The $100bn Facebook question: Will capitalism survive ‘value abundance’? by Michel Bauwens, Aljazeera: […] Open-source software, shared innovation and crowd-sourced manufacturing threaten capitalism as we know it. Not only is the world faced with a global resource crisis, it is also facing a crisis of intensive development, because value creators are increasingly income-less. The knowledge economy turns out to be a pipe dream, because what is abundant cannot sustain market dynamics.

Thus we have an exponential rise in the creation of use value, but only a linear increase in the creation of monetary value. Continue reading

Time/Bank Restaurant :: September 24 – October 16, 2011, Thursdays through Sundays; 1:00 – 3:00 pm :: Abrons Arts Center, 466 Grand Street, New York City.

Time/Bank will open a New York City branch in the form of a temporary restaurant on the Lower East Side, which will offer daily lunch in exchange for time credits and time currency that you can earn by helping others in Time/Bank community.

There will be a changing menu of meals prepared with recipes provided by a group of artists who like to cook, including Martha Rosler, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Carolina Caycedo, Lawrence Weiner, Liam Gillick, WAGE, and many others. Continue reading

Everything Must Go! Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield — An exploration of art and commerce through gift and barter economies — Give One, Get One Free :: until August 31, 2011 :: 24 Eagle Street, North Adams, Massachusetts.

As part of DownStreet Art, Ephraim & Sadie Hatfield will manufacture large quantities of small electronic art works that they will give away free of charge through their pop-up “store” at 24 Eagle Street in North Adams, MA. Each work of art will feature an object that has been gifted by the public to the Hatfields.

Give One, Get One Free: The Hatfields seek interesting items, curiosities, toys, trinkets, memorabilia, and other objects that can serve as a focal point for these works. Continue reading

The Principle of Reciprocity by Dr. Hector Rodriguez from Videotage Unlimited on Vimeo. Continue reading

Time/Bank @ Liverpool Biennial :: October 18 – November 28, 2010 :: 52 Renshaw Street, L1 4PN, UK.

Starting about a year ago, Julieta Aranda & Anton Vidokle have been developing a time bank for the art community. On a practical level, their Time/Bank is a platform where artists, curators, writers and other people in their field, can exchange time and skills — help each other get things done without using money. Continue reading

Scanners, collectors and aggregators. On the ‘underground movement’ of (pirated) theory text sharing by Janneke Adema, posted on Open Reflections, September 20, 2009

“But as I say, let’s play a game of science fiction and imagine for a moment: what would it be like if it were possible to have an academic equivalent to the peer-to-peer file sharing practices associated with Napster, eMule, and BitTorrent, something dealing with written texts rather than music? What would the consequences be for the way in which scholarly research is conceived, communicated, acquired, exchanged, practiced, and understood?” — Gary Hall – Digitize this book! (2008)

Ubu web was founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith and has developed from ‘a repository for visual, concrete and (later) sound poetry, to a site that ‘embraced all forms of the avant-garde and beyond. Continue reading

Morgan Currie wrote:

“How can the book find an adequate outside with which to assemble in heterogeneity, rather than a world to reproduce” – Deleuze and Guattari.

Despite the recent hype around ebooks, the future of publishing remains uncertain. The growth in markets for electronic distribution has resulted in a messy and highly competitive ecology of digital rights management systems, conflicting file formats and devices, and an online book market driven by new players such as Google and Apple. Meanwhile, pirate networks for ‘liberated knowledge’ have opened other avenues for delivering content (whether legal or not), while the open access movement has increasingly consolidated as a legitimate alternative to corporate publishers. These are the realities of media convergence as perpetual crisis, or at least an ongoing entanglement of interests, and a situation full of potential for the future of the book. Continue reading

Esse, Nosse, Posse Common Wealth for Common People — Online exhibition and Platform :: Curated by Daphne Dragona (Greece).

Contributing artists and theorists: Burak Arikan & Engin Erdogan (Τurkey), Samuel Bianchini (France), Michael Bielicky, Kamila B. Richter (Chech Republic/ Germany), Marcelo Expósito (Spain), Furtherfield (UK), Pat Kane (UK), Carlos Katastrofsky (Austria), Dmytri Kleiner (Germany), Nicholas Knouf (USA), Tobias Leingruber (Germany)/ Jamie Wilkinson (USA)/ Greg Leuch (USA), Aarton Koblin & Daniel Massey (USA), Geert Lovink (Netherlands), MediaShed & Eyebeam (UK/ USA), Molleindustria (Italy), Ge Jin aka Jingle (China), Matteo Pasquinelli (Italy), Platoniq.net (Spain), Juan Martin Prada (Spain), Kate Rich (UK), Stephanie Rothenberg & Jeff Crouse (USA), Trebor Scholz (USA), Anders Weberg (Sweden), Dan Phiffer & Mushon Zer-Aviv (US/IL). Continue reading

Furtherfield needs your old laptops for work with homeless people in London… >The Zero Dollar Laptop Project:

In January 2010 The Zero Dollar Laptop Project kicks off with clients of St Mungo’s charity for homeless people in London. We will be recycling hardware, breaking Windows and installing Free and Open Source Software to build media laptops and create music, graphics and video for distribution over the Internet. Participants will leave the project with street-smart technical knowledge and a wireless enabled media laptop, classier than any shiny power-book.

The Zero Dollar Laptop is a recycled computer, running Free Open Source Software (FOSS) that is fast and effective — now and long into the future. Do you have an old, unused laptop taking up space in your home or office? Would you like to see it returned to productive life? If YES, then please donate your old laptop. Continue reading