Tag: economy
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The Age of Campaign Financialization is Here
What matters more, your vote or your bet on a prediction market? A campaign contribution or a stock purchase? It has long been common practice to worry about “campaign finance.” But even since the 2010 Citizens United Supreme Court decision further unleashed dark money, that kind of finance was relatively straightforward: contributions to support the…
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The People’s Disruption
Want to help bring democracy to the internet? On the heels of the successful platform co-op conference in Toronto, I’m now working with a mighty team of collaborators to organize November’s conference in New York, The People’s Disruption. It’s all about connecting the resources of the present with ambitious visions of a cooperative future online,…
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Electricity People
The big oil and electric companies are largely unaccountable to the communities they power and pollute. But the U.S. power grid has other kinds of companies, too. Seventy-five percent of the landmass of the country gets electricity from electric cooperatives—a wildly successful New Deal program, long maligned as communist, and now little-remembered, even by its…
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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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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…