Torturing their metaphors and confusing art and business, New Labour's favourite creative consultants revealed their vision for the future of arts institutions in the age of networks. Simon Ford reports from the Cornerhouse's ‘The Art of With' conference

In a time of credit crisis, small to medium bank branches are failing, forcing the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) to go in and clean up the mess. Coming in stealthily to avoid public panic and sudden withdrawal of all a bank’s funds, which would result in a sinking of the bank and possibly others in the area, the FDIC makes a quick job of taking over the bank.

Last year's Royal Mail strikes responsded to an ongoing attack on postal workers' conditions, the origins of which can be traced directly to the competitve, 'harmonized' market being gradually introduced under the EU Postal Directives of 1997 and 2002.  The threatened closure of post offices across the UK also falls within the Directives' market logic.  (It remains to be seen if local post office user campaigns, whose bandwagon now groans under the weight of Ken Livingstone and a posse of embarrassed/embarrassing Labour MPs, will manage to organize in solidarity w

The Measure for Measure: A Workshop on Value from Below conference in London last week promised to take a critical look at the way value is created and measured in contemporary capitalism. Melancholic Troglodytes went along but found that the  talks didn't quite measure up to the title

My business in this state
Made me a looker on here in Vienna.

It’s not just the founders of hippy communes or artists like Amy Balkin who are looking for ‘a breathing space from the State’ in which to experiment with freedom and free-time. Big IT companies like Google apparently share their ideals. With a commitment to ‘me time’, the production of ‘universal access’, and (energy) sovereignty, corporates are leveraging the dream of the commons

In a bust economy can Keynesian demand management save us from the latest cycle of Schumpeterian creative destruction? In this issue’s ‘Cyberhype’, CCRU assesses the contenders’ credentials