[Multitude Project] The stateless economy and the local aconomy
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Jan 5, 2015, 12:25:34 PM1/5/15
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The Multitude movement enters a new era, where its processes can be supported by truly p2p infrastructures. Bitcoin is now a well-known symbol of a new breed of value exchange systems, called cryptocurrencies, money without the bank, stateless money, a new currency that looks and feels like your ATM card, but it is entirely decentralized, under the control of those who use it.
Peer-to-peer is a new pattern that emerges in almost all the spheres of human activity, from culture, to governance, to the creation and the distribution of goods and services. It is the underlying pattern of the current leap in the emancipation of the multitude (see the multitude manifesto). Bitcoin is the poster child of p2p exchange systems, but the same technology is now expanding and promising much more:
We are creating new economic processes with their own governance and exchange systems that know no borders, no political boundaries, and no central authority (which doesn't mean no rules or chaos).
One of the most interesting observations in relation with this new pattern that deploys globally on p2p infrastructures is the emergence of a global multitude. It is a very diverse multitude. This diversity is rooted in values and principles rather than in local customs. We speak about it as different cultures of online communities. These new social structures transcend the state, which has no effective means to control them.
Will states turn against these trends as a reaction of self-preservation? Yes, see for example a list of countries that ban bitcoins. I predict that this opposition will grow stronger in the near future, but no government can bury an idea who's time has come. No government can oppose something that provides value to all its citizens, especially when the current economic model is evidently unsustainable, openly criticized, and in decline. What should governments tell their youth looking for a job? The answer can be read in the daily news in Spain, Italy, Greece, France, USA, ... and the list is growing longer every year. Institutions are not eternal. They have a life cycle, like any other thing. Nation-states were created in the 19th century. When people decide not to use them anymore it's probably time for them to be replaced with new social structures.
So how should local communities adapt to this new situation, since a lot of what it takes for a good living happens at the local level? In other words, how are they going to generate the material goods and the services needed for a good live in this new global, stateless society?
The stateless economy is not in contradiction with the local economy. I am drawing this conclusion from my work on the Open Value Network (OVN) model within the SENSORICA community, a pilot project for long tail peer production.
Proximity is still relevant: Even though the Internet allows the exchange of knowledge at the global scale, as well as coordination and collaboration, making stuff (manufacturing hardware for example) requires local resources, local processes, and know how. There is still a need for proximity, which clusters economic activities by geographical areas.
Local economies: Environmental concerns, the energy crisis, and geopolitical situations are favoring the development of diversified local economies. New technologies for renewable energy, new materials, automation and robotics, including 3D printing, make local production for local consumption economically viable.
From global commons to local economies, this is how the new economy is shaping. It builds on another new reality: knowledge is abundant, know how and capacity of production are scarce and require proximity.
Knowledge is abundant because one idea becomes available to the entire planet in one instant, as soon as it is shared on the Internet. Thus, the Internet becomes this huge repository of ideas that people use to generate new knowledge, which is itself shared, and so on. The open source movement (software and hardware) illustrate this new reality. The abundance of knowledge goes hand in hand with the creation of a global knowledge commons. Open source communities, which are virtual, global, stateless are now the most innovative organizations. 3D printing has been democratized by open hardware communities, which continue to lead in 3D printing innovation, despite a few corporate successes. The same can be said for automation and control systems, with Arduino being the most popular example. DIY Drones is where the innovation in UAV technology happens. The dominant mode of innovation is now global, decentralized, stateless, increasingly using it's own physical infrastructure (a network of fablabs, makerspaces, co-working spaces), increasingly using its own funding mechanisms (crowdfunding and peer lending).
This global knowledge commons gets materialized into local economies, by drawing from the local know how and the local capacity of production. This materialization requires a special type of infrastructure and new economic models. Let's illustrate this potential with two examples.
Transportation: Your local community needs adapted means of transportation? You can open a Local motors shop and grow a community around it, to produce and distribute cars, locally. You continue to be plugged into the global Local motors community and benefit from the stream of open innovation that comes out of it. You can also join other similar communities like Wikispeed and the OScar for more potential. There is no intellectual property around these car designs, they are open source, and everything you build on top of these designs becomes open source by default.
Agriculture: You need to improve food production in your local area? Join Farmhack, which provides open source solutions. Open source ecology provides tools not only for agriculture, but also for the construction of your farm and even an entire village. There are similar online communities for indoor growing, automated greenhouse growing, hydroponics and aquaponics... Name it, you'll find it. These sources of knowledge and designs are complemented with other tools and services for resource sharing, like sharing land (see landshare), tools and equipment, seeds, etc. Local food production and distribution is reorganizing itself along a different logic.
New types of organizations are needed in order to orchestrate the development of the global commons and to funnel it into sustainable local economies. I bet on the Open Value Network (OVN) model and on organizations like SENSORICA, because they take into consideration how innovation, production and distribution are restructuring. Within OVNs a need (local or not) is translated into a problem, which come with its own incentive system (monetary or others) to be solved by a global, stateless community of developers, into open source solutions. The solution is materialized into a product or a service at the point of origin of the problem, and distributed to those in need, in exchange of some form of benefit/revenue. The revenue gets redistributed to ALL the participants in proportion to their contributions, using a value accounting system (records contributions) and a value equation (turns contributions into fluid equity). Since the solution is open source, others can also distribute it as is, or as a modified/improved/remixed version, also giving back to the original contributors, in order to buy their loyalty and to sustain the open innovation channel.
New infrastructures are required to support these organizations and their processes. OVNs are supported by a network resource planning and value accounting system (NRP-VAS). These tools will move on truly p2p infrastructures like Ethereum. It is important to realize that these new economic systems would be dysfunctional if they were obliged to use classical means of value exchange, or even new systems like Paypal. Cryotocurrencies are necessary in order to make OVNs effective. Imagine an open source project with thousands of participants and a long tail contribution distribution. The redistribution of revenue from every market exchange event (every sale) would require thousands of micro-payments across the globe. Imagine thousands of individuals crowdfunding the purchase of a new equipment used in a project, again with a long tail contribution distribution. This would require thousands of transfers into a unique account from which the purchase is made. Bitcoin and other currencies built on the block chain technology are very compatible with these new processes.
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Posted By Blogger to Multitude Project at 1/03/2015 01:53:00 PM
Peer-to-peer is a new pattern that emerges in almost all the spheres of human activity, from culture, to governance, to the creation and the distribution of goods and services. It is the underlying pattern of the current leap in the emancipation of the multitude (see the multitude manifesto). Bitcoin is the poster child of p2p exchange systems, but the same technology is now expanding and promising much more:
From Ethereum project: Satoshi Nakamoto's development of Bitcoin in 2009 has often been hailed as a radical development in money and currency, being the first example of a digital asset which simultaneously has no backing or "intrinsic value" and no centralized issuer or controller. However, another, arguably more important, part of the Bitcoin experiment is the underlying blockchain technology as a tool of distributed consensus, and attention is rapidly starting to shift to this other aspect of Bitcoin. Commonly cited alternative applications of blockchain technology include using on-blockchain digital assets to represent custom currencies and financial instruments ("colored coins"), the ownership of an underlying physical device ("smart property"), non-fungible assets such as domain names ("Namecoin"), as well as more complex applications involving having digital assets being directly controlled by a piece of code implementing arbitrary rules ("smart contracts") or even blockchain-based "decentralized autonomous organizations" (DAOs). What Ethereum intends to provide is a blockchain with a built-in fully fledged Turing-complete programming language that can be used to create "contracts" that can be used to encode arbitrary state transition functions, allowing users to create any of the systems described above, as well as many others that we have not yet imagined, simply by writing up the logic in a few lines of code. (See the source).For those who think that all this technology is nothing if it doesn't live on its own support, on a p2p Internet, take a look at the MaidSafe project, FNF and many others like them.
We are creating new economic processes with their own governance and exchange systems that know no borders, no political boundaries, and no central authority (which doesn't mean no rules or chaos).
One of the most interesting observations in relation with this new pattern that deploys globally on p2p infrastructures is the emergence of a global multitude. It is a very diverse multitude. This diversity is rooted in values and principles rather than in local customs. We speak about it as different cultures of online communities. These new social structures transcend the state, which has no effective means to control them.
Will states turn against these trends as a reaction of self-preservation? Yes, see for example a list of countries that ban bitcoins. I predict that this opposition will grow stronger in the near future, but no government can bury an idea who's time has come. No government can oppose something that provides value to all its citizens, especially when the current economic model is evidently unsustainable, openly criticized, and in decline. What should governments tell their youth looking for a job? The answer can be read in the daily news in Spain, Italy, Greece, France, USA, ... and the list is growing longer every year. Institutions are not eternal. They have a life cycle, like any other thing. Nation-states were created in the 19th century. When people decide not to use them anymore it's probably time for them to be replaced with new social structures.
So how should local communities adapt to this new situation, since a lot of what it takes for a good living happens at the local level? In other words, how are they going to generate the material goods and the services needed for a good live in this new global, stateless society?
The stateless economy is not in contradiction with the local economy. I am drawing this conclusion from my work on the Open Value Network (OVN) model within the SENSORICA community, a pilot project for long tail peer production.
Proximity is still relevant: Even though the Internet allows the exchange of knowledge at the global scale, as well as coordination and collaboration, making stuff (manufacturing hardware for example) requires local resources, local processes, and know how. There is still a need for proximity, which clusters economic activities by geographical areas.
Local economies: Environmental concerns, the energy crisis, and geopolitical situations are favoring the development of diversified local economies. New technologies for renewable energy, new materials, automation and robotics, including 3D printing, make local production for local consumption economically viable.
From global commons to local economies, this is how the new economy is shaping. It builds on another new reality: knowledge is abundant, know how and capacity of production are scarce and require proximity.
Knowledge is abundant because one idea becomes available to the entire planet in one instant, as soon as it is shared on the Internet. Thus, the Internet becomes this huge repository of ideas that people use to generate new knowledge, which is itself shared, and so on. The open source movement (software and hardware) illustrate this new reality. The abundance of knowledge goes hand in hand with the creation of a global knowledge commons. Open source communities, which are virtual, global, stateless are now the most innovative organizations. 3D printing has been democratized by open hardware communities, which continue to lead in 3D printing innovation, despite a few corporate successes. The same can be said for automation and control systems, with Arduino being the most popular example. DIY Drones is where the innovation in UAV technology happens. The dominant mode of innovation is now global, decentralized, stateless, increasingly using it's own physical infrastructure (a network of fablabs, makerspaces, co-working spaces), increasingly using its own funding mechanisms (crowdfunding and peer lending).
This global knowledge commons gets materialized into local economies, by drawing from the local know how and the local capacity of production. This materialization requires a special type of infrastructure and new economic models. Let's illustrate this potential with two examples.
Transportation: Your local community needs adapted means of transportation? You can open a Local motors shop and grow a community around it, to produce and distribute cars, locally. You continue to be plugged into the global Local motors community and benefit from the stream of open innovation that comes out of it. You can also join other similar communities like Wikispeed and the OScar for more potential. There is no intellectual property around these car designs, they are open source, and everything you build on top of these designs becomes open source by default.
Agriculture: You need to improve food production in your local area? Join Farmhack, which provides open source solutions. Open source ecology provides tools not only for agriculture, but also for the construction of your farm and even an entire village. There are similar online communities for indoor growing, automated greenhouse growing, hydroponics and aquaponics... Name it, you'll find it. These sources of knowledge and designs are complemented with other tools and services for resource sharing, like sharing land (see landshare), tools and equipment, seeds, etc. Local food production and distribution is reorganizing itself along a different logic.
New types of organizations are needed in order to orchestrate the development of the global commons and to funnel it into sustainable local economies. I bet on the Open Value Network (OVN) model and on organizations like SENSORICA, because they take into consideration how innovation, production and distribution are restructuring. Within OVNs a need (local or not) is translated into a problem, which come with its own incentive system (monetary or others) to be solved by a global, stateless community of developers, into open source solutions. The solution is materialized into a product or a service at the point of origin of the problem, and distributed to those in need, in exchange of some form of benefit/revenue. The revenue gets redistributed to ALL the participants in proportion to their contributions, using a value accounting system (records contributions) and a value equation (turns contributions into fluid equity). Since the solution is open source, others can also distribute it as is, or as a modified/improved/remixed version, also giving back to the original contributors, in order to buy their loyalty and to sustain the open innovation channel.
New infrastructures are required to support these organizations and their processes. OVNs are supported by a network resource planning and value accounting system (NRP-VAS). These tools will move on truly p2p infrastructures like Ethereum. It is important to realize that these new economic systems would be dysfunctional if they were obliged to use classical means of value exchange, or even new systems like Paypal. Cryotocurrencies are necessary in order to make OVNs effective. Imagine an open source project with thousands of participants and a long tail contribution distribution. The redistribution of revenue from every market exchange event (every sale) would require thousands of micro-payments across the globe. Imagine thousands of individuals crowdfunding the purchase of a new equipment used in a project, again with a long tail contribution distribution. This would require thousands of transfers into a unique account from which the purchase is made. Bitcoin and other currencies built on the block chain technology are very compatible with these new processes.
Without cryptocurrencies the potential of new economic systems that incentivize the development of the global knowledge commons and funnel open innovation into sustainable local economies is greatly reduced. Without global, stateless open source communities there is no global knowledge commons, and innovation goes back to its slow pace of the past, leaving critical and time-sensitive problems related to sustainability unsolved. Without embracing stateless p2p practices we don't actualize the full potential of the new digital technology in making our economy more effective, efficient, and sustainable. Without embracing stateless p2p practices we will see the collapse of our local communities. The state is an instrument for the locals, for the people, it is not above the people. States that are fighting stateless p2p infrastructures and processes are essentially depriving their local communities from engaging in the new economy, the only available alternative, which already shows clear signs to be effective.
By Tibi
By Tibi
AllOfUs
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Posted By Blogger to Multitude Project at 1/03/2015 01:53:00 PM
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