Info, news & debate

Platform co-ops




The debate on capitalism in full swing with Transition Town Tooting

Public debate featuring yours truly: is capitalism the best system for a sustainable future?

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If you’re in London on April 18th, there’s a public debate you might be interested in, upstairs in a pub in Tooting. I’ve been asked to put the case against capitalism. There will be initial presentations, rebuttals, questions from the audience, and then a summing up.

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The next great transition will be to the Solidarity Economy with a mutual credit exchange system

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I’ve been working in the environmental field for over 20 years, and I believe, like the National Academy of Sciences of the USA, that we’re headed for ‘biological annihilation’, and like the good folk at the Dark Mountain Project, that a crash is coming that we may or may not recover from

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A Freifunk WiFi-node is installed as part of a low-tech internet network in Berlin, Germany - via Wikipedia Commons.

Resilient networks: building a low-tech internet

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A solution to the absence of high-speed wireless networks across some developing countries and increasingly appearing in the form of WiFi based community networks in numerous countries in Europe, building a low-tech internet could have benefits for all. With excerpts from an original Low-tech Magazine article by Kris De Decker, we explore how a less resource-intensive and more energy-efficient

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Time to ditch the corporate sector in favour of the solidarity economy

Why an economy that’s not dominated by the corporate sector would be much better for individuals, communities and nature

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Lowimpact.org is an organisation that was founded by two people in 2001 because of concerns about ecological damage and what that might mean for the future of humanity. The focus has always been on individual lifestyle change

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Examples of organisation within the non-corporate sector

Let’s build a sustainable, non-corporate world; but what exactly does ‘non-corporate’ mean?

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This is the first of two articles examining the non-corporate sector, and its advantages for ecology, democracy, communities and individuals. Here’s a checklist of the benefits of reducing the reach of the corporate sector, but first, let’s work out what kind of organisations comprise the non-corporate sector.

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Fairphone - designed to open

Companies like Fairphone, Ecotricity etc. are doing great things, but could easily be picked off by the corporate sector; why aren’t they co-ops?

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Body Shop, Green & Blacks, Ben & Jerry’s and Innocent Drinks represented a Brave New World when it came to doing business – Fair Trade, sustainable, (slightly) less hierarchical, informal, friendly.

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mutualism

Mutualism: a philosophy for changing society with a difference – it’s implementable

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There are lots of ideas for changing the world – from voting to demonstrations, petitions, lifestyle change, incremental change, revolutionary change, or more of the same, only harder. The problem with many of them is that they are either ineffective or not implementable.

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uber

Beware the ‘sharing’ economy – back door for a more rapacious form of capitalism

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Something that’s been troubling me for a while. The ‘sharing’ economy must be a good thing, right? I’ve been trying to see the good in it for a while. Sharing anything must mean that fewer resources are used, less waste produced, people get to know each other in their communities. All sounds great, doesn’t it?

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