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Cake day: January 30th, 2025

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  • China would be coordinating this with EU forces

    China’s is a the most important supporter of Russia in the war against Ukraine, Chinese companies are already actively investing in Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine, China’s envoy for Europe openly said that former Soviet states have no independent legal status, just to name some examples. These things don’t make China a good ally for Europeans.

    (In the meantime, China rejected reports it will deploying a contingent to Ukraine as far as I read. But it wouldn’t a good idea for Europe imho.)










  • Writer Ben Tarnoff and researcher Dr James Muldoon have been proposing to ‘deprivatise’ the internet. Dr Muldoon writes a lot on ‘digital democracy’ and how the ‘extractivism’ of today’s digital world needs to be rethought, very much a the UK’s Ada Lovelace Institute.

    Their and other people’s ideas are mostly based on cooperatives, which are not new as we know, but barely applied in the technical space.

    There are, however, already first projects in a lot of countries around the globe, and despite in their early stages, many of them appear to be very promising. In the U.S., for example, researcher Trebor Scholz’s Platform Cooperativism Constortium is certainly among the most notable. The organization supports communities from cooperatives that then build more or less the same products and services like the centralized, venture capital-backed surveillance technology (Uber, Amazon, video conferencing tools, …), but are owned on a more collective basis and pursuing a less extractive business model.

    In Europe, the Smart Cooperative was launched as a social economy project by founders from the cultural sector. These visionaries created Smart as an innovative solution for freelance artists and cultural professionals who often work under precarious conditions. Today, the collective has tens of thousands of members, and is active in 7 countries (Belgium, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal).

    In Mexico, Tierra Comun is a similar project and equally successful.

    There are many more across the globe, aiming at solving a huge variety of issues, and they are very promising imho.