Surviving the Culture Wars

Free culture and open business models. We all fall up. Πάνταῥεῖ•λόγος•πρᾱξις

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20 March 2009

My YouTube Debut

Posted by Thom Hastings

Last week my friend Christopher randomly asked me to be part of his YouTube project, WEECY TV. I had an amazing conversation with two neighbors who I had never met, and Christopher did a great job editing it down to a few minutes. I could write about my current work, or the rest of that long, powerful conversation, but I'd rather let the video speak for itself:

My friend Steve commented on Facebook:

Hey Thom, the whole video was pretty cool. We had an Italian economist from the University of Rome come speak last night on the Italian and European economy, but he brought up the same line: there was a brilliant English economist (from the 19th century, the man's name escapes me, the article is titled something along the lines of: "A forecast for our Grandchildren") who wrote that come year 2030 (or so) the world will be at a point where greed will no longer exist because of the wealth will have increased 8-fold for the entire populous, and everybody (entrepreneurs specifically) will have satisfaction with their level of wealth.
Wealth in Europe has risen to that level, statistically it is 8-fold what it was then. But the world hasn't changed, and the Economist predicted the state of man a hundred years later incorrectly. This is because the driving factor of growth (entrepreneurs) was not the acquiring of wealth but rather success, that success is the basic human need which drove entrepreneurship and economics in general.
Thank you, Steve.

I don't believe capitalism will ever die. We can, however, evolve our sensibility to the point where we take advantage of social capitalism and bring the up social "safety net" to a much higher standard of living. That is to say, we can build a capitalism on top of a commons, but that commons must be sound enough for the capitalism which stands on top of it. This is the model of the hybrid economy.

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The Seven Movies of Destiny!

This section has problems with formatting, it's so important that it breaks the rest of the page. I'll be migrating to wordpress someday anyway.
Eternity
These are the seven must-see movies on the future of business, the Internet, and culture.
  1. Lawrence Lessig @ 23C3 - On Free, and the Differences Between Culture and Code
  2. Jonathan Zittrain @ ISOC-NY - The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It
  3. Joi Ito @ DLD 09 - On Creative Commons
  4. Lawrence Lessig, Molly S. Van Houweling, James Boyle, Joi Ito, and Jonathan Zittrain @ Berkman - The Commons: Celebrating Accomplishments, Discerning Futures
  5. Thomas Friedman @ MIT OCW - The World is Flat 3.0
  6. Pia Waugh @ VITTA - Closing Keynote: Open Source Futures
  7. Originally I had "Either a James Boyle or a Jimmy Wales or a Mark Shuttleworth or a Cory Doctorow,
    as well as everything @ TED.com" here. Now, I know that the 7th Movie of Destiny is RiP: A Remix Manifesto.