With his latest book, C4SS senior fellow and regular contributor, Kevin Carson, shares a radical vision of a not-too-distant future where networks replace hierarchies, and co-operation and self-regulation make both the state other forms of authority obsolete.  The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks is the fourth in a series of…

C4SS Feed 44 presents Kevin Carson‘s “The State as Stay Puft Marshmallow Man” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. Sometimes the capitalist state’s internal rules and procedures, created to serve an economic ruling class, in specific cases wind up sabotaging the very interests they were created to serve. Much like the Catholic doctrine of concupiscence…

Molly Sauter. The Coming Swarm: DDOS Actions, Hacktivism, and Civil Disobedience on the Internet (New York, London, New Delhi, Sydney: Bloomsbury, 2014). “The aim of this work,” Sauter writes, “is to place DDoS [distributed denial of service] actions… in a historical and theoretical context, covering the use of the tactic, its development over time, and…

I’m usually pretty optimistic about the day after tomorrow — I’ve been dismissed more than once as a techno-utopian — but sometimes when I get depressed by NSA surveillance, drones, and the corporate state’s manufactured aura of inevitability, I need a story to cheer me up. Here it is: A Canadian artist copyrighted his land…

Rudolph Rocker once said that there is a definite trend in the historical development of human civilization which strives for the “free, unhindered unfolding of the individual and social forces of life.” This is indeed an accurate account of human history — we strive for the beautiful ethic of liberty. Liberty can be described, rather simply,…

In a post at the Students For Liberty (SFL) blog, (“Between Radicalism and Revolution: The Cautionary Tale of Students for a Democratic Society,” May 6), Clark Ruper uses the example of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) as a warning against factionalism and division within the libertarian movement. The libertarian movement, he says, should be…

C4SS Media presents Trevor Hultner‘s “Missing Comma: Concerning ‘Horizontal Loyalty’” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. I think, for a long time, we’ve been trying to look for new ways to talk about concepts like mutual aid and solidarity; horizontal loyalty, at least as Krulwich describes it (and as Friedman uses it), serves exactly this…

Last week’s blog excerpted a piece from Ann Friedman over at the Columbia Journalism Review that mentioned the term, “horizontal loyalty.” Coined by Radiolab host and longtime public radio producer Robert Krulwich during a commencement speech he gave to UC Berkeley grads in 2011, Friedman used the term as a way to challenge perceptions on…

Scrive la Reuters che quest’anno la corte suprema degli Stati Uniti sarà chiamata a decidere sul più alto numero di casi riguardanti la proprietà intellettuale (PI) di tutta la storia. I giudici sono chiamati a decidere su otto casi: sei riguardano brevetti e due riguardano diritti di copia. Un vero e proprio segno dei tempi….

C4SS Media presents Grant Mincy‘s “Common Property, Common Power,” read by James Tuttle and edited by Nick Ford. “What we are seeing is social power at work. The courts, legislature and special interests are powerless in the new public arena. The liberated market is not interested in the ownership of ideas, but rather progress, innovation and co-operative labor….

Reuters reports that this year the United States Supreme Court will hear its highest proportion of intellectual property (IP) cases in history. The justices are set to decide eight cases on IP — six on patent laws and two on copyright. A sign of the times, really. In a world of open source content and the…