Francesca Bria

Del pacto social fordista a la “gig economy”, el trabajo está
cambiando radicalmente. La precarización laboral y el déficit
creciente en los sistemas de seguridad social exigen soluciones
urgentes. El salario básico universal figura en la agenda tanto
de la derecha neoliberal como de la izquierda radical.

This paper focuses on the rise of the robot economy and the impact on work. It is argued that some urgent measure and alternatives such as basic income that should become part of a non-neoliberal industrial and social policy Agenda to shape the technological future that shouldn’t be left to tech libertarians.

Recensione del libro “Marazzi, C. (2010) La violenza del capitalismo finanziario“. New York: Semiotext(e). Questo libro conciso ma intenso traccia una brillante analisi di ciò che
Marazzi chiama una delle più grandi crisi della storia: una “violenta crisi
di una fi nanza violenta”. In questo testo, Christian Marazzi, economista
italiano e stabilmente emigrato all’estero, uno dei principali esponenti
della scuola Italiana del Marxismo Autonomo, proveniente dalla tradizione
operaista, fornisce nuovi strumenti di analisi necessari per comprendere
la crisi economica attuale.

In order to understand both where we are going and why we are witnessing the disappearance of good jobs and increased polarization in society, we must broaden our focus beyond a mere analysis of technological change. Rather, the debate that we should be having should be about our political choices and the economic agenda that will shape technological change in the long-term. In short, the debate needs to be about connecting the technology and innovation policy with economic choices and industrial policy.

Informe preparado por Francesca Bria. Las nuevas oportunidades que ofrecen las tecnologías digitales para la participación, la democracia, la transparencia y la proximidad a la ciudadanía, puede producir una democratización radical de las instituciones públicas. Sin embargo, estas tecnologías están siendo utilizadas hoy día para fines muy opuestos como la promoción de la Ciudad Inteligente (Smart City) que promueve una participación 'cosmética' de los ciudadanos, mientras en realidad desarrolla una gestión de la ciudad privatizada, tecnocrática y dirigida al beneficio empresarial, ofreciendo soluciones tecnológicas para problemas estructurales que en realidad requieren intervenciones políticas y económicas y un enfoque democrático innovador.

This report coordinated by Nesta and commissioned by the European Commission, DG CONNECT is the first systematic network analysis of the emerging digital social innovation (DSI) ecosystem in Europe.

A growing movement of innovators in civil society, tech and social entrepreneurs are now developing inspiring digital solutions for a variety of social issues, in areas such as health, democracy, consumption, money and education.

We have identified DSI organisations and projects as part of a larger social network and have mapped this network in a way that has not been possible before.

Digital technologies and the internet have transformed many areas of business – from Google and Amazon to Airbnb and Kickstarter. Huge sums of public money have supported digital innovation in business, as well as in fields ranging from the military to espionage. But there has been much less systematic support for innovations that use digital technology to address social challenges.

This paper contains the proceedings of a seminar on the Internet Identity Marketplace co-organised by D-CENT, ISOC and Teatro Valle. The multidisciplinary seminar included debates and interviews with leading hackers, activists, technologists, economists, philosophers, lawyers and political scientist.

They discussed issues such as collective intelligence and the production of subjectivity, surveillance and power, future infrastructures, the commons and the future of identity, citizenship and democracy.

This initiative aims at activating a process of recomposition of thinkers and activists from various disciplines that will raise awareness of the stakes of the political economy of the internet, resulting in a common vision that can lead to the creation of a constituency to work on awareness, rights, claims, self-governance issues, and technical standards: the kind of work necessary in order to preserve a democratic governance of the digital identity ecosystems.

This paper is the talk I gave at the Platform cooperatives conference in NYC: http://platformcoop.net/participants/francesca-bria

Platform capitalism is influencing developments in areas as diverse as  industrial policy, logistics, energy management and urban planning. It also shapes ideas about governance and influence collective subjectivity formation.

Drawing upon experience at local and European level, this report sets out the variety of ways in which public policy can be developed to fund alternative models and infrastructures that are collectively and democraticly owned and managed (the concept of the commons) and collective ownership can be introduced to meet the critical social and environmental issues that face us all in the twenty-first century.

This report provides a broad overview of open standards that could be used by the D-CENT project in terms of decentralized and federated social networking, with a particular focus on our two use cases of democratic decision-making and social digital currencies.

Current social networking platforms such as Facebook and Google+ are currently built almost entirely on proprietary technologies and cannot interoperate. Due to reasons ranging from data protection to the desire for autonomy by sovereign
bodies such as community organizations and even nation-states, simply using these platforms “as is” is unacceptable to the D-CENT project. However, at the same point the D-CENT project must find a way to communicate with social networking sites such as Twitter and Facebook to take advantage of the “network effect” of the tremendous amounts of users on these sites. The ethos of the project is to develop software which is as open as possible. The use of open standards is distinct from the development of open source software. The hypothesis put forward by this report is that the solution is the use of open standards that allow at
least one open-source implementation.

First, we overview an argument for open standards rather than only open-source by learning from the failure of Diaspora, the most well-known alternative to centralized social platforms like Facebook.

Then, we explain the difference between the various standards bodies and their licensing issues. In the rest of the report, we outline the landscape of standards in social networking and go through each part of the landscape in detail, ending with an analysis of socio-economic models for standards-based social networking and conclusions for possible next steps.

In order to understand both where we are going and why we are witnessing the disappearance of good jobs and increased polarization in society, we must broaden our focus beyond a mere analysis of technological change. Rather, the debate that we should be having should be about our political choices and the economic agenda that will shape technological change in the long-term. In short, the debate needs to be about connecting the technology and innovation policy with economic choices and industrial policy.