Category: p2p organizing
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Yesterday’s Trickle-Down Hype Is Today’s Post-Capitalist Meme
Speaking truth to power is a brave thing in any era, in any moment. Trickle-down theory. Critiques of this neoliberal belief, its ironic usage, once a slam relegated to smaller progressive and academic circles now seems to be growing as a default critique. Meme-worthy even. We are moving beyond questioning the myth of trickle-down assumptions,…
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Moving from Transactional to Intentional Cultures
The Preface Story… And The Post: When teachers and students are seen as sellers and consumers that’s transactional culture. When the people in local government and in a city are seen as service providers and consumers, that’s transactional culture. In the U.S. since the Reaganite 1980s the U.S. became a largely transactional culture. Today the…
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Smart Cities Or Wise Cities?
Smart cities, smart politicians, smart leaders, smart writers, smart journalists, smart policy makers, smart planners, smart consultants, smart authors, smart… people. When most people use the word “smart” in civic life they are really saying some person: has technocratic or corporate efficiency, or has skillful rhetoric regardless of logic or ethics, or has an exemplary…
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Living Within The American Lie, On The Passing of Vaclav Havel
“In highly simplified terms, it could be said that the post-totalitarian system has been built on foundations laid by the historical encounter between dictatorship and the consumer society. Is it not true that the far-reaching adaptability to living a lie and the effortless spread of social auto-totality have some connection with the general unwillingness of…
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World Charter for the Right to the City
(Liberated into HTML from one of the many PDFs of this document, this text in particular was found at UrbanReinventors.net on October 2, 2011. See wikipedia for more on the idea of the Right to the City. I posted this after mulling over the Declaration of the Occupation of New York City posted by the…
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John Dewey 2.0 – We the P2P Public, Reassembling, Eclipsed No More
John Dewey wrote 2.5 human generations ago (in 1927) about what we now find so valuable in digital peer to peer systems of communication that enable better freedom of Expression, Transparency, and Collaboration. Dewey’s writing was in response to Walter Lippmann who wrote cynically about the “Phantom Public” and in that era of broadcast-top-down-one-way-media on the rise it’s…
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Renewing Networks: Egypt & “Losing Control”
(Image: “Thursday 10 February 2011 – Day 17 Al Qasr Al Aini Street, Cairo as doctors and nurses walk peacefully on one side of the street, others take video from mobile phones in the other side of the street.” photo by sierragoddess. cc-by-nd) A lot of the recent talk about what’s going on in Tunisia…