Why Anarchy Fails as AI Policy
Dr. Joanna Bryson explains why removing rules from AI systems doesn’t lead to freedom or innovation. Wealth, markets, and technology all depend on public goods that are easy to overlook.
A broader discussion on what AI is and how governance can help it serve society.
👉 Full episode: https://youtu.be/fJSrpfwFXRo
Higher Education in the Time of Fascist Plague
- bssproj
https://socialistproject.ca/2026/01/higher-education-in-the-time-of-fascist-plague/
#PublicGoods #Highereducation
Alberta is Privatizing Healthcare: Threatening Public Healthcare Across Canada
- bssproj
https://socialistproject.ca/2025/12/alberta-is-privatizing-healthcare/
#PublicGoods #Healthcare
Hallo @dfg_public :
Gibt es bei den durch die DFG bereitgestellten Förder-Geldern * Vorgaben/Beschränkungen in Bezug auf Patente/Produkte/Wissen/... die daraus hervorgehen? Wie lauten diese?
Z.B. muss zu x Prozent gemeinnützig und frei verfügbar (#openaccess) sein. Ganz im Sinne von #publicmoney = #publicgoods.
Kontext: "Darüber hinaus könnten staatlich geförderte Forschungsgruppen #Patente beantragen, um auszuschließen, dass diese in die Hände von Privaten fallen, die um der Profite willen vielen den Zugang hierzu unmöglich machen. Und schließlich sollte gerade bei genetischen und anderen Gemeingütern kein #Patentschutz vergeben werden."
https://www.surplusmagazin.de/pistor-der-kapitalismus-lasst-sich-durch-das-recht-transformieren/
*
"2024 verfügte die #DFG über einen Förderungsetat von rund 3,9 Milliarden Euro, aus dem 30.940 Projekte unterstützt wurden. Bei dem Förderungsetat handelt es sich um Steuergelder, die (...) vom Bund / den Ländern getragen werden." https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Forschungsgemeinschaft
Pl help. Where's the social/economic history on this?
Ok. Like, when #JosephBazalgette famously built public sewers in London. Great public network. But where's the story of all the private connections into that?? Retrofitting backyard pits can't have been a small thing. How did everyone afford it, or not? What secured compliance?
Book recommendations etc all welcome. It's not about London. It's about compliance with public health.
#sewage #foul #history #PublicGoods #PublicHealth #compliance
Ontario Government is Privatizing Surgeries While Pushing Public Hospitals into Deficit
- bssproj
https://socialistproject.ca/2025/12/ontario-government-is-privatizing-surgeries/
#PublicGoods #Healthcare
Trustless digital inheritance on Ethereum.
This video shows how Heavenkey works:
inactivity detection, encrypted heirs, automated succession.
Full demo 👇
https://x.com/i/status/2000505686812422268
#Ethereum #Web3 #CryptoSecurity #Privacy #PublicGoods #OpenSource #Heavenkey
"...[F]or those of us who have the luxury of not being in the trenches, it’s a good time to start talking about what a specifically socialist approach to municipal government might look like, especially when it comes to technology.
Fortunately, we have a historical precedent to help us think through this question. As Eric Blanc has argued, the experience of Milwaukee’s “sewer socialists” in the early twentieth century holds lessons for our current moment. Significantly, sewer socialism is a tradition that Mamdani himself has cited as inspiration. “Sewer socialism, to me, represents a belief that the worth of an ideology can only be judged by its delivery,” he said in an interview earlier this year.
The basic insight of sewer socialism is bringing people into your politics by improving their lives in obvious ways. “You win someone’s trust through an outcome” is how Mamdani puts it. The sewer socialists of Milwaukee made the case that municipal ownership of systems like sanitation, water, and power could deliver services more efficiently and more equitably than private ownership. They solved practical problems for their constituents while constructing working examples of a postcapitalist political economy in miniature.
The same method can be applied to the internet. Call it “digital sewer socialism.” Socialist elected officials in New York, Seattle, and beyond can craft policy interventions that increase the quality of life for residents by addressing the difficulties that arise in their relationship with technology. These interventions can be carried out in such a way that, by modeling socialist principles, they win wider support for socialist ideas."
https://jacobin.com/2025/12/digital-sewer-socialism-public-ownership
#USA #Socialism #SewerSocialism #DigitalSewerSocialism #PublicGoods #PublicInfrastructure
PeerTube is recognized as a digital public good by Digital Public Goods Alliance
https://www.digitalpublicgoods.net/r/peertube
#HackerNews #PeerTube #DigitalPublicGood #PublicGoods #Alliance #OpenSource #VideoSharing
"If politics is the art of negotiating differences–and, ideally, supporting and multiplying them–under a common rule, then the work before us is to renovate the “common”: the infrastructures through which we meet, rely on, and matter to one another. This political labor prioritizes building over branding, reciprocity over performance, and the ethical experience of reciprocally caring for one another over the satisfactions of solipsistic online expression, newspaper columns, or podcasts.
To beat Trumpism, we must name the breakdown of democracy that has already transpired over decades of neoliberal disinvestment from the commons and from care it supports. And for those in positions of power who oversaw the breakdown and whose careers and bank accounts benefited from it, they should take responsibility for the reality they’ve wrought.
Then let us treat politics not as civility training but as the work of caring for democracy: the deliberate construction of public, participatory systems of care that give our talk of community actual substance. That means Medicare for All–and a national community care worker system that keeps people from needing doctors and hospitals in the first place. It means universal childcare–and the well-paid neighborhood jobs and safe spaces to enable it. It means housing as a fundamental right–and the support teams that get and keep people stably housed.
It means regarding racial, gender, and religious differences not as inconveniences to be tolerated but as the very lifeblood of democracy and the wellspring of its essential creativity. It means moving resources from punishment to care and proving, block by block, that safety is a function of belonging and caregiving, not of policing or surveillance."
https://www.newglobalpolitics.org/neither-culture-wars-nor-big-tents-will-save-american-democracy/
#USA #Democracy #Democrats #DemocraticParty #PublicGoods #Universalism
Heavenkey = digital inheritance without intermediaries.
🔐 Encrypted heirs (AES-GCM, client-side)
⏱️ Inactivity engine
🧩 Diamond architecture
🪂 Ethical fallback
No notaries
No bureaucracy
No custody
Protocol + docs: tinyurl.com/5baher5h
#Heavenkey #Ethereum #PublicGoods
I wrote a piece on literacy, human capital formation, state capacity & development in South Africa. Link in the comments. #publicgoods #statecapacity #southafrica #stateformation #democracy #Education
State capacity, taxation, public goods, allocation of resources, employment, bandits, states, Brazil, Rio #politicaleconomics #brazil #publicgoods #statecapacity #economics
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/manoel-bittencourt-971a4b266_brazil-brasil-statecapacity-activity-7391010010908205056-5YUc?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAEFLa6UBls1jonc2aSgPa7XwRqKB80W_Q1w
UK pharma giants are pulling out of long-term research initiatives — which, surprise, could gut scientific infrastructure.
But wait… I thought capitalism was supposed to be innovative?
Funny how the “free market” loves science — right up until it stops being instantly profitable.
Public science built the world. Capital privatizes the parts it can sell.
#Capitalism #Science #UK #Pharma #Research #PublicGoods #Degrowth #SystemicFailure
🚨A cool column by Benito Salomão on public goods and democratic stability. Link to the article in the comments below. 👉 #brazil #brasil #democracy #publicgoods #welfare 👇
"For the conservative argument to hold any water, there needs to be a reason that free stuff from the government is bad but free stuff from individuals is not. Why would that be? When people like Senator Paul rage against free stuff, the concern seems to be the effect it will have on the recipient — that handing out free stuff promotes laziness. Why would a free bus ride turn working-class people into freeloaders but a trust fund make rich kids into innovative entrepreneurs? This makes sense only if you have already decided that poor people are lazy and rich people are inherently better.
Any capitalist who doesn’t want to abolish inheritance rejects the first premise of the first version of the Anti-Socialism Argument. Unless you have either simply presupposed that capitalism is the better system or have assumed that rich people are genetically superior, you have no reason to believe premise one of the revised Anti-Socialism Argument 2.0.
So let’s be clear: The “free stuff” line isn’t an argument. It’s a smoke screen. It’s a way to sneer at programs that help ordinary people while keeping quiet about the much larger freebies that flow to the wealthy every day. Mamdani’s win shows that more and more New Yorkers see through the hypocrisy."
https://jacobin.com/2025/08/mamdani-socialism-capitalism-free-stuff/
#Socialism #PublicWelfare #Conservatism #PublicGoods #Capitalism #Ideology
Tangled in the “thicket” of regulations behind closed doors
World-making and planet-making
"On its day two, the roundtable had substantial discussions about housing and the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act, both hampered by excessive regulation."
The message from Canavan...was: “to make our economy bigger, we need to make our government smaller”.
>>
https://theconversation.com/view-from-the-hill-everyone-wants-a-slice-of-the-productivity-action-263431
#EPBCAct #biodiversity #laws #Environment #conservation #BiodiversityCrisis #ecosystem #decline #PublicGoods #state #regulation #governance #MarketForces #growth #GrowthMindset #DecisionMaking #democracy #ClimateEmergency #LookingAfterCountry
🚨 I wrote a short article on inequality persistence, education quantity and quality, state capacity and economic growth, in South Africa. Link to the article in the comments below. 👉 #southafrica #inequality #welfare #education #publicgoods #economicgrowth👇
Essential Reading ->
"One could argue that by repurposing creative works, AI has expanded the art multiplier: each dollar spent on the arts now yields its usual social return, as well as additional value derived from its incorporation into AI systems.
Yet, despite the value of their contributions, public funding for artists and creators has steadily declined. In the United Kingdom, for example, direct support from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to national arts bodies fell by 18% per person in real terms between 2009-10 and 2022-23. Over the same period, core funding for arts councils dropped by 18% in England, 22% in Scotland, 25% in Wales, and 66% in Northern Ireland. As generative AI continues to churn out synthetic content and displace human labor, that support must increase to reflect the realities of a changing creative economy.
Admittedly, with public finances under pressure and debt on the rise, this is hardly the time for unchecked government spending. Any additional funding would need to be financed responsibly. While a detailed policy blueprint is beyond the scope of this article, it’s worth noting that the enormous profits generated by major tech firms could be partially redirected to support the creative communities that power their models.
One way to achieve this would be to impose a levy on the gross revenues of the largest AI providers, collected by a national or multilateral agency. As the technology becomes increasingly embedded in daily life and production processes, the revenue flowing to AI firms is bound to grow – and so, too, will contributions to the fund. These resources could then be distributed by independent grant councils on multiyear cycles, ensuring that support reaches a wide range of disciplines and regions."
#AI #GenerativeAI #BigTech #Copyright #IP #AITraining #Commons #DigitalCommons #CreativeLabour #PublicGoods
