements.

Whether we assume that “it all starts with the individual” or “the individual is shaped by their social systems and circumstances”, we miss the extent to which individuals influence collective awareness, functionality and evolution AND collective systems influence individual consciousness, evolution and functioning. Individual and collective capacities and dynamics constitute a feedback cycle which doesn’t START anywhere. Or perhaps I should more usefully say that this feedback cycle starts everywhere. (This is similar to it being more useful to talk about leaderful groups rather than leaderless groups. Both are true, but the framing invites different consciousness and behavior.) This realization about the feedback and synergy between the individual and collective opens our consciousness to strategies which maximize the evolution of BOTH.

The term "Hyperlocal" generally refers to community-oriented news content typically not found in mainstream media outlets and covering a geographic region too small for a print or broadcast market to address profitably. The information is often produced or aggregated by online, non-traditional (amateur) sources.

A republication of January 2006, on my own concept of netarchical capitalism. Some of the references are dated, but I think the main concept is still valid.

The Opera browser, since June 2009, comes with an important extension: Opera Unite can turn any computer running the browser into a server that will share designated data with peers on the net, directly, without the need to upload. After the alpha version of June, last November saw the release of the beta Version 10.10 of Opera which includes Unite as a standard feature. It runs on Unix/Linux, Windows and Mac operating systems.

Social transformation is not a job to be left to the whims of billionaires. Perhaps if we supported the energy and creativity of millions of ordinary people, we could create a foundation for lasting progress that will never come through top-down planning by a new global elite, however well intentioned. When this principle is accepted and philanthropy is recon?gured to be less technocratic and more supportive of people’s own self-development efforts, then change will come — larger than we can control, quicker than we can imagine, and deeper than we could ever hope for by reducing everything to market forces.

As this article goes to publication, the University of California is erupting as a site of political conflict over the recent budget cuts, tuition increases and furloughs. A UC wide strike and walkout of faculty, staff and students has been called for on August 24th, 2009, the first day of instruction. It seems that the UC’s disregard for the health and wellbeing of their employees, as well as for the quality of education, has reached an intolerable point for many. Many academics have taken this opportunity to turn their research back to the university itself, which is exemplified by UC Berkeley’s colloquium event entitled “The University in Crisis: The Dismantling and Destruction of the University of California.

"Social innovation is a process of change where new ideas emerge from a variety of actors directly involved in the problem to be solved: final users, grass roots technicians and entrepreneurs, local institutions and civil society organizations. The main way in which it differs from traditional “garage” innovation is that here the “inventors” are groups of people (the “creative communities”) and the results are forms of organization (the “collaborative services”).

What is happening is that profit risk is less manageable and the tendency of consumption (a consumption function) is approaching a price of zero because people can get replacement items for free (the core of P2P theory). The result of these two trends is businesses like Twitter and outcomes like co-ops.

We received a message from folks organizing a new conference tentatively titled the "First International Conference on Accessible Digital Manufacturing Technology and Design" to be held in Campinas, Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2010. While the conference's title is not yet written in stone, their objectives are:

This retreat week with Barbara Marx-Hubbard is a blossoming of ideas, visions, insights, states of consciousness. We gave ourselves enough time to cover many topics. This video is a short excerpt of our conversation on free currencies.

At the root of this idea is overwhelming recent evidence for horizontal gene transfer - in which organisms acquire genetic material "horizontally" from other organisms around them, rather than vertically from their parents or ancestors. The donor organisms may not even be the same species. This mechanism is already known to play a huge role in the evolution of microbial genomes, but its consequences have hardly been explored. According to Woese and Goldenfeld, they are profound, and horizontal gene transfer alters the evolutionary process itself.