The New Year’s Message of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do
Michel Bauwens
will appear tomorrow on our blog:
The New Year’s Message of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do
The following is a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction of a peer to peer world
What have we been doing in the last few years, and what should we be doing next? Here is a list of major undertakings, some well under way, some barely begun. All need to be done, are interdependent on each other, but need to be done ‘at the same time’, though there is a certain maturation effect which may need to take place to move from one phase or priority to another. Finding out these interdepencies and choosing amongst those priorities is a matter of debate, strategising, and practical experience.
* use the existing infrastructures for immaterial exchange for personal and social autonomy
We started by creating an infrastructure that allowed for peer to peer communication. Out of this striving came the internet and its end to end principle, web 2.0 and its possibilities for participation, and social media allowing for intense relational interaction, and tools such as wikis which allow for the collaborative construction of knowledge.
The creation of this infrastructure was a combination of efforts of civil society forces, governments and public funding, and private R&D and commercial deployments. It’s an imperfect world full of governmental control, corporate platforms, but also many capabilities for p2p interaction that did not exist before.
My assessment is that this struggle can experience setbacks but can no longer be undone. They have become civilisational achievements that are just as necessary for p2p-commoners than for the powers that be, even if they can impose a ‘dissent tax’
* change those infrastructures itself away from centralized and corporate control
But precisely because phase 1 is an imperfect one and partially if not largely in control of forces which have their own agenda of (political) control and (commercial) exploitation, as lately exemplified so well in the corporate decisions around Wikileaks, we are increasingly realizing the need to control these very infrastructures and insure that they can continue to allow and even expand the possibilities for p2p communication and value creation.
Hence the movements for free software, open standards, independent p2p infrastructures. There are many efforts underway in this area, some successful, some fledlging, some of which will go nowhere and be defeated.
Success on this front also depends on what the ‘enemy’ is doing. To the degree they want to go too far in controlling the platforms, to that degree they will mobilize the counterforces building the counter-infrastructures, and convince more and more users to use them.
* use the existing infrastructrures, and the new p2p-transformed ones, to change the very infrastructure of production of material goods, making it more sustainable in the process
As we get habituated to p2p communication and value creation, and move from open software to open knowledge to open design, p2p communities get involved in redesigning the means of production and making, i.e. open design necessarily needs to a reconfiguration of production processes towards ‘distributrion’. Open design communities moreover have no perverse incentives for planned obsolence or for hindering the sharing of innovation, so the new infrastructures have a bias towards sustainability, but also to relocalized production and a rationalisation of wasteful and unsustainable material globalization.
* change the property structures of the infrastructure and means of production in the process
As the new modalities of open design and distributed manufacturing are deployed, peers discover and experience the many constraints imposed by the old order of production, such as modes of property, the lact of benefit or revenue sharing, compound-interest based capital which is not easily available for them etc … They start building their own platforms, governance foundations, etc …This creates a need to extend p2p practices and modalities to the rest of the economy, with efforts towards forms of peer funding, open money, a revival of cooperatives and mutualism, and many other. Commoners also discover their affinities with other counter-economies such as the solidarity economy, fair trade, and other forms of commons-friendly enterprise and start developing practical and political alliances
* raising of political awareness and expression as a means of overcoming opposition
As all the above processes are undertaken, digital commoners learn about and experience the political and economic forces that are arraigned against them, and become more politically aware, discovering the need for their own modalities of political action and expression. They may also discover affinities with the enemies of their enemies, other social movements, commons-friendly enterpreneurs, etc
* transform the infrastructures so that the abundance of immaterial sharing can co-exist with the sustainability of the planet, and the demands for equity and social justice
Immaterial cooperation rests on a physical infrastructure which is currently part and parcel of an unsustainable mode of production. Commoners learn the importance of recognizing the natural scarcities of the physical world and how knowledge sharing and open design are themselves vital factors to redesign the unsustainable infrastructure, and to transform it into resilient modalities that insure the perenity of the new social practices. Digital commoners ally with those forces that combine an interest in the abundant sharing of immaterial resources, in the context of preserving natural resources, and according to the principles of social equity.
--
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss: http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
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Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
Michel Bauwens
Michel
hi neal,
i completely agree with douglas rushkoff there.
in 2005, a webhosting company that i will not name gave delete.tv the refund of a whole year of service, even though 6 months had already gone by, because some "anonymous" users didn't want to have their info hosted at the same company where the borderhack project was being hosted... of course, no one at the time believed us, as the idea was the internet was a place of freedom. so yea, being evicted lead to us start the possibleworlds.org and spacebank.org operation, but that's another story...
yours,
f.
On Jan 3, 2011, at 3:02 PM, Neal Gorenflo wrote:
> Thanks Michel for this inspiring message. Coincidently, Douglas Rushkoff just posted an opinion piece on Shareable supporting the second point in your platform:
>
> The Next Net
> http://shareable.net/blog/the-next-net
>
> He basically says we lost the net long ago to corporations and that the only way to have a truly free net is to build one ourselves. Giving our attention to Wikileaks and Net Neutrality are just distractions keeping us from what we need to do.
>
> It's a bold position, and I wonder if there's anyone on this list that actually knows how we can build our own? I'm guessing it would have to use some of the existing infrastructure, but could have a different topology and governance system. Feel free to share your ideas in comments of the post.
>
> Here's to forking the net!
>
Giovanni Lostumbo
http://www.masternewmedia.org/the-alternative-p2p-wireless-internet-network-the-netsukuku-idea/
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Netsukuku
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/IEEE_802.11s
also
"http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2010/12/non-centralised-
infrastructure/index.htm:
" * YaCy is a search engine where many nodes share information to
build a distributed index.
* Status.Net is a microblogging system that allows users to run
their own Twitter-like site and federate selected streams with other
systems.
* Tahoe-LAFS is a high-redundancy file system that allows many
systems to contribute to an encrypted and distributed storage system
which nonetheless remains readable only to the owner of the files and
not to the owner of the storage
....
* Diaspora will hopefully be a social networking community where
users can run their own federated "pods", thus owning their personal
data and directly controlling what is shared with who.
* OpenPGP encryption is based on self-issued certificates which
gain authority as a result of a web of trust expressed via user-
maintained keyrings rather than a hierarchical certificate authority
system that can be centrally compromised.
* There is discussion and prototyping of a P2P DNS in progress,
without a root authority but rather with federated authority...
... * Various federated identity approaches already exist for
different use-cases, using mechanisms like OAuth and SAML.
* Various experiments in using P2PTV video streaming technology
exist, where the video stream is sourced from nearby users rather than
always from a central provider.
* And of course there are many P2P file distribution systems, as
well as the GNUNet framework project.."
http://www.stanford.edu/~allison/saito.html
http://www.media-art-online.org/iwat/
http://www.informatik.uni-trier.de/~ley/db/indices/a-tree/s/Saito:Kenji.html
http://www.watsystems.net/watsystems-translation/english.html
https://twitter.com/jukux
http://www.accianco.jp/
http://www2.media-art-online.org/~ks91/gsap2009f-ks91.pdf
http://www2.media-art-online.org/~ks91/gsap2009f-ks91-doc.pdf
Paul D. Fernhout
> will appear tomorrow on our blog:
This is an excellent post that I agree summarizes a big picture about
social change. (Just noticed it as I was looking through the archive for
the discussion about DVCS.)
As I see it, there have always been four interwoven economic models:
* Subsistence
* Gift
* Planned
* Exchange
Different cultures emphasize a different balance of them.
I have a concern, previously expressed, that one should be careful about
tying together some progressive notion of social change with some
fundamentalist notion of permanent material scarcity and crisis (even as
we may always have current resource limits).
> Immaterial cooperation rests on a physical infrastructure which is currently
> part and parcel of an unsustainable mode of production. Commoners learn the
> importance of recognizing the natural scarcities of the physical world and
> how knowledge sharing and open design are themselves vital factors to
> redesign the unsustainable infrastructure, and to transform it into
> resilient modalities that insure the perenity of the new social practices.
> Digital commoners ally with those forces that combine an interest in the
> abundant sharing of immaterial resources, in the context of preserving
> natural resources, and according to the principles of social equity.
While overall I agree (especially on the "immaterial part" since digital
files lend themselves more easily to a gift economy), I have to take
issue with the point on "recognizing the natural scarcities of the
physical world".
It would have been better to say: "recognizing current apparent
scarcities of the physical world based on our current social
arrangements and scientific & technical knowledge relative to our
current population and aspirations". Or some more concise way of saying
that. :-)
My concern is that a focus on scarcity leads to fear, and then fear
leads to the creation of artificial scarcity by hoarding and violence as
a self-fulfilling prophecy, usually ironically.
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
Going into all that in detail would just rehash this sort of discussion:
"[p2p-research] A joint statement on P2P and post-scarcity thinking"
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-September/004626.html
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-September/004635.html
But briefly (for me :-), Julian Simon talks in general about how
imagination is the "ultimate resource" because there is a human process
involved in making aspects of our environment into resources to various
ends:
http://www.juliansimon.com/writings/Ultimate_Resource/
And while, say, the amount of oil easily accessible might be limited, we
can use our imagination and other things to produce energy in all sorts
of ways (like solar, geothermal, wind, fission, fusion, LENR, or
whatever else) or to be more efficient in our use of energy (creating
negawatts).
I describe that in this parable:
"Burdened by Bags of Sand"
http://www.pdfernhout.net/burdened-by-bags-of-sand.html
"""
"You there, on the bridge, with the USA T-shirt and the bags tied to
yourself, stay where you are."
"I'm going to jump!"
"Don't do it. Have some hope and optimism. Things could get better."
"No they can't! I'm so poor and burdened! I've cut back on
everything, but I'm still poor! And I'm forced to carry these darn heavy
sand bags around everywhere! Life's just too hard!"
"Those heavy looking bags you have tied to yourself -- they are
labeled sand but they look a little pointy for sand?"
"Oh, they are bags of Intel Core i7s and bags of solar cells --
basically just congealed sand, so disgusting."
"But how can you be poor when you have bags of expensive refined
silicon ingots!"
"Don't you get it? I'm poor! The world is poor! In fact, just
carrying these sand bags around all the time for years has made my life
a living hell and made it hard for me to get and keep a job as a clerk
or an oil well roustabout. These sand bags are so heavy I can't do
anything I want to do anymore. You don't know what it's like with a
burden like this to carry around these heavy sand bags all the time
everywhere I go. I am so cursed!"
"But why don't you sell the bags or give them away?"
"Don't you get it, I'm POOR! We're all POOR! What would be the point?
Who would want sand? We're all going to die from Peak Information and
Peak Oil soon, anyway, so everyone is buying guns and Spam, and so no
one is going to buy sand!"
"I'm going to come up to give you a hand getting down safely. Hang on
to hope."
"Don't come any closer or I'll throw this bunch of old congealed sand
I found in my attic at you!"
And so on... "
"""
BTW a link there for: "Chinese Vase, Found in Attic, Fetches $83M" and a
vase as ceramic is basically just congealed sand.
Now, that may all seem silly, but you are claiming to be talking about
"natural" scarcity. How can energy be "naturally" scarce when we have a
lot of sand for PV solar panels? How can information be "naturally"
scarce when we have a lot of sand for computer chips? How can food be
"naturally" scarce when we can build ceramic robots to tend the fields
and build rock crushers to create fertilizer from endless basalt to mix
with the sand, where abundant CO2 from the air creates an organic mulch
to also enrich the soil?
How can even land be "naturally" scarce when we can build space habitats
using sand which we can travel to in our space ships made of sand? Well
sand might not be the best choice for space craft, but how about
diamanoid made from abundant C02 in the atmoshere? Although:
"Ceramic Materials for Reusable Liquid Fueled Rocket Engine"
http://ammtiac.alionscience.com/pdf/AMPQ8_1ART06.pdf
Scarcity fears by some individuals is one of the reasons spam exists,
where spammers trying to make money out of fear for their future are
making it harder for the rest of us to bring about abundance for
everyone, ironically harming themselves and their own children and
children's children etc..
Scarcity fears by some individuals is also a reason we are still
dependent on fossil fuels despite fossil fuels being much more expensive
than renewables since the 1970s -- if you consider externalities like
pollution, disease, war, corruption, and so on:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brittle_Power
http://www.energyandcapital.com/articles/oil-gas-crude/461
Don't let people get away with saying fossil fuels are "cheaper" than
renewables. Fossil fuels are only cheaper when someone else pays the
health bills, and the cleanup costs, and deal with the disrupted
aquifers, and pays the defense taxes, and has to live with a government
corrupted by petro-dollars, and and so on.
So some people have warped US tax subsidies and foreign policy to ensure
a flow of oil profits to them.
Wars are created in part because some people are afraid of not having
enough profits from selling technology (or controlling foreign markets):
http://www.lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm
Basically, some people in our society, the spammers and the oil barons
and the militarists, are afraid there is not enough for them, or they
want to be financially obese out of other fears (or some form of mental
illness similar to why some people intentionally put on vast amounts of
weight). So, they create artificial scarcity in various ways where they
control some choke point of society (or create choke points in society).
And they try to get everyone else to think like them, too.
Bill Gates is another example. He was born a millionaire, learned to
program by dumpster diving OS listings at a computer center, and then he
wrote a letter saying no one would write any more software unless people
pay him lots of money. What is a good word for that? But it is what is
celebrated widely in the USA:
"From Predators to Icons; How to succeed as an entrepreneur : The New
Yorker"
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/e7eae87cee277d04
At what point will Bill Gates be seen like Donna Simpson?
"Obese woman's goal: To weigh 1,000 pounds"
http://www.examiner.com/populist-in-national/obese-woman-s-goal-to-weigh-1-000-pounds
"In Old Bridge, NJ, 42-year-old Donna Simpson eats 12,000 calories a
day. No, she isn't an athlete of Olympic proportions; she has a
different goal. She wants to weigh 1,000 pounds. She's only at 602 right
now. ..."
To Bill Gate's credit, he has given a lot of money to charity, even if
the Gates Foundation is taking a very mainstream approach to global
problems (probably the same mainstream approach that helped create them?)
None-the-less, despite all this mental illness and hypocrisy and fear,
we are progressing as a society to abundance, where, say, solar PV is
cheaper than subsidized fossil fuels:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid_parity
"The fully-loaded cost (not price) of solar electricity is $0.25/kWh or
less in most of the OECD countries. By late 2011, the fully-loaded cost
is likely to fall below $0.15/kWh for most of the OECD and reach
$0.10/kWh in sunnier regions. These cost levels are driving some
emerging trends:[8]..."
What bothers me about focusing on material scarcity as an alleged
absolute fact is that it may lead progressive forces to shoot themselves
in the foot and bring about the very scarcity problems they fear. It
encourages getting people to focus on hoarding stuff, fattening
themselves, and creating private walled gardens instead of encouraging
everyone to cooperate and make our society work well for everyone in a
healthy way. Contrast two approaches to talking about subsistence and
sustainability (one mostly private, one public):
http://www.alpharubicon.com/
http://www.appropedia.org/Welcome_to_Appropedia
===
Basically, to build on what Julian Simon suggests, "resources" are what
emerge from the application to our surroundings of imagination, tools,
effort, computation, collaboration and other previously accessed
"resources".
One aspect of that is also about what we consider our "surroundings" (is
the Moon part of our resource base?) and further whether we choose to
move to places that may have more easily accessible resources by some
definition of resource.
Even if the amount of matter and energy nearby is fixed in some sense,
how we think about it or what we do with it is not, and neither is our
location.
For example, ground up rock makes excellent fertilizer, but most people
do not know that and think we need oil-based fertilizer:
http://www.remineralize.org/
For another possible future example, right now, nickel is just useful
for building things. It might be the case someday soon it will be an
energy source due to lots of people having thought about LENR (Cold
Fusion) building on the science and technology humanity has been
developing for thousands of years. My comment on that related to a claim
of success (I'm not saying their claim is true, but it raises an
important issue in any case):
"On the socioeconomics of cheap energy"
http://www.journal-of-nuclear-physics.com/?p=360&cpage=6#comment-20270
Right now we live on the Earth, but someday quadrillions of people may
live on space habitats around the solar system (habitats perhaps even
built from disassembling the Moon using mass drivers, or more likely,
and better aesthetically, the asteroids).
http://space.mike-combs.com/
Right now species are going extinct. Thanks to DIY-Bio, simulation, and
other things, we may have a vast diversity of species in the near future
(Freeman Dyson suggests DIY-Bio will be a child's game in the Sun, the
Genome, and the Internet, though I question the morality of creating
experimental species for childish amusement given their likely
suffering). Granted, the loss of historical species is a tragic and
needless waste IMHO, so the fact that we could create new species in no
way justifies needlessly destroying existing ones like by cutting down
rainforests to get cheap hamburgers (that ultimately just make people in
the USA sick, anyway it seems).
A fundamental aspect of innovation, especially peer-to-peer is it can
lead to reimaginging our technical and socioeconomic possibilities. This
may allow a return to modes of thought about abundance that may have
been more common in some places hundreds of years ago when there were
relatively few people and a relatively infinite-seeming Earth (like
perhaps Haiti before Columbus). From:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/zinncol1.html
"The Indians, Columbus reported, "are so naive and so free with their
possessions that no one who has not witnessed them would believe it.
When you ask for something they have, they never say no. To the
contrary, they offer to share with anyone....""
It took the force of various armed forces to destroy all that social
abundance, either in Haiti or on the continent. For example:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potlatch
"At potlatch gatherings, a family or hereditary leader hosts guests in
their family's house and holds a feast for their guests. The main
purpose of the potlatch is the re-distribution and reciprocity of
wealth. ... Potlatching was made illegal in Canada in 1884 in an
amendment to the Indian Act[8] and the United States in the late 19th
century, largely at the urging of missionaries and government agents who
considered it "a worse than useless custom" that was seen as wasteful,
unproductive, and contrary to "civilized" values.[9]"
The main use of the US Army for the first century of its existence was
essentially the destruction of the Native way of life. Even though
ironically much of the better parts of the US constitution came from the
Haudenosaunee (Iroquois). Related:
http://www.tuscaroras.com/graydeer/influenc/page1.htm
Or, as is now the case, there are various forces that act against
sharing on the web right now through lawsuits (backed ultimately by
police and state violence) such as through RIAA or through copyright
extension by Disney. Example from this month:
http://blog.gitorious.org/2011/02/03/an-update-on-the-sony-dmca-issue/
"We have just sent an email to Sony�s legal attournes in reply to their
DMCA takedown notice sent to us yesterday: ..."
So, there is a war being waged by those forces of artificial scarcity
against the digital natives who believe in sharing and abundance.
Who will win? As I see it, it is sort of a race between whether the
internet enslaves us or liberates us.
Also, it would be fair to say that Sony in that case thinks it has some
claim to certain patterns or capabilities as being Sony's "property".
But, as with the conquest of the Americas, there was a different view of
"property" as far as land ownership (for example, hunting rights vs.
fencing off so no one else can use it rights, even assuming anyone had a
right to speak for entire tribes however they represented themselves --
the bedrock of capitalism, Manhattan Island, was "sold" by natives who
lived on Long Island and probably thought it was a big joke to make
trouble for their neighbors). This is a standard problem with a
capitalist view of property -- property always begins somewhere, with
the previous history thrown into the dustbin of history. So, Sony thinks
it has some claim to wall off some area of innovation (and legally in
the USA it may), but that is based on saying that all the previous ideas
and patterns and narratives that Sony engineers have built on are
somehow in the public domain. It is convenient, just like it is
convenient to say that land tenure begins based on some war hundreds of
years ago where the land got doled out to some favorites of some king or
despot somewhere, but, ignoring that, all the current land claims are
legitimate.
Or in other words:
http://www.skepticfiles.org/en001/peasant.htm
"Man: (laughingly) Listen: Strange women lying in ponds distributing
swords is no basis for a system of government! Supreme executive power
derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some... farcical
aquatic ceremony!"
As I said at the start, the mix of the four interwoven types of
economies (subsistence, gift, planned, exchange) is dependent on
culture. That perhaps mostly comes down to aesthetics and values and
stories and historic outcomes of previous interactions. Relative to our
needs, there are plenty of material resources should we choose to use
them in productive ways.
To weave the narrative of digital abundance with a narrative of material
scarcity (even though we may always have specific current limits) just
seems like a problematical position that just plays into the hands of
the very forces of artificial scarcity trying to shut down cooperation
on the internet.
I'd suggest people are more likely to contribute to something like the
open manufacturing movement if they see a future of abundance coming
from it rather that a future centered around managing scarcity. Still,
there are reasons to contribute in either case. :-) And, we still need
to figure out how to plot our own courses individually or collectively
from the exchange-based culture we have now in many parts of the world
to cultures that have a different balance and may emphasize more
subsistence production, gift giving, and/or collective planning on
various scales.
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/
====
The biggest challenge of the 21st century is the irony of technologies
of abundance in the hands of those thinking in terms of scarcity.