Privatizing Greece
The Question: Is the sale of the Greek family silver a long-term solution? is to be answered: No!
But what else to do? The answer is found around the corner: A wage raise in Germany.
General
Community Gardening and Grassroots Politics in the Neoliberal City
When community garden activists of the 1970s and early 1980s clandestinely planted tomatoes, cucumber and sunflowers in abandoned backyards and on run-down lots, they probably never imagined that a time would come when city administrations would embrace urban gardening as an important “cultural, ecological and social resource”.1 Many of today’s community gardens in North America and Europe started out as squats or informal “guerilla style” gardens and were influenced by, if not a substantial part of urban social and environmental movements of the 1960s and 1970s.2
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London – March 26th – All out against the cuts
“Our name is Knowledge Liberation Front, and we’re your crisis!”
Pirate Utopias
During the ‘Golden Age’ of piracy in the 17th and 18th centuries, crews of early proletarian rebels, dropouts from civilization, plundered the lucrative shipping lanes between Europe and America. They operated from land enclaves, free ports; ‘pirate utopias’ located on islands and coastlines as yet beyond the reach of civilization. From these mini-anarchies – ‘temporary autonomous zones’ – they launched raiding parties so successful that they created an imperial crisis, attacking British trade with the colonies, and crippling the emerging system of global exploitation, slavery and colonialism. Read more about “Pirate Utopias: Under the Banner of King Death”.
April ’11, Rome: Conference on Water Commons
The Conference “Common Goods of Humankind: The Referendum Against Water Privatisation in Italy” will take place in Rome on the 28th an 29th of April. Read more
The Future of ‘The Commons’: Neoliberalism’s ‘Plan B’ or the Original Disaccumulation of Capital?
The current issue of new formations contains an interesting article on “the future of the commons”:
The ‘commons’ has undergone a remarkable transformation in the last fifteen years, from a word referring rather archaically to a grassy square in the centre of New England towns to one variously used by real estate developers, ‘free software’ programmers, ecological activists and peasant revolutionaries to describe very different, indeed conflicting, purposes and realities. I believe that this resurgence of ‘commons’ thinking is due to a confluence of two streams coming from opposing perspectives.
Seafood
Image Collection Palastine 1917-1918
Sorry, only in german language: A collection of more than 1.500 photographs mostly taken from airplanes that have been shot by bavarian air force soldiers on the base of their cooperation with the Ottomanic Empire. The Bavarian State Archives digitalized and published the pictures in very high resolution. I can not find any hint about the license the images are published under. See more
Facebook alternative Diaspora now online alpha-testing
Diaspora is an open-source Facebook alternative. The idea got so much buzz on the crowdsourced micro-funding site Kickstarter, that they were able to turn a goal of raising $10,000 in 39 days into $200,000 from 6,500 backers in the same timeframe. But with such high expectations, you have to deliver. And many expressed doubts that the small team of college students could do that. Read more
Youtube: The Commons
The animated video clip titled “The Commons” provides a short introduction into the idea of the commons, as well as a critical review of the so called “tragedy of the commons”.
Berlin Commons Conference
The International Commons Conference connected about 150 leading figures in commons-based studies and activism for a multidisciplinary, international conference in Berlin, Heinrich Böll Foundation. The general objective was to emerge with a set of principles and long-term goals that can foster the planning and development of commons based organisations and policy as well as their networking capacity. Read more about the outcomes of the conference.
See also: Workshop report: Commoning through the Crisis: creating commons power and resisting enclosures and cooptation
USB dead drop
Online file sharing too dangerous? Dead Drops is an anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space. Anyone can access a Dead Drop and everyone may install a Dead Drop in their neighborhood/city. A Dead Drop must be public accessible. Read more or check the dead drop database
Classical music goes public domain
Two great interactive infographics about oil
The RMI’s oil import map interactively shows how much oil the U.S. has imported, from where, and how much the US have spent every month since 1973. The NYT oil prices chart tells how oil consumption and prize intermingle.