April 5, 2016, 4 – 6 pm
Norlin Library, Room M549 (fifth floor)
University of Colorado Boulder
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Every five hundred years or so, the Western world—and now the world system that has adapted to its extractive practices—has been racked by a transition from one value regime to another. In this talk, Michel Bauwens will discuss the role of media platforms in the current transition, which points to a simultaneous transformation of civic, market, and state forms toward a contribution-based and commons-oriented economy. He will argue that new forms and institutions emerging in the process are potential seeds for a successful transition toward a fair, free, and sustainable mode of value creation and distribution.
Michel Bauwens is an eminent Belgian peer-to-peer theorist and an active writer, researcher, and conference speaker on the subject of technology, culture, and business innovation. Bauwens is director and founder of the P2P Foundation, a global organization of researchers working in collaboration in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. He has authored a number of essays, including The Political Economy of Peer Production, and has taught at Payap University and Dhurakij Pandit University’s International College, as well as IBICT, Rio de Janeiro. He is a founding member of the Commons Strategies Group, with Silke Helfrich and David Bollier, organizing major global conferences on the commons and its economics. In 2014, he was research director of the Flok Society research group, which produced the first integrated Commons Transition Plan for the government of Ecuador. Bauwens currently lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand.
Sponsored by the College of Media, Communication, and Information, the Department of Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder, and CU’s Innovative Seed Grant program