For more context to these remarks, see the recap page on the Benkler/Lessig/Bauwens/Kleiner debate.

With some delay, Stefan Merten of the Oekonux group, which aims to extend Free Software principles to the core of the economy, chimes in on our earlier debate on the same topic:
1. How the Oekonux vision of the GPL society differs from the ideals of the worker’s movement

Much of the worker movement’s vision about a society were about how to
distribute work. This is also true for the anarchists directions
though many of them distributed agricultural work rather than
industrial work.

The problem is that all these movements had work in mind – not
productive Selbstentfaltung. And in a way this is clear: The
activities necessary to operate (early) industrial machinery are not
only alienated because they are paid. They are also alienated because
they require only a very small part of the human and thus give little
room for Selbstentfaltung. This is the concept of work as pain and it
is not by chance that payment is necessary to compensate for this
pain. Also the notion of a “common stock for mutual and individual
benefit” to me sounds like this work as pain concept.

Insofar I don’t think GPL society resonates well with worker
movement’s ideas. To me one of the big advantages of the Oekonux
debate is to discover that with the contemporary means of production
for the first time in history productive Selbstentfaltung has the
potential to overcome this industrial work-as-pain concept on a level
of the whole society. IMHO *this* is one of the main differences
between worker movement idea(l)s and the Oekonux debate.

2. How should the peer-produced use value be changed into exchange value?

Well, IMHO this use value is not meant to be translated into exchange
value so this question sounds a bit strange to me. Things are useful -
that’s all. And personally I’d wish this could be said about every
product I buy…

3. How can the peer producers be able to acquire the material needs for
their own subsistence?

Well, I think this is a wrong question. This question implies that
every activity useful for society as a whole ultimately needs to be
paid. That’s of course wrong. *Lots* of useful activity in capitalism
is not paid (if people now think women movement they are right). I
think instead of extending exchange logic to for instance raising kids
I think we need to reverse the tendency to put everything under the
command of exchange.

But even if you accept this question the useful Free Products are also
useful for the producers of Free Products. So Free Products reduce the
need to buy also for producers therefore reducing the need for money.

4. Response to the Kleiner argument: “The source of poverty is not reproduction costs, but rather extracted economic rents, forcing the producers to accept less than the full product of their labour as their wage by denying them independent access to the means of production.”

Now this is of course pure worker movement: “Unjust” “exploitation”.
Today I think this is simply not the field where capitalism can be
overcome. The argument is simply the antithesis and as such stays
fully in the exchange based society and only wants to change the
distribution. What we need is the synthesis, however.

5. Kleiner: “owners of material property, namely land and capital, will continue to capture the marginal wealth created as a result of the productivity of the information commons.

That’s something which puzzles lots of leftists indeed. However, if it
would be the case that the ancien regime *must not* benefit from the
new productive forces then we would have not capitalism in the first
place: The feudal lords benefitted in several ways from the beginnings
of capitalism. Nonetheless they were washed away after a while.

6. Kleiner: Whatever exchange value is derived from the information commons will always be captured by owners of real property, which lays outside the commons.

I don’t think it makes sense to distinguish “real” or “unreal”
property. Property is always a concept based on force to maintain it.
In this regard the differences between intellectual and material
property are only marginal here.

7. Kleiner: By establishing the idea of commons-based peer-production in the context of an information-only commons, Benkler is giving the peer-to-peer economy, or the competitive sector, yet anther way to create wealth for appropriation by the property privilege economy, or the monopoly sectors.ซ

And what’s wrong with it? The concepts of Selbstentfaltung and Free
Production play on a different playground than this one. They
undermine capitalist superiority on its very power base: The ability
to organize interesting production processes.

8. What is abundant, what is not?

I’d like to remind of Steven Weber’s point about what is abundant in
Free Software and what is limited (where he talks about gift economy).
Of course the computing resources are abundant – but that’s *not* the
key resource needed for the production of Free Software. Indeed though
Free Software certainly flourished through the Internet it existed
before – listen to Richard Stallman when he talks about sending tapes
around. What actually is limited is the availability of bright
developers. Existing Free Software is abundant but non-existing Free
Software needs limited resources.

What really protects from the tragedy of the commons is the
impossibility to extract alienated value from the common good.
Abundance is one such example. If a good is abundant then it can not
be overused. And it also doesn’t make sense to sell it. Distributed
fabbers could be helpful here because they give the power to produce a
wide range of goods to lots of people.

The *production* of Free Software is actually based on
a rival good: the brain and time of experts. Only the reproduction of
existing Free Software is abundant. I think we need to take this into
account more thoroughly.

9. On Scarcity

An exchange based economy needs to make goods
scarce. Scarcity is something which is produced by a society and
namely by an exchange based one. Only in an exchange based society it
can happen that people die from hunger whereas in general there are
plenty of food resources available. Or need to live in paper boxes
while there are unused flats nearby.

10. On a non-capitalist exchange economy

I think capitalism is the best exchange based economy we can
think of. (Real existing) socialism tried to create an exchange based
economy without capitalism and we witnessed its ultimate failure.

IMHO the flaws of exchange based economies can not be cheated away
somehow. They are deeply built into the nature of exchange as an
economic principle.

Michel Bauwens responds: I find Stefan Merten’s response very interesting and agree withmuch of it. I see two points of difference in our respective interpretation of peer production:

1) I think we can have exchange regimes, fair trade, social trade, natural
capitalism, living economies, divorced from infinite accumulation and generalized wage
labour;

2) I think that peer production does rely on a abundance of intellect. Free
software and other modes of peer production does not rely exclusively on bright
developers, but on a wide variety of equipotential contributors, who can self-select
the granular and modular tasks, and whose contributions are then communally validated. But there is a vast amount of excess creative capacity that can be used in abundance.

This South-African wine maker has gotten itself in the news by referrring to its practices as wine hacking:
“Wine is defined by historical paradigms and perpetuation of old beliefs: Place defining wine instead of a certain ethos of production that actually makes the difference. Many people think that terroir defines a wine, but put the wrong winemakers, procedure or equipment into great terroir, and then terroir matters little. However, great technique can take the mundane and make it special. We see that with hacker driven producers like Andy Quady, making great wine in the heart of a commodity grape growing area. Randall Graham has done the same thing… created great products from mundane sources. How often has a great winemaker shown the potential of a hitherto under estimated area?”

One of the crucial elements of P2P Theory invoves a needed examination of the issues of Abundance vs. Scarcity, and how to reverse pseudo-scarcity and pseudo-abundance. P2P social dynamics arise most easily in a abundant and/or distributed environment. This refers to the distribution/abundance of intellect, of the means of production (shareable computing), but also crucially: distributed finance. One of the aspects of p2p-inspired social change policies will undoubtedly be monetary reform.
So, a crucial issue is: should we accept a monetary system based on scarcity, and which leads to such a flawed distribution of prosperity across the world and inside countries?

One of the first thinkers to examine this topic was Silvio Gesell, and Greg Martin, who will co-maintain our P2P Monetary Concepts page, has volunteered to choose a number of significant concepts of Gesell’s still significant book: The Natural Economic Order.

Here is the introductory paragraph by Greg:

“In 1916 Silvio Gesell, economist and entrepreneur, wrote “The Natural
Economic Order.” In it he proposes reforming the nature of money into what
he calls “free money,” or money that is at liberty to circulate freely. He
saw that the best way to make money circulate was to abolish interest and to
have money gradually loose its value over time. This placed its holders
under compulsion to spend it sooner rather than later, creating employment
and prosperity.

His theories are explained simply, logically and from various points of
view. It shows in intricate detail why the current monetary system fails,
will continue to fail, and how these failures can be remedied by the use of
free money. You can read his book or download it from
www.systemfehler.de/en/neo/“

Mother Jones asks whether Google is turning evil, and whether you can really trust it.

Their answer is negative, focusing on the threat of privacy. Google knows more about you than the NSA, and it can’t and won’t protect such data.

“From the start, Google’s informal motto has been “Don’t Be Evil,” and the company earned cred early on by going toe-to-toe with Microsoft over desktop software and other issues. But make no mistake. Faced with doing the right thing or doing what is in its best interests, Google has almost always chosen expediency. In 2002, it removed links to an anti-Scientology site after the Church of Scientology claimed copyright infringement. Scores of website operators have complained that Google pulls ads if it discovers words on a page that it apparently has flagged, although it will not say what those words are. In September, Google handed over the records of some users of its social-networking service, Orkut, to the Brazilian government, which was investigating alleged racist, homophobic, and pornographic content. Google’s stated mission may be to provide “unbiased, accurate, and free access to information,” but that didn’t stop it from censoring its Chinese search engine to gain access to a lucrative market (prompting Bill Gates to crack that perhaps the motto should be “Do Less Evil”). Now that the company is publicly traded, it has a legal responsibility to its shareholders and bottom line that overrides any higher calling. So the question is not whether Google will always do the right thing—it hasn’t, and it won’t. It’s whether Google, with its insatiable thirst for your personal data, has become the greatest threat to privacy ever known, a vast informational honey pot that attracts hackers, crackers, online thieves, and—perhaps most worrisome of all—a government intent on finding convenient ways to spy on its own citizenry. It doesn’t take a conspiracy theorist to worry about such a threat.”

Here’s a listing of the most visited pages in the first nine months of 2006.

The following list refers to subject entries in our P2P Encyclopedia. It excludes biographies, country pages, categories, etc..

Techno-Progressivism (2,967 views)

Participatory Spirituality (2,133 views)

Open Access (2,024 views)

Commons (1,870 views)

P2P TV (1,656 views)

Creative Commons (1,184 views)

Peer Governance (1,148 views)

Participative Epistemology (1,092 views)

Collective Intelligence (1,080 views)

Bittorrent (1,028 views)

Relational Spirituality (1,021 views)

I’m going to attempt to make a regular selection of the best links tagged for Del.icio.us:

P2P Issues

Mutualist Blog: Free Market Anti-Capitalism: Mutualism and the State

dissussion between social democratic and mutualist opinions, by mutualist Kevin Carson.

P2P in the World

P2P Trends in Brazil

Overview page from the P2P Foundation

P2P Education

Book – Using Wiki in Education -

Note Centric – P2P Foundation

NoteCentric is a new service for university students that helps you to collaborate on school notes

Blogs for Learning – P2P Foundation

Blogs for Learning is an online resource designed for students and instructors who are interested in instructional blogging. The goal of the site is to provide information and resources surrounding the technical, legal, and pedagogical aspects of blogging

The Personal Learning Environments Blog

Stephen Downes on Student-Owned Education – P2P Foundation

Personal Learning Environments – P2P Foundation

The Inevitable Personal Learning Environment Post at incorporated subversion

Personal Learning Environments – JITT

P2P Healthcare

OrganizedWisdom Launches Social Network for Health – Mashable!

OrganizedWisdom combines trusted, doctor-reviewed content from the non-profit information service Healthwise with user-generated content.

P2P Spirituality

Process Spirituality

The relational and participatory aspects of process spirituality, by Hyatt Carter.

P2P Technology

Grid Computing – P2P Foundation

how is it related to p2p infrastructure and technical principles. Overview by Ian Foster.

Municipal Fiber to the home projects in Europe

Crucial development.

Open Search Initiative

“Who controls the information? In this modern age, search engines have a distinct influence on the retrieval of information from the internet. Your average user will, when prompted with the need to look up information, go to google and look for the pages.

This is a 50 min. talk/presentation by Jawed Karim – one of the three YouTube co-founders – about how and why (social networking) sites like YouTube became so popular in the last couple of years. Although it focuses on the bigger known services this is very interesting to watch. Specially towards the end (last 10 min. or so) there is a lot to learn about why YouTube works/what made it work – recommended for anyone who has to do with social networking sites or wants to better understand them…

[via Social Synergy Bliki]
One of the great things about the CreativeCommons license system is that it does not try to force any one solution upon a content creator. CreativeCommons licenses support a range, or spectrum of possibiblities for allowing signaling to others how and when they can re-use your content.

Another great attribute is that CC licenses enable the person who creates the content to instantly choose and use a license. There is no central authority to register with. You simply indicate somewhere in the content what the license is for it. Several search engines are starting to make it easier to find CreativeCommons content. See: search.creativecommons.org/

Searching through the CC search engine reveals how fast people are adopting and employing the license convention. And, while the CC license system is enabling people to create a SharingEconomy?, and a KnowledgeCommons? and MediaCommons?, unforseen potential collisions with with existing media copyright schemes may be an emergent byproduct of the growth of CreativeCommons.

LawrenceLessig explains in his Lessig Letter yesterday:

“At its core, Creative Commons is designed to support this sharing economy. Our free tools give creators a simple way to signal the rules under which they want to create. And, perhaps more importantly, by signaling clearly and reliably these freedoms, they encourage others who otherwise might hesitate to share and build upon that work. Thus, for example, the Public Library of Science plos.org publishes all of its articles under a CC license that gives users the freedom to share those articles broadly. Libraries and institutions around the world can now archive these works and make them available locally. Without the confidence of the CC licenses, no doubt lawyers within these different institutions would have panicked. The CC licenses let that panic be avoided, and invite many (who otherwise would not) to help share and build upon work.

The next challenge is to figure out how this sharing economy interacts with a traditional commercial economy. What happens when Time wants to use a fantastic CC-licensed Flickr photo? Or how does a hit on ccMixter move into the commercial space?

CC will never become a part of that commercial economy. But it is important, I believe, that we play a role in enabling this crossover. The alternative is a world we’re seeing too much of all ready: large entities that create sandboxes for “sharing,� but then effectively claim ownership over everything built within that sandbox. This is, in my view, not a sharing economy. It is instead simple sharecropping.

The key is to build alternatives that creators on the Internet can use to both create as they wish and keep control of their creativity. That’s the challenge I see over the next four years. And as we review over the next few weeks some of the best of CC from around the world, you’ll begin to see how this challenge might be met.�