[Multitude Project] The role of power relations in a p2p economy

[Blogger]

The #occupy movement, which is a surface manifestation of a deeper Multitude movement, is in fact a refutation of power. Not of the "power in place", i.e. big banks, governments, etc. but of what we call "instituted power", the kind of power your boss has over you. The consensus decision making process, a form of direct democracy that has been adopted by the #occupy movement, is the most obvious affirmation of this refutation of instituted power relations, until now seen as necessary structuring mechanisms of society. 

Where is this coming from? Was it there before? Is this pure Utopia? Or is there something fundamental happening which makes power relations loose their importance?  

We often hear that power relations are tolerated by people because they are believe to be essential to organize us into efficient and effective groups, to achieve complex goals. Some say that without instituted power relations society would simply brake down, collapse. Go tell that to an anarchist... 

It is our conviction that the Multitude constructive revolution drives the world towards a p2p economy, which we also like to call a swarm economy. The p2p economy shares a common thread with the #occupy movement, which is an important cord in the Multitude movement. This movement is about the empowerment of the multitude, of the individual, of all individuals seen as members of communities, not as isolated creatures. This empowerment is not declared. It comes naturally through the use of the new digital technology, which offers a lot of potential to networked individuals. The most important side of this empowerment is economical, (co-)creation, distribution and consumption of value. Empowerment of all individuals to the detriment of a few (still) "in power" is in fact decentralization of power, i.e. suppression of instituted power relations. These large value producing p2p networks formed by the Multitude are value-based organizations. They are growing stronger every day, to the detriment of power-based organizations, or hierarchies. 

We believe that in a society with VERY efficient means of communication and coordination power relations are losing their key role in structuring organizations, in making them more efficient. We are going through a phase transition, from a state structured by instituted power relations, to a state structured by value-based relations.

During the last four years of our studies we uncovered two reasons why power-based relations are becoming less operational. They are very well understood in two famous cases: the #occupy movement and Wikipedia.

Power relations and information

We were used to hierarchical social movements. These were movements that had strong leaders, like the civil rights movement in the US, or the communist and socialist movements in the early nineteen hundreds.  Why didn't we have large scale movements like #occupy in the past? Because it was impossible!

Human relations based on power, more precisely instituted power, insures the transfer of information in large social settings that are deprived of effective means of communication, and are critical for maintaining a sustainable level of coordination. In this context, power relations produce accountability, trust, and create secure pathways of information between important functional parts of the system ("you deliver the message or I kill you"). Moreover, in these conditions of poor communication and coordination large systems centralize, i.e. we see formation of centers of data and information processing, which form the locus of analysis, command and control. Egalitarian societies were only stable at small scales. Throughout history, anywhere on the planet, large societies formed centralized political systems and economies. This was an inevitable path of evolution in an environment of continuous fights for supremacy between tribes, clans, kingdoms and empires.

But today, there is another way to insure efficient information transfer and good coordination at the level of the individual, without spatial barriers, in real/effective time. #occupy made heavy use of Internet technologies. In this context power relations loose their "raison d'etre", or at least their role is greatly reduced.

Power relations and redundancy

Let's move now to economic systems. Imagine a group of individuals coming together around a project. If the project is complex many different skills are needed. Suppose that these are special skills, and that not every person involved can possess them all at once. We'll have division of tasks/roles. In this conditions, it takes a minimum number of individuals to fill all the necessary roles in order to complete the project. If there are roles occupied only by one individual, that individual has a monopoly on a specific activity. If this individual becomes a delinquent, doesn't respect priorities set by the group, delivers poor quality, etc. the group is in trouble, because the project cannot get completed. In order to make it work, the groups must find ways to force this individual to adjust his behavior. If the group has access to a pool of individuals with similar skills they can decide to exclude the delinquent, to replace him with another individual. The coercion  can be done by the group, or by an individual who is empowered, who's power has been instituted by the group or by a higher authority.    

There is no such mechanism of coercion within the community of Wikipedia content producers. No one will be forced to write/correct an article. No one will be punished for having entered poor content. And yet, Wikipedia's value is contiguously growing. That is because there is a lot of redundancy within the system. There are hundreds or even thousands of individuals with all the necessary skills for a specific task, and there everyone's input is checked and refined by many others. The entire system doesn't rely on a single person to do something. 


By t!b!

By AllOfUs

--
Posted By Blogger to Multitude Project at 9/18/2012 10:29:00 PM