Talk:P2P Book of the Year 2013

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books published in 2012 not retained for the 2013 list

2012

Open Field: Conversations on the Commons. Edited by Sarah Schultz and Sarah Peters. Contributions by Susannah Bielak, Steve Dietz, Stephen Duncombe et al. Walker Art Center, 2012

URL = http://shop.walkerart.org/collections/walker-publications-1/products/open-filed-conversations-on-the-commons

"an absorbing collection from many authors exploring issues of the arts, the commons, public space and community co-creation, which is especially about the relationship between commons and museums, and the complications of institutional forays into social practice."


Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet. by Julian Assange with Jacob Appelbaum, Andy Müller-Maguhn and Jérémie Zimmermann. OR Books, New York, 2012,


[edit]Review

By Cryptome:

"This is a highly informative book, perhaps the best published on the substance of WikiLeaks, its technology, philosophy, origin and purpose, rooted in the Cypherpunks resistance to authority through encryption and anonymizing technology. The trenchant and salient, wide-ranging discussion among Assange, Appelbaum, Müller-Maguhn and Zimmermann, is derived from a four-part RT series with additional editorial material and a summarizing prologue by Assange, "A Call to Cryptographic Arms."


Open Utopia. Thomas More & Stephen Duncombe. Autonomiedia, 2012 URL = http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=487


[edit]Description

"Open Utopia is the first complete English language edition of Thomas More’s Utopia that honors the primary precept of Utopia itself: that all property is common property. Open Utopia, licensed under Creative Commons, is free to copy, to share, to use. But Utopia is more than the story of a far-off land with no private property. It is a text that instructs us how to approach texts, be they literary or political, in an open manner: open to criticism, open to participation, and open to re-creation. Utopia is no-place, and therefore it is up to all of us to imagine it." (http://www.minorcompositions.info/?p=487)


"Money and Sustainability: The Missing Link" by Bernard Lietaer, Christian Arnsperger, Sally Goerner and Stefan Brunnhuber. Triarchy Press, 2012

URL = http://www.triarchypress.com/pages/Money-and-Sustainability.htm

A report from the Club of Rome to Finance Watch and the World Business Academy


The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies. By Scott E. Page. Princeton University Press, 2012. URL = http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8353.html


[edit]Description

"In this landmark book, Scott Page redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups--and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity--not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities.



Bob McChesney. Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism is Turning the Internet Away from Democracy.


[edit]Description

1. Author's description:

"The book is a political economic examination of the digital revolution based upon 15 years of research. The book provides considerable detail but also an overarching analysis and argument, so it is intended for anyone concerned with the Internet. It is the capstone of my career.

Michael Delli Carpini, Dean of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, said: “Digital Disconnect makes a convincing case that one can only understand the Internet and related communication technologies through the lens of political economy, and that the capitalist political economy in which they are currently embedded in the United States is anathema to a truly democratic information environment.”


Strength in Numbers: The Political Power of Weak Interests, by Gunnar Trumbull. Harvard University Press , 2012.

URL =

"This book makes a bold and startling claim: diffuse interests, rather than concentrated interests, dominate the making of public policy in the advanced democracies. (Pepper D. Culpepper, European University Institute )"


Everyday Revolutions: Autonomy and Horizontalism in Argentina. Marina Sitrin. Zed Books.

URL = http://zedbooks.co.uk/paperback/everyday-revolutions


Gernot Böhme, Invasive Technification: Critical Essays in the Philosophy of Technology, Cameron Shingleton (tr.), Bloomsbury, 2012, 261pp.


[edit]Review

Andrew Feenberg:

"This book covers a vast range of issues in the philosophy of technology with clarity and insight. It is divided into six chapters, each of which contains several short essays on related subjects. The chapters address the relation of science to technology, different types of technologies, the technification of human relations and nature, and critical approaches to technology. The theme is clear from the title, although Gernot Böhme is not as technophobic as it implies. However, he is concerned with tracing the profound impact of technical mediation on every aspect of modern social life including, among many others, production, consumption, perception, communication, medicine, education. The technological "invasion" of all these domains transforms what it means to be human for better and for worse. Just how humanity will end up is an open question in Böhme's view. He is rather pessimistic, finding few resources in contemporary culture that could support a positive outcome.


Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond. Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson (eds.), Property-Owning Democracy: Rawls and Beyond, Wiley-Blackwell, 2012, 320pp.


[edit]Review

Paul Weithman:

"Property-owning democracy is unfamiliar and not well-understood, but it is a promising ideal for progressive political economy. In this very instructive, wide-ranging, and most welcome volume, Martin O'Neill and Thad Williamson have assembled fourteen thoughtful essays and a substantial introduction which together explore its meaning and history, and the prospects of its implementation. The book has a great deal to interest political philosophers and theorists, political scientists, political economists, and reflective political activists on the left. The essays are accessibly written, and the economics that is included is not mathematically demanding. As with any collection on an unfamiliar topic, a review of this one requires the provision of considerable background. The book is not primarily about Rawls. But its sub-title is "Rawls and Beyond" and it takes Rawls's treatment of property-owning democracy as its touchstone and starting point. And so to appreciate this book, we need to see what Rawls meant by "property-owning democracy" and why he concluded in Restatement that either it or what he called "liberal socialism" "seem[s] necessary" to realize his conception of justice.[3] I shall therefore explain what Rawls had in mind while engaging and commenting on a number of the essays in O'Neill and Williamson's collection.


This Machine Kills Secrets: How WikiLeakers, Cypherpunks, and Hacktivists Aim to Free the World’s Information. by Andy Greenberg. Virgin Books, London, 2012


[edit]Review

By Harry Halpin:

"The ideology of Wikileaks comes from an entirely different lineage than revolutionary movements of the 20th century, namely the largely under-appreciated thinking (and code!) of a certain breed of hackers known as cypherpunks. This hidden current is detailed in Andy Greenberg’s This Machine Kills Secrets: How Wikileakers, Hacktivists, and Cypherpunks Aim to Free the World’s Information, whose best-seller status shows that regardless of the censorship, Wikileaks is still very much on peoples’ minds. Far from dismissing Wikileaks, the task should be to understand the emerging ideology inherent in the slogan “freeing the world’s information” and the particular tight coupling to digital technology inherent in this new ideological formation. The ideology of Wikileaks emerged slowly from the cypherpunks mailing list for over twenty years ago, an online conversation of a global group of hackers who put their faith in the power of an obscure branch of mathematical computer science – cryptography – to change the world. Within the historical trajectory of Wikileaks outlined by Greenberg, if one reads carefully, one can detect both the power and limitations of their utopian project.

Surprisingly for a journalist from Forbes, Greenberg provides a fairly well-written history of Wikileaks’ origins.