“How a person lives and interacts with others and with nature is called ubuntu. This indigenous knowledge reminds us that we are humans thanks to mother nature. She belongs to us and we belong to her. But we have forgotten who we are and that we have a deep connection to nature.”
The hacker culture is capable of reversing the relationships at play in the contribution economy. Hacking means appropriating tools and networks to put them to other uses. We’re amateurs, yes, but rebel amateurs…
My dear friend, I know what you’re going through. Neoliberalism has you possessed and you don’t know how to get rid of it. If it’s any consolation, let me tell you that you are not alone. Neoliberalism, more than an ideology or a policy, is a demon that has possessed everything. It has possessed the State and all its institutions, the hospitals, the schools, and the workplaces. It has also possessed us. It has taken our bodies, our desires and yearnings, our ideas and dreams. And once possessed, the demon of neoliberalism governs us under its one law: the law of competition.
“But it has to be noted that the world of the existing collaborative economy has a divided soul: one side has much to do with P2P, the communal and the free software community that are by no means in the majority.”
“The native peoples anticipated the much-touted sharing economy by a few centuries. While the current global crisis pushes capitalism towards an irreversible mutation, our vision of a post-capitalist future is remarkably similar to the pre-capitalist origins of indigenous America.”
Neal Gorenflo (founder, Shareable), Michel Bauwens (founder, P2P Foundation), and John Restakis (author, “Humanizing the Economy”) speak with Enric Duran about the creation and development of the Catalan Integral Cooperative, Enric’s path and current situation, and much more.
“Resilience is at the same time the golden rule and the consequence of building community on a shared economy under a P2P architecture. It is our main virtue and the only thing that can guarantee survival even under increasing global decomposition.” Cyberpunk, P2P, and the Future Now: Michel Bauwens, Neal Gorenflo and John Robb interview David de Ugarte from las Indias.”
“To immunize ourselves from learned helplessness, the best thing is to have encountered neither success nor failure exclusively. Be conscious that there are things which we can control, and things which we cannot. As Epicurus remarked: “We must remember that the future is neither wholly ours nor wholly not ours, so that neither must we count upon it as quite certain to come nor despair of it as quite certain not to come…”
Can commons-oriented peer production be applied to material production? Will activists and contributors to the commons always be forced to work within capitalist structures to subsist while investing their available free time in volunteer activities? How can we create socially-oriented companies without the start-up capital to fund them? Is there a model that will allow us to make a living, produce goods and services and even compete with the dominant hegemony?
Juan Domingo Sánchez Estop Translated by Stacco Troncoso, edited by Ann Marie Utratel I recently had occasion to visit Disneyland