If we were to summarize the political goals of the P2P Foundation it would be fairly easy to pin them down by saying the following:

- What we need to achieve a sustainable world, not a perfect one or an utopian one, is to reverse the current combination of pseudo-abundance in the natural world (i.e. believing that an infinite growth system is possible in a finite material world), and pseudo-scarcity in the immaterial world (believing that artificial scarcity needs to be created and thereby arresting the free flow of cooperation and social innovation). Reversing it into its opposite: a production system that recognizes limits and combines with the free flow of social innovation over networks of cooperation.

But it is true to say that our work really focuses on the latter.

Today, we discovered a rather marvelous essay explaining the logic of moving from pseudo-abundance to a logic of sustainability. It explains the basics of the current crisis, and how we can reasonable expect to get out of this crisis.

This essay deserves a wide readership.

The essay is available here and contains great graphics to make the issues understandable.

The basic logic of the argument is the following:

The world as we know it is about to be transformed. Why? Because our economic system is based on continuous growth, and unlimited material growth cannot be sustained on a planet with finite resources.

There are only two possible outcomes; either increasing resource shortages and collapsing ecosystems will end advanced civilizations on earth, or a sustainable planetary system will emerge.

and therefore:

“Growing global crises will dominate our lives and the lives of our children

Humanity has the potential to transform the existing unsustainable system into a sustainable system.”

See the website of Best Futures for more: www.bestfutures.org/

We received the following message from South Korea, where the new proposed Free Trade agreement with the U.S. would represent an unprecedented assault against social innovation and free culture.

Sent by Kim Jeong Woo of the Korean Progressive Network ‘Jinbonet‘

Email at i@patcha.jinbo.net

Announcement:

The full text of Korea US FTA was openned, last Friday.

But it has many poisonous articles there.

Especially we are very worried about the IPR chapter and its confirmation letters. They have very dangerous things which the former US FTA didn’t have.

For examples, the both governments agree on the objective of shutting down the internet sites that permit unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or transmission of copyright works.
Korean government shutting down even P2P service and webhard service. And it also includes strong enforcements activities such as enforcement on book printing on university campuses.

If this Korea US FTA is passed, then the US will request other countries to include these things in the following FTA. So it needs to have international solidarity activities to stop this kind of US FTA.

Please check below and we welcome your comments, criticizing opinions or statement to this IP chapter of Korea US FTA. And please forward it to other people world-wide.

Korean Alliance Against the Korea-U.S. FTA and social organizations will have a press conference about the problem of IPR chapter of Korea US FTA on May 28th.

Documentation overview:

Confirmation letter (Online Piracy Prevention)

- Full text – www.mofat.go.kr/mofat/fta/eng/e45.pdf

* The Parties agree on the objective of shutting down Internet sites that permit the unauthorized reproduction, distribution, or transmission of copyright works, of regularly assessing and actively seeking to reduce the impact of new technological means for committing online copyright piracy, and of providing generally for more effective enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet.

* Korea also agrees on the objective of shutting down Internet sites that permit the unauthorized downloading (and other forms of piracy) of copyright works, including so-called webhard services, and providing for more effective enforcement of intellectual property rights on the Internet, including in particular with regard to peer-to-peer (p2p) services.

* Korea will work to prevent, investigate, and prosecute internet piracy. In doing so, Korea will work with the private sector, the other Party, and other foreign authorities.

Confirmation letter (Promoting Protection and Effective Enforcement of Copyrighted works on University Campuses)

- Full text – www.mofat.go.kr/mofat/fta/eng/e46.pdf

* The Parties recognize the importance of preventing illegal copying and distribution of copyrighted works on university campuses and providing effective enforcement against book piracy. Therefore, consistent with Korea’s May 2004 Master Plan for IPR, Korea agrees to continue to increase its efforts to improve awareness of copyright infringement activities and book piracy on university campuses and reduce illegal reproduction and distribution of copyrighted works.

The Full text of IP Chapter is at www.mofat.go.kr/mofat/fta/eng/e43.pdf

As 2007 installment of Reboot comes to fruition this year, we find Nicole Simon interviewing participants including Bauwens on his ideas. Check out other podcasts on her blog, Cruel to be Kind, including Stowe Boyd and Thomas Madsen_Mygdal (founder of reboot).

U.S. civil society organizations are creating powerful tools that inject transparency in the political system.

The New York Times Circuits columns gives the example of two websites that dramatically illustrate the connection between money and voting in the U.S. political system. It is to early to say what political effects such information will have, but it is hard to imagine that it will have no effect, when people can verify that their representative votes are simply “for sale”

The article discusses two webistes:

- Maplight.org, a new Web site with a very simple mission: to correlate lawmakers’ voting records with the money they’ve accepted from special-interest groups.

- OpenSecrets.org, exposes who’s giving how much to whom.

“Nobody has ever revealed the relationship between money given and votes cast to quite such a startling effect.”, writes David Pogue.

He cites the following example:

“If you click the “Video Tour” button on the home page, you’ll see a six-minute video that illustrates the point. You find out that on H.R.5684, the U. S.-Oman Free Trade Agreement, special interests in favor of this bill (including pharmaceutical companies and aircraft makers) gave each senator an average of $244,000. Lobbyists opposed to the bill (such as anti-poverty groups and consumer groups) coughed up only $38,000 per senator … Surprise! The bill passed.”

If you are like me, in your late forties, or up and down in that neighbourhood, some of the new behaviours of younger people might be puzzling. I must admit for example, that even live chatting is not natural or preferred for me. Another puzzling thing is the total openness of quite a few in the younger generation who are sharing their intimacy in online diaries. And a third puzzling phenomenom for me was ‘twittering’ (named thus for the dominating software in the field) or ‘lifelogging’ (the general concept of ‘recording your life events’).

Why would anyone want to share everything he does in the day, and want to know what everyone else is doing?

So, for the benefit of such older people, I’m happy to have found an article, or more precisely an interview with the founders of the lifelogging software Jaiku, which explains to me what personal and social trends drive such changes in behaviour.

Let us first of all define it: Lifelogging = the continuous logging and recording of life events so that the daily experiences of connected group members can be shared.

Lifelogging software enables “Social Peripheral Vision: the ability to have your finger on the pulse of your friends, family, and colleagues. Once you know what the people you care about are up to, you notice opportunities for social interaction that you would probably otherwise miss. Even just the simple knowledge that your loved ones are ok can have a lot of emotional value in an increasingly unstable world.”

The founders “realized they both wanted a better way to share what we were doing in real life with our friends online. Although we spent a lot of time on blogs and Web services built by our friends, like Flickr, we felt they were too cumbersome to update and difficult to read on our mobile phones. We decided to make a service that regular people would use every day, that was quicker to update on the go and would enable all of us to see what our family members, friends, and colleagues were doing simply by glancing at our handset.”

How does it work exactly?

“Just as a recap, the posts on Jaiku are simply called Jaikus. They are shorter than blog posts. Because their content is usually about what you’re doing, how you’re feeling, or where you’re going right now, their value typically also degrades more quickly over time. On many Web services the interval between new updates from a user is a day or more, but on Jaiku the updates are more frequent. When you browse the profiles of Jaiku members, you’ll notice that a Jaiku that was posted an hour ago can already be outdated by several newer ones. The content of Jaikus is also often more personal than on blogs. Although many share their Jaikus publicly, a lot of people prefer to share them privately with their friends.”

And why exactly is it emerging so strongly?

“We believe that online social behavior as a whole is moving towards groups who are in a state of constant connectedness. This means shorter, more frequent, more personal updates that assume the recipients already know a lot about the sender and context of the message. The amount of communication increases but it contains less noise because we know more about the context of our peers. For example, in trials of the early research prototype of Jaiku Mobile, the amount of missed calls between the users dropped by about 15 percentage points, because on Jaiku the caller can see when the recipient is busy already before they try to reach them.”

Want to know even more?

See how this new social need is driving the development of what is alternative called “Personal Data Streams“, Attention Streams, or Lifestreams.

Please note that we monitor such changing behavioural trends in our ‘P2P Relational Concepts‘ section of our wiki.

Open Business continues to produce remarkable work investigating the ongoing developments of open business models, under the leadership of Christian Ahlert.

Recently, we came across the following:

- Interview with the founder of Freebase, a project to have a Wikipedia for data, which Tim O’Reilly calls “huge” in its implications.

See URL = www.openbusiness.cc/2007/05/23/wikipedia-for-data-freebase/

- A detailed comparison of social lending and p2p funding initiatives, such as Prosper, Zopa, Sellaband and Fundable, with some interesting conclusions about the experience so far.

See URL = www.openbusiness.cc/2007/05/20/the-emergent-field-of-p2p-finance/

I often try to characterize my attempts at a P2P Theory (a theory which can explain the emergence of the p2p relational dynamic and practically ‘advance’ it as well), as being post-ideological. I was prompted to think again about this aspect, after an email dialogue with Vasilis Kostakis, who is working on a Laser Theory of social action , seeking to determine what are the conditions for successfulll p2p-based action and social change.

Ideology has many different meanings, but there are 2 that I find important. One, that it is not the result of genuine insight, but a hidden defense of concrete social interest; and two, that it is enclosed within one paradigm of reality. In other words, it is an exclusionary exercise. So what we need is rather a meta-paradigmatic approach, one that realizes that there are different ways to look at reality, and that truth is better served with an openness towards such different insights. This means that we move both towards a transcendence of social interests (as different paradigms will represent different social groups), but also that the approach becomes inclusionary, seeking for valid insights ‘wherever they may occur’. A theory then becomes a provisional integration, that has to be consistent with the facts, and open the way for further research. In terms of praxis, it becomes a search for commonalities between various social and political forces. Commonalities around which temporaray alliances can be built, while accepting the paradigmatic differences. One more aspect is that we have learned that part of the system cannot know the whole system of which it is a part, and this destroys a large part of the certainty that cemented ideological approaches. In this context, our approach that seeks to both understand and promote p2p alternatives, is not the quest for any ‘fixed answer’, a better solution by itself of the problems that humanity is faced with, but rather, it becomes the promotion of a set of processes, which are better able to find such a set of answers, because they are more participative, and can bypass narrow-minded interests which are blocking such best solutions to emerge. Again here we see a significant difference with the old approaches. Politics becomes the quest to broaden the set of possible social experiments, so that the best solutions may emerge, and learn and interconnect with each other.

Below is a contribution by Vasilis Kostakis:

“Nowadays, we live in a meta-ideological era when Communism, Socialism, Anarchism, Kingship and other regimes and systems have failed to embrace, enhance and incarnate people’s expectations and needs, achieving simultaneously a natural equilibrium. Moreover, it seems that many people do not believe in any ideology: the ”ideology of cynicism” or in other words the Capitalism, in its most vicious version, rules.

So what comes after ideologies? I know that I have to be concrete, but that is the point: we should not be concrete, we have just to participate till a population inversion is created and then the pluralism will determine. Our future has taken up the wager to transform P2P processes from a subsystem within the capitalist community into the dominant mode of civilisation.”

We discussed and presented Ponoko before, but here is a presentation sent to us by one of the founders, Derek Elley:

About us

Ponoko is the world’s first personal manufacturing platform where anyone can click to make, buy and sell digital products.

The brainchild of software entrepreneurs Dave ten Have and Derek Elley, Ponoko was founded on the disappointing experience people face when making (individualized) products – it is complex and high cost, both financially and environmentally.

Encouraged by the rise of the Internet connected ‘creative-class’ along with smarter, faster, smaller and cheaper digital manufacturing hardware (laser cutters, CNC routers and 3D printers that connect to your everyday PC), they formed a plan to solve these problems.

Starting with the premise that the personal computing and the personal manufacturing industries have strong parallels, they realized that one day everyone will be able to create and make any product from their own home.

This led to the idea of mass-individualized products created by the Web community and made on a globally distributed network of manufacturing hardware controlled from any PC.

And then things got quite exciting. Imagine today’s explosion in digital content creativity being replicated with products – what world changing inventions are we going to see by giving 1 billion Internet connected people the chance to simply ‘click to make’? And what about the positive effects on the global warming problem that stem from eradicating the storage needs of finished mass produced products? Wow.

And so they got building the world’s POST post industrial revolution – and called it ponoko.com.

The problems solved

Today’s product making and distribution model is financially and environmentally unsustainable. It is also under pressure to digitize like the music and video industries have.

Because today’s 100-year old product making and distribution system is so ingrained into our every day lives and delivers so much benefit, problems are not so obvious. But when was the last time you made something? Making products today does not come easy – some major problems exist:

1) Making and delivering (individualized) products is a time consuming, complex and expensive process. This pain does not fit well in a world that is increasingly in demand for instant satisfaction from mass personalized and customized products at low cost.

2) Product making and distribution is cost prohibitive for new entrants without relatively deep financial reserves. This is stifling mass creativity of real products and the progress of humanity on unimaginable fronts.

3) Low cost mass production and global distribution relies upon using lots of cheap energy and labour. But these two resources are running out.

4) Product making and distribution is a major contributor to the global warming problem (according to the WRI, perhaps 20% of the problem). Being environmentally unsustainable, the increasing ‘carbon currency’ costs also make the current model financially unsustainable.

5) Finding individualized products is very difficult and buying such products is a time consuming, relatively complex and expensive burden. Why is there no easy to find supplier of low cost personalized products?

These pressing problems illustrate that a new product making and distribution process is required. Ponoko is that new process.

Our solution is made possible given the rise of the Internet connected ‘creative class’ along with smarter, faster, smaller and cheaper digital manufacturing hardware (laser cutters, CNC routers and 3D printers that connect to your everyday PC), and production materials.

The benefits delivered

Ponoko delivers the future of product making and distribution to the mass market, today:

- Creators – less risk. On-demand design and manufacture is made possible, so work does not need to be commenced until a consumer makes a purchase. And because product designs can be sold to a large global audience from day one, pay back periods can be shortened.

- Creators – lower costs. With Ponoko, creators can now ship digital product designs with the click of a mouse, not physical products requiring a pocket full of cash. This is Apple iTunes for products, but with YouTube style user-generated content.

- Creators – instant scalability without cost. Ponoko’s distributed manufacturing model means the creator’s cost and timeframe to manufacture a product for 1 customer is the same as for 1 million customers. Creators can now sell millions of products on-demand at ‘no’ extra cost.

- Creators – increased control. Ponoko is specifically designed to provide end-to-end visibility & control over the entire product making and distribution process.

- Creators – less complexity. By connecting creators direct with consumers, the traditional supply chain complexity involving a manufacturer, distributor, wholesaler and retailer is eliminated.

- Consumers – low cost individualized products. Because no physical product exists until purchase, product design collaboration makes it possible for everyone to co-create and personalize ‘almost anything’ they need & want. As adoption increases, prices for Ponoko’s design-to-order and made-to-order commodity type products will become unrecognisably low.

- Environment – cut the global warming costs and product waste. By cutting out todays supply chain middlemen (manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, retailers), less transport and no storage of final products means less carbon emissions. And because products are only made after purchase, less ends up in the landfill.

- Humankind – explosion of world changing products. Ponoko enables a real world creative explosion to parallel the digital content explosion, meaning we are going to see product invention breakthroughs faster than ever before.

Francois Rey has sent us the following commentary concerning this news item.

Francois Rey:

Anshe Chung Studios, one of the most prominent virtual business, “is preparing to launch a virtual financial market, financial products and a set of services that are going to, for the first time, allow direct capital flow and investment across virtual world boundaries.”

You may ask how does this relate to P2P?

Well it isn’t directly related except that this is another step taken towards the strengthening of virtual economies and finance hence another step taken towards the weakening of real world centralization of power in real world economy and finance. What’s happening in virtual worlds is bound to impact on what’s happening in real world. Indeed, the link between virtual economy and real world economy are multiple.

First RMT (Real Money Trade) involving virtual assets establish a bridge between the virtual economy and the real one. Ebay contains numerous listing for virtual assets, many other market places exist for such trading, and there is a virtual currency market with published exchange rates, see p2pfoundation.net/Virtual_Gaming_Currencies. Another powerful link between the two worlds is the fact that a lot of virtual companies are also real world companies, some with more their own offices and more than one employee. Finally, virtual currencies are starting to be used for trades in real world just like any other real world currencies (see virtual-economy.org/blog/qq_coins).

All this is generating great concerns from authorities, notably in China and Korea who are deploying laws to regulate such trade. For now volumes may not be of such concerns, but virtual economies are growing very fast. What if virtual economies were to conquer the huge market of game stations? The last version of Skype contains a “send money” feature, so what would happen if eBay (owner of Skype) were to buy Anshe Chung Studios or even Linden Labs (owner of Second Life)? Clearly the powers of this world are concerned about what’s happening with virtual economies and nobody can say for sure how things will evolve. Many challenging issues are raised, such as the protection of virtual assets, how regulation in virtual worlds should follow those of the real world, how virtual activity should be taxed, etc. Attempts to regulate virtual worlds will also face the same challenges that are faced by regulation of digital media: how to enforce the regulation in the immaterial world? How can one enforce regulation on open source P2P metaverses?

Perhaps what’s more important is not so much all the struggles between virtual worlds and real world, but what comes out of them: the consciousness of the limitations we create for ourselves in both worlds, and the resulting evolution that comes from removing these limitations. Metaverses or virtual worlds are by nature immaterial, and are created out of the minds of designers who are like gods creating universes. In such process, the creation of boundaries and limitations is a conscious choice because no physical limitations (except the availability of computing resources) are there to constrain design choices. So when a virtual world designer chooses to enforce a rule that says nobody can send messages to more than 100 users, he or she is making a conscious choice, not a choice dictated by the laws of the physical world. When sketching out virtual worlds and more generally any computing architecture, the choices are endless and only a conscious act of creation can bring the necessary structures and limitation that make a certain world possible. In the political, economical, and financial spheres, the limits of the real world made it easier for centralized and hierarchical structures to develop, even if that was against the interest of the many. With the advent of a networked economy, virtual or not, P2P architectures are increasingly becoming the most appropriate choice and no longer can one ignore the interest of the many, because we’re now talking of powerful participants in the most important spheres of production who have the ability to reorganize themselves as needed.

It might be wise to follow the developments of virtual worlds. Who knows, maybe the next great social innovation may first take place in these worlds.

Ulises Ali Mejias, a researcher who works on p2p-relationality issues, has released his report on Networked Proximity.

Abstract

Networked Proximity: ICTs and the Mediation of Nearness

The network as a map of interconnected elements or nodes has become a favored metaphor for describing a wide variety of social systems in our age. But the network is transitioning from being merely a way to describe social realities to serving as a model for organizing them. The large-scale adoption of information and communication technologies is producing new architectures of networked participation in which the social subject becomes a decentralized node, unbound by location or physical space. Nearness (in terms of social proximity) acquires a new significance, since the distance between two nodes—regardless of their physical location—is practically zero, while the distance between a node and something outside the network is practically infinite. Thus, physical proximity is replaced by informational availability as the basis for experiencing social nearness, resulting in a form of networked proximity characterized simultaneously by a sense of renewed connectedness to the local (hyperlocality), and a sense of distancelessness that makes any point in the network readily accessible. Hence, critiques of networked sociality need to account for the fact that the network is neither anti-social nor anti-local: it thrives on making social connections, and is indifferent to where nodes are located in relation to the social subject (physically near or far). Instead, critiques need to focus on the epistemological exclusivity engendered by the fact that nodes are only capable of recognizing other nodes. In other words, the network imposes a nodocentric filter on the social, and only elements that can be mapped onto the network (the nodes) are rendered as real. This model is then used to institute a paradigm of progress and development in which those elements outside the network can acquire value only by becoming part of the network. The social becomes subordinate to the economics of the network, and the network becomes a model of subjectivation that prepares individuals for entrance into this form of sociality. In this context, the paranodal—the space between nodes—becomes an important site for disidentification from the network, correcting the nodocentric tendencies of networked sociality and providing alternative models of social engagement.