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From David Levine’s Hearsay Culture interview program, and other sources including our own directories on books, podcasts and webcasts, we have selected for you, a series of authors passionately talking about their books.

If you have little time to read, but can spend time listening during your commute or otherwise, this will provide you with many hours of interesting listening and watching experience.

For fast access, use this page here.

Here’s the list, please do suggest others:

1. Cass Sunstein on Infotopia
2. Charles Leadbeater on We Think
3. Chris Anderson on the Emergence of Free
4. Christopher Kelty on Free Software as Culture
5. Clay Shirky on Here Comes Everybody
6. Daniel Solove on the Future of Reputation
7. David Brin on the Transparent Society
8. David Korten on The Great Turning
9. David Weinberger on Everything Is Miscellaneous
10. Douglas Rushkoff on Corporatism
11. Erik Davis on TechGnosis
12. Interview with Mark Anielski on the Economics of Happiness
13. Joanna Demers on Steal This Music
14. John Thackara on Participatory Design for a Complex World, on the book “In the Bubble”
15. John Willinsky on The Access Principle
16. Jonathan Zittrain on the Future of the Internet
17. Julian Dibbell on Play Money
18. Kristin Lord on the Perils of Global Transparency
19. Matt Mason on the Pirate’s Dilemma
20. Paul Duguid on the Social Life of Information
21. Richard Lanham on the Economics of Attention
22. Robert Markley on Virtual Realities and Their Discontents
23. Rod Beckstrom on The Starfish and the Spider
24. Steven Weber on the Success of Open Source
25. Terry Fisher on Promises to Keep
26. Tim Wu on Who Controls The Internet
27. Yochai Benkler on the Wealth of Networks

• Internet Users and Statistics in Thailand
• Main Page - Fab Lab Wiki
• Chile and the UK, what future for labour
  we were concerned about Tony Benn precipitating a policy decision by Britain to turn its back on the IMF. I think if that had happened the whole system would have begun to come apart. God knows what Italy might have done; then France might have taken a radical change in the same direction
• Digitallyours » Les entretiens du nouveau monde industriel
  Enjeux technologiques et industriels des réseaux sociaux et du Web collaboratif
• Recent barcampbangkok2 Bookmarks on Delicious
• More Videos from Iam.in.th Team | BarCamp Bangkok
• On BarCamp Bangkok 2 :
  blogs, photos, slides, media | BarCamp Bangkok
• European Centre for the Experience Economy -Four types of open and free business models by Michel Bauwens
  We are talking here about free price, not free speech.
• FrontPage - eXe : eLearning XHTML editor
  The eXe project is developing a freely available Open Source authoring application to assist teachers and academics in the publishing of web content without the need to become proficient in HTML or XML markup
• Linux.com :: Installing Cinelerra on Ubuntu Studio
  Ubuntu Studio is a relatively new distribution based on Ubuntu (the version I'm using is 7.04 Feisty Fawn), whose specific aim is multimedia production
• MBDC: Cradle to Cradle Design
  Minimizing toxic pollution and the waste of natural resources are not strategies for real change. Designing industrial processes so they do not generate toxic pollution and "waste" in the first place is true change. Long-term prosperity depends not on the efficiency of a fundamentally destructive system, but on the effectiveness of processes designed to be healthy and renewable in the first place.

What should we think of the U.S. Elections? Especially as a pluralist network?

Consider this entry an update to the Predator State article.

Can we be neutral towards those kind of forces?

Consider this hair raising theocratic video from Sarah Palin’s local church … , and then ask yourself whether you would like to live under such a regime?

I consider Douglas Rushkoff a wise and moderate guy, with an integrative bent that tries to overcome different viewpoints in a higher unity.

But here’s what he said after witnessing the Republican convention:

“What is it they hate? Guiliani and Palin both made it pretty clear: community organizing. Community organizing is energized from below. From the periphery. It is the direction and facilitation of mass energy towards productive and cooperative ends. It is about replacing conflict with collaboration. It is the opposite of war; it is peace.

In their attack on community organizing - a word combination they pretended they didn’t know what it meant - Giuliani and Palin revealed their refusal to acknowledge the kinds of bottom-up processes through which our society was built, and through which local communities can begin to assert some authority over their schools, environments, and economies. Without organized communities, you don’t get the reduction in centralized government the Republicans pretend to be arguing for. In their view, community organizing as, at best, equivalent to disruptive and unpredictable Al Qaeda activity.”

And here’s how he explains the dynamic behind it:

“As I explained in Coercion, having a parent figure on whom to transfer authority allows people to regress to a more childlike state. This not only allows them to feel safe; if gives them the freedom to express their rage. Make no mistake - that’s what we’re witnessing. And this rage - not America - is the greatest threat to humanity’s long-term chances for survival.

I don’t believe hate is the best way to motivate people to develop long-term solutions to problems. It is a tried and tested way to motivate them to short-term support of dangerous leaders. That much is certain. But if McCain and Palin are able to rouse the national hatred they will need to actually win this election, I fear they will have unleashed a force that they will be unable to control. ”

• Cybersociology Magazine: Issue 7: Religion Online / Techno-Spiritualism
  In this issue of Cybersociology, guest editor Michel Bauwens has secured some thought provoking contributions from leading theorists working at the interface between religion and cyberspace.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Eric Hunting on the historical origins of peer to peer architecture, part two
  fascinating conversation with polymath Eric Hunting
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The status of 3D Printing
  There’s a lot of movement on the ‘fabbing’ front, i.e. the ability to make 3D objects out of the comfort of your home (by either owning a 3D printer, or sending it by email to a company which sends you the object).
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The extraordinary shift to peer to peer trust forms
  an extraordinary job in summarizing recent surveys and polls showing the decline in trust in intermediary institutions, and the rise in trust in peers.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The role of the market in a Peer to Peer Society
  if they have always co-existed, it may be illusory to aim for a stateless and marketless society, rather, we should expect states and markets to continue to exist in some form or other, but informed and trans-formed by P2P principles

David Levine of the Hearsay Culture radio program in Stanford has done an 50-minute interview with me, the 72th in an excellent series.

David was a skillfull interviewer who had clearly done his homework, so this conversation allowed us to go deeper than usual.

Listen to it here.

(our other interviews are listed here)

The past archive of interviews conducted by David is here, and the future programming is here.

We have integrated those that are most related to our own p2p concerns in our own podcast directory, which now contains nearly 600 items.

Resilience comes in two main parts: food production andindustry, supported by two underlying infrastructural elements: smart local information networks and local money systems.

1. Agricultural and food resilience

As the first solution for farming, John Robb proposes subscription farming:

“In addition to entrepreneurial mini-farms, local farming can also be supported through subscriptions (aka Community Supported Agriculture). These subscriptions entitle the buyer to weekly deliveries/pick-ups of fresh produce. Subscription farming grew from 50 farms in 1990 to over 2000 today.

* If you combine both models (subscription and mini-farms), you can develop hybrid models where individuals rent/manage small plots on a larger parcel and purchase services (from weed/pest control to tilling) from the land’s manager.”

The second solution is SPIN, Small Plot Intensive Farming for the cities and suburbs.

John Robb:

“The a return to local agriculture within suburban and urban environments won’t be a redux of amateur gardening nor will it be done on local traditional farms (mostly, long since paved over). Instead it will feature high tech, intense, and energy efficient efforts on clusters of small plots. In short, it will buffer families from the risk of soft and hard disruptions as well as provide an opportunity for income generation. In fact, we are already seeing signs of resilience entrepreneurs in this space. One example is SPIN (small plot intensive) farming, a company that has optimized/packaged techniques for suburban/urban farmers.

* High value products. A focus on products that cost the most and are the most valuable to local buyers (restaurants and farmers markets). Freshness premiums and fuel cost ratios are important variables.”

Does a SPIN-like approach work?

Early indications are that it works. An interesting study done by Urban Partners for the city of Philadelphia indicates that a fully ramped up effort can generate upwards of $120,000 a year in sales and $60,000 in net income.

How it Will Accelerate

Factors that will accelerate local farming include (in addition to the acceleration of effort due to negative pressure, like those listed above):

* Community support and demand. Relaxation of zoning/community regulations against yard conversions, support for a farmer’s market, etc.”

2. Local industrial fabrication networks

For industry, what is needed is the creation of fabrication networks:

“John Robb:

“Already, the fabrication equipment necessary to build complex objects/products costs only $20-50 thousand (some systems are in the hundred dollar range) and the costs are plunging. Given the technological trends, it will be possible in the next decade or so to produce nearly any product locally through these local fabricators in a cost competitive way — some at home and the rest at a local shop. The system like the one I built above would make it possible to take designs you purchase or acquire on a Web site, modify them as you see fit, and then send them to a local fabrication company (or your desktop) nearby for production.

* Comparative/competitive advantage. Communities that shift to self-production early will benefit from an ability to not only deal with shocks/disruptions better than global competitors, they will be able to generate wealth faster through cost reduction and commercial exploitation of innovations.”

3. Smart Local Information Networks

All this need to be tied together through smart local information networks, you can’t just rely on the international infrastructure, he insists:

“Most of the local loops (from telco fiber to cable company coaxial) currently in place and/or being installed in the US are dumb (I suspect it is the same globally). They simply route data from local customers to regionally clustered corporate server farms and then outwards/back. This means that any disconnection (physical or logical fault) between local customers and these remote systems will result in a complete cessation of service.”

* Community coordination software to sit on these servers. Easy to use and edit social software: blogs, wikis, etc. If the market is large enough, there will be software packages (hopefully open source) that replicate the functionality of a fully functional emergency response system (i.e. locally cached Google maps, etc.). In terms of operating this software, most communities could ask schools/boy scouts/etc. to maintain the software, even during an emergency (young people are much more likely to have the skill sets to do this w/o specific training).”

4. Local monetary systems

Finally, control of local money may be very important:

John Robb:

“despite spotty record so far, scrip is an extremely powerful means of accelerating local economic activity when nothing else seems possible (in economic extremis).

* To the extent possible, connect scrip to local production rather than retail. Locally produced food (farmer’s markets), energy (via local microgrids), products (personal fabs), and labor/services. Further, work with local banks to establish checking accounts for scrip and to enable conversions hard currencies (at a slight discount).

There is one element of the above explanations that strikes a doubtful chord, i.e. the jump from present 3D printing of simple molds, to complex personal fabrication networks, in just a decade. I may return on that topic after consultation with our own network.”

Here’s another commentary, from Sam Rose:

“Robb recognizes the technology and infrastructure systems that we need in place for resilient community. “SPIN” ventures are a definite focus on Ohio Local Food Systems Collaborative.

For instance, a person new to these ideas could follow a “plan” that would help them become self-employed, voluntary network participant withing 3-4 years time. This is similar to general plans that show people how to plan/save for retirement, how to buy a home, how to be more energy efficient, etc. It’s just that in this case people would be learning how to change the way that they procure food, technology, etc …

• New Statesman - Battle of the blogs in Iran
  over the past seven years blogs have come to fulfil the role of liberal newspapers, civil society organisations and even private gatherings. In 2004 unofficial estimates placed Persian as the fourth most common language in the blogosphere.
• Born Digital: A review for the moment - Digital Native
  postulates a watershed between those born on or before 1980 and those born after.
• Digital Natives » Digital Natives Forum Today! & Obama Works: Online Activism Breeds Local Change
  Obama Works is an independent grassroots organization that helps Obama supporters in neighborhoods across the country to organize community service events. The group was founded in early 2008 by a group of Yale students who were inspired by Barack Obama
• liquid culture: <i>The Pirate Bay</i>: the fine line between publishing and “merely providing” data
  On the 5th of September 2008 it transpired (TT, 2008) that The Pirate Bay was making public some of the evidence from a well-known murder case in Sweden where the victims had been children.
• If God had a powerbook at Mediacology
  Sarah Palin’s church is apparently quite media and tech savvy. Who could imagine the apoloclypse would be made so vivid by FinalCut Pro. (You can skip the little intro bit and go straight to the church video towards the end.) PS Please spread widely. People need to know what these people are up to.
• Life Despite Capitalism - Building Radical Economies — keimform.de
  We will analyse why the current economic system has failed and we will learn from the possibilities and experiences of those working despite capitalism to build autonomous networks of production and circulation from a basis of sustainability, self organization, solidarity, respect and social/environmental justice.
• ESCANDA - Espacio Social Colectivo para la Autogestión, la Diversidad y la Autonomía
  Escanda is a space for practicing and experimenting how to live together, without exchange relations and with horizontal structures. The common thread is non-hierarchical, anti-capitalist grassroots movements, with an emphasis on the environment
• Thinking Space: Programming The Universe, Part Two
  In contrast to energy or mass, Seth's research discovered that information computes by itself. It means that essentially information production could be energy free when its output does not involve mass/energy production
• Towards a New Literacy of Cooperation in Business [SR-851A] | The Institute For The Future
  Traditional business strategy is organized around competition: win–lose models fueled by SWOT analyses, market share frameworks, hard measurement, and protection of quantifiable private assets.
• Ohio Local Food Systems Collaborative
  Welcome ...to a network of the many people who support local food production and consumption in Ohio!
• Greener Acres | Ohio Local Food Systems Collaborative
  Advance ideas for new or expanded businesses within local food systems among communities and neighborhoods in the Columbus, Ohio area
• USDA Specialty Crops Research Initiative grant awarded! | Ohio Local Food Systems Collaborative
  The overall goal of the project is to support the networking needed for rapid commercialization of innovations emerging in production and marketing of specialty crops in local food systems.
• WxMonitor - Open Source Weather Monitoring
• OSCirrus open source software weather station
  an expandable, open source software weather station built on inexpensive hardware and weather sensors.
• Weather Toys - Build your own Weather Station
  This is the official site to learn more about the Weather Toys book, download the source code for the book's projects, get the latest updates, and share your weather station photos and information with others

What is my most valuable source of information?

Without any doubt, it is the delicious network feature, which lets me directly peep into the minds and discoveries of people I respect most, such as Howard Rheingold, Clay Shirky, McKenzie Wark and four dozen other people.

I’ve always wished that when I search, I could use some feature that would prioritize the items that those trusted people have already chosen.

So I totally symphatize with the feelings of Steve Rubel at MicroPersuasion, in his analysis of the link between search and social networks:

“TRUSTED SEARCH TRUMPS UNTRUSTED SEARCH - Do you trust Google? I do as does most everyone. Do you trust what’s in Google? For me, that depends on what I am searching for and where it comes from. However, I do trust the 1,000 people I have added to my social network on Facebook. In fact, it’s why I limit my connections there to people I have either met or corresponded with. I value what they talk about and share there.

However, there’s a gaping hole in the Facebook experience. While I can search through my friends, find new friends and also groups, I can’t search the content my network creates. In addition, I can’t go a layer deeper to see what my friends’ friends are sharing (as I can on Friendfeed). Look for search to get embedded deeper into the social networking experience and create a split between trusted and untrusted search. “

John Robb, master analyst of global guerilla warfare, is very pessimistic about the potential of the current global system to prevail. This means that he expects, like us, a strong trend towards relocalization. However, his vision is more radical since he expects a global breakdown. Hence, the need for a distributed network of resilient local communities, that can thrive amongst the chaos. However, it is not survivalism he is advocating, but local communities connected with global tinkering networks, supported by smart local and international network technology, and that are hyperproductive compared to the nation-state.

In other words, John Robb is moving into the same style of thinking and seeking for solutions that is characteristic of other ‘peer to peer thinkers’ (and doers), and it is time to present his thinking more extensively.

We’ll do that in two parts. First, a general presentation of resilience; then, in the next installment, we focus on the constituent parts. We will quote liberally but not fully, so please go to the original articles for more extensive context and treatment.

Good complements to John Robb are the similar and complementary explorations by Eric Hunting, Steve Bosserman, Dave Pollard, and Jeff Vail, with Marcin Jakubowski as the ultimate practicioner.

So, how does he define resilient communites?

John Robb:

“This conceptual model creates a set of new services that allow the smallest viable subset of social systems, the community (however you define it), to enjoy the fruits of globalization without being completely vulnerable to its excesses. These services are configured to provide the ability to survive an extended disconnection from the global grid”

The resilient community has broad applicability beyond just improving the ability of those of us in developed economies to preserve wealth and a quality of life despite severe system shocks. It can also be applied to the problems of counter-insurgency in semi-modern urban environment (to radically update a process that was built for the last century) and provide the potential for organic development in underdeveloped areas of the world. The key is that we need to support the open source efforts currently underway to expand this capability underway such as the transition towns movement to MIT’s low tech solutions effort.”

What is his rationale for resilient communities? Answer: the coming state failure.

He writes:

“As you watch the global financial system continue to unravel this fall, think hard what it will take to prevent rampant state failure in a chaotic global market system that has already weakened (privatized, hollowed out, and bankrupted) nation-states across the entire landscape.”

Given the depth of the crisis, the emergence of such resilient communities are nearly inevitable, he argues:

“* Local is the only choice. The ability of the global system to dampen instability and prevent failure is nearing zero. We have neither the organizational frameworks necessary for global governance nor the precise tools of global policy required (even IF we were smart enough to manage something this complex). Any chance of real global change must start at the ground level by correcting the true sources of the problem and spread virally. Resilient communities eliminate nearly all of the drivers towards global instability and mitigate the effects of instability already in the system. It’s self-reinforcing.

* RCs offer a path to accelerating returns. In contrast to the isolation of survivalism, the RC is community driven — both within the community’s physical environs and across similar efforts (via data connectivity). As such, it will benefit (we are already seeing this) from rapid rates of innovation available through open source development — across the entire range of activities from energy to food to product fabrication. Relatively quickly, the solutions generated from these efforts will convert a community that was once a black hole of economic productivity into its exact opposite: a fount of accelerating wealth and life improvement that is orders of magnitude more efficient in its use of mass, energy, space, time, and information.”

Resilient communities are a result of superempowerment created by distributed networking, he explains:

“Most important to our analysis is how this change superempowers small groups, allowing them to accomplish activities normally reserved for large corporations or governments.

Unfortunately, this supempowerment makes it possible for small groups to do incredible damage to global society. Fortunately, it also making it possible for resilient communities to efficiently and productively emulate global production/services locally. As a result, the resilient community isn’t a step backwards to 19th Century approaches (survivalism, scarcity, and low productivity), but rather a move in a direction that makes it possible to generate rapid and sustained (as opposed to the relative stasis and irregular progress of the current system) improvements how we live.

Commentary:

Here’s a comment by Jeff Vail, author of the Theory of Power:

“I think that John Robb takes the most implementable and realistic approach to improving decentralized resiliency by placing the locus of self-sufficiency at the community level. However, I think that the ideal approach is to view the drive to replace hierarchal and centralized processes with a scale-free or fractal approach to self-sufficiency. In a dystopian view of the future resilient communities become indistinguishable from networks of feudal fiefs and manors. The key, in my opinion, to maintaining the participatory, egalitarian, and advancing mode of community is that it must be composed of individuals and sub-community groups that are equally self-sufficient and resilient. A community made up of people who depend on the good governance of community leaders is a recipe for localized totalitarianism, and even communities that begin in egalitarian, representative fashion will trend toward localized centralization, localized autocracy unless the components cut the same ties of dependency on and control by the community support structure that Resilient Communities seek to cut from the global system. Additionally, while some forms of self-sufficient production may be most appropriate at the community, or even bio-regional level, others may prove most efficient at a much lower level: water collection, storage, and purification; energy for home heating and cooling; substantial food production; etc. While it may be most realistic to target the Resilient Community theory at community organizers, this theory should at least encourage those organizers to actively facilitate the creation of scale-free self-sufficiency within their communities.”

We continue our coverage of Siefkes’ discussion of his Peer Economy workshop in Hiddinghausen, where he proposed the idea of a Commons Network.

In the same article, he proposes an interesting typology of such a commons.

I suggest that perhaps we could distinguish sharing networks in case of Granted Property, and talk of a Commons Network in case of Common Property?

Here is the summary by Christian Siefkes:

Typology according to Property Format:

Shared goods and the necessary means of production are either:

• Granted Property: (private property shared by the owners)
• Common Property (permanent part of the commons—nobody has the right to take them out)

Typology according to Usage Formats:

• “Shares: goods that are shared

o Parallel co-use (e.g. Wi-Fi)
o Serial co-use (e.g. book lending, apartments) o Repositories (e.g. of tools; libraries)
o Open Production Places (e.g. on-demand book/media printer, individual furniture-maker)

• Floaters: goods that can “float” from one peer to another (“New user wanted”)

• Sources (“Open X Source”): peers or projects producing new goods

Sample: Open Food Source, maybe using permaculture/community farming

• Sinks: peers or projects using/consuming goods

Sharing Constraints:

“Based on an idea by Thomas Kalka.

Family of constraints which shares may apply (family of “sharing agreements”, similar to the family of Creative Commons licenses):

• Permanent: good must remain permanently in the commons (“permafloater”)

• Transitive: any goods produced with the help of this good become part of the commons (“copyleft” for physical goods/means of production)

• Attribution appreciated: sharers wish to be attributed, if practical (not a strict requirement)

• Details for serial co-use:

o Use on site (e.g. washing machine, on-demand press, house/apartment) or move to user (e.g. books)?
o If move to user: who (user or sharer) organizes/pays for transport? o Transfer to others allowed? (only within a specific region?) o Return on date / on demand?
o Must repair if broken by user?”

Why Participate?

For the same reasons that motivate people to develop free software or participate in community networks:

• To produce goods they like to have (“scratching an itch”)
• To do something they enjoy doing (“fun and passion”)
• To give something back to the community
• To learn something or expand their skills
• To increase their reputation or community standing
• Because sharers might get preferred treatment

Source: http://www.keimform.de/2008/09/08/hiddinghausen-talks-2-commons-network/

P2P security scholar Athina Karatzogianni has edited an excellent collection of essays on cyber-conflict.

(unfortunately it is only avalailable at extortionate prices)

The abstract says that:

“This volume examines theoretical and empirical issues relating to cyberconflict and its implications for global security and politics.

Taking a multidimensional approach to current debates in internet politics, the book comprises essays by leading experts from across the world. The volume includes a comprehensive introduction to current debates in the field and their ramifications for global politics, and follows this with empirical case studies. These include cyberconflict, cyberwars, information warfare and hacktivism, in contexts such as Sri Lanka, Lebanon and Estonia, the European Social Forum, feminist cybercrusades and the use of the internet as a weapon by ethnoreligious and socio-political movements. The volume presents the theoretical debates and case studies of cyberconflict in a coherent, progressive and truly multidisciplinary way. ”

Athina has contributed the introduction: New Media and the Reconfiguration of Power in Global Politics as well as a separate essay.

My own contribution is a reworking and expansion of: Some notes on the social antagonism in netarchical capitalism.

Amongst the other contributions:

*2. War and the New Media Paradox Hall Gardner

*3. The Internet as a weapon of war? Some thoughts on radicalization Ben O’Louglin and Andrew Hoskins

*4. Transparency and accountability in the age of cyberpolitics: the role of blogs in framing conflict

* 8. The Internet and Militant Jihadism: Global to Local Re-imaginings Frazer Egerton

* 12. Electronic Civil Disobedience and Symbolic Power Graham Meikle

* 13. Decentralization and Communication: Email lists and the organizing process of the European Social Forum Anastasia Kavada

We are talking here about free price, not free speech.

Chris Anderson’s book offers a triarchy of three kinds of free:

“The cross-subsidy model: the razors-and-blades model, as well as loss leaders of all sorts, from “free gift inside” to “free toaster for opening an account

The Freemium model: “The third is the new one, enabled by digital markets where the marginal cost of production and distribution is close to zero. This is the one that allows the “freemium” business model, where 90% of the users get the basic product for free and 10% chose to pay for a premium version.”

It is glaringly obvious that something is missing here, the kind of exchange that takes place through couchsurfing for example … which has variously been called the freeconomy, the adventure economy …

(it also does not cover state-subsidized free services)

This is well explained by the Digital Extremist blog, which insists on this fourth kind of free, and calls it “IASCT” which stands for Indirect Abundant Synergistic Cooperation Theory.

DE explains:

“It is both another economic structure and a fourth model in the antique models in use today. The premise is abundance (where the premise of the systems today is scarcity) and its methodology is indirect (where the model’s today use direct cooperation).

It takes a degree of faith, yes; but it is valuable to list because it is truly and legitimately Free #4

I would also like to remind our readers of the very valuable typology of open and free business models developed by Steve Bosserman.

Here is my summary of Steve’s quaternary typology:

“Differentiating between open and closed content/code/design, and free/paid approaches, yields for quadrants:

d) Quadrant 4 = Closed and paid: the classic business model that we are all familiar with and which relies on state-protected intellectual rights monopolies. This is the model that is being most severely undermined by the free replicability of information. This means that it is not just the hackers and consumers that threaten such a business model, but your own competitors. In any sector, there will always be a pioneering company that decides to give the primary commodity for free, or gives away the source code, deriving income from secondary modalities, leaving the traditional closed rights holders in the cold, and making this model unsustainable in the long run.”

• How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar. - By Evgeny Morozov - Slate Magazine
  I knew that the only reliable way to find out what was really happening was to enlist in the Russian digital army myself.
• Global Guerrillas: OPEN SOURCE WARFARE: Cyberwar
  a form of open source warfare (see Brave New War for a deep exploration of open source warfare) over the Internet fought by groups civilians for reasons of nationalism, revenge
• Global Guerrillas: RESILIENT COMMUNITY: Technological Acceleration
  the resilient community isn't a step backwards to 19th Century approaches (survivalism, scarcity, and low productivity), but rather a move in a direction that makes it possible to generate rapid and sustained (as opposed to the relative stasis and irregular progress of the current system) improvements how we live.
• Global Guerrillas: RC JOURNAL: Survivalism?
  The ability of the global system to dampen instability and prevent failure is nearing zero. We have neither the organizational frameworks necessary for global governance nor the precise tools of global policy required
• Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Governance of the Wilderness
  al Qaeda's theory is edging ever closer to Global Guerrilla thinking (the optimal approach for small group warfare/global insurgency). Amir Taheri has an excellent review of the book
• Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Amplification
  how decentralized tinkering networks (al Qaeda's media arm) improve over time: "The Power of Truth" Review of the video by Jarret Brachman,
• Global Guerrillas: BOW-TIE CONTROL SYSTEMS
  a form of universal control system architecture that underlies complex systems from the Internet to cell metabolism
• Global Guerrillas: THE RESILIENT COMMUNITY: SCRIP
  scrip is an extremely powerful means of accelerating local economic activity when nothing else seems possible (in economic extremis).
• Global Guerrillas: JOURNAL: Task Force ODIN and Cloud Power
  'Cloud Airpower' -- a three dimensional blanket of microsensors and machines that can dominate a target zone -- is the future of the Air Force.
• Bow ties, metabolism, and disease
  The aims of this article are to describe the features of one common organizationalarchitecture in biology, the bow tie. Large-scale organizational frameworks such as the bow tie are necessary starting points for higher-resolution modeling of complex biologic processes
• Global Guerrillas: RC QUOTE: Competitive Advantage
  How will a home or a community be valued by the marketplace in the future? By the amount of solar energy it captures
• Global Guerrillas: BOOK REVIEW: The Unthinkable (Ripley)
  Just wrote a review of Amanda Ripley's new book, "The Unthinkable" for the City Journal. This book is about how human beings respond to disasters (psychologically and biologically)
• Open Source Roboticists On a Path to C3P0 | OStatic
  In the open source community, though, there are several efforts to develop robots that look and/or act like humans, performing interesting and useful tasks.
• ROS - Wiki for robot operating system
  ROS is an operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management
• Personal Robotics Program: Program Overview
  platform for Personal Robotics – robots that do tasks for humans in human environments

From an interesting post by Robert Cringely:

“I’ve been hearing that peer-to-peer file sharing has declined a bit. Actually, it’s the rate of growth that has declined, but in a market where volume is always rising and prices always falling, even a decline in growth can be significant. This is happening for lots of reasons (market saturation, summer vacation, etc.) but the effect appears to be real, much to the relief of the RIAA and MPAA, which hate people sharing music, TV shows, and movies that they see as violating the intellectual property rights of their members.

The poster child for this new kind of service is RapidShare, a German file-sharing service that will let you distribute files up to 200 megs each for free and up to two gigs for not much money — 55 Euros per year — with no limit on the total number of files, total storage, total downloads or even total simultaneous downloads. Rip your copy of The Dark Knight, store it on RapidShare, then send the download URL to anyone you like or simply post it somewhere on the web. It’s not as efficient as P2P, but it sure is easier AND harder to detect since nothing but http is used.”

Eric Hunting writes:

The intermediate level of industrial demassification that is underway today and not necessarily dependent upon open source technology or peer-to-peer activity, creates a fertile ground for the immediate future and drives the complementary trend in the miniaturization of machine tools

One of the key underlying trends that we see as supporting the emergence of peer production in the physical world, is the ‘distribution’ of production capacity, i.e. lower capital requirements and modularisation making possible more decentralized and localized production, which may eventually be realized through the free self-aggregation of producers.

In this context, Nathan Cravens has launched a collective document, which proposes to create a roadmap to achieve what he calls Mutually Assured Production. The working draft is located here and Nathan reports, I’m happy to hear that, that our appeal has generated 17 co-authors.

The appeal is already generating a little buzz at our Ning community space and Eric Hunting has just published an informed reaction which I think bears refracting in our blog as well.

He explains how distributed manufacturing is already in many ways a reality, in particular through the practice of contract manufacturing.

Eric Hunting:

“Industrial ecologies are precipitated by situations where traditional industrial age product development models fail in the face of very high technology development overheads or very high demassification in design driven by desire for personalization/customization producing Long Tail market phenomenon. A solution to these dilemmas is modularization around common architectural platforms in order to compartmentalize and distribute development cost risks, the result being ‘ecologies’ of many small companies independently and competitively developing intercompatible parts for common product platforms -such as the IBM PC.

All this represents an intermediate level of industrial demassification that is underway today and not necessarily dependent upon open source technology or peer-to-peer activity but which creates a fertile ground for that in the immediate future and drives the complementary trend in the miniaturization of machine tools.”

Christian continues his report from the Peer Economy workshop:

“”Free design is an important building block for spreading peer production, but it is not enough. A second topic discussed in Hiddinghausen was therefore how to facilitate and encourage the sharing and the shared production of physical goods and of services in all areas of life. My proposal here is called the *Commons Network.*

The idea of the Commons Network is to build a loose network of people and projects that is based on *commons* (goods which are jointly used, managed or owned) and that allows the free sharing and the shared production of goods and resources among everybody who wants to get involved. Ideally, the network should also become a self-organizing and self-healing “mesh,” where production processes spontaneously adapt to the needs and wishes of the people involved and where anybody can join or leave the network without causing disruption.”

More at Keimform and here.