Reviews and Comments

"The rule by code, characterized by the instrumentalization of computer code to serve the interests of powerful tech companies, thus presents itself as the software equivalent of the rule by law, characterized by the arbitrary wielding of laws to serve the interests of powerful sovereigns. (...) While both traditional online platforms and blockchain-based systems rely on code to regulate online behaviors, there is nonetheless a fundamental difference in the way these two systems operate. Because there is no centralized authority controlling a public and permissionless blockchain network (i.e., there is no sovereign), blockchain technology provides for the establishment of code-based rules that are difficult to co-opt for the benefits of a few."

"Responding to sociological work on trust, it [this book] argues that blockchain technology could best be understood as a “confidence machine” even though the need for trust is not eliminated but rather dispersed within a distributed network of actors."

"The easier “being wrong” is for you (the faster you can release your viewpoint), the quicker you can adapt to changing circumstances. (...) consider that the place where you are wrong might be the most fertile ground for connecting with and receiving others. And in a beautiful twist, being soft in your rightness, as opposed to smashing people with your brilliance, can open others up to whatever wisdom you’ve accumulated."

"what’s really at stake here is a collapse of the collective imagination of a technology (i.e., the internet) that is playing such a pivotal role in the everyday life of billions, one that nonetheless can be shaped, steered, designed, bent towards unofficial purposes. The closing of the possibility of change has been going on for a decade or more, replaced by smooth user interfaces and cat videos."

"As Zizek says here, communism is nothing less than the conscious attempt to reconstruct the commons—knowledge, nature, human rights, society—dismantled by capitalism.

It's not well known, but Marx in fact referred to the society to come, a society founded on the reconstructed commons, as one of “free association.” When he spoke of this future society, Marx seldom used the words “socialism” or “communism.” Rather, he preferred to refer to the “free association” of producers. The voluntary mutual aid between workers characterizing such an association is the ultimate realization of the commons."

"The clearer you are as a group about where you’re going, the more you can relax into collaborative innovation around how to get there. You can relax into decentralization, and you want to."

"It is a category error to say that a haiku is “concise.” It is not like a bigger, wordier poem that has been boiled down to one image, some concentrate or demi-glace of a landscape. It is more like a tiny 300,000,000-volt thundercloud. Or the reader is the cloud, electric with potential, and the haiku is the single tree on a hill." -- George Estreich

"Perhaps we have already ran out of time to do fundamental research but the least we can do is facilitate artists—and listen carefully to their cosmotechnic ‘cli-fi’ imagination. (...) What is internet degrowth, machine unlearning, artificial stupidity? (...) Let’s stop building Web3 solutions for problems that do not exist and launch tools that decolonize, redistribute value, conspire and organize."

Although full of good ideas and pointers, this book reads like an explosion of thoughts around the principles and values of Coops (as in, participatory democracy, solidarity, sustainability, mutualism, etc). There is a good presentation of the coop movement and interesting bridges with other social justice movements. But most of the text are half baked (cyclical) explorations of links with social, political, and philosophical threads the author has knowledge about.

Relevant, food for thought, but half baked.

"Prison abolition had to be accompanied by the creation of an array of social institutions that would begin to solve the social problems that set people on the track to prison...

We would not be looking for prisonlike substitutes for the prison, such as house arrest safeguarded by electronic surveillance bracelets. Rather, (...) we would try to envision a continuum of alternatives to imprisonment —demilitarization of schools, revitalization of education at all levels, a health system that provides free physical and mental care to all, and a justice system based on reparation and reconciliation rather than retribution and vengeance." --- Angela Davis

"This is our Inconvenient Truth moment. Not only have infinite possibilities imploded into platform realism, but we also face the existentially confronting horizon of finitude. Not of TCP-IP or packet switching. Extinction Internet marks the end of an epoch of collective imagination that in many ways demonstrated how alternative vertical and horizontal technological arrangements were possible. Not one stack but many plateaux."

"The countries of the Global North must not continue to use enormous amounts of energy to foster even more economic growth. As we have seen, increasing economic growth past the current level is hardly guaranteed to improve the level of happiness and well-being of the people living in those countries.

But if the same resources and energy were used in the Global South instead, the happiness and well-being of the people there would increase exponentially. And if this is true, doesn't it follow that we should set aside a part of the worldwide “carbon budget” (the amount of carbon dioxide emissions the world can still safely allow) for them?"

"Any domain of nature may yield the virtual. By abstracting from nature, hacking produces the possibility of another nature, a second nature, (...) The nature of any and every domain may be hacked. It is in the nature of hacking to discover freely, to invent freely, to create and produce freely." #75

"To hack is to abstract. To abstract is to produce the plane upon which different things may enter into relation. (...) Differentiation of functioning components arranged on a plane with a shared goal is the hacker achievement, whether in the technical, cultural, political, sexual or scientific realm." #83