February 2013
1 post
“If corporations founded by Stanford alumni were to form an independent nation,...”
– Rebecca Solnit · Diary: Google Invades · LRB 7 February 2013 (via interestingsnippets)
June 2012
1 post
March 2012
2 posts
1 tag
“Contrary to a commonly held view of crowdsourcing as a transfer of low-skill...”
– in Forbes
6 tags
Work Without Jobs: A Trend For The Educated Elite →
The rapid shift to non-employment should concern us for a number of reasons. Routine employment data, which underpins economic optimism or pessimism, is unlikely to reflect the full range of opportunity that the economy is creating as we move away from jobs as a primary form of engagement with work. Add to that the fact that emerging types of work tend towards the extremes. They can be...
February 2012
3 posts
4 tags
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
5 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.
“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...
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...
December 2011
14 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
5 tags
“We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will...”
– F. T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto
9 tags
“AIGA was advised by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) not to publish a spec...”
– Ric Grefé
7 tags
“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).
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... →
November 2011
4 posts
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...
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
3 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
1 post
7 tags
August 2011
6 posts
1 tag
“13% of (US) cell owners pretended to be using their phone in order to avoid...”
– Name This Activity: Pretending to Use a Cell Phone to Avoid Other People - Alexis Madrigal - Technology - The Atlantic (via interestingsnippets)
13 tags
Russell Brand on the UK Riots →
Why am I surprised that these young people behave destructively, “mindlessly”, motivated only by self-interest? How should we describe the actions of the city bankers who brought our economy to its knees in 2010? Altruistic? Mindful? Kind? But then again, they do wear suits, so they deserve to be bailed out, perhaps that’s why not one of them has been imprisoned. And they got...
5 tags
Men call the shots on Wikipedia, say researchers →
A good example of how ‘open’ in theory does not equal ‘open’ in practice:
Computer science researchers at the University of Minnesota say that only 16 percent of new editors joining the site are female, and that these women made only nine percent of edits.
8 tags
Is Rioting Revolutionary? →
Must the London youth don Black Bloc attire and shout utopian anarchist slogans while burning cop cars before their acts are recognized as a kind of political rebellion? Must they be able to articulate themselves in a way that is intelligible to readers of Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben and Antonio Negri before their riotous flashmobs are acknowledged as the highest form of networked...
6 tags
The sad truth behind London riot →
As political and social protests grip the Middle East, are growing in Europe and a riot exploded in north London this weekend, here’s a sad truth, expressed by a Londoner when asked by a television reporter: Is rioting the correct way to express your discontent?
“Yes,” said the young man. “You wouldn’t be talking to me now if we didn’t riot, would...
“…the number of Wikipedia editors is slowly dwindling. “We are not replenishing...”
– Wikipedia Is Slowly Dying (via everythingisdisrupted)
July 2011
4 posts
5 tags
More cute pull-quotes from thesis drafts
Howe’s seminal article, The Rise of Crowdsourcing, is accompanied by the tagline, “Remember outsourcing? Sending jobs to India and China is so 2003. The new pool of cheap labor: everyday people using their spare cycles to create content, solve problems, even do corporate R&D.” According to this trendy formulation of a nascent revolution in production, the crowd is not a...
Organizing in a Fish Bowl: Limits of the Web →
fuckyeahmarxismleninism:
By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report
With no help from the Mossad, the Israelis created a “no-fly” list that stymied hundreds of Palestinian solidarity activists from reaching the city of Bethlehem, on the West Bank. Social networking – or Internet organizing, if you will – made it easy to put the trip to the West Bank together – and just as easy for the Israelis to...
9 tags
“The term ‘half-breed’ was used almost exclusively by the federal...”
– Search-tips from Library and Archives Canada. Stay classy, Canada.
15 tags
“Whereas von Hippel’s findings could be read as a strong argument for...”
– Critique of Eric von Hippel’s 1988 book, The Sources of Innovation, in my case study of Threadless. I should mention that von Hippel is also pretty chill about putting his work out into the commons (hence I got to read The Sources of Innovation and Democratizing Innovation for free, and could write...
June 2011
9 posts
4 tags
“[A]s long, therefore, as activity is not voluntarily, but naturally, divided,...”
– Marx, in The German Ideology (1846)
19 tags
“[I]t could be argued that crowdsourcing transcends commodity fetishism –-...”
– Early thoughts on commodity fetishism in relation to crowdsourcing, from my (hopefully soon-finished!) case study of Threadless.
5 tags
Critical Studies in Peer Production →
Found out about this journal today:
Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) seeks high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners of peer production. We understand peer production as a mode of commons-based and oriented production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the self-selection of tasks. Notable examples are the collaborative development of Free...
8 tags
“With crowdsourcing, we witness a highly contradictory departure from Fordism: it...”
– Today, I continue writing about crowdsourcing as a departure from Fordism, in a case study of Threadless.
3 tags
“Those who purchase “design” through crowdsourcing probably treat design as a...”
– AIGA has spoken. (via collectivecontext) 