A recent survey of the landscape of economic-themed comics revealed some gems.
I’ve been a longtime fan of xkcd and this time Randall poses his take on alternative currency and cultural memes:
(The tooltip reveals a nod to 4chan.)
marriedtothesea.com on the possible origins of Craigslist:
and finally this quite interesting anonymously posted primer on subprime loans:
alternative currency comics culture exchange
With the motto “taking the Internet to the streets” and inspired by the way the web works, Barcelona-based group Platoniq explores alternative models to distribute, shape and share information, knowledge and cultures. The models they propose are both innovative and built upon a tradition based on political, social and cultural movements that started thirty years ago. But while in the past such projects and structures were mostly the isolated doings of so-called anarchists, punks, and evangelists of ’skillshares’, nowadays they are connecting local structures and processes with global dynamics and networks.
Platoniq gained world fame when they launched Burn Station , a mobile self-service system for searching, listening to and copying music and audio files with no charge. Legally and under a Copyleft Licence. Launched in 2003, Burn Station has met with an enormous and worldwide success. Its system and structure has been autonomously reproduced in schools, social centers, libraries and universities in Europe and South America, demonstrating its value as an educational tool.
Video documentation of Burn Station.
Platoniq’s latest endeavour is the Bank of Common Knowledge , a lab platform that engages with new ways of enhancing the distribution channels for practical and informal knowledge. Stephen Downes believes that : The greatest non-technical issue is the mindset. We have to view information as a flow rather than as a thing. Online learning is a flow. It’s like electricity or water. It’s there, it’s available and it flows. It’s not stuff you collect….
Could the same philosophy apply to the knowledge that does not flow in the digital space?
The Bank of Common Knowledge exports the dynamics of Free Culture and the Copyleft philosophy to processes of knowledge generation and transmission among citizens.
The contents generated are Copyleft, and can be copied, redistributed or modified freely. Based on the organization of meetings among citizens, the Bank of Common Knowledge experiments with new forms of production, learning and citizen participation.
For more details check the video presentation.
Platoniq has organized several free knowledge markets over the past two years. As a member of Platoniq recently explained me, their activities cover an extensive range of topics: The Bank of Common Knowledge Markets are made possible through the offers and requests that BCK receives from citizens: How does a consumer cooperative function?, How can i share wifi with my neighbours?, Is it possible to earn money through collaboration instead of competition?, Is it possible to unfreeze patent-protected scientific knowledge? What can we learn from traditional cultures in the economic context? How can we regularize immigration documents in Spain? How can we set up a wiki without computer?
The exchanges generated during the activities are recorded and published online under a copyleft license in order to guarantee that knowledge keep on circulating.
Video of the Cambridge’s market
Video of the Lisbon edition.
In order to make BCK truly public (in the sense that its appeal should go beyond the usual copyleft and the free culture crowd), Platoniq is testing various knowledge transmission and communication formats, such as games, demos, workshops, first person experiences, challenges, first aid kits or take away theory. These activities are documented in a set of video manuals or knowledge capsules produced for inclusion in the Bank of Common Knowledge.
The main goal of the project is not to build an online video archive, even if that would end up being one of the consequences , says Platoniq. The real challenge for the Bank of Common Knowledge is to build a model of transmission and free exchange whose social organization and self-training strategies can be easily replicated.
activism culture exchange free knowledge platoniq services
This is a thought exercise:
Imagine waking up in 2015 and all money has disappeared. All cash, credit cards and forms of currency, gone. Stock markets, kaput. A world without money.
What’s more, you can’t even remember that it had existed or that it had been important to you or the world.
All you have is yourself and the people and ideas you value. You have your unique combination of history, talent, skills and creativity. Your understanding of the world based on your DNA, your upbringing, your geographic location and your influences. You have your thoughts, ideas, perceptions, sensory experiences. And you have the need to process, share, express and inspire.
Then imagine people coming together to solve problems with nothing but this, and with no prior knowledge of what exchange used to be.
Would you think in terms of what you need or what you can share? Would you exchange or contribute?
If you were to offer something to exchange, what would it be? How do you conduct this exchange? How is value established, among individuals? Among communities?
How might you set up an exchange that leverages everyone’s talents, creativity, perspectives and passions? How would you form groups? How would you solve problems?
And how might you prepare now for this future?
[Note: This is meant to be a thought exercise to explore omission, and inspired by one of John Maeda's Laws of Simplicity: 'Simplicity is about subtracting the obvious, and adding the meaningful.']
alternative currency community culture exchange future questions value
Important, uncertain, uncontrollable. These are the 3 characteristics shared by the events we are looking for till 2015. Foresight is mostly about sketching and playing with the factors that will have an important influence on how we live, that we cannot be sure of and which we cannot always control.
10 years ahead, the big picture is quite clear, let’s set up the scene using some common pointers. On the environmental side, the pressure will be more and more important, with the beginning of the natural resource exhaustion in some petro-region, the possible re-localization of production in places which used to outsource it to developing countries. In terms of demography, developed countries will experience both aging population and the arrival of younger migrants, which will surely lead to some unbalanced repartition of wealth and social protections. Of course, developing countries will keep seeing a booming young population, only a part of it may escape and leave for the western world. Globalization will be more and more reinforced with the interdependence of different economies but in 2015, some weak signals of today may even be more pregnant:
* the competitive advantage of countries with low cost of labor may decrease, and the transportation cost will rise
* the creation of wealth will be even more affected by technological and industrial factors thanks to the advent of computer-based design tools (such as 3D printing), new materials and energy sources.
* the preference of consumer will more and more go to locally-produced artifacts and food.
* on the political side, states and institutions will try to reduce the dependency their territories have with other sources of production.
* jeremy rifkin’s “age of access” will be the right metaphor here as consumers will have tons of “services” at hands mediated by various technologies. The difficulty to maintain the interoperability of these services will of course lead to weird scenarios and misunderstandings.
* social relationships will still thrive with an even wider range of links: merchant-based, family-based, politically-based but, above all communautary-based with an shape: the diaspora model. The cohabitation of communities with different needs, ethnic and religious ideals, sources of wealth and desires will of course lead to some frictions.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/purplbutrfly/2713329072/
The quick and dirty picture I’ve painted here is of course characterized by a clear lack of balance and symmetry between various actors (developed/developing countries, migrant versus others, those who have access and those who don’t) which will eventually lead to conflicts and crisis. Globalization will foster migration, re-localization, nuisances caused by transport and their creeping infrastructures, etc. The asymmetry between different communities will also lead to greater surveillance and threat of privacy. One of the answer for this will be the recurring “calls for more regulations” in the economic, cultural, political and perhaps even religious spheres. Regulation at global levels will be so slow that nothing may happened through the UN but some regional blocks (such as the EU) may manage to structure a bit their socio-economic system. The side-effect of regulation will inevitably lead to resistance and the reinforcement of the aforementioned communities.
In my next post, I’ll try to address what this means for the evolution of transactions and how these factors may reshape the exchange of value. Or, to put it shortly what happens at the individual or social level.
capitalism community context culture debate
