The end of neoliberalism - Reflecting the empirical reality of the economy

"New economics does not accept the orthodox theory that has dominated economics for the past several decades that humans are perfectly rational, markets are perfectly efficient, institutions are optimally designed and economies are self-correcting equilibrium systems that invariably find a state that maximises social welfare. [...] Rather new economics is best characterised as a research programme that encompasses a broad range of theories, empirical work, and methods. It is also highly interdisciplinary, involving not only economists, but psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, historians, physicists, biologists, mathematicians, computer scientists, and others across the social and physical sciences."

How the Profound Changes in Economics Make Left Versus Right Debates Irrelevant: here

The critical role of energy in foundational infrastructure

"[...] the great economic revolutions in history are infrastructure revolutions, and what makes the great infrastructure revolutions transformational is the convergence of new communications media with new energy regimes. Every energy revolution in history has been accompanied by its own unique communications revolution. Energy revolutions change the temporal and spatial reach of society and make possible more complex living arrangements, all of which require new communication media to manage and coordinate the new opportunities. Try to imagine organizing the production and distribution complexities of a steam-powered urban industrial revolution without cheap and quick steam-powered printing and the telegraph, or organizing the managerial complexities of an oil, auto, and suburban mass-consumer culture without centralized electricity and especially telephone communication, radio and television."
Zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin [pg 236]

Information technology is going to erode the need for work

Paul Mason: "Information technology is going to erode the need for work"

"If you ever get to a situation, where humanity is stood to the side of the production process, letting machines do the job, you will need for knowledge to become social"
[Marx, by Paul Mason]

"If such [automated] machines ever existed, the difference between master and slave would disapear"
[Aristotle]

"The two sources of truth in modern life (universities and the media) are on the systemic attack by the new thought architects of fascism"

Paul Mason: here

Giving narratives a framework for a better world

"At the very least, there is some possibility, even hope, that we could have a world in which much more of intellectual and inventive production is free. "'Free' as in 'free speech,'" Richard Stallman says, not "'free' as in 'free beer.'" But we could hope that much of it would be both free of centralized control and low cost or no cost. When the marginal cost of production is zero, the marginal cost of transmission and storage approaches zero, the process of creation is additive, and much of the labor doesn't charge – well, the world looks a little different. This is at least a possible future, or part of a possible future, and one that we should not foreclose without thinking twice."
Jeremy Rifkin, in Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 220]


The Second Enclosure Movement - James Boyle - Conference on the Public Domain

"When you give a monopoly to someone it is an incentive for governmental corruption. You are setting up a continuing system os incentives designed to ensure the corruption of your government."
[26:17]

James Boyle: The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain:

Abstract:

"We are in the middle of a second enclosure movement. It sounds grandiloquent to call it "the enclosure of the intangible commons of the mind," but in a very real sense that is just what it is. True, the new state-created property rights may be "intellectual" rather than "real," but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights. In this article, I try to develop the vocabulary and the analytic tools necessary to turn the tide of enclosure. I offer an historical sketch of various types of skepticism about intellectual property, from the antimonopolist criticisms of the Framers of the U.S. Constitution, through the emergence of affirmative arguments for the public domain, to the use of the language of the commons to defend the possibility of distributed methods of non-proprietary production. In many ways, it turns out, concepts of the public domain show the same variation in assumptions, and the same analytic differences, as the concept of property itself. I conclude by arguing that, for a number of reasons, the appropriate model for the change in thinking which I argue for comes from the history of the environmental movement. The invention of the concept of "the environment" pulls together a string of otherwise disconnected issues, offers analytical insight into the blindness implicit in prior ways of thinking, and leads to perception of common interest where none was seen before. Like the environment, the public domain must be "invented" before it is saved. Like the environment, like "nature," the public domain turns out to be a concept that is considerably more slippery than many of us realize. And, like the environment, the public domain nevertheless turns out to be useful, perhaps even necessary."
here


The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
But leaves the greater villain loose
Who steals the common from off the goose


The law demands that we atone
When we take things we do not own
But leaves the lords and ladies fine
Who take things that are yours and mine


The poor and wretched don't escape
If they conspire the law to break
This must be so but they endure
Those who conspire to make the law


The law locks up the man or woman
Who steals the goose from off the common
And geese will still a common lack
Till they go and steal it back

[Seventeenth century protest against English enclosures]

---


Thomas More (one of the only political theorists who are also a saint!):

"your sheep that were wont to be so meek and tame, and so small eaters, now, as I heard say, be become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up, and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy, and devour whole fields, houses, and cities."
Here

The Porto Alegre Treaty

We proclaim these truths to be universal and indivisible;

That the intrinsic value of the Earth’s gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, precedes its utility and commercial value, and therefore must be respected and safeguarded by all political, commercial and social institutions,

That the Earth’s gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, exists in nature and, therefore, must not be claimed as intellectual property even if purified and synthesized in the laboratory,

That the global gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, is a shared legacy and, therefore, a collective responsibility,

And,

Whereas, our increasing knowledge of biology confers a special obligation to serve as a steward on behalf of the preservation and well being of our species as well as all of our other fellow creatures,

Therefore, the nations of the world declare the Earth’s gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, to be a global commons, to be protected and nurtured by all peoples and further declare that genes and the products they code for, in their natural, purified or synthesized form as well as chromosomes, cells, tissue, organs and organisms, including cloned, transgenic and chimeric organisms, will not be allowed to be claimed as commercially negotiable genetic information or intellectual property by governments, commercial enterprises, other institutions or individuals.

The Parties to the treaty - to include signatory nation states and Indigenous Peoples - further agree to administer the gene pool as a trust. The signatories acknowledge the sovereign right and responsibility of every nation and homeland to oversee the biological resources within their borders and determine how they are managed and shared. However, because the gene pool, in all of its biological forms and manifestations, is a global commons, it cannot be sold by any institution or individual as genetic information. Nor can any institution or individual, in turn, lay claim to the genetic information as intellectual property.

Aqui.

On sharing

"Most economists would be nonplussed because their discipline is so wedded to the idea that human nature is purely self-interested and that each individual seeks to optimize his or her autonomy. The very idea of freely choosing to pursue the collective interest is anathema to many market-oriented economists. They might be well served by boning up on findings of evolutionary biologists and neurocognitive scientists. A spate of studies and discoveries over the past 20 years is shattering the long-held belief that human beings are, at their core, utilitarian-seeking loners prowling the marketplace for opportunities to exploit their fellow human beings and enrich themselves.

We are learning that our species is the most social of beings, boasting a very large and extremely complex neocortex. The worst punishment that can be imposed on a human being is ostracism. Cognitive scientists tell us that our neural circuitry is soft wired for experiencing empathic distress and that evolutionary survival has depended far more on our collective sociability than our self-directed proclivities. Far from being an anomaly, the Commons approach to marshaling economic activity appears to be much better suited to our biological instincts than the stark picture of an anonymous marketplace where an invisible hand mechanically rewards selfish behavior in a zero-sum game."
Jeremy Rifkin, in Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg197]

Managing the collaborative commons

"Ostrom, although every bit the economist, was not shy about taking on the role of an anthropologist. She studied commons management schemes from the Swiss Alps to Japanese villages to discover the underlying principles that made them effective governing models. At the very onset of her work, she took care to explain that many of the commons institutions she cataloged had, in her words, "survived droughts, floods, wars, pestilence, and major economical and political changes" over long sweeps of history, making it crystal clear that the commons has proven itself to be a formidable governing institution and worthy of reconsideration in light of the environmental, economic, and social challenges and opportunities facing humanity in an increasingly connected global world."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [of 191/192]

The Collaborative Commons / towards 'the end of History' (?)

"...there lies outside purely private property and government-controlled 'public property' a distinct class of 'inherently public property' which is fully controlled by neither government nor private agents.  [this is] property collectively 'owned' and 'managed' by society at large, with claims independent of and indeed superior to the claims of any purported governmental manager."

Carol Rose, quoted by Jeremy Rifkin in The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 189/190]

Paying for the IoT

The Internet of Things is the first general purpose technology platform in history that can potentially take large parts of the economy to near zero marginal costs. And that’s what makes the marginal cost controversy so pivotal to humanity’s future.

Whether the new potential inherent in the IoT infrastructure can be realised will be determined by who finances the platform.

The struggle for control is already well underway, mostly behind the scenes, in regulatory commissions, courtrooms, legislatures, corporate boardrooms, civil society organisations, and academic circles all over the world. As of yet, only snippets of the discussion have bubbled up to the public consciousness. That is likely to change in the next few years as a younger generation squares off with itself on what kind of economic future it favours.

Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 167]

The search for transcendence and meaning

"In the coming era, deep play in the Collaborative Commons becomes as important as hard work was in the market economy, and the amassing of social capital becomes as valued as the accumulation of market capital. Attachment to community and the search for transcendence and meaning comes to define the measure of one's life rather than one's material wealth.

[...] If the steam engine freed human beings from feudal bondage to pursue material self-interest in the capitalist marketplace, the Internet Of Things frees human beings from the market economy to pursue nonmaterial shared interests on the Collaborative Commons. Many – but not all – of our basic material needs will be met for nearly free in a near zero marginal cost society. Intelligent technology will do most of the heavy lifting in an economy centered on abundance rather than scarcity. A half century from now, our grandchildren are likely to look back at the era of mass employment in the market with the same sense of utter disbelief as we look upon slavery and serfdom in former times. The very idea that a human being's worth was measured almost exclusively by his or her productive output of goods and services and material wealth will seem primitive, even barbaric, and be regarded as a terrible loss of human value to our progeny living in a highly automated world where much of life is lived on the Collaborative Commons."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 161]

3D

The democratization of production fundamentally disrupts the centralized manufacturing practices of the vertically integrated Second Industrial Revolution. The radical implications of installing Fab Labs all over the world so that everyone can be a prosumer has not gone unnoticed. Again, science-fiction writers were among the first to imagine the repercussions.
The zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin [pg114]

Thingiverse:

A meeting place for the 3D printing community.
A website that hold open-source, user-created digital design files licensed under both the General Public Licenses (GPL) and Creative Commons Licenses.
The zero Marginal Cost Society, Jeremy Rifkin [pg113]


The Fab Lab Foundation
Formed in 2009 to facilitate and support the growth of the international fab lab network as well as the development of regional capacity-building organizations. The Fab Foundation is a US non-profit 501(c) 3 organization that emerged from MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms Fab Lab Program. Our mission is to provide access to the tools, the knowledge and the financial means to educate, innovate and invent using technology and digital fabrication to allow anyone to make (almost) anything, and thereby creating opportunities to improve lives and livelihoods around the world. Community organizations, educational institutions and non-profit concerns are our primary beneficiaries.

The Solar Sinter: aqui



The Filabot: tritura e derrete objectos de plástico. O produto resultante pode ser utilizado para imprimir novos objectos.

Imprimir casas: aqui

Fabricantes:

Concept Laser

EOS

Economia e privacidade

"Connecting everyone and everything in a neural network brings the human race out of the age of privacy, a defining characteristic of modernity, and into the era of transparency. While privacy has long been considered a fundamental right, it has never been an inherent right. Indeed, for all human history, until the modern era, life was lived more or less publicly, as befits the most social species on Earth. As late as the sixteenth century, if an individual was to wander alone aimlessly for long periods of time in daylight, or hide away at night, he or she was likely to be regarded as possessed. In virtually every society that we know of before the modern era, people bathed together in public, often urinated and defecated in public, ate at communal tables, frequently engaged in sexual intimacy in public, and slept huddled together en masse.

It wasn't until the early capitalist era that people began to retreat behind locked doors. The bourgeois life was a private affair. Although people took on a public persona, much of their daily lives were pursued in cloistered spaces. At home, life was further isolated into separate rooms, each with their own function – parlors, music rooms, libraries, etc. Individuals even began to sleep alone in separate beds and bedrooms for the very first time.

The enclosure and privatization of human life went hand-in-hand with the enclosure and privatization of the commons. In the new world of private property relations, where everything was reduced to "mine" versus "thine," the notion of the autonomous agent, surrounded by his or her possessions and fenced off from the rest of the world, took on a life of its own. The right to privacy came to be the right to exclude. The notion that every man's home is his castle accompanied the privatization of life. Successive generations came to think of privacy as an inherent human quality endowed by nature rather than a mere social convention fitting a particular moment in the human journey."

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 90, 91]

Post truths / legitimizing reality through discourse / Narratives

Martin Luther

Thomas Aquinas

"The practicing of legitimizing economic paradigms by creating grand cosmological narratives to accompany them is an age-old practice. Contemporary historians point to St. Thomas Aquinas's description of creation as a Great Chain of Being during the feudal era as a good example of the process of framing a cosmology that legitimizes the existing social order. Aquinas argued that the proper workings of nature depend on a labyrinth of obligations among God's creatures. While each creature differs in intellect and cpabilities, the diversity and equality is essential to the orderly functioning of the overall system. If all creatures were equal, St. Thomas reasoned, then they could not act for the advantage of others. By making each creature different, God established a hierarchy of obligations in nature that, if faithfully carried out, allowed the creation to flourish.

St. Thomas's description of God's creation bears a striking resemblance to the way feudal society was set up: everyone's individual survival depended on them faithfully performing their duties within a rigidly defined social hierarchy. Serfs, knights, lords, and the pope were all unequal in degree and kind but obligated to serve others by the feudal bonds of fealty.

[...] The cosmology of the Protestant Reformation that accompanied the soft proto-industrial revolution of the late medieval era performed a similar legitimizing role. Martin Luther launched a frontal attack on the church's notion of the Great Chain of Being, arguing that it legitimized the corrupt hierarchal rule of the pope and the papal administration over the lives of the faithful. The Protestant theologian replaced the church's feudal cosmology with a worldview centered on the personal relationship of each believer with Christ. The democratization of worship fit well with the new communication/energy/transportation matrix that was empowering the new burgher class."

Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pa 70, 71]

Oil giants and banks – what they depend on

"Three of the four largest shareholding companies in the world are oil companies – Royal Dutch Shell, Exxon Mobil, and BP. Underneath the oil giants are ten banks – JPMorgan Chase, Goldman Sachs, BOA Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, Credit Suisse, Barclays Capital, UBS, and Wells Fargo Securities – that control nearly 60 percent of the worlwide investment banking market. [...] beneath the financial investors are 500 globally traded companies – with combined revenue of $22.5 trillion, which is equal to one-third of the world's $62 trillion GDP – that are inextricably connected to and dependent on fossil fuel energy, global telecommunications, and the world's electricity grid for their very existence. In no other period of history have so few institutions wielded so much economic power over the lives of so many people. [...] This unprecedented – and unimaginable – concentration of economic power was not just happenstance or a byproduct of man's insatiable avarice. [...] on a more fundamental level, it flowed inexorably from the communication / energy / transportation matrices that were the foundation of the First and Second Industrial Revolutions."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 66, 67]

The Auto Age

Automobiles consumed "20 percent of the steel, 12 percent of the aluminum, 10 percent of the copper, 51 percent of the lead, 95 percent of the nickel, 35 percent of the zinc, and 60 percent of the rubber used in the U. S." by 1933. One enthusiast, writing in 1932, marveled at the automobile's impact on the economy, noting that "as a consumer of raw material, the automobile has no equal in the history of the world."

Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 64]

The First Industrial Revolution – STEAM – Second half of 19th century

The convergence of coal-powered steam printing and coal-powered steam rail transport created an infrastructure for the First Industrial Revolution. The communications part of the infrastructure was augmented with the build-out of a nationwide telegraph network in the 1860's, allowing businesses instantaneous communication across their supply chains and distribution channels.
The coming together of steam-powered printing, the telegraph, and the steam-powered locomotive dramatically increased the speed and dependability with which economic resources could be marshaled, transported, processed, transformed into products, and distributed to customers.

[...] The vertically integrated business enterprise took off in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and became the dominant business model during the whole of the twentieth century.

[...] Virtually all the entrepreneurs who prospered during the takeoff stage of the First Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth century succeeded in large part because they were able to raise sufficient financial capital by incorporating and becoming a publicly traded shareholding company. The capital allowed them to capture vertically scaled market opportunities and become the standard bearers of their respective industries.

Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 55, 56, 57]

The 18th and 19th centuries paradigm

"Mercantilist policies favored merchant exporters but hurt domestic manufacturers in the host countries as well as the colonies. Moreover, restricting the volume of domestic products that could be produced for the home market in order to keep export prices artificially high worked not only to the disadvantage of the domestic manufacturers, but also the rising middle class and urban working poor, who had to contend with higher prices for domestic goods.

Opposition to mercantilist policies in Europe and the colonies continued to mount, leading the 13 American colonies to break with England in 1776, followed by the French Revolution, which initiated the overthrow of that nation's monarchy in 1789. These two great defining moments in political history were as much about the struggle to secure private property through free trade in open markets as they were about securing political freedom and democratic representation.

Any doubt on that score was quickly put to rest as the far modern nation-states deliberated the question of who should be extended the right to vote. The United States, Britain, France, and most other nation-states in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries believed that the central mission of government was to protect private property and a market economy. With that rationale in mind, the right to vote was extended only to men of property, aligning the new nation-state with a market economy based on free exchange of private property."

Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 46]

IoT

Minds + Machines: Insights from John Flannery on GE’s Digital Transformation

Everything you need to know about the industrial internet of things: here



C40 & Siemens │walking the talk for sustainable cities


Sieman's Sustainable Cities: here


System of Systems

IBM's Smarter Planet: here

All mentioned in "Zero Marginal Cost Society" (pg 17), by Jeremy Rifkin.

Paradigms and unnoticed tipping points

"... paradigm [is] a system of beliefs and assumptions that operate together to establish an integrated and unified worldview that is so convincing and compelling that it is regarded as tantamount to reality itself. [...] A paradigm's narrative power rests on its all-encompassing description of reality. Once accepted, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to question its central assumptions, which appear to reflect the natural order of things. Alternative explanations of the world are rarely entertained, as they fly in the face of what is accepted as unambiguous truth. But this unquestioning acceptance, and refusal to envision alternative explanations, leads to a festering of inconsistencies that pile up until a tipping point is reached where the existing paradigm is torn apart and replaced with a new explanatory paradigm better able to marshal the anomalies, insights, and new developments into a comprehensive new narrative."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 11,12]

Capitalism vs capitalism / ironia do destino!

"Profit is defunct, property is meaningless, and the market is superfluous. [...] A near zero marginal cost society is the optimally efficient state for promoting the general welfare and represents the ultimate triumph of capitalism."
Jeremy Rifkin, Zero Marginal Cost Society [pg 6, 11,12]