Posts
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#WeAreTwitter
Usually when I throw out a somewhat crazy idea, it remains just that—a somewhat crazy idea, out there in the ether. But when I proposed in The Guardian recently that maybe Twiter users should buy Twitter rather than letting it get sold to another big company, something else happened. People started organizing. It has become…
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Ours to Hack
The Internet we’ve been waiting for is now available for pre-order—or, at least, a book about it. For the past couple of years, New School professor Trebor Scholz and I have been working the support and build a movement to develop more democratic, fair, and accountable ownership models for the online economy. We organized a…
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Free the Land
What would it take for black lives to matter in America? In this month’s issue of Vice magazine, I take a long look at one answer to that question in Jackson, Mississippi. There, in 2013, voters elected black-nationalist lawyer Chokwe Lumumba as mayor based on promises of direct democracy and cooperative enterprise. Lumumba died unexpectedly…
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Opening Doors
Everyone is talking about Donald Trump. I can’t bring myself to do it. As we choose our apocalypse from among the presidential candidates, I’m starting to think that the best hope this election season may come from state-level initiatives, which in turn could open doors for the rest of the United States. This week, I…
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Be the Bank You Want to See in the World
If you could make a new economy from the ground up, what would it look like? Enric Duran has tried—twice. In 2008 he became famous after borrowing half a million dollars from Spain’s banks and refusing to give it back. He then masterminded the Catalan Integral Cooperative, a network of independent workers that may just…
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Owning Is the New Sharing
What if we owned the Internet? Would we get paid for our likes and comments? What privacy policies would we write for ourselves? Last month, the Silicon Valley-based network Shareable dispatched me to write a report on the growing movement to experiment with new forms of economic democracy online. The folks at Shareable recognized that,…
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A Generation of Hackers
Hackers are fascinating—the good ones, the bad ones, the ones in between. From corporate elites like Bill Gates to fugitives like Edward Snowden, we look to hackers to provide for us, to excite us, to liberate us. But why? This is the question that took hold of me in the midst of my summer’s journey…