February 2012
2 posts
7 tags
“The awareness that we live in a system or, better, that our lives and...”
– Massimo De Angelis. The Beginning of History. (2007, p. 225-226, emphasis in original).
January 2012
8 posts
7 tags
“Any existing structures and all the conditions of doing business are always in a...”
– Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32), obviously plagiarizing one of the early chapters of the Communist Manifesto, in which I believe the phrase was about relations that become “antiquated before they can ossify.”
7 tags
“As a matter of fact, capitalist economy is not and cannot be stationary. Nor is...”
– Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 31-32, emphasis included).
If I understand correctly, a good way to become a hugely influential economist is to plagiarize Marx while you repudiate Marx.
6 tags
“To any mind not warped by the habit of fingering the Marxian rosary it should be...”
– Joseph Schumpeter, in Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942, p. 19).
Yep, still waiting on that nuanced, “neutral” (p.xxi) appraisal of Marxism that was promised in the book’s introduction.
“The possibility of the privatisation of the general intellect was something Marx...”
– Slavoj Žižek · The Revolt of the Salaried Bourgeoisie · LRB 11 January 2012
The best Zizek piece in a while (probably since the height of Occupy). He handily explains the becoming-rent of profit, performs a hat-tip and drive-by criticism of Hardt & Negri, and does an eloquent job of making the...
2 tags
6 tags
“…spec work devalues the communication design profession. It reduces...”
– NO!SPEC.
Commodities are here understood in their simplest sense, as undifferentiated goods such as wheat or oil, which are exchanged in a market according to supply and demand, such that their prices are generally determined without the consideration of qualitative differences in their...
Anonymous asked: I am looking for another success story for crowdsourcing like Goldcorp and Toyota, that have opened up there information pathways to people for the company's for humanities greater good. Do you have any other success stories?
December 2011
17 posts
4 tags
“Marx is not only selling well, he has also been praised most recently by German...”
– High praise for Marxism
7 tags
“To confront these issues, we, along with many others, have proposed possible...”
– Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012
3 tags
“On the economic terrain we need to discover new social technologies for freely...”
– Hardt and Negri, What to expect in 2012
9 tags
“We will sing of the great crowds who can finally free themselves from the...”
– Franco Berardi, The Post-Futurist Manifesto
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“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will...”
– F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto
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“AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec...”
– Ric Grefé
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“Time is the room of human development. A man who has no free time to dispose of,...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 54).
4 tags
“We have till now supposed that the working day has given limits. The working...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 52).
1 tag
“[A]s the costs of producing labouring powers of different quality do differ, so...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 39-40).
1 tag
“…how does this strange phenomenon arise, that we find on the market a set...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 38-39).
2 tags
“…wasted upon flunkeys, horses, cats, and so forth…”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 13)
Anti-cat rhetoric: the real reason Internet theorists don’t take a Marxist perspective.
3 tags
“The will of the capitalist is certainly to take as much as possible. What we...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 11)
2 tags
“The working men, therefore, reacting against the attempt at, or the act of,...”
– Marx, in Value, Price and Profit (1935, p. 11).
9 tags
“Unfortunately there is a disturbing growing trend affecting the creative...”
– NO!SPEC
From Photoshop Tennis to Photoshop Cockfighting?
Scamming Social Media with Crowdsourcing is a... →
4 tags
6 tags
“…some of the so-called web 2.0 ideas are stinkers, so we ought to reject...”
– Jaron Lanier
One of the few points I agree with in his ‘manifesto,’ You Are Not A Gadget.
November 2011
11 posts
11 tags
14 tags
Crowd-Sourcing the Renaissance of Manufacturing →
Watch as we enter a dazzling new age, rivaled only by eighteenth century Britain:
In his Strategy for American Innovation, the President called on all agencies to increase their use of prizes to solve tough problems. And in January 2011 he signed new legislation granting every agency broad authority to do so. The Administration also launched Challenge.gov, a one-stop shop where entrepreneurs...
1 tag
“I have endeavoured to take seriously the exaggerated claims of crowdsourcing...”
– Here is where I try to distance myself from the people I keep citing. Immediately afterwards, I try to convince the reader that crowdsourcing is worth studying. Hedging my bets FTW!
3 tags
“It is astonishing how much of the chatter online is driven by fan responses to...”
– Jaron Lanier, in You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (2010, p. 122)
8 tags
Chicago Trader Dumps McDonald’s Applications On... →
Chicagoist reports that someone at the Chicago Board of Trade blanketed Occupy Chicago protesters with hundreds of McDonald’s applications, mocking the demonstrators camped outside. Employees at the organization — the world’s oldest futures exchange — have heckled Occupy Chicago protesters almost since day one. They’ve proudly hung “We Are The 1%” in their office windows, papered the movement...
Crowdsourcing: The Biggest Business Opportunity Or... →
tacanderson:
New post:
You Can’t Ignore Crowdsourcing:
Some of you reading this will be adamantly against spec work and I’ve heard many of you compare it to slave labor (and there’s some evidence to support that). Others will argue that if people don’t like it, they don’t have to participate. I’ve learned, and I’ve said this several times before, anytime something elicits this kind of a...
5 tags
“It actually hadn’t become clear to me how much the discourse had shifted until I...”
– Occupy Wall Street is Transforming its Participants, Our Country, and Democracy | | AlterNet (via alternet-working)
October 2011
4 posts
6 tags
The Rise of the Internet (Anti)-Intellectual? →
Highlights:
“…the need for public intellectuals, the role of academics in framing theories of new technologies and what the consequences are when we leave this discussion to be dominated by business folks.”
“…Jarvis’ book is part of a larger trend of so-called Internet Intellectuals or “gurus” who are not doing rigorous work but instead providing sound-bites...
6 tags
Crowdsourcing links piecework with freelancers... →
This is casual labour reduced to its most basic form, as individuals from Calcutta to Calgary face off in a virtual jobs game where low cost and speed trump education or experience.
“The whole industry is in very early days,” says trailblazing Australian entrepreneur Matt Barrie, founder of Freelancer.com. “We are on the verge of transforming society and how we run business.”
As the...
September 2011
7 posts
3 tags
The Syrian War Crowdsourcing Experiment →
Amnesty International USA and the Standby Task Force have launched an ambitious campaign to crowdsource analysis of Syrian satellite imagery for military movements, demonstrations, and checkpoints. So far, volunteers have tagged more than 2,000 potential troublespots. Is DIY intelligence analysis the future of human rights work?
3 tags
12 tags
iPads Now Helping Marines Unleash Hell →
I know technological advances usher in unintended, often unwanted consequences. I get that. But technophiles, even Apple fanatics, need not be cheerleaders for war.
Wired’s Mark Riffee provides this disappointingly uncritical look at the use of iPads in aerial warfare [read: US marines bombing the shit out of people]:
The Marines recently took a baby step towards a more efficient...
7 tags
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Crowdsourcing as a Declaration of Class War
So you’ve lost your job, maybe even your career or livelihood, and maybe even your home. But don’t fret: your suffering is helping to usher in the era of mass collaboration.
Jeff Howe, who coined the term and literally wrote the book on crowdsourcing, suggests we look toward Mechanical Turk, Amazon’s platform for unskilled, ill-paid labour:
In early 2007, Mechanical...
8 tags
“Crowdsourcing is, at bottom, no more or less than an ascendent business model,...”
– From my first draft of the second thesis chapter, Crowdsourcing is a Paper Tiger: The Assimilation of iStockphoto by the Stock Photo Industry.
5 tags
Crowdsourcing Added to the Merriam-Webster’s...
According to Suzanne Obszanski’s article, Why You Should Know Jeff Howe, crowdsourcing has made it into the dictionary:
Although crowdsourcing is in its inception, the term is catching on rapidly. Recently, crowdsourcing was added in an update of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate ® Dictionary, America’s best-selling dictionary in 2011. This would not have happened if it was not for Jeff...
August 2011
18 posts
6 tags
Foursquare Graffiti Appears Across College... →
This is old news, well, news from early-2010, but these little rebellions are always interesting to see:
As many universities digitize the conventions of the college visit by geotagging points of interest or including history lessons as you navigate campus via smartphone, many officials are running into issues with those defacing the community space.
From The Chronicle of Higher...