Kevin Carson is continuing his work on Organization theory , and has published added drafts and excerpts for chapter 13 and 15.

I have always liked Kevin’s work because, though it is libertarian and in his own words, ‘free market fundamentalist’, his brand of mutualism is not based on a justification of the exploitation of the weak by the strong, but on small producers freely associating in open markets. His fundamentalism is really a misnomer as he consistently has shown an open mind, despite his virulence against the exploitation-justifying ‘royal libertarians’. Of course, we also have differences, but the common ground is very interesting and fruitful as well.

Chapter 13 is about the dissolution of the state in civil society and I do not have access to it yet (computer issues), so I hope to discuss it later.

But he also publishes major excerpts on peer production in blog format, part of his chapter 15.

In this contribution, he recaps a lot of my own arguments, but links it to other dialogues we have had, both inside and outside the p2pfoundation blog (of course, some contributors were arguing independently, not as a response to me).

He specifically tackles the coordination problem between open design and actual physical production, citing a possible scenario by Dave Pollard, which I find unsatisfactory, because it seems to ignore the human transactional costs. See here and please do tell us here what you think about this scenario.

Kevin then critically engages with the Crisis of Value thesis (also formulated by Adam Arvidsson), which states that the largest fraction of immterial production cannot be monetized and that this requires a fundamental social re-organization.

However, he also argues that we are forgetting some aspects of this crisis.

Here just below is the crux of the argument, but I really recommend reading the whole discussion, which also includes contributions by Karim Lakhani, Franz Nahrada, Vinay Gupta, and others. It’s a marvelous and clear recap of the kind of things we have been discussing here.

One minor point, in one quote Carson says I give a “few” examples of physical production based on open design, but I would no longer consider this list to be small, see here for an extensive listing, part of our Open Design for Physical Production section, which also features many of the interventions that Carson refers to.

Kevin Carson:

“In addition, capitalism faces a crisis of realization in another regard that Bauwens does not directly address. For over two centuries, as Immanuel Wallerstein observed, the system of capitalist production based on wage labor has depended on the ability to externalize many of its reproduction functions on the non-monetized informal and household economies, and on organic social institutions like the family which were outside the cash nexus.

The result is a singularity, of sorts, in which it is becoming impossible for capital to prevent a shift in the supply of an increasing proportion of the necessities of life from mass produced goods purchased with wages, to small-scale production in the informal and household sector. The upshot is likely to be something like Vinay Gupta’s “Unplugged” movement, in which the possibilities for low-cost, comfortable subsistence off the grid result in exactly the same situation, the fear of which motivated the propertied classes in carrying out the Enclosures: a situation in which the majority of the public can take wage labor or leave it, if it takes it at all, the average person works only on his own terms when he needs supplemental income for luxury goods and the like, and (even if he considers supplemental income necessary in the long run for his optimal standard of living) can afford in the short run to quit work and live off his own resources for prolonged periods of time. It will, in short, be the kind of society Wakefield lamented in the colonial world of cheap and abundant land: a society in which labor is hard to get on any terms, and almost impossible to hire at a low enough wage to produce significant profit.”

My last comment:

Reading this, I wonder if this scenario is not too optimistic, I see too little sign of such a social economy emerging which really allows people to live alongside the cash system, without really needing it? Or am I misreading that argument?

Michel Bauwens recently sent this link in an email to the p2plist:

research.cibcwm.com /economic_public/download /feature1.pdf

Along with the question: “Are higher transportation costs reversing globalization?”

My own answer:

Globalization was never a self-sustaining system to begin with. Globalization began in part (after WWII) precisely because local systems were too efficient for market mass producers. They needed governments to go “open up new markets” for them. But then the people on the receiving end started wanting something in return, so the governments also quietly but steadily started to look the other way while market mass producers made war on those local systems, to drive out local competition, and get their deal-cutting global networks in place as an only choice system.

This was always heavily subsidized by the largest and wealthiest governments. This is why apples from New Zealand are cheaper at my local grocery store than Michigan apples from 10 miles away!! I pay the remainder of the cost of New Zealand apples in the 1/3 of my earnings that go towards federal taxes. So, the Michigan apple was actually always cheaper in the first place.

Since we can’t keep those subsidies up for ever, like oil and fuel and shipping lane subsidies, we’ll be returning to local food systems, which will in part DEFINE this new century we are in. A shift from the unsustainable to the sustainable, for human and earth-system survival.

However, we don’t all ride off happily into the sunset, unfortunately. All of those mass market producers, sitting on top of piles of money, are going to quickly catch whiff of the change. They are going to try to co-opt it. To make it look like they are also doing this local thing. But what they really will be doing is trying to do is go around and buy out and control these emerging local food systems.

Indeed, this could be the next financial “bubble” that we experience (at least in the US, anyway). With wild speculation based around green tech, local food systems, sustainable products and services, fueled by optimism and enthusiasm based around change in government (namely when Obama is elected president).

This is why people who are working to create local food system infrastructure need to be careful to make them a self-sustaining, community, collaborative, peer-governed system. They also need to be more agile, more adaptable than behemoth companies are. The people that make them up need to realize that they can do business with large companies, but that they should not put themselves in a position of relying on large companies, nor governments, for their existence. They will emerge on the other side of the “bubble” burst in a few years, as the entities that possess actual value once all of the ponzi and get rich quick schemes fall apart.

Additional useful related resources for thinking about this:

globalguerrillas.typepad.com/ great blog by war and systems analyst John Robb that looks at how declining globalization is moving us towards a networked global/localization that puts a lot of infrastructure for energy and food and other production back into communities.

Do you also have the impression that we are witnessing the great unraveling of the neoliberal period, and that we are entering a period that is akin to the long crisis period that came after the Great Depression in the 20’s and 30’s of the last century?

If this would be true, then a further analogy would be what happened then, i.e. a great bifurcation between on the one hand the forces of even greater evil, social regression and permanent war, then exemplified by fascism and Stalinist Russia, and on the other side a reforming capitalism that would eventually lead to a more fair redistribution of wealth, and would lead to the long boom and the post-war welfare state? (the problem then of course is that it took a world war to achieve the latter, an option which is no longer open to us)

I believe we are indeed facing such a bifurcation. On the other hand, the forces of further dislocation, the Al Qaeda’s, other fundamentalist forces and the current American administration. On the other hand, there is the potential of great reforms towards a new and sustainable global system based on much greater equity.

I have touched upon this scenario in my review of David Laibman’s book.

In this review, I conclude that the promise of peer to peer civilization is not achievable in the short term, but that we can expect, in the scenario of the positive bifurcation, a ‘green capitalist’ reform which would necessarily make more place for participatory and commons-oriented movements and practices.

So I have been extremely happy to read a much more ‘professional’ and elaborate analysis by Alex Foti, which is an absolute must-read and also has a remarkable summary graphic on the evolution of world society before and after the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

For the positive bifurcation to occur, tWo changes are needed. On the one hand, sections of the ruling elite must have enough enlightened self-interest to understand that it must make concessions, rather than continue to increase the amount of surplus value it claims for itself. It was indeed the failure of the Roman ruling class to be able to envision such reforms, which led to its downfall, and it doesn’t take a great leap of imagination to see this psychology at work in the current US administration. It seems to me that Obama represents such a countervailing force, capable of being a pole of attraction to the enlightened parts of the establishment, much as Franklin Roosevelt was in the thirties. But to be effective, they need a lot of pressure from below.

Change must therefore also come from below, from the grassroots levels, presenting the necessary pressure so that reforms can benefit the wider population.

This issue is also addressed by Alex Foti, who contrasts two possible approaches, demoliberal, currently attempted in Europe, vs. demoradical regulation, which would be imposed from below. (I’m not sure whether Foti sees Berlusconi/Sarkozi as demoliberals or as forces of Bushist regression?)

My own approach, which is complementary, is not to just demand changes, but to actually realize them in new life forms and institutions. The labour movement of the 19th and 20th century, did not just arose out of intermittent social struggles and electioneering, but because the workers had created a great variety of alternative lifeforms and institutions, which would eventually be integrated into the state system, and stabilized the welfare state until the 1970’s.

Here to conclude, is an extended quote on the demoradical option by Alex Foti:

“Europe is today facing a fundamental bifurcation for the future of its political economy. The crisis of the neoliberal agenda, unpopular in Europe everywhere, is evident also to European elites. They have responded by tracing what I call a DEMOLIBERAL regulation. Basically it’s neoliberalism lite: it is a bit less pro-American, because US-EU interests are no longer coinciding in geoeconomic and geopolitical terms (for instance, Europeans have only to lose from clashing head-front with Islam) but retains a strong commitment to NATO; it invests a little more in public infrastructure and possibly spends on welfare to cushion workers from the vagaries of the labor market, but only as long as people remain under the control of workfare provisions aiming at increasing the productivity of so-called human capital and guarantee social obedience among welfare recipients. This top-down project, to which social movements and radical subjectivities must respond with a grassroots mobilization to shape political Europe as they see fit, has one only, but crucial, merit. It would constitute antibushist counterbalancing for Europe, and would put Atlantic relations on a more equal footing, should bushism be electorally defeated. And muted European neoliberalism could be still preferable to returning to the nation-state with its nationalist and militarist pretensions. Demoliberal regulation not only seeks a new business-friendly social consensus, it opposes the dangerous xenophobic forces that have become a major factor in European politics.

A political answer to European moderates which would take an explicitly multiethnic, egalitarian and ecological road is what I call DEMORADICAL regulation, i.e. a dramatic change in socioeconomic policy thanks to a progressive social bargain imposed from the bottom up (rather than top-down, as in demoliberal regulation) through labor protest, social conflict, participatory democracy. A progressive front that would link leftist/democratic organizations, unions, movements in their common opposition to technocrats, corporations, financial markets and the liberal regulation these would like to re-assert, in order to protect the unequal economic status quo they have gained so much from. But most of all, demoradicalism would be a clarion call to all emancipatory forces in Europe to mobilize against populist xenophobia, anti-immigration hysteria, clerical interference.”

I am suggesting a new series in this blog, describing Anti P2P Practises in various industries, exploiting users ideas, times and efforts in ways that are clearly immoral, while taken for granted and legal by their promotors. To begin with, I found a little note on a site of a commercial software company (The Omni Group) that is outstanding for its short and direct chutzpah:

Pardon me Sir: if you arrogate that right for yourself, why should not we?

“Interview by Vinay Gupta for the first of the Global Swadeshi Dialogues weekly interview series. This interview is perhaps the most clear description to date of the essence of our experiments with Open Source Ecology, and its implementation lab – Factor e Farm. If you can bear the 54 minutes of time, this will definitely be insightful regarding the forthcoming peer-to-peer economy – and provide much insight into the threads of thought and motivations behind our work. At Factor e, we grow ideas, and winnow for the truth.”

via Global Swadeshi

Something strange happened to me today, and I wonder if any of you can explain to me how this could possibly happen.

Yesterday, I undertook a google search on the topic of summer camps in Italy, for a friend of mine in Italy. I did not contact any of the people behind the pages I found.

Today, I got an email advertisement in my yahoo mailbox, entitled “Summer camps in Italy” but with content about a general seminar organization.

This cannot be possibly a coincidence. Clearly this company got hold of my email address, knew I had done this search, and used the topic as a hook to send me a related message.

I see two possibilities:

1) google is selling my keyword searches, along with my email address, to third parties using email advertising

2) somebody somehow scraped my email when I was browsing one of the pages. And it is one of the companies behind these browsed pages that sold my email address.

Any technical or ethical insights? Are these common practices?

Michel

“On March 28, 2008 Reality Sandwich/Evolver sponsored a panel discussion on the capacity of digital technology to transform our reality. As moderator Ken Jordan put it, “What’s going to emerge from this digital soup?”

The panelists were Laura Dawn, cultural director of MoveOn; Paul D. Miller aka DJ Spooky, musician, writer, and filmmaker; Daniel Pinchbeck, author and editorial director of Reality Sandwich, and Peter Koechley, former managing editor of the Onion, now with MoveOn.

via Reality Sandwich

One of the great insights of science fiction author Bruce Sterling, is how intelligent objects, i.e. that know and can telll you where they come from, are necessary to create a world of zero waste. Before presenting that argument, a recap of the vocabulary of the P2P-Objects, and a summary history of their evolution.

This entry is inspired by a great speech by Bruce Sterling, recently rediscovered.

1. The vocabulary

First a reminder of the ABC of the Internet of Things:

A Spime is an object that can be tracked through space and time throughout the lifetime of the object.

A spime descends from the species of gizmo’s: “A Gizmo is not manufacturable by any centrally planned society. A Gizmo is something like a Product, but instead of behaving predictably and sensibly for a mass market of obedient consumers, a Gizmo is an open-ended tech development project. In a Gizmo, development has been deputized to end-users.” (see also here for info on a subspecies of gizmo’s: the blobject)

Some of the trackable objects will be able to blog, i.e. the blogjects: “The three major characteristics of a blogject are its sense of space combined with its ability to track where it has been, its knowledge of its encounters and previous experiences, and more importantly, its ability to participate in an assertive way to social networks. “In its most basic form, a blogject is not dissimilar to people that blog — it is an artifact that can disseminate a record of its experiences to the web.” (from Smartmobs)

Trackable objects will need physical bookmarking.

2. The history of man-made objects

Bruce Sterling:

“In my grand vision, there’s a history of the relationship of objects and human beings. It goes like this. Up to the present day, during previous history, we humans have had. and made, four different classes of possible objects. These classes of objects are called, in order of their historical appearance, Artifacts, Machines, Products, and Gizmos.

Blobjects tend to be a subset of the class of Gizmos. Not all blobjects are Gizmos, but most gizmos have insane amounts of functionality in them, and they are designed on computers.”

3. Why Spimes are necessary for the survival of the planet

Bruce Sterling:

“The people who make Spimes want you to do as much of the work for them as possible. They can data-mine your uses of the spime, and use that to improve their Spime and gain market share. This would have been called “customer relations management,” in an earlier era, but in a Spime world, it’s more intimate. It’s collaborative, and better understood as something like open-source manufacturing. It’s all about excellence. Passion. Integrity. Cross-disciplinary action. And volunteerism.

In the future, an object’s life begins on a graphics screen. It is born digital. Its design specs accompany it throughout its life. It is inseparable from that original digital blueprint, which rules the material world. This object is going to tell you — if you ask — everything that an expert would tell you about it. Because it WANTS you to become an expert.”

(note: also proposed as a discussion on our Ning network site)

Though there are many kinds of networks , they all seem to have a hierarchy

This seems to be the logical conclusion from recent research reported in Nature

We quote:

“researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it’s possible to extract automatically the hierarchical structure of networks. The researchers say their results ‘suggest that hierarchy is a central organizing principle of complex networks, capable of offering insight into many network phenomena.’ They also think that their algorithms can be applied to almost every kind of networks, from biochemical networks (protein interaction networks, metabolic networks or genetic regulatory networks) to communities in social networks.”

I believe this is true, as the opposite would imply ‘sameness’ of all the nodes, totally equal influence.

But this does not mean that there is only one kind of hierarchy, or leadership, i.e. how is it intentionally exercised in human social networks.

It is therefore useful to recall the summary provided by John Heron:

The key question is: do the centralized and hierarchical elements in the protocol, enable or disable participation?

In true peer to peer networks, Heron writes, the role of hierarchy is to enable the spontaneous emergence of ‘autonomy in cooperation’:

“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

(4) commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor.”

Heron adds that “These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

(1) Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;

(2) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;

(3) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;

(4) The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor

From all of the above, we can conclude that hierarchy does not disappear in peer to peer processes, but that it changes its nature. Hierarchy, or authority ranking as it is called by Alan Fiske, takes on new forms such as peer governance, servant leadership, multistakeholdership.

Here is how Joseph Rost defines leadership in the new collaborative era:

“The first is that the activities be influential, that is, noncoercive. The second is that the activities be done by people in a relationship. The third is that the activities involve a real significant change. And the fourth element is that the activities reflect the purposes of the people in the relationship, not just a single person. All of these standards insure collaboration rather than the notion that leadership is a great leader doing great things .”

Similarly, another author on leadership, Jeffrey S. Nielsen distinguishes ‘rank thinking’, from ‘peer thinking’ :

“I define rank thinking as the belief that only a few in any organization should be given special privilege to monopolize information, control decision-making, and command obedience from the vast majority either through coercive or manipulative power. Peer thinking, on the other hand, is the belief that everyone in the organization should have equal standing to share in information, participate in the decision-making process, and choose to follow through persuasive means. Peer thinking assumes that we each have equal privilege to speak and an obligation to listen. Peer-based organizations create a space–an arena–where we come to recognize and respect one another as equal participants in organizational life .”

Can we do anything about unwanted, because too hierarchical and unequal, forms of protocollary power, in the context of using value-sensitive design?. Can we actually design networks of cooperation so that they are more democratic?

Here we can refer productively to the conscious design of what Stephen Downes calls Knowing Networks . What are there characteristics?:

“First, diversity. Did the process involve the widest possible spectrum of points of view? Did people who interpret the matter one way, and from one set of background assumptions, interact with with people who approach the matter from a different perspective?

Even where such networks are open and allow autonomy (and they are often not), the members of such networks are constrained: only certain perspectives are presented to them for consideration, and only certain perspectives will be passed to the remainder of the network (namely, in both cases, the perspectives of those occupying the highly connected nodes).”

(note: I rediscovered this in our archive, it was mistakenly labeled private and does never saw the light of day, back in 2006)

Some interesting quotes to think through, selected from this essay by Evan Thompson:

“When we consider ourselves, taking what is usually called a first-person perspective, just what do we see ? We describe ourselves with words, with concepts, identifying our ideas. But where do these come from, what is the source of all the descriptive categorization we thus employ in, say, our phenomenlogical approach ? At birth no such abilities exist, so these must arise by experience, and for humans such experiences are always highly social – our entire ‘human’ mind is almost created culturally, in other words from a second-person ‘we’ perspective, even our view of the material or animal worlds are formed from the prior beliefs of the society that teaches us about such ‘things’ and their ‘labels’. Thus when we abstract a separate ‘I’ all we are doing is breaking out from the collective whole a delusion. The ‘I’ still contains the essence of ‘we’, our very thought processes are ‘we’ processes. We think as our culture taught us to think, our thoughts suffer from the very same limitations and possibilities as the culture that incubated us. We often think that we escape such pressures in our ‘I’ perspective, but we only can challenge our upbringing to the extent that our culturation permits.

**

We emphasised earlier the role of culture in creating and maintaining mind, the social aspect, but now we can see that we must also add body, the biological aspect. Our genetic inheritance is again a form of intersubjectivity, arising from the interactions of many lifeforms over many aeons. This form of causality both enables the development of brain and mind and restrains it – we cannot do what we are biologically incapable of doing. But we can overcome these restrictions, and that is what our culture adds to the mix. Humans cannot fly, but cultures can. The ‘aeroplane’ is a cultural creation, a new ‘lifeform’ (in memetic space) that can evolve, grow, replicate and die – in common with all our artefacts and fashions. Mind possibility then is extended into the cultural artefacts that augment it. Consciousness then is a three-way intersubjective coevolution, between mind and body, between mind and culture and between ideas or concepts. In other words consciousness isn’t located just in the ‘brain’ but exists in the world, in the society and in the body also – we cannot then meaningfully isolate any ‘mind’ in a ‘first-person’ sense at all, it is an environmentally driven ‘active externalism’ also, the artefacts we use (as mind creations) whether artificial or natural are also intersubjective – we integrate all our available resources (e.g. a calculator) when we think. The mind is embedded in and structurally coupled to our environment.

“Human consciousness is not located in the head, but is immanent in the living body and the interpersonal social world. One’s consciousness of oneself as an embodied individual embedded in the world emerges through empathic cognition of others. Consciousness is not some peculiar qualitative aspect of private mental states, nor a property of the brain inside the skull; it is a relational mode of being of the whole person embedded in the natural environment and the human social world.”

Evan Thompson, Human Consciousness: From Intersubjectivity to Interbeing , 1999