David Bollier: Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own (2009)

“A world organized around centralized control, strict intellectual property rights, and hierarchies of credentialed experts is under siege. A radically different order of society based on open access, decentralized creativity, collaborative intelligence, and cheap and easy sharing is ascendant.”

From free and open-source software, Creative Commons licenses, Wikipedia, remix music and video mashups, peer production, open science, open education, and open business, the world of digital media has spawned a new “sharing economy” that increasingly competes with entrenched media giants.

Reporting from the heart of this “free culture” movement, journalist and activist David Bollier provides the first comprehensive history of the attempt by a global brigade of techies, lawyers, artists, musicians, scientists, businesspeople, innovators, and geeks of all stripes to create a digital republic committed to freedom and innovation. Viral Spiral-the term Bollier coins to describe the almost-magical process by which Internet users can come together to build online commons and tools-brilliantly interweaves the disparate strands of this eclectic movement. The story describes major technological developments and pivotal legal struggles, as well as fascinating profiles of hacker Richard Stallman, copyright scholar Lawrence Lessig, and other colorful figures.

A milestone in reporting on the Internet by one of our leading media critics, Viral Spiral is for anyone seeking to take the full measure of the new digital era.

Publisher New Press, 2009
Creative Commons BY-NC License
ISBN 1595583963, 9781595583963
344 pages

Book website
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David Graeber: Toward an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of Our Own Dreams (2001)

“This innovative book is the first comprehensive synthesis of economic, political, and cultural theories of value. David Graeber reexamines a century of anthropological thought about value and exchange, in large measure to find a way out of quandaries in current social theory, which have become critical at the present moment of ideological collapse in the face of neoliberalism. Rooted in an engaged, dynamic realism, Graeber argues that projects of cultural comparison are in a sense necessarily revolutionary projects: He attempts to synthesize the best insights of Karl Marx and Marcel Mauss, arguing that these figures represent two extreme, but ultimately complementary, possibilities in the shape such a project might take. Graeber breathes new life into the classic anthropological texts on exchange, value, and economy. He rethinks the cases of Iroquois wampum, Pacific kula exchanges, and the Kwakiutl potlatch within the flow of world historical processes, and recasts value as a model of human meaning-making, which far exceeds rationalist/reductive economist paradigms.”

Publisher Palgrave Macmillan, 2001
ISBN 0312240457, 9780312240455
337 pages

Review: Sutton (Anthropological Theory, 2004).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2015-3-6)

Karl Polanyi: The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (1944–) [EN, IT, CR, ES, BR-PT, LT, GR, PT, CN]

“In this classic work of economic history and social theory, Karl Polanyi analyzes the economic and social changes brought about by the “great transformation” of the Industrial Revolution. His analysis explains not only the deficiencies of the self-regulating market, but the potentially dire social consequences of untempered market capitalism. New introductory material reveals the renewed importance of Polanyi’s seminal analysis in an era of globalization and free trade.”

Keywords and phrases: fascism, gold standard, Concert of Europe, economic liberalism, market economy, protectionism, laissez-faire, Industrial Revolution, Statute of Artificers, nomic, commodity money, Chartist, trade unions, token money, Adam Smith, Robert Owen, labor power, economic system, outdoor relief.

English, 2nd edition
Foreword by Joseph E. Stiglitz.
With a New Introduction by Fred Block
Publisher Beacon Press, 2001
ISBN 080705643X, 9780807056431
317 pages

Wikipedia
Publisher (EN)

The Great Transformation (English, 2nd ed., 1944/2001, 21 MB, updated on 2021-10-30)
La grande trasformazione (Italian, trans. Roberto Vigevani, 1974, added on 2021-10-30)
Velika preobrazba (Croatian, trans. Luka Marković, 1999, added on 2021-10-30)
La gran transformación (Spanish, trans. Julia Várela and Fernando Álvarez-Uría, 2000, added on 2021-10-30)
A Grande Transformação (BR-Portuguese, trans. Fanny Wrabel, 2nd ed., 2000, added on 2021-10-30)
Didžioji transformacija (Lithuanian, trans. Jūratė Musteikytėir and Rimantas Grikienis, 2002, added on 2021-10-30)
Ο μεγάλος μετασχηματισμός (Greek, trans. Κώστας Γαγανάκης, 2007, added on 2021-10-30)
A Grande Transformação (Portuguese, trans. Miguel Serras Pereira, 2012, EPUB, added on 2021-10-30)
Ju bian (Chinese, trans. Shumin Huang, 2013, added on 2021-10-30)