Last week I was interviewed by the German newspaper Neues Deutschland on the european campaign for basic income and my personal perspective on the role of the internet. The title says: “It [basic income] changes everything”.
You can read the interview online here (in german).
My European tour continues! Here are my next travel destinations:
Please do contact me if you want to help, meet, invite, or drink with me 
PS: Further destination will probably be Eastern Europe (more to come soon).
The anonymous blogger behind Namawinelake, a prominent watchdog blog that chronicled Ireland’s efforts to deal with its economic crisis, has stopped publishing, triggering a wave of speculation as to the blogger’s identity and his or her reason for quitting.
While being a tremendous proof of concept, the distributed cryptocurrency Bitcoin is fundamentally flawed as an alternative money system, critics say. It is now time for truly radical monetarists to build on this technical experiment and move to the next level of the monetary revolution: a truly human-based digital monetary system. Read my take on the future of digital currencies on OuiShare.net.
My european tour leads me to Greece next week. On my todo list:
If you want to meetup or have any opportunity, ideas, projects to share with me, please get in touch! I’ll land in Athens on April 10th morning and fly back to Paris on May 2nd.
With the launch of the european citizen’s initiative for unconditional basic income, the time has come for basic income supporters to take action for the one of the biggest battle of History: the battle for Human Rights, Dignity, Democracy, the Commons… All at once reunited in the demand for a basic income. Continue reading
Months of efforts were rewarded last week : you can now officially sign the european citizens initiative for unconditional basic income.
This initiative is a project I have been coordinating for one year with people from 15 countries. Our goal is to have the EU commission make a case for a basic income in Europe. For that matter we need to collect one million signatures within one year.
If you support the idea, please sign our initiative by following this link: http://sign.basicincome2013.eu
Thank you!
So the greek central bank just announced the cost of the greek bank recapitalization : 27.5bn euros just for the 4 biggest banks, 40 bn overall. That could even top at 50bn, the Bank of Greece admits. This represents about 20% of Greece’s GDP.
What a scam, isn’t it? Well, this is actually awesome: just by doing this, bankers are providing the best possible evidence to my argument that a basic income is perfectly fundable, even in a bankrupt State like Greece. Read my post here on BoilingFrogs.info
Under the slogan “You are not a loan, you are not alone,” Occupy Wall Street’s “Strike Debt” group is aiming to inject life into a resistance movement against debt repayment. The operation is gaining worldwide support, and could very well revive the protest movement which was born a year ago.
My last piece for OuiShare is about how collaborative economy is destroying jobs, and what we can do about it. Long story short:
The major point of the Collaborative Economy is that value creation is being scattered among society. This makes it difficult to be measured. For instance, consumers are now involved in the co-production of the products they buy. The problem is not only that they do not get paid for their contribution, but a large number of companies would not even exist if they could not use open-source tools created by communities of developers , long before these businesses were even created, for free. In other words, a large amount of the market economy’s profits is built on a large free lunch – the one of the non-market economy.
Which of course, leads me to the conclusion of the basic income:
Philosophically, this would be a compensation for what the French economist Yann Moulier Boutang calls the “retribution for pollinisation”, or a reward for all non-marketable values we create by accident, like bees that fertilize flowers by carrying pollen.