Utopia now
In 1890 William Morris imagined a world free from wage slavery. Thanks to technology, his vision is finally within reach
Vasilis Kostais is a senior researcher at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia, and an affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Massachusetts. He is also the founder of the P2P Lab. His latest book project, Peer-to-Peer: The Commons Manifesto, with Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaitis, is forthcoming.
is professor of governance at the Ragnar Nurkse Department of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology in Estonia, and an associate at the Davis Center at Harvard University in Massachusetts. His latest book project, Innovation Bureaucracies, with Rainer Kattel and Erkki Karo, is forthcoming.
William Morris (1834-1896) is best-known today as a Victorian designer who has never gone out of fashion. You can buy Morris merchandise – from coasters to picture frames to ties to mugs – in the gift shops of every big design museum. And if you Google his name, your screen will erupt in cascades of dense, colourful ornaments. But Morris was also a radical thinker, a Socialist and, after Karl Marx’s death, a leader of the Socialist League. One of the most relevant aspects of Morris’s work today is the framework for a commons-based world of cooperation that he sketched in his utopian novel News from Nowhere (1890), which has striking applications for the age of the internet. /.../
No comments:
Post a Comment