Mutualist journal club

join diaspora - blog

At the beginning of the summer, some college students declared that they were going to produce a free, decentralized (i.e. federated) application to compete with Facebook. They requested donations through Kickstarter, and got everything that they wanted almost instantly. There is apparently a lot of interest in a project like this.

In the end, I hope that projects like this, Google Wave, OneSocialWeb, and AppleSeed will be able to convert modern social networking systems into a decentralized, user-controlled system similar to email but much more powerful (at least, email is self-controlled by anyone who controls a server and domain name).

I think that this is one of the most exciting examples of the mutualist ethic (as I understand it) in the society at large. Communication is fundamental to everything that we do, and a flexible user-controlled instant communication system could provide the foundation for other mutualist reforms, such as decentralised currency systems like BitCoin or RipplePay.

Bitcoin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is another decentralized monetary system. It's like Ripplepay in a way, but it seems more sophisticated technically and it has a different basis for value, which I don't quite understand (just reading the Wikipedia article). I see why the currency units are scarce, but not why they are valuable outside of an as-yet unrealized role as money.

The Homebrew Industrial Revolution: A Low-Overhead Manifesto is now available in hard copy format. The eBook version is here.

Marginal Revolution: Getting tough with Germany?

Cowen responds to Krugman's calls to get tough with Germany (and China). Aside from the technical points that Cowen covers, this illustrates how the instabilities of our current economy may lead (is leading) to a global economic system to allocate supply and demand among nations. It sounds like Marx's description of the drive for empire.

FWIW, I wrote a little rant on it.