From the introduction:

“This downturn marks the end of an unsustainable economy. Rather than trying to reinflate the old bubble economy, these activists, visionaries, and upstarts are trying something new: an economy that puts people first and works within the carrying capacity of Mother Earth.”

The full ToC is here.

The Promise of Open Media from thoughtcast on Vimeo.

Produced by Jenny Attiyeh of ThoughtCast:

“At the first ever Open Video Conference, held at New York University in Manhattan, participants pondered the significance of the open media movement, at a time when its tools are being put to use by protesters in Iran.

ThoughtCast spoke with the new media guru Jonathan Zittrain, who’s a professor at Harvard Law School; Xeni Jardin, of Boing Boing fame; and Peter Kaufman, the CEO of Intelligent Television, among several others, about the potential of this movement to effect social change.”

In the age of cheap facts, we now inhabit a world where knowing something is possible is practically the same as knowing how to do it.

Cory Doctorow, in the science fiction magazine Locus.

Excerpt:

“Invention is now a lot more like collage than like discovery. Bruce Sterling’s new Imaginary Inventions project is seeking to catalog the imaginary inventions of fiction, hucksters, failed entrepreneurs, and other imaginers. I sent him some excerpts from my forthcoming novel Makers (Tor, HarperCollins UK, Fall 2009), which concerns hardware hackers whose principle activity is thinking up stuff that would be cool, then googling to figure out how to build it, and Bruce replied,

What does this all mean for science fiction? Well, it probably means that SF writers are going to get credited with a lot more invention than we’re accustomed to. The formerly rare occurrence of technology jumping off the page and into the world (Heinlein’s waterbeds, Clarke’s geosynchronous orbits) are about to become a lot more common. When readers can download or mail-order off-the-shelf components and instructions for integrating them, it becomes much simpler to turn fiction into reality.”

Here are a few must-read items, followed by a summary of John Hagel’s new report outlining some of the underlying changing fundamentals in the form that capitalism is taking.

The first must-read is Matt Taibbi’s essay which appeared in Rolling Stone, about the pernicious role that Goldman-Sachs has played in past, present and future (carbon markets) speculative bubbles and meltdowns. This remarkable essay will make you rather sick in the stomach.

Here’s the summary:

“The bank’s unprecedented reach and power have enabled it to turn all of America into a giant pump-and-dump scam, manipulating whole economic sectors for years at a time, moving the dice game as this or that market collapses, and all the time gorging itself on the unseen costs that are breaking families everywhere - high gas prices, rising consumer-credit rates, half-eaten pension funds, mass layoffs, future taxes to pay off bailouts. All that money that you’re losing, it’s going somewhere, and in both a literal and a figurative sense, Goldman Sachs is where it’s going: The bank is a huge, highly sophisticated engine for converting the useful, deployed wealth of society into the least useful, most wasteful and insoluble substance on Earth - pure profit for rich individuals.”

The Financial Times’ Ben Funnell , brings a remarkable editorial outlining the role of debt in the neoliberal system:

“Just why is there so much debt in the Anglo-Saxon world? Bankers and regulators know well that it is in nobody’s long-term interests to have allowed borrowing to escalate to a position where the US now owes far more, as a multiple of the economy, than at the start of the Great Depression. The answer is capitalism’s dirty little secret: excessive lending was the only way to maintain the living standards of the vast bulk of the population at a time when wealth was being concentrated in the hands of an elite. The amount by which the elite has benefited is startling, and illustrates the problem with lightly regulated free markets: the rich get much richer while the rest do not get richer at all.”

The Daily Telegraph gives us a rundown on unemployment, and explains why we have lulled ourselves in complacency, because we have the timeline of the Great Depression wrong … It takes time for the economy to unwind, and we’re not even close to the bottoming out. We haven’t, but will, reach the levels of 1932, and the author invites us to look at the political upheaval’s which were its consequence.

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard writes:

“The Centre for Labour Market Studies (CLMS) in Boston says US unemployment is now 18.2pc, counting the old-fashioned way. The reason why this does not “feel” like the 1930s is that we tend to compress the chronology of the Depression. It takes time for people to deplete their savings and sink into destitution. Perhaps our greater cushion of wealth today will prevent another Grapes of Wrath, but 20m US homeowners are already in negative equity (zillow.com data). Evictions are running at a terrifying pace. Some 342,000 homes were foreclosed in April, pushing a small army of children into a network of charity shelters. This compares to 273,000 homes lost in the entire year of 1932.”

To conclude here are some conclusions from a new report by Deloitte , the 2009 Shift Index, the rationale of which John Hagel explains here:

“Everyone acknowledges that we are in the midst of a fundamental shift playing out on the business landscape on a global scale over many decades. We may not all agree on the exact dimensions of the big shift, but the reality is so widely recognized that it is often unstated. When we looked for indices that gave us some insight into the nature and pace of this big shift, we pretty much came up drive. There were isolated measures and one-off analyses, but there was nothing resembling a comprehensive index of key metrics updated on a regular basis. So we decided to develop one.”

“The most interesting findings can be summarized as follows:

• The third, the “Impact” wave, centers on the consequences of the Big Shift. Given the time it will take for the first two waves to play out and manifest themselves, this third wave—and its related index—provides an even greater lagging indicator.”