Peer to peer as the premise
of a new mode of civilization
(version 3/05)
Author: Michel Bauwens, [email protected]
The
essay is an emanation of the Foundation for P2P Alternative, Draft 1.1, March
1, 2005; it was written after several months of collaboration with Remi Sussan.
An
earlier draft version for the 'integral discourse community' is located at http://207.44.196.94/~wilber/bauwens2.html
2.
P2P as the Technological Framework of Cognitive Capitalism............................ 5
2.1.
The emergence of peer to peer as technological infrastructure.................... 5
2.2.
Explaining the Emergence of P2P technology.................................................. 7
2.3.A.
Placing P2P in the context of the evolution of technology............................ 8
3.2
Explaining the Emergence of P2P Economics................................................ 13
3.2.A.
The superiority of the free software/open sources production model.... 13
3.3.A. The evolution of cooperation: from neutrality
to synergetics.................... 16
3.4.B.
Beyond Formalization, Institutionalization, Commodification................... 18
3.4.C.
Not a Gift Economy, but a new form of Communal Shareholding.......... 20
3.3.D.
Who rules: cognitive capitalists, the vectoral class, or netocrats?.......... 23
4.1.C.
New conceptions of social and political struggle....................................... 26
5.
The Discovery of P2P principles in the Cosmic Sphere....................................... 32
6.1.A.
A new articulation between the individual and the collective.................... 33
6.1.B.
Towards 'contributory' dialogues of civilizations and religions................ 35
6.1.C.
Participative Spirituality and the Critique of Spiritual Authoritarianism... 35
7.1.B.
P2P, Postmodernity, Cognitive Capitalism: within and beyond............... 40
The
following essay describes the emergence, or expansion, of a specific type of
relational dynamic, which I call peer to peer. It's a form of human
network-based organisation which rests upon the free participation of
equipotent partners, engaged in the production of common resources, without
recourse to monetary compensation as key motivating factor, and not organized
according to hierarchical methods of command and control. This format is
emerging throughout the social field: as a format of technology (the point to
point internet, filesharing, grid computing, the Writeable Web initiatives,
blogs), as a third mode of production (neither centrally planned nor
profit-driven), producing hardware, software and intellectual and cultural
resources (wetware) that are of great value to humanity (Linux, Wikipedia), and
as a general mode of knowledge exchange and collective learning which is
massively practiced on the internet. It also emerges as new organizational
formats in politics, spirituality; as a new 'culture of work'. This essay thus
traces the expansion of this format, seen as a "isomorphism" (=
having the same format), in as many fields as possible. But it does more than
that: it tries to provide an explanatory framework of why it is emerging now,
and how it fits in a wider evolutionary framework. Note that within the
sections, the first subsection is descriptive, the second is explanatory, and
the third is evolutionary. In the latter, I use the triune distinction
premodernity/modernity/postmodernity, well aware that it is a simplification,
and that it collapses many important distinctions, say between the tribal and
the agrarian era. But as an orienting generalization that allows to contrast
the changes occurring after the emergence of modernity, it remains useful.
Thus, the concept of 'premodern', means the societies
based on tradition, before the advent of industrial capitalism, with fixed
social roles and a social organisation inspired by what it believes to be a
divine order; modern means essentially the era of industrial capitalism;
finally, the choice of the term postmodern does not denote any specific
preference in the 'wars of interpretation' between concepts such as
postmodernity, liquid modernity, reflexitive modernity, transmodernity etc.. It
simple means the contermporary period, more or less starting after 1968, which
is marked by the emergence of the informational mode of capitalism. I will use
the term cognitive capitalism most frequently in my characterization of the
current regime, as it corresponds to the interpretation, which is the most convincing in my
view. The French magazine Multitude is my main source for such interpretations.
I
will conclude my essay with the conclusion that P2P is nothing else than a
premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards
the profit motive. What I have to convince the user of is that 1) a particular
type of human relational dynamic is growing very fast across the social fields,
and that such combined occurrence is the result of a deep shift in ways of
feeling and being. 2) That it has a coherent logic that cannot be fully
contained within the present 'regime' of society. 3) As such, it is not an
utopia, but, as 'an already existing social practice', the seed of a major
transformation to come.
One
word about my methodology. I use as heuristic device, and as such device only,
the four quadrant system developed by Ken Wilber, so I want to state
emphatically that I do not share the conclusions of his 'Theory of Everything',
which I think is seriously flawed. But as a method for assembling, presenting
and understanding my data, I find it to be extremely useful. The four quadrant
system organizes reality in 'four aspects', which encompass the subjective
(evolution of self and subjectivity), the materiality of the single organism
(objectivity), the intersubjective (the interaction of groups of subjectivities
and the worldviews and cultures they so create), and the behavior of groups of
objects, i.e. the interobjective perspective of systems. The integral theory
tradition tries to construct a narrative of the unfolding cosmic processes, in
explanatory frameworks that enfolds them all. It also does this historically,
trying to make sense of an evolutionary logic, trying to enfold the different
historical phases into a unified human understanding.
If
you'd place explanatory theories about the evolution of
matter/life/consciousness into 2 axis define by the 'relative attention given
to either the parts or to the whole', and another one 'relative attention given
to difference or to similarities', integral theory would be that kind of
hermeneutical system that pays most attention to the whole, and to structural
similarities, rather than to the parts and to difference. In doing this it runs
counter to the general tendency of modern objective science to focus on parts
(to be analytical), of
postmodernism to focus on difference, and hence to reject integrative narratives,
and to systems theories and its follow-ups, which ignore subjectivity. It is
this distinction from dominant epistemologies, which makes it particularly
interesting to uncover new insights, missed by the other approaches. A key
advantage of the integral framework is that it integrates both subjective and
objective aspects of realities, refusing to reduce one to the other. In section
8, I briefly mention some of the reductionist traps of interpretation that can
be avoided.
To conclude,
generally speaking, an integral approach is one that:
- respects the relative autonomy of the
different fields, and looks for field specific laws
- affirms that new levels of complexity
causes the emergence of new properties and thus rejects reductionisms that try
to explain the highly complex from the less complex
- always relates the objective and
subjective aspects, refusing to see any one aspect as a mere epiphenomena of
the other
- in general, attempts to correlate
explanations emanating from the various fields, in order to arrive at an
integrative understanding
My
modified form of the four-quadrant
system starts with the 'exterior-individual', i.e. single objects in
space and time, i.e. the evolution of the material basis of the universe, life,
and mind (the evolution from atoms to molecules to cells etc..), but in my
personal modification, this quadrant includes technological evolution, as I
(and others such as McLuhan) can legitimately see technology as an extension of
the human body. Second, we will look at the systems (exterior-collective)
quadrant: the evolution of natural, political, economic, social and
organizational systems. Third, we will look at the exterior-collective
quadrant: human culture, spiritualities, philosophies, worldviews. In the
fourth quadrant we will be discussing the interior-individual aspects, and we
look at changes occurring within the sphere of the self. However, in practice,
despite my stated intention, I have found it difficult to separate individual
and collective aspects of subjectivity and they are provisionally treated in
one section. That this is so is not surprising, since one of the aspects of
peer to peer is it participative nature, which sees the individual
always-already embedded in social processes.
|
|
Parts
|
Whole
|
Includes
|
|
Difference
|
Postmodern
approaches |
Integral
Approaches |
Subjects
and Objects |
|
|
Analytical
Sciences |
Systemic
Sciences |
Objects Only
|
|
|
Individual
Aspects |
Collective
Aspects
|
|
Interior Aspects
|
Subjective field The subject /
the self |
Intersubjective field Spirituality /
Worldviews |
|
Exterior Aspects
|
Objective field Technological
artifacts as extensions of the body |
Interobjective field Natural Systems
/ Political, economic, organizational systems |
The
combined use of the four quadrants also has important advantages in avoiding
various kinds of reductionisms:
1) the analytical-materialist reductionism
(scientism), which attempts to totally explain the world of life and culture by
the properties and processes of matter
2) the biological/Darwinistic reductionism,
which attempts to totally explain the life of culture by the animalistic
processes of survival of the fittest.
3) The reductionism of the system sciences,
which deny the agency of the subject
4) The linguistic reductionism of extreme
postmodernists, which tend to totally bypass materiality and reduce everything
to language games
In
conclusion: the integral approach allows us to use these various partial
perspectives and to use them as heuristic devices, so that we can obtain a
fuller picture combining them.
This
essay is part of a larger project, the writing of a French-language book, which
I'm undertaking with Remi Sussan, a Paris-based free-lance journalist working
for 'digital' magazines like TechnikArt. Hence, the continuing dialogue with
him has been a great source of inspiration and clarification in terms of the
ideas expressed in this essay. We share an enthousiasm for understanding P2P, though we frequently
differ in our interpretations. The current essay therefore reflects my own
vision.
A
first essay on P2P, essentially descriptive, but supported by many citations,
is available on the internet on the Noosphere.cc site, and was written in 2003.
In this current essay, which was written pretty much in a 'free flow of
consciousness' mode, though I will mention quite a few names of social
theorists, citations have been kept at a minimum, but I may add them in later
version as footnotes.
Some
acknowledgements about the sources used: amongst the contemporary and
near-contemporary thinkers that I have been reading most recently in preparing
this essay are: Norbert Elias, Louis Dumont, and Cornelis Castoriadis; the Italian-French school of thought
around Multitude magazine, especially Toni Negri, Michael Hardt, Maurizio
Lazzarato, Philippe Zafirian. Particularly useful has been "Les Formes de
l'Echange: controle sociale et modeles de subjectivation", by Claude Macquet
and Didier Vranken. Amongst the specific P2P pioneers I have read, are Pekka
Himanen, for his study of work culture; John Heron and Jorge Ferrer, for their
work on participative spirituality. Timothy Wilken of Synearth.org was
instrumental in the discovery of the theories of Edward Haskell and Arthur
Coulter, on synergetics and cooperation.
As
I was finishing this draft, I just in time received the formidable Hacker
Manifesto from McKenzie Wark, and I have made a last-minute attempt to
integrate his profound analysis into the essay as well.
What
is peer to peer? Here's a first tentative definition: It is a specific form of relational
dynamic, is based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized
through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common
task, for the creation of a common good. P2P is a network, not a hierarchy; it
is decentralized; it a specific form of network using distributive
intelligence: intelligence is located at any center, but everywhere within the
system. Assumed equipotency means that P2P systems start from the premise that
'it doesn't know where the needed resource will be located', it assumes that
'everybody' can cooperate, and does not use formal rules in advance to
determine its participating members. Equipotency, i.e. the capacity to
cooperate, is verified in the process of cooperation itself. Validation of knowledge,
acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective. Cooperation must be
free, not forced, and not based on neutrality (i.e. the buying of cooperation
in a monetary system). It exists to produce something. These are a number of
characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems 'in general', and in
particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld. To have a good understanding
of P2P, I suggest the following mental exercise, think about these
characteristics, then about their opposites. So doing, the radical innovative
nature of P2P springs to mind. Though P2P is related to earlier social modes,
those were most in evidence in the early tribal era, and it now emerges in an
entirely new context, enabled by technologies which go beyond the barriers of
time and space. After the dominance during the last several millennia, of
centralized and hierarchical modes of social organisation, it is thus in many
ways now a radically innovative emergence, and also reflects a very deep change
in the epistemological and ontological paradigms that determine behaviour and
worldviews.
But
how does it apply to technology?
The
Internet, as it was conceived by its founders, and evolved in its earliest
format, was a point to point network, consisting of equal networks, and the
travel of data uses different sets of resources as necessary. It is only later,
after the rise of stronger and weaker networks, of open, semi-closed and closed
networks, that the internet became hybrid, but it still in essence functions as
a decentralized network, having no central core to manage the system.
The
web similarly was seen as a many-to-many publishing medium, even though it
follows a semi-hierarchical client-server model. However, it is still and will
remain a essentially participative medium allowing anyone to publish his own
webpages. Because of its incomplete P2P nature, it is in the process of
becoming a true P2P publishing medium in the form of the Writeable Web
projects, that allow anyone to publish from his own or any other computer,in
the form of blogging etc’Ķ Other P2P media are instant messaging, chat, IP
telephony systems, etc.. For the internet and the web, P2P was not yet
explicitly theorized (though the idea of a network of networks was), they are
weak P2P system in that they only recognize 'strong' members, DNS-addressed
computers in the internet, servers in the case of the web. In the systems
developed afterwards, P2P was explicitly theorized: they are 'strong' P2P
systems, in which all members, also the weak members (without fixed DNS address
for the internet, blogs with permalinks in case of the web) can participate.
Filesharing
systems were the first to be explicitly tagged with the P2P label, and this is
probably the origin of the concept in the world of technology. In such systems,
all voluntary computers on the internet are mobilized to share files amongst
all participating systems, whether that be documents, audiofiles, or
audiovisual materials. In June 2003, videostreaming became the internet
application using the largest bandwidth, and some time before, online music
distribution had already surpassed the physical distribution of CD's (in the
U.S.). Though the earliest incarnations of these P2P systems still used
centralized databases, they are now, largely thanks to the efforts of the music
industry, mostly true P2P systems, in particular Bittorrent and the planned
development of Exeem.
Finally,
grid computing uses the P2P concept to create 'participative supercomputers',
where resources, spaces, computing cycles can be used from any participant in
the system, on the basis of need. It is the next paradigm for computing.
In
terms of media, the broadband internet is rapidly mutating to enhance the
capacities to create online publishing (blogging), internet radio systems, and
the distribution of audiovisual programming. In physical terms of the evolving
telecommunications infrastructure, the broadcast model is being replaced by the
'meshwork system', which is already used by the Wireless Commons movement to
create a worldwide wireless communications network that will totally bypass the
Telco infrastructure. In such a system a wide array of local networks is
created at very low cost, while they are interlinked with 'bridges'.
Communication on these networks follows a P2P model, just like the internet.
Mark Pesce has already developed a realistic proposal to build an integrated
alternative network within then years, based on similar premises. And think
about the potential of 'file-serving television' models as pioneered by TiVo.
Telephony using the Internet Protocol,
recently popularized by Skype, is similarly destined to change the
nature of the hitherto centralized telephone system.
While
mobile telephony is strongly centralized and controlled, it will have to
compete with wireless broadband networks, and users are busily turning it into
yet another participative medium, as described by Howard Rheingold in Smart
Mobs.
I
could go on, but what should emerge in your mind, is not a picture of a series
of marginal developments, but the awareness that P2P networks are the key
format of the technological infrastructure that supports the current economic,
political and social systems. Companies have used these technologies to
integrate their processes with those of partners, suppliers, consumers, and
each other, using a combination of intranets, extranets, and the public
internet, and it has become the absolutely essential tool for international
communication and business, and to enable the cooperative, internationally
coordinated projects carried out by teams.
In
the above phenomenology of P2P, notice that I have taken an extreme literal
definition of P2P, as many hybrid forms exist, but the important and deciding
factor is: does it enable the participation of equipotent members?
Why
this emergence? The short answer is: P2P is a consequence of abundance (in fact
it is both cause and consequence). With the advent of the 'Information Age'
that started with mass media and unintegrated private networks for
multinationals, but especially with the advent of the internet and the web
itself, which allow for digital copying and distribution of any digital
creation at marginal cost, information abundance is created. For business
processes, the keyword becomes 'flow', and the integration of these endless
flows. Production of material goods is predicated on the management of
immaterial flows. In such a context, centralized systems inevitably create
bottlenecks holding up the flow. In a P2P system, any node can contact any
other node, without passing through such bottlenecks. Hierarchy only works with
scarcity, and in a situation where the control of scarce resources determines
the end result of the zero-sum power games being conducted. In a situation of
abundance, centralized nodes cannot possible cope. Information, I probably do
not need to remind the reader of this, is different from material goods, in
that its sharing does not diminish its value, but on the contrary augments it.
Second,
P2P systems are predicated on redundancy, several resources are always
available to conduct any process. This makes them a lot less vulnerable than
centralized systems to any kind of disruption, P2P systems are extraordinarily
robust. One cannot, in terms of resources, compare any centralized system, to
the extraordinary combination of millions of peripheral systems with the
billions and trillions of unused memory, computing cycles, etc’Ķ. These are only
unlocked in a P2P system.
Abundance
is again both a cause and a consequence of complexity. In a situation of a
multiplication of flows, flows that no longer follow predetermined routes, it
cannot possible be predicted, where the 'solution' for any problem lies.
Expertise comes out of a precise combination of experience, which is
unpredictable in advance. Thus, systems are needed that allow expertise to
unexpectedly announce itself, when it learns that it is needed. This is
precisely what P2P systems allow to an unprecendented degree.
Premodern
technology was participative, but not differentiated. The instruments of
artisans were extensions of their bodies, with which they 'cooperated'. But the
lifeworld, was not differentiated into different spheres or into subject/object
distinctions, since they saw themselves, not as separate and autonomous
individuals, but as parts of a whole, following the dictates of the whole,
moving in a world dominated by spirits, the spirits of men (the ancestors), of
the natural world (with no distinction natural/supernatural), and of the
objects they used.
Modern
technology could be said to be differentiated, but is no longer participative.
The subject-object dichotomy means that nature becomes a resource to be used
(objects used by subjects). But the object, the technological instrument, also
becomes autonomous, and in the factory system typical of modernity, a dramatic
reversal takes place: it is the human who becomes a 'dumb' extension of the
machine. The intelligence is not so much located in the machine, but in the
organization of the production, of which both humans and machines are mere
cogs. Modern machines are not by itself intelligent, and are organized in
hierarchical frameworks. Modern humans think themselves as autonomous agents
using objects, but become themselves objects of the systems of their own
creation. This is the drama of modernity, the key to its alienation.
In
post-modernity, machines become intelligent (though not in the same way as
humans, they can only use the intelligence put in them by the humans, and lack
the creativity). While the old paradigm of humans as objects in a system
certainly persists, a new paradigm is being born. The intelligent machines
become computers, extensions now of the human brain and nervous system (instead
of being extensions of the external limbs and internal functions of the body in
the industrial system). Humans again start cooperating with the computers, seen
as extensions of their selves, their memories, their logical processes, but
also and this is crucial: it enables affective communication amongst a much
wider global community of humans. Of course, within the context of cognitive
capitalism (defined as the third phase of capitalism where immaterial processes
are more important than the material production; where information 'as
property' becomes the key asset), all this still operates in a wider context of
exploitation and domination, but the potential is there for a new model which
allies both differentiation (the autonomous individual retains his freedom and
prerogatives), and participation. Within the information paradigm, the world of
matter (nanotech), life (biotech) and mind (AI) are reduced to their
informational basis, which can be manipulated, and this opens up nightmarish
possibilities of the extension of the resource-manipulation paradigm, now
involving our very own bodies and psyches. However, because of the equally
important paradigm of participation, the possibility arises of a totally new,
subjective-objective, cooperative way of looking at this, and this is an
element of hope.
Starting our
description with the emergence of P2P within the field of technology could be
misconstrued as saying that P2P is a result of technology, in a
'technology-deterministic fashion'.
The precise role
of technology in human evolution is subject to debate. A first group of
positions sees technology as 'neutral'. Humans want more control over their
environment, want to go beyond necessity,and in that quest, built better and
better tools. But how we use these tools is up to us. Many inventors of
technology and discoverers of scientific truths have argued this way, saying
for example that atomic energy can be used for good (energy) or for bad (war),
but that is entirely a political decision.
A different set
of positions argues that on the contrary, technological development has a logic
of its own, that as a system is goes beyond the intention of any participating
individual, and in fact becomes their master. In such a reading, technological
evolution is inevitable and has unforeseen consequences. In the pessimistic
vision, it's in fact the ultimate form of alienation. This is so because
technology is an expression of just a part of our humanity, instrumental
reason, but when embedded in the technological systems and its machines, it
then forces us to ressemble it, and we loose many parts of our full humanity.
Think of the positions of Heidegger, Baudrillard, and Virilio as exemplars of such
a type of analysis.
Technological
determinism can also have a optimistic reading. In this view, for example
represented by the progress ideology of the late 19th century, and
currently by the technological transhumanists, such as Kurzweil, technology represents
an increasing mastery and control over nature, a means of going beyond the
limitations set to us by nature, and that is an entirely good thing.
The position I
personally feel the closest to is the 'critical philosophy of technology'
developed by Andrew Feenberg. In his analysis, technological artifacts are a
social construction, reflecting the various social interests: those of capital,
those of the engineering community conceiving it, but also, those of the
critical voices within that community, and of the 'consumers' subverting the
original aims of technology for entirely unforeseen usages. Feenberg comes very
close to recognize the new form of power that we discuss in section four: i.e.
the protocollary power which concerns the 'code'. The very form of the code,
whether it is for the hardware or the software, reflects what usages can be
made of technology.
It is in this
sense that I see a first important relation between the emergence of P2P and
its technological manifestations. The engineers who conceived the point to
point internet already had a wholly new set of conceptions which they
integrated in their design. It was in fact explicitely designed to enable
peer-based scientific collaboration. Thus, the emergence of peer to peer as a
phenomena spanning the whole social field is not 'caused' by technology; it is
rather the opposite, the technology reflects a new way of being and feeling,
which we will discuss in section 6A in particular.
But our argument
is stronger than that. In a certain sense, peer to peer, understood as a form
of participation in the commons, i.e. as communal shareholding, which we
discuss in section 3.4.C, has 'always existed' as a particular relational
dynamic. It was especially strong in the more egalitarian tribal era, with its
very limited division of labor, before the advent of property and class
division. But it was always limited to small bands. After the tribal era, as we
enter the long era of class-based civilization, forms of communal shareholding
and egalitarian participation have survived, but always subvervient, first to
the authority structures of feudalism and similar 'land-based systems', then to
the 'market pricing' system of capitalism. But the situation is now different,
because the development of P2P technology is an extraordinary vector for its
generalization as a social practice, beyond the limitations of time and space,
i.e. geographically bounded small bands. What we now have for the first time is
a densely interconnected network of affinity-based P2P networks. Thus, the
technological format that is now becoming dominant, is an essential part of a
new feedback loop, which strengthens the emergence of P2P to a degree not seen
since the demise of tribal civilization. It is in this particular way that the current
forms of P2P are a historical novelty, and not simply a repeat of the tolerated
forms of egalitarian participation in essentially hierarchical and
authoritarian social orders.
To repeat: it is
not the technology that causes P2P. Rather, as technology, it is itself an
expression of a deep shift in the epistemology and ontology occurring in our
culture. But nevertheless, this technology, once created, becomes an
extraordinary amplifier of the existing shift. It allows a originally
minoritarian cultural shift to eventually affect larger and larger numbers of
people. Finally, that shift in our culture, is itself a function of the
emergence of a field of abundance, the informational field, which is itself
strongly related to the technological base that has helped its creation.
In
the economic sphere, P2P is emerging as nothing less than a 'third mode of
production' (as first defined by Y. Benckler using the concept of
'Commons-based peer production). Worldwide, groups of programmers and other
experts are engaging in the cooperative production of immaterial goods with
tremendous use value, such as new software systems. The new software, hardware
and 'wetware' thus being created are at the same time new means of production,
since the computer is now a universal machine 'in charge of everything'. This
takes the form of either the Free Software Movement ethos, as defined by
Richard Stallman, or in the form of Open Source projects, as defined by Eric
Raymond. In the latter more flexible form, it is only required that the 'source
code' is free for the sharing of all; in the first form, no economic gain may
result from using the freely supplied code. Open Sources is admittedly less
radical and even being embraced by corporate interests such as IBM and other
Microsoft rivals, but the creation of an open infrastructure is crucial and in
everyone's interest. Open-source based computers are already the mainstay of
the internet's infrastructure (Apache servers); Linux is an alternative
operating system that is taking the world by storm. It is now a practical
possibility to create an Open Source personal computer that exclusively uses OS
software products for the desktop, including database, accounting, graphical
programs, including browsers such as Firefox. Wikipedia is an alternative
encyclopedia produced by the internet community which is rapidly gaining in
quantity, quality, and number of users. And there are several thousands of such
projects, involving at least several millions of cooperating individuals. If we
consider blogging as a form of journalistic production, then it must be noted
that it already involves between and 10 million bloggers, with the most popular
ones achieving several hundred thousands of visitors. We are pretty much in an
era of 'open source everything', with musicians and other artists using it as
well for collaborative online productions. In general it can be said that this
mode of production achieves 'products' that are at least as good, and sometimes
better than their commercial counterparts. In addition, there are solid reasons
to accept that, if the open source methodology is consistently used over time,
the end result can only be better alternatives, since they involved mobilization
of vastly most resources than commercial products.
It
is called 'a third mode of production', because it produces effective use
values, without resort to either the centralized public ownership model
typified by the now failed Soviet model, nor the theoretically decentralized
(but in fact monopolized and working through companies with feudal-era
authority structures) but for-profit based capitalist system. In contrast, the
open source production is based on free cooperation of equipotent individuals
and has the characteristics described in para 2.1
Open
source production operates in a wider economic context, of which we would like
to describe 'the communism of capital', with 'the hacker ethic' functioning as
the basis of it's new work culture.
In
modernity, the economic ideology sees autonomous individuals entering into
contracts with each other, selling labor in exchange for wages, exchanging
commodities for fair value, in a free market where the 'invisible hand' makes
sure that the private selfish economic aims of such individuals, finally
contribute to the common good. The 'self' or subject of economic action is the
company, led by entrepreneurs, who are the locus of innovation. Thus we have
the familiar subject/object split operating in the economic sphere, with an
autonomous subject using and manipulating resources.
This
view is hardly defensible today. The autonomous enterprise has entered a widely
participative field that blurs clear distinctions and identities. It is linked
with its consumers through the internet, today facing less a militant labor
movement than a 'political consumer' who can withhold his/her buying power with
an internet and blogosphere able to destroy corporate images and branding in
the very short term through viral explosions of critique and discontent. It is
linked through extranets with partners and suppliers. Processes are no longer
internally integrated, as in the business process re-engineering of the
eighties, but externally integrated in vast webs of inter-company cooperation.
Intranets enable widespread horizontal cooperation not only for the workers
within the company, but also without. Thus, the employee, is in constant contact
with the outside, part of numerous innovation and exchange networks, constantly
learning in formal but mostly informal ways. Because of the high degree of
education and the changing nature of work which has become a series of
short-term contracts, a typical worker has not in any real sense gained his
skills within the company, but expands on his skill and experience throughout
his working life. Because the complexity, time-based, innovation-dependent
nature of contemporary work, for all practical terms, work is organized as a
series of teams, using mostly P2P work processes. The smarter companies are
consciously breaking down the barriers between production and consumption,
producers and consumers, by involving consumers, in an open-source inspired
manner, into value creation. Think of how the success of eBay and Amazon are
linked to their successful mobilization of their user communities. There are of
course important factors, inherent in the functioning of capitalism and the
format of the enterprise, which cause structural tensions around this
participative nature, and the use of P2P models, which we will cover in our
explanatory section.
Why
do we speak of 'cognitive capitalism'? For a number of important reasons. The
relative number of workers involved in material production is dwindling rather
rapidly, with a majority of workers in the West involved in either symbolic
(knowledge workers) or affective processing (service sector) and creation
(entertainment industry). The value of any product is mostly determined, not by
the value of the material resources, but by its level of integration of
intelligence, and of other immaterial factors (design, creativity, experiential
intensity, access to lifeworlds and identities created by brands). The
immaterial nature of contemporary production is reconfiguring the material
production of agricultural produce and industrial goods. In terms of
professional 'experience', more and more workers are not directly manipulating
matter, but the process is mediated through computers that manage machine-based
processes. Cognitive capitalism is therefore a hypothesis that the current
phase of capitalism is distinct in its operations and logic from earlier forms
such as merchant and industrial capitalism.
McKenzie
Wark's Hacker Manifesto goes one step further in this analysis and argues that
the key factor of the new era is 'information as property'. According to him,
we have a new class configuration altogether. While the capitalist class owned
factories and machinery, once capital was abstracted in the form of stocks and
information, a new class has arisen which controls the 'vectors of
information', the means of producing, storing and distributing information, the
means to transform use value in exchange value. This is the 'vectoralist' class. The class who actually
produces the value (as distinct from the class that can 'realise'it and thus
captures the surplus value), he calls the hacker class. It is distinguished
from the former because it
actually creates new means of production: hardware, software, new knowledge
(wetware). See 3.3.D. for a fuller explanation of the different interpretations
of the current political economy, of which P2P is a crucial element.
In
section 3.2 we will attempt to show the contradictory nature of the
relationship between capitalism and peer to peer processes. It needs P2P to
thrive, but is at the same threatened by it. A similar contradiction takes
place in the sphere of work. We said before how in the industrial, 'Fordist'
model, the worker was considered an extension of the machine. Another way of
saying this, is that intelligence was located in the process, but that the
worker himself was deskilled, he was required to be a 'dumb body', following
instructions. The worker had to sell his labor in order to survive, and meaning
could only be found in the activity of working itself, as a means of survival
for the family, as a way of social integration, as a means of obtaining
identity through one's social role. But finding meaning in the content of the
work itself was exceptional. In post-Fordism important changes and reversals
occur. Today, the worker is supposed to communicate and cooperate, to have a
capacity to solve problems. He is required not only to use his intelligence,
but also has to engage his full subjectivity. Certainly this increases the
possibility to find fulfillment and meaning through work, but that would be to
point a too rosy picture. Inside the company, the quest for fulfillment is
often contradicted by the empty purpose of the company itself, especially as
efficiency thinking, short termism and a sole focus on profit, are taking hold
as the main priorities. Peer to peer processes characteristic of the project
teams are in tension with the hierarchical, feudal-like nature of the
management by objectives models. Psychological pressure and stress levels are
very high, since the worker has now full responsibility and very high targets.
One could say that instead of exploiting the body of the worker, as was the
case in industrial capitalism, it is now the psyche being exploited, and
stress-related diseases have replaced industrial accidents. But this is not
all: the productivity model and modes of efficiency thinking have left the
factory to diffuse throughout society. It is not uncommon to manage one's
family and children and household according to that model. Human relations
(dating) and creative activities have been commoditized and monetized. As the
pressure within the corporate timesphere intensifies through the
hypercompetition based model of neoliberalism, learning and other necessary
activities to remain creative and efficient at work have been exported to
private time. Thus paradoxically, the Protestant work ethic has been
exacerbated, or as Pekka Himanen would have it in his Hacker Ethic, there has
been a 'Friday-isation of Sunday' going on. In other words, the values and
practices of the productive sphere, the sphere of the workweek including
Friday, defined by efficiency, have taken over the private sphere, the sphere
of the weekend, Sunday, which was supposed to be outside of that logic.
Yet
at the same time, new subjectivities and intersubjectivities (which we will
discuss later), are creating a counter-movement in the form of a new work ethic:
the hacker ethic. As mass intellectuality increases through formal and informal
education, and due to the very requirements of the new types of immaterial
work, meaning is no longer sought in the sphere of salaried work, but in life
generally, and not through entertainment alone, but through creative
expression, through 'work', but outside of the monetary sphere. Occasionally,
and it was especially the case during the new economy boom, companies try to
integrate such methods, the so-called 'Bohemian' model. This explains to a
large part the rise of the Open Sources production method. In the interstices
of the system, between jobs, on the job when there is free time, in academic
circles, or supported by social welfare, new use value is being created. And it
is done through a totally new work ethic, which is opposed to the exacerbation
of the Protestant work ethic. And as it was first pioneered by the community of
'passionate programmers, the so-called hackers, it is called 'the hacker
ethic'. Himanen explains a few of its characteristics:
- time is not rigidly separated into work
and non-work; intensive work periods are followed by extensive leave taking,
the latter necessary for intellectual and creative renewal; there is a logic of
self-unfolding at work, workers look for projects at which they feel energized
and that expands their learning and experience in desired directions;
participation is voluntary; learning is informal and continuous; the value of
pleasure and play are crucial; the project has to have social value and be of
use to a wider community; there is total transparency, no secrets; there is an
ethic that values activity and caring; creativity, the continuous surpassing of
oneself in solving problems and creating new use value, is paramount.
In open source projects, these characteristics are
full present; in a for-profit environment they may be partly present but enter
into conflict with the different logic of a for-profit enterprise.
Part
of the explanation is cultural, located in a changing set of values affecting
large parts of the population, mostly in the Western world. The World Values
research by R. Inglehart has shown that there is a large number of people who
identify with post-material values and who have moved up in the 'hierarchy of
values' as defined by Abraham Maslow. For those people who feel relatively
secure materially, and are not taken in by the infinite desires promoted by
consumer society, it is inevitable that they will look to other means of
fulfillment, in the area of creation, relationships, spirituality. The demand
for free cooperation in a context of self-unfolding, is a corollary of this
development.
By
abolishing distinctions between producer and consumer, open source processes
dramatically increase their access to expertise, to a global arena networked
through the internet. No commercial entity can afford such a large army of
volunteers. Any user can participate, at least through a bug report, or by
offering his comments. Because the cooperation is free, participants function
passionately and optimally without coercion. The 'Wisdom Game', which means
that social influence is gained through reputation, augments the motivation to
participate with high quality interventions. In surveys of participants of
FLOSS (=Free Libre Open Sources Software) projects, the most frequently cited
motivation is 'learning'. Because
a self-unfolding logic is followed which looks for optimal feeling of flow, the
participants are collaborating when they feel most energized. Open source
availability of the source code and documentation means that the products can
be continuously improved. Because of the social control and the reputation
game, abusive behavior can be controlled and abuse of power is similarly
dependent on collective approval.
In
the sphere of immaterial production and distribution, such as for example the
distribution of music, the advantages of online distribution through P2P
processes are unmatched. In the sphere of material production, through
essentially the contributions of knowledge workers, similarly P2P processes are
more efficient than centralized hierarchical control.
Yochai
Benkler, in a famous essay, 'Coase's Penguin', has given a rationale for the
emergence of P2P production methodologies, based on the ideas of 'transcaction
cost'. In the physical world, the cost of bringing together thousands of
participants may be very high, and so it may be cheaper to have centralized
firms than an open market. This is why earlier experiences with collectivized
economies could not work. But in the immaterial sphere used for the production
of informational goods, the transaction goods are near-zero and therefore, open
source production methods are cheaper and more efficient.
Aaron
Krowne, writing for Free Software magazine, has proposed a set of laws to
explain the higher efficiency of CBPP (= Commons-based peer production) models:
(Law
1.) When positive contributions exceed negative contributions by a sufficient
factor in a CBPP project, the project will be successful.
This
means that for every contributor that can 'mess things up', there have to be at
least 10 others who can correct these mistakes. But in most projects the ration
is 1 to 100 or 1 to 1000, so that quality can be maintained and improved over
time.
(Law
2.) Cohesion quality is the quality of the presentation of the concepts in a
collaborative component (such as an encyclopedia entry). Assuming the success
criterion of Law 1 is met, cohesion quality of a component will overall rise.
However, it may temporarily decline. The declines are by small amounts and the
rises are by large amounts.
Individual
contributions which may be useful by themselves but diminish the overall
balance of the project, will always be discovered, so that decline can only be
temporary.
(Corollary.) Laws 1 and 2 explain why cohesion quality of the
entire collection (or project) increases over time: the uncoordinated temporary
declines in cohesion quality cancel out with small rises in other components,
and the less frequent jumps in cohesion quality accumulate to nudge the bulk
average upwards. This is without even taking into account coverage quality,
which counts any conceptual addition as positive, regardless of the elegance of
its integration.
Krowne
has also done useful work to define the authority models at work in such
projects. The models define access and the workflow, and whether there is any
quality control. The free-form model, which Wikipedia employs, allows anyone
to edit any entry at any time. But in the owner-centric model, entries can only
be modified with the permission of a specific 'owner' who has to defend the
integrity of his module.
He concludes that "These two models have different
assumptions and effects. The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all
users are on the "same level," and that expertise will be universally
recognized and deferred to. As a result, the creator of an entry is spared the
trouble of reviewing every change before it is integrated, as well as the need
to perform the integration. By contrast, the owner-centric authority model
assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand, above all
others, and all others must defer to them. Because of this
arrangement, the owner must review all modification proposals, and take the
time to integrate the good ones. However, no non-expert will ever be allowed to
"damage" an entry, and therefore resorting to administrative powers
is vanishingly rare." (x)
The owner-centric model is better for quality, but takes more
time, while the free-form model increases scope of coverage and is very fast.
Given
that open source is predicated on abundance, how far can it be extended into
the material economy, and leave its confinement in the field of pure immaterial
production, such as software? The logical answer is: it can be extended
whenever there is perceived abundance. If we look at material production, there
are two facets. Material production itself requires large resources and
capital, it seems at first antithetical to P2P. But the other facet is that the
whole process of design is immaterial and by definition in the sphere of
abundance. Making a car today is highly, essentially dependent on the
immaterial factors such as design, cooperation of dispersed international
teams, marketing and communication. After that, the production of the cars
through standardized parts in outsourced production companies, is -- despite
the capital requirement -- more of an epiphenomenom. It is therefore not
extremely difficult to expect an extension of OS production models, at least in
the design and conception phase of even material production. We can envisage a
future form of society, as described in the GPL (General Public License)
Society scenario of Oekonux.de, where the intellectual production and design of
any material product, is done through P2P processes.
We
should also see that scarcity is in many ways a social construction. Nature was
abundant to the tribal peoples, but when it was transformed into land that
counted as property, land became scarce and a resource to be fought for. The
enclosures movement in England was designed to to precisely that. Out of land,
previously plentiful resources were taken, and transformed into the form of
property known as capital. Capital became scarce and to be fought for.
Similarly today, the plentiful information commons that we produce, is being
fought, so that it can turn into intellectual property, that can artificially
be rendered scarce. Thus the whole dialectic between abundance and scarcity is
not a given objective fact, as for example, when we say that the immaterial is
by definition abundant, and the material by definition scarce. As McKenzie Wark
explains, information might be abundant, but in order for it to be accessed and
distributed, we need vectors, i.e. the means of production and distribution of
information. And these are not in the hands of the producers themselves, but in
the hands of a vectoral class. Use value cannot be transformed into exchange
value, without their intervention. At the same time, through intellectual
property laws, this vectoral class is in the process of trying to make
information scarce. For Wark, the key issue is the property form, as it is the
property form, and nothing else, which renders resources scarce. However, the
natural abundance of information, the peer to peer nature of vectors such as the internet, makes this a
particularly hard task for the vectoral class. Unlike the working class in
industrial capitalism, knowledge workers can resist and create to numerous
interstices, which is where true P2P is thriving. Their natural task is to
extend free access to information, to have a commons of vectoral resources;
while the natural task of the vectoral class, is to control the vectors, and
change the information commons into tightly controlled properties. But at the
same time, the vectoral class needs the knowledge workers (or the hacker class,
as McKenzie Wark puts it), to produce innovation, and in the present regime, in
many cases, the knowledge workers need the vectors to distribute its work.
This
is the reason that relations between P2P and the for-profit model of the
enterprise are highly contradictory and rife with tensions. P2P-inspired
project teams have to co-exist with a hierarchical framework that seeks only to
serve the profit of the shareholders. The authority model of a corporation is
essentially a top-down hierarchical even 'feudal' model. Since traditionally corporate power was
a scarce resource predicated on information control, very few companies are
ready to actually implement coherent P2P models and their inherent demand for
an information sharing culture, as it threatens the core power structure. By
their own nature, companies seek to exploit external resources, at the lowest
possible cost, and seek to dump waste products to the environment. They seek to
give the lowest possible socially-accepted wage, which is sufficient to attract
workers. Mitigating factors are the demands and regulations of the democratic
polity, and today in particular the demands of the political consumer; and the strength and scarcity of labor.
But essentially, the corporation will be reactive to these demands, not pro-active.
We will argue
elsewhere that P2P is both 'within' and 'beyond' the present system. It is
within because it is the condition for the functioning of the present system of
'cognitive capitalism'. But P2P, if it follows its own logic, demands to be
extended to the full sphere of material and social life, and demands its
transformation from a scarce resource, predicated on private property to an
abundant resource. Therefore, ultimately, the answer to the question: can P2P
be extended to the material sphere, should have the following reply: only if
the material sphere is liberated from its connection to scarce capital, and
instead starts functioning on the predicate of over-abundant and non-mediated
labour, will it effectively function outside the immaterial sphere. Thus P2P
points to the eventual overcoming of the present system of political economy.
If
we take a wider view of economic evolution, with the breakdown of the tribal
'gift economy', which operated in a context of abundance (this
counter-intuitive analysis is well explained by anthropologists such as
Marshall Sahlins, who showed that tribal peoples only needed to work a few
hours per day for their survival), we can see that premodern imperial and
feudal forms of human cooperation where based on the use of force. Using Edward
Haskell's triune categorization of human cooperation (adversarial, neutral,
synergetic): It was a win-lose game, which inevitably led to the monopolization
of power (either in land and military forces in precapitalist formations, or in
the commercial sphere, as in capitalism). Tribute was exacted from losers in a
battle (or freely offered by the weak seeking protection), labor and produce
from slaves and serfs. In forced, adversarial cooperation, in this win-loose
game, cooperative surplus is less than optimal, it is in fact negative: 1 + 1
is less than two. Productivity and motivation are low.
In
capitalist society, neutral cooperation is introduced. As we said above, in
theory, free workers exchange their labor for a fair salary and products for a
'fair' amount of money. In neutral cooperation, the result of the cooperation
is average. Participants give just their money's worth. Neither participant in
a neutral exchange gets better, 1 plus 1 equals 2. We can interpret this
negatively or positively. Negatively, capitalist theory is rarely matched in
practice, where fair exchange is always predicated on monopolization and power
relationships. The situation is therefore much darker, more adversarial and
less neutral, than the theory would suggest. Nevertheless, compared to the
earlier feudal models, marked by constant warfare, the monopoly of violence
exercised by the capitalist state model, limits internal armed conflicts, and
adversarial relationships are relegated to the sphere of commerce. The system
has proven very productive, and coupled with the distributive nature of the
welfare state which was imposed on it, has dramatically expanded living
standards in certain areas of the world. Seen in the most positive light, a
positive feedback loop may be created in which both partners feel they are
winning, thus it can sometimes be seen as a win-win model. But what it cannot
do, due to its inherent competitive nature, is transform itself into a
win-win-win model. A capitalist relationship cannot care for the wider
environment, only forced to care.
Here peer to
peer can be again defined as a clear evolutionary breakthrough. It is based on
free cooperation. Parties to the process all get better from it: 1 plus 1 gives
a lot more than 2. By definition, peer to peer processes are mobilized for
common projects that are of greater use value to the wider community (since
monetized exchange value falls away). True and authentic P2P therefore
logically transforms into a win-win-win model, whereby not only the parties
gain, but the wider community and social field as well. It is, in Edward
Haskell's definition, a true synergetic cooperation. It is very important to
see the 'energetic' effects of these different forms of cooperation, as I
indicated above: 1) forced cooperation yields very low quality contributions;
2) the neutral cooperation format of the marketplace generates average quality
contributions; 3) but freely given synergistic cooperation generates passion.
Participants are automatically drawn to what they do best, at the moments at
which they are most passionate and energetic about it. This is one of the
fundamental reasons of the superior quality which is eventually, over time,
created through open source projects
Arthur
Coulter, author of a book on synergetics, adds a further twist explaining the
superiority of P2P. He adds to the objective definition of Haskell, the
subjective definition of 'rapport' based on the attitudes of the participants.
Rapport is the state of a persons who are in full agreement, and is determined
by synergy, empathy, and communication. Synergy refers to to interactions that
promote the goals and efforts of the participants; empathy to the mutual
understanding of the goals; and communication to the effective interchange of
the data. His "Principle of Equivalence" states that the flow of S +
E + C are optimal when they have equivalent status to each other. If we
distinguish Acting Superior, Acting Inferior on one axis and Acting
Supportively and Acting with Hostility on another axis, then the optimal flow
arises when one treats the other as 'somewhat superior' and with 'some
support'. Thus an egalitarian-supportive attitude is congenial to the success
of P2P.
|
|
Nature
of cooperation |
Nature
of Game |
Quality
of Cooperation |
|
Premodern |
Adversarial |
Zero-sum:
win-lose |
Low, 1+1 < 2 |
|
Modern |
Neutral |
Zero-sum: draw |
Average, 1+1 =
2 |
|
P2P |
Synergetic |
Non Zero-sum: win-win-win |
High, 1=1 >
2 |
Observation of
commons-based peer production and knowledge exchange,
unveils a further number of important elements, which can be added to our
earlier definition.
In
premodern societies, knowledge is 'guarded', it is part of what constitutes
power. Guilds are based on secrets, the Church does not translate the Bible,
and it guards its monopoly of interpretation.
With the
advent of modernity, and let's think about Diderot's project of the
Encyclopedia as an example, knowledge is from now on regarded as a public
resource which should flow freely. But at the same time, modernity, as
described by Foucault in particular, starts a process of regulating the flow of
knowledge through a series of formal rules, which aim to distinguish valid
knowledge from invalid one. The academic peer review method, the setting up of
universities which regulate discourse, the birth of professional bodies as
guardians of expertise, the scientific method, are but a few of such
regulations. An intellectual property rights regime also regulates the
legitimate use one can make of such knowledge, and which is responsible for a
re-privatization of knowledge. If original copyright served to stimulate
creation by balancing the rights of authors and the public, the recent
strengthening of intellectual property rights can be more properly understood
as an attempt at 'enclosure' of the information commons, which has to serve to create
monopolies based on rent obtained through licenses. Thus at the end of
modernity, in a similar process to what we described in the field of work
culture, there is an exacerbation of the most negative aspects of the
privatization of knowledge: IP legislation is incredibly tightened, information
sharing becomes punishable, the market invades the public sphere of
universities and academic peer review and the scientific commons are being
severely damaged.
Again,
peer to peer appears as a radical shift. In the new emergent practices of
knowledge exchange, equipotency is assumed from the start. There are no formal
rules to engage in participation (unlike academic peer review, where formal
degrees are required). Validation is a communal intersubjective process. If
there are formal rules, they have to be accepted by the community, and they are
ad hoc for particular projects. There is a move away from public
categorization, such as the bibliographic formats (Dewey, UDC, etc..) to
informal communal 'tagging', what some people have termed folksonomies. In
blogging, news and commentary are democratized and open to any participant, and
it is the reputation of trustworthiness, acquired over time, by the individual
in question, which will lead to the viral diffusion of particular 'memes'.
Power and influence are determined by the quality of the contribution, and have
to be accepted and constantly renewed by the community of participants. All
this can be termed the de-formalization of knowledge.
A
second important aspect is de-institutionalization. In premodernity, knowledge
is transmitted through tradition, through initiation by experienced masters to
those who are validated to participate in the chain mostly through birth. In
modernity, as we said, validation and the legitimation of knowledge is
processed through institutions. It is assumed that the autonomous individual
needs socialization, 'disciplining', through such institutions. Knowledge has
to be mediated. Thus, whether a news item is trustworthy is determined largely
by its source, say the Wall Street Journal, or the Encyclopedia Brittanica, who
are supposed to have formal methodologies and expertise. How different it is in
the P2P arena, where there are no such mediating institutions. It is thoroughly
de-institutionalized, which represents another major shift in our
civilisational history.
A
good example of P2P principles at work can be found in the complex of solutions
instituted by the University of Openness. UO is a set of free-form
'universities', where anyone who wants to learn or to share his expertise can
form teams with the explicit purpose of collective learning. There are no entry
exams and no final exams. The constitution of teams is not determined by any
prior disciplinary categorization. The library of UO is distributed, i.e. all
participating individuals can contribute their own books to a collective
distributed library. The categorization of the books is explicitely
'anti-systemic', i.e. any individual can build his own personal ontologies of
information, and semantic web principles are set to work to uncover
similarities between the various categorizations.
All
this prefigures a profound shift in our epistemologies. In modernity, with the
subject-object dichotomy, the autonomous individual is supposed to gaze
objectively at the external world, and to use formalized methodologies, which
will be intersubjectively verified through academic peer review. Post-modernity
has caused strong doubts about this scenario. The individual is no longer
considered autonomous, but always-already part of various fields, of power, of
psychic forces, of social relations, molded by ideologies, etc.. Rather than in
need of socialization, the presumption of modernity, he is seen to be in need
of individuation. But he is no longer an 'indivisible atom', but rather a
singularity, a unique and ever-evolving composite. His gaze cannot be truly
objective, but is always partial, as part of a system can never comprehend the
system as a whole. The individual has a single set of perspectives on things
reflecting his own history and limitations. Truth can therefore only be
apprehended collectively by combining a multiplicity of other perspectives,
from other singularities, other unique points of integration, which are put in
'common'. It is this profound change in epistemologies which P2P-based
knowledge exchange reflects.
A third
important aspect of P2P is the process of de-commodification. In traditional
societes, commodification, and 'market pricing' was only a relative phenomenom.
Economic exchange depended on a set of mutual obligations, and even were
monetary equivalents were used, the price rarely reflected an open market. It
is only with industrial capitalism that the core of the economic exchanges
started to be determined by market pricing, and both products and labour became
commodities. But still, there was a public culture and education system, and
immaterial exchanges largely fell outside this system. With cognitive
capitalism, the owners of information assets are no longer content to live any
immaterial process outside the purview of commodification and market pricing,
and there is a strong drive to 'privatize everything', education included, our
love lives included Any immaterial process can be resold as commodities. Thus
again, in the recent era the characteristics of capitalism are exacerbated,
with P2P representing the counter-reaction. With 'commons-based peer
production' or P2P-based knowledge exchange more generally, the production does
not result in commodities sold to consumers, but in use value made for users.
Because of the GPL license, no copyrighted monopoly can arise. GPL products can
eventually be sold, but such sale is only a credible alternative (since it can
always be downloaded for free), if it is associated with a service model. It is
does in fact the services around it which are sold. Since the producers of
commons-based products are rarely paid, their main motivation is not the
exchange value for the eventually resulting commodity, but the increase in use
value, their own learning and reputation. Motivation can be polyvalent, but
will generally be anything but monetary.
There is a
profound misconception regarding peer to peer, expressed by the various authors
who call it a gift economy, such as Richard Barbrook, or Steven Webber. But, as
Stephan Merten of Oekonux.de has already argued, P2P production methods are not
a gift economy based on equal sharing, but a form of communal shareholding
based on participation. In a gift economy if you give something, the receiving
party has to return if not the gift, then something of at least comparable
value. In a participative system such as communal shareholding, organized
around a common resource, anyone can use or contribute according to his need
and inclinations.
Let me give a
context to this claim by introducing the typology of intersubjective relations,
as defined by anthropologist Alan Page Fiske. There are he says, historically
and across all cultures, only four basic types of relating to one another,
which form a grammar of human relationships, these are Authority Ranking,
Equality Matching, Market Pricing, and Communal Shareholding. From the
following description, one can deduce that P2P does not correspond to Equality Matching, which is the
principle behind a gift economy, but to Communal Shareholding.
"People use just four fundamental models for organizing
most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures . These models are
Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market Pricing.
Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or
group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in
question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to utilization
of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with respect to their
social selves), people who "ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls
for thee" (CS with respect to shared suffering and common well-being), or
people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation
for an attack (CS with respect to collective responsibility). In Authority
Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which
subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take
precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are
military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other matters),
ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of
protection and enforcement of norms), monotheistic religious moralities (AR for
the definition of right and wrong by commandments or will of God),
social status systems such as class or ethnic rankings (AR with respect to
social value of identities), and rankings such as sports team standings (AR
with respect to prestige). AR relationships are based on perceptions of
legitimate asymmetries, not coercive power; they are not inherently
exploitative (although they may involve power or cause harm).
In
Equality Matching relationships people keep track of the balance or difference
among participants and know what would be required to restore balance. Common
manifestations are turn-taking, one-person one-vote elections, equal share
distributions, and vengeance based on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth.
Examples include sports and games (EM with respect to the rules, procedures,
equipment and terrain), baby-sitting coops (EM with respect to the exchange of
child care), and restitution in-kind (EM with respect to righting a wrong).
Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or
rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses.
Money need not be the medium, and MP relationships need not be selfish,
competitive, maximizing, or materialistic’Äîany of the four models may exhibit
any of these features. MP relationships are not necessarily individualistic; a
family may be the CS or AR unit running a business that operates in an MP mode
with respect to other enterprises. Examples are property that can
be
bought, sold, or treated as investment capital (land or objects as MP),
marriages organized contractually or implicitly in terms of costs and benefits
to the partners, prostitution (sex as MP), bureaucratic cost-effectiveness
standards (resource allocation as MP), utilitarian judgments about the greatest
good for the greatest number, or standards of equity in judging entitlements in
proportion to contributions (two forms of morality as MP), considerations of
"spending time" efficiently, and estimates of expected kill ratios
(aggression as MP). " (source: Fiske website)
From
the above description, it should be clear that the tribal gift economy is a
form of sharing, based on 'equal' parts, according to a specific criteria of
'what it is that functions as common standard for comparison'. Thus in the
tribal economy, when a clan or tribe gives away its surplus, the recipient
group is forced to eventually give back, say the next year, at least as much,
or they will loose relative prestige. Similarly, in the feudal social
redistribution mechanism, the powerful compete in the gift giving to Church or
Sangha, as a matter of prestige. This is not at all how it functions in the
sphere of knowledge exchange on the internet. In open source production,
filesharing, or knowledge exchange communities, I freely contribute, what I
can, what I want, without obligation; on the recipient side, one simply takes
what one needs. It is common for any web-based project to have let's say 10%
active contributing members, and 90% passive lurkers. This can be an annoyance,
but is never a 'fundamental problem', for the very reason that P2P operates in
a sphere of abundance, where a tragedy of the commons, an abuse of common property,
cannot occur. In the concept of Tragedy of the Commons, communal holdings are
depleted and abused, because they belong to no one. But in the Information
Commons created through P2P processes, the value of the collective knowledge
base is not diminished by use, but on the contrary enhanced by it. This is so
because of the network effect, which makes resources more valuable the more
they are used. Think about the example of the fax, which was relatively useless
until a critical mass of users was reached.
What
the better P2P systems do however, is to make participation 'automatic', so
that even passive use becomes useful participation for the system as a whole.
Think of how BitTorrent makes any user who downloads a resource, in his/her
turn a resource for others to use, unbeknownst and independent of any conscious
action of the user. Say I have a team working on a software project, and it
creates a special email system to communicate around development issues. This
communication is considered a common resource and archived, and thus, without
any conscious effort of the participating members, automatically augments the
common resource base. One of the key elements in the success of P2P projects,
and the key to overcoming any 'free rider' problem, is therefore to develop
technologies of
"Participation Capture".
The
social logic of information and resource sharing is a cultural reversal vis a
vis the information retention logic of hierarchical social systems.
Participation is assumed, and non-participation has to be justified.
Information sharing, the public good status of your information, is assumed,
and it is secrecy which has to be justified.
So
what people are doing in P2P systems, is participating, and doing so they are
creating a 'commons'. Unlike traditional Communal Shareholding, which starts
from already existing physical resources, in peer to peer, the knowledge
commons is created through participation, and does not exist 'ex ante'.
One
more clarification, some American authors, especially libertarians such as Eric
Raymond, but also 'common-ists' such as Lawrence Lessig, say that P2P processes
are market-based, but this is misleading, although in the American context, it
is a clever use of memetic warfare.
A
market is based on the exchange of scarce goods, through a monetary mechanism.
This is not the case for P2P
products, which can be downloaded for free. They are not made for the profit
obtained from the exchange value, but for their use value and acceptance by a
user community. So what Lessig means by with his notion of a market-based
solution is simply to say that users are free to use them or not.
Eric
Raymond has written a book, the 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' which compares
different methodologies to produce software. Corporate software production
methods are called 'the Cathedral', i.e. a big planned and bureaucratic
project, while open source is coined a 'bazaar', a free process of cooperation
involving many participants, but the concept also implies connotations with the
free market idea. But in fact, the internet and many open source projects own
their existence to the public sector, which financed internet research and the
salaries of participating scientists. And the so-called 'bazaar' does in fact
not make any money! Moreover, in actual practice, the building of Cathedrals
were massive collective projects, initiated by the Church but drawing on
popular fervor, a competition in gift giving, and lots of volunteer labor!!!
When we define P2P processes as a form of Communal Shareholding, the process is
a lot less confused. What people are doing is voluntarily and cooperatively
constructing a commons, according to the 'communist principle' (described by
Marx in his definition of the last phase of history): from each according to
his abilities, to each according to his needs'.
Since
the famous opinion storm generated by Bill Gates charge that copyright
reformers were 'communists', it is important to stress specifically what we are
talking about when we use the concept of communism as related to P2P. Let's
therefore not confuse the utopian definition of Marx, with the actual practices
of the Soviet Union, which were centralized, authoritarian and totalitarian,
one of the more pernicious forms of social domination. Using Fiske's grammar of
relationships, we could say that the Soviet system or 'really existing
socialism', consisted of the following combination: 1) property belonged to the
state, but was in fact controlled by an elite social fraction, the
nomenclatura, and did not function as common property; 2) the economic
practices were a combined form of equality matching and market pricing, though
the monetary prices were most frequently determined not by an open market, but
by political and planning authorities; 3) there was no free participation but
obligatory hierarchical
cooperation; 4) socially, there was a very strong element of authoritary
ranking, with one's status largely determined by one's function in the
nomenclatura. The reason of course is that these systems arose in a context of
social and material scarcity and deprivation, inevitable given rise to a
process of monopolization of power for the control of scarce resources.
In
contrast, Marx's definition was predicated on abundance in the material world.
If P2P emerges according to this very definition, it is because of a sufficient
material base, which allows the types of volunteer labor P2P thrives on, as
well as the abundance inherent in the informational sphere.
But
since peer to peer is not a ideology nor utopian project, but an actual social
practice which responds to true social needs, it can be practiced by anyone,
despite one's formal personal philosophy and ideological blinders. Thus the
paradox is that American libertarians call it a market, while the European
digital left calls it a 'really existing anarcho-communist practice' (Andre
Gorz), though they are speaking of the same process. I actually find Lawrence
Lessig's tongue-in-cheek suggestion (in reply to the red-baiting Cnet interview
which led to an opinion storm about Bill Gates equating copyright reforms with
communists), to call the P2P movement's advocates 'Common-ists', not a bad
concept at all.
The
above argumentation that P2P is not a Equality Matching model, but Communal
Shareholding, has an ideological subtext. The reason I am stressing this
analysis is to counter neoliberal dogma that humans are only motivated by
greed. Saying that P2P is a gift economy requires a strict accounting of the
exchange. Or saying that such participation is motivated by the quest for
reputation only, or that it is a game to obtain attention, correspond to this
same ideology which cannot accept that humans also have a 'cooperative' nature,
and that it can thrive in the right conditions.
The
above does not mean that P2P is unrelated to the contemporary revival of gift
economy applications. Local Exchange Trading Systems, which are springing up in
many places, are forms of Equality Matching, and they may be preferable to
Market Pricing mechanisms, since for them, any hour of labour has an equal
value. Both P2P as 'Communal Shareholding', and contemporary expressions of the
gift economy ethos, are part of the same 'spirit' of 'gifting'. Substantial
numbers of participants to P2P projects freely give, as do participants in LETS
systems and other schemes. The difference is in the expectation that they will
receive something specific and of equal value in return.
I
would feel it likely that in a future civilisational model, both models are
complementary. P2P will function most easily where there is a sphere of
abundance, while gift economy models may bean alternative model to manage
scarcity.
We
already mentioned the analysis of both the school of 'cognitive capitalism' and
the theories of McKenzie Wark. They are part of a larger debate on the nature
of the new regime of economic exchange.
According
to the school of cognitive capitalism, capitalism needs to be historicized.
This because the main logic of economic exchange is different. In a first
phase, we have an agrarian- or merchant-based capitalism. Land is turned into
capital, and commerce, especially on the basis of the triangular trade
involving slavery, is the basis for producing a surplus. Non-machine assets are
the key to producing the surplus, i.e. land and people. At some point,
industrial capitalism arises based on capital assets in industry. The
capitalists are the owners of the factories, machinery, and forges. But as
these assets are abstracted into stocks, they start having their own life, both
financial and informational, and industry processes are transformed into
processes based on the flows of finance and information. So, according to the
cognitive capitalism hypothesis, we have a third stage, cognitive capitalism,
based on the predominance of immaterial flows, which in turn reconfigure
industrial and agriculture modes of production to its own image. But according
to the main CC theorists, such as Yann-Moulier Boutang, M. Lazzarato, C. Vercellone
and others, it is a change <within> capitalism. CC theorists argue both
against neoclassical economists, which fail to historize capitalism, and
against postcapitalism information age interpretations, which declare
capitalism dead. In fact, if
anything, there is a move to a postmodern form of hypercapitalism, of which
neoliberal ideology is a symptom.
If
modernity (aka industrial capitalism) still has to compromise with a strong
legacy of traditional elements, which muted its virulence (what possible use
could the learning of Latin and the classics have for business!), in
postmodernity, the instrumental logic reigns supreme. The interest, and in my
opinion the strength of the CC hypothesis is that it can account for both
radical change (the dominance of the immaterial) and for continuity (the
capitalist mode), and can then start looking at the different changes taking
place, such as new modes of regulation, social control, etc.. In such a
scenario, the working class is also transformed, becoming involved in knowledge production, affect-based
services, and other 'immaterial forms'. But the knowledge workers clearly
become the key sector of the multitudes.
McKenzie
Wark, adds a twist, since he insists a new class is now in power. Unlike
capitalists, who based their control on capital assets, a vectoral class has
arisen that owes it power to the control of stocks, information (which it owns
through patents and copyrights) and the control of the vectors through which
the information must flow. Thus, they own not only the media which manipulate
our mindsets, but also achieve dominance over industrial capitalists, because
they own and trade the stocks based on information, and the latter need the
information flows and vectors to run the process flows. It is now no longer a
matter of making profits through material industry production, but of making
margins in the trading of stocks, and of the development of new monopolistic
rents based on the ownership of information.
And
the mirror image of the vector class is the hacker class, those that 'produce
difference' (unlike the workers which produced standard products, and yearned
to achieve unity), i.e. new value expressed through innovation. A crucial
distinction between the more general concept of knowledge workers, and the more
specific class concept of the hacker class, is that the latter produce new
means of production, i.e. hardware, software, wetware, and they are
correspondingly stronger than farmers or workers could ever have been.
Therefore, what McKenzie Wark explains perhaps more cogently and starkly that
CC-theorists is the new nature of the class struggle, centered around the
ownership of information, and the ownership of the vectors. Thus the key issue
is the property form, responsible for creating the scarcity that sustains a
marketplace. Another advantage is the clear distinction between the hacker
class, which produces use value, and the vectoral value, i.e. the
entrepreneurs, who transform it into exchange value. The predominance of
financial capital is explained by the ownership of stocks, which replaces
ownership of capital, a less abstract form, and unlike industrial capitalists,
who were happy to leave a common
and socialized culture, education, and science to the state, vectoral
capitalists differ in that they want to turn everything into a commodity. The
latter is a cogent explanation of the logic behind neoliberal
'hyperca;italism'.
Much
less satisfactory is the netocratic thesis of Alexander Bard in his book
Netocracy. He also insists of the postcapitalist nature of the new
configuration, but the new class is described as 'in control' of networked
information, and as operating in a
hierarchy of networks. Here, we get no idea of a distinction between knowledge
workers and information entrepreneurs. Similarly in Pekka Himanen's very useful
Hacker Ethic, though we get a very interesting insight into the new culture of
work, no distinction is made between knowledge workers and entrepreneurs,
between the hacker class and the vectoral class.
The
alterglobalisation movement is a well-known example of the P2P ethos at work in
the political field. The movement sees itself as a network of networks that
combines players from a wide variety of fields and opinions, who, despite the
fact that they do no see eye to eye on every aspect, manage to unite around a
common platform of action around certain key events. They are able to mobilize
vast numbers of people from every continent, without having at their disposal
any of the traditional newsmedia, such as televisions, radios or newspapers.
Rather, they rely almost exclusively on the P2P technologies described above.
Thus internet media are used for communication and learning on a continuous
basis, prior to the mobilizations, but also during the mobilizations, where
independent internet media platforms such as Indymedia, as well as the skillful
use of mobile phones are used for real-time response management, undertaken by
small groups that use buddy-list technologies, sometimes open source programs
that have been explicitly designed for political activism such as TextMob. The
network model allows for a more fluid organization that does not fix any group
in permanent adversarial positions, but various temporary coalitions are
created on a ad hoc basis depending on the issues. A key underlying philosophy
of the movement is the paradigm of non-representationality. In classic modern
political ideology, participating members elect representatives, and delegate
their authority to them. Decisions taken by councils of such representatives
then can take binding decisions, and are allowed to speak 'for the movement'.
But such a feature is totally absent from the alterglobalisation movement. No
one, not even the celebrities, can speak for anyone else, though they can speak
in their own name. Another distinguishing feature, is that we can no longer
speak of 'permanent organizations'. While unions, political movements, and
international environmental and human rights NGO's do participate, and have an
important role, the movement innovates by mobilizing many unaffiliated
individuals, as well as all kinds of temporary ad hoc groups created within or
without the internet. Thus we can add to the de-formalization and
de-institutionalization principles explained above, another one that we could
call the process of de-organization, as long as we are clear on its meaning,
which refers to the transcendence of 'fixed' organizational formats which
allows power to consolidate.
A
commonly heard criticism is that 'they have no alternative', but this in fact
reflects their new approach to politics. The main demand is not for specifics,
though that can occasionally be part of a consensus platform (such as
'abandoning the debt for developing countries'), more importantly is the
underlying philosophy, that 'another world is possible', but that what is most
important is not asking for specific alternative, but rather for an open
process of world governance that is not governed by the power politics and
private interests of the elite, but determined by all the people in an
autonomous fashion that recognized the wide diversity of desired futures.
An
important aspect of the alterglobalisation movement is the above-mentioned
reliance on alternative independent internet media. Despite the overriding
influence of corporate-owned mass media, groups such as the alterglobalisation
movement have succeeded in created a vast number of alternative news outlets,
in written, audio, and audiovisual formats. Those are used for a permanent
process of learning and exchange, outside of the sphere of the 'manufacturing
of consent' (as described by Noam Chomsky).
Since
the mid-eighties, observers have noticed that social struggles have taken a new
format as well, that of the coordination. In France for example, all the
important struggles of the recent decade, by nurses, by the educational
workers, and most recently by the part-time art workers, have been led by such coordinations.
Again, such coordinations are a radical innovation. They are also based on the
principle of non-representationality: no one is elected to represent anybody
else, anyone can participate, their decisions are based on consensus, while
participants retain every freedom in their actions. Note how the coordination
thus differs from the earlier hyperdemocratic form of worker's councils, which
were still based on the idea of representation.
The
latest struggle of the artistic 'intermittents' was particularly significative.
These are creative knowledge workers who move from artistic project to artistic
project, and who are therefore, unlike earlier industrial workers, not in
permanent contact with each others. Yet their 'network sociality', which means
they keep in touch with a variety of subgroups of friends and associates to
keep informed of opportunities and for permanent collective learning and
exchange, meant that, when confronted with a reform they found intolerable,
they were able to mount one of the most effective mass social movements in a
very short time, through the use of viral diffusion techniques. Traditional
power plays by established left political parties and unions are not tolerated
in the coordinations, when they happen, people simply leave and set up shop
elsewhere. Thus authoritarian political organizations are seriously restrained
by this format.
The
change in political practices has been reflected by new thinking in the field
of political theory. Among the thinkers that come to mind are Toni Negri and
Michael Hardt, with their books Empire and Multitude, Miguel Benasayag with his
book "Le Contre-Pouvoir", and John Holloway with 'Revolution Without
Power'.
Negri/Hardt
have introduced the concept of Multitude. Unlike the earlier concept of People
or proletariat, multitudes do not have a synthetic unity. They exist in their
differences. What is rejected is abstract human identity in favor of the
organization for common goals of concrete humanity in its differences. The
principle of non-representationality is reflected in their concept of
transcendence. Modernity, while rejecting divine power, thought that the
anarchic multitudes (Hobbes), should unify in a People, which then allowed its
power to be exercised by the national sovereign. This transcendence of power is
totally rejected in favor of 'absolute democracy', i.e. the immanent life and
desires of the multitudes. Unlike the concept of People, which unifies but also
rejects the non-People, the multitude is totally open and global from the
outset. In terms of political strategy, they develop concepts like 'Exodus',
which means no longer facing the enemy directly (in a network configuration of
social movements, there is no direct enemy and in Empire 'there is no there
there', i.e. the enemy cannot be precisely located as it is a network itself),
but to route around obstacles and more importantly to refuse to give consent
and legitimation by constructing alternatives in real-time, through networks.
It is only when the multitudes are under direct attack, through reforms that
are experienced as 'intolerable', that the network is galvanized into struggle,
and that the very format of organizing prefigures already the society to come.
Essential
components of the multitude are the knowledge workers, affective 'service'
workers, and other forms of
immaterial labor. Miguel Benasayag similarly argues that 'to resist is to
create', and that political struggle is essentially about the construction of
alternatives, here and now. Current practice has to reflect the desired future,
and has to emerge, not from the 'sad passions' of hate and anger, but from the
joys of producing a commons. The Hacker Manifesto is another important
expression of this new ethos.
Though
none of these authors explicitly use the peer to peer concept, their own
concepts reflect its philosophy and practice, and they are generally in tune
with the themes of the peer to peer advocates (such as favoring an information
commons, support for free software and open source methodologies, etc’Ķ).
Next
to new forms of political organization, new conceptions regarding the tactics
and strategies of struggle, the emergence of peer to peer also generates new
conflicts, which are different from those of the industrial age.
In
my opinion, the key conflict is about the freedom to construct the Information
Commons, vs. the private appropriation of knowledge by for-profit firms, which
is not to say that an accommodation cannot eventually be found. In filesharing,
it is now possible to share digital music and video. A process that always
existed amongst groups of friends, is now extended in scope by technology. This
endangers the intellectual property system. But the P2P system of music
distribution is inherently more productive and versatile, and more pleasing to
the listener of music than the older system of physically distributing CD's.
But instead of building a common pool for the world's music, and finding an
adequate funding mechanism for the artists, the industry is intent to destroy
this more productive system, and wants to criminalize sharing by punishing the
users, and even by attempting to render the technology illegal. Another
strategy is to incorporate control mechanisms either in software (where it can
be hacked and circumvented), or in the hardware (digital rights management
schemes).
Another
example is biopiracy. The age-old experience and knowledge of tribal groups
concerning the herbal and healing properties is studied by pharmaceutical
multinationals, who then patent the findings and expropriate the native
peoples.
The
problem for capitalism is that it has always been dependent on the private
appropriation of common resources, as indicated for example by the Enclosures
movement (the privatization of common land) that generated the first 'primitive accumulation' of
capital. In a situation where the extensive growth period typical of
imperialism has to be replaced by intensive growth on existing territories, the
immaterial field of knowledge exchange and digital creativity is very
important. As Mackenzie Wark eloquenty argues: the key to extracting a surplus
is to convert information to a commodity. Hence a drive to strengthen the
Intellectual Property system, to extend copyrights in time, but also in scope,
inventing new areas of application such as software and university-based
research. While such a policy can stimulate specific areas through the profit
motive, it is also responsible for a structural decay of the scientific
commons, that used to be based on the free sharing of scientific findings, and
academic peer review. With software and even ideas being patented, there are
more and more impediments to the free flow of scientific exchange, and it has
become a strain on innovation. The strategy is that since knowledge products
can be reproduced and distributed at marginal cost, IP protection can create
temporary, but extendable monopolies, thereby creating monopolistic rents in
the forms of licenses to use. The whole strategy and reason for growth of a
company like Microsoft is based on that idea. At the same time, the industry as
a whole has an interest in open standards that can be improved upon, seen as a
necessary infrastructure for growth and innovation. Hence, the support given by
certain sectors of industry for Open Sources and the use of Linux. We see, at
the same time, scientists advocating a renewal of the scientific commons, for
example in the biotechnology industry. In Europe, a struggle is going on to
impeach the advent of software patents, while South Asia and Latin America are
concerned about biopiracy.
Also
the forces arrayed start from diametrically opposed paradigms. For the
entertainment industry, IP is essential to promote creativity, even though the
current system is a 'winner-take-all' system that serves only a minority of
artists. For them, without IP protection, there would be no creativity. But as
P2P processes demonstrate, which are extraordinarily innovative outside the
profit system, creativity is what people do when they can freely cooperate and
share, and hence IP is seen as an impediment, impeding the free use what should
be a common resource. Between the more radical positions on either side, it is
likely that compromise (reform) positions can be found, but in the meantime, in
true P2P fashion, the forces using peer to peer are devising their own
solutions. It started with a legal infrastructure for the free software
movement, the General Public License, which prohibits the commercial
exploitation of such software. It continued with the very important Creative
Commons initiative initiated by Lawrence Lessig, who also supported the
creation of a Free Culture advocacy movement.
Another
important line of conflict concerns the nature of the protocols incorporated in
the digital systems that can be used for P2P. We will discuss this later, when
we examine the evolution of power.
According
to the Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, the deeper reason and underlying
common logic between these different struggles is the struggle for control of
both information (as intellectual property) and the vectors of information
(needed for distribution), between those that produce information, knowledge
and innovation (the hacker class, knowledge workers), and the groups that own
the vectors (the vector class).
How
to explain the emergence of such P2P networks in the political field?
It
reflects new cultural values, the desire that authority grows from engagement
and expertise, and that it is temporary to the task at hand. It reflects the
refusal to give away autonomy, i.e. the rejection of the transcendence of power
as defined by Toni Negri. It reflects the desire for self-unfolding of creative
potential.
Networks
are incredibly efficient: they can operate globally in real-time, react and
mobilize around events in the very short term, and offers access to alternative
civic information that has not been massaged by corporate-owned mega-media. In
a political network configuration, the participating individual retains his
full autonomy.
Politically,
P2P processes reflect a de-monopolization of power. Power, in the form of
reputation that generates influence, is given by the community, is time-bound
to the participation of the individual (when he no longer participates,
influence declines again), and can thus be taken back by the participating
individuals. In the case where monopolization should occur, participants simply
leave or create a 'forking' of the project, a new path is formed to avoid the
power grab.
There
is an important counter-trend however, and it concerns the scarcity of
attention. Because our time and attention are indeed scarce in a context of
information abundance, mediating portals are created, who collate and digest
this mass of information. Think about Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay who exemplify
the process of monopolization in the 'attention economy'. But the user
community is not without power to affect these processes: collective reaction
through opinion storms are activated by abusive monopolistic behavior, and can
quickly damage the reputation of the perpetrator, thereby forcing a change in
behavior in the monopolistic ambitions. Competing resources are almost always
available, or can be built by the open source community. But more
fundamentally, the blogosphere practice shows that it is possible to route
around such problems, by creating mediating processes using the community as a
whole. Thus techniques such as folksonomies, i.e. communal tagging, or
reputation ranking, such as the 'Karma' points used by the Slashdot community,
avoid the emergence of autonomous mediating agents. The blogosphere itself, in
the form of the Technorati ranking system for example, has found ways to calculate
the interlinking done by countless individuals, thereby enabling itself to
filter out the most used contributions. Again, monopolization is excluded. What
is the mechanism behind this?
For
this we have to turn again to the concept of non-representationality, or what
Negri calls immanence. In modernity, the concept is that autonomous individuals
cannot create a peaceful order, and therefore they defer their power to a
sovereign, whether it be the king of the nation. In becoming a people, they
become a 'collective individual'. They loose out as individuals, while the
unified people or nation behaves 'as if' it was an individual, i.e. with
ambition for power. It is 'transcendent' vis a vis its parts. In
non-representationality however, nothing of the sort is given away. This means
that the collective hereby created, is not a 'collective individual', it cannot
act with ambition apart from its members. The genius of the protocols devised
in peer to peer initiatives, is that they avoid the creation of a collective
individual with agency. Instead, it is the communion of the collective which
filters value. The ethical implication is important as well. Not having given
anything up of their full power, the participants in fact voluntarily take up
the concern not only for the whole in terms of the project, but for the social
field in which its operates.
Anticipating
our 'evolutionary' remarks in section 4.3, we can see the above examples as
illustrating the new form of protocollary power, which is becoming all-important
in a network. The very manner in which we devise our social technologies,
implies possible and likely social relationships. The protocols of the
blogosphere enable the economy of
attention to operate, not through individual actors that can become monopolistic,
but by protocols that enable communal filtering. But when used by private firms
such as Yahoo and Google, they may have a vested interest in skewing the
protocol and the objectivity of the algorhythms used. In the blogosphere,
protocols are also important since they imply a vision: should everyone be able
to judge, and in that case, would that not lead to a lowest common denominator,
or should equipotency be defined in such a way that a certain level of
expertise is required, to allow higher quality entries to be filtered upwards?
How
do P2P processes integrate 'values' and 'social relation'-typologies such as
equality, hierarchy, and freedom?
Cornelis
Castoriadis gives an interpretation of Aristoteles on this issue: equality is
actually present in all types of society, but it is always 'according to a
criteria'. (this is so because a society is implicitly a form of exchange, and
thus in need of comparative standards for such exchange). It is over the criteria of exchange
that social and political forces are fighting. Is power to be distributed
according to the merit accorded to birth, according to military exploits,
according to commercial savvy shown in economic life, to intelligence?
In
the modern sense, equality is defined mostly as an equal right to participation
in the political process, and as an 'equality of opportunity', based on merit,
in the economic sphere.
Similarly,
hierarchy was based in premodern societies based on 'authority ranking' which
depended on fixed social roles, and on the competition within these narrowly
defined spheres (warriors competing amongst themselves, Brahmins competing
through their knowledge of sacred scripture). The command and control hierarchy
is fixed amongst the levels, somewhat flexible within the levels. In modern
society, theoretically, hierarchy in power is derived from electoral choice in
case of political power, through economic success in case of economic power. In
theory, it is extremely flexible, based on 'merit', but in practice various
processes of monopolization prohibit the full flowering of such meritocracy.
World-systems
theorist Immanuel Walllerstein defines three important political traditions
according to their position regarding equality/hierarchy. Conservatives want to
conserve existing hierarchical relations, as they were at a certain point in
time; liberals are in favor of a selective meritocracy and stress the
formalized and institutionalized selection criteria; democrats are in favor of
maximum inclusion, without formal testing. Thus, in the early modern system,
conservatives were against elections, liberals were for selective census-based
elections, democrats for general suffrage.
How
does peer to peer fit in this scheme? P2P is a democratic process of full
inclusion based on the idea of equipotency. It believes that expertise cannot
be located beforehand, and thus general and open participation is the rule. But
selection immediately sets in as well, since the equipotency is immediately
verified by the work on the project. Thus there is a selection before the
project, and a hierarchy of networks is created, where everyone finds his place
according to demonstrated potential. Within the project, a hierarchy is also
immediately created depending on expertise, engagement, and the capacity to
generate trust. But in both cases the hierarchies are fluid, not fixed, and
always depend on concrete context, the precise task at hand. It's the model of
the improvising jazz band, where everyone can in turn be the solo-ist or the
trendsetter. Reputation is generated, but constantly on the move. Peer to peer
is not anti-hierarchy or even anti-authority, but it is against fixed
hierarchies and 'authoritarianism', the latter defined as the tendency to
monopolize power, with a will to perpetuate itself and deprive others of
resources that it wants for itself. P2P is for equality of participation, for a
natural and flexible hierarchy based on real merit and communal consensus. That
P2P recognizes differences in potential, and thus natural hierarchy, does not
preclude it from treating participating partners as equal persons. In fact
research from within the synergistic tradition, which studies the
practicalities of cooperation, has verified a remarkable fact. In free and synergistic
cooperation, those groups function best, which treats its members 'as if' they
were equals. Therefore, the recognized hierarchy in reputation, talent,
engagement, etc.. does not preclude, but if requires an egalitarian environment
to blossom.
Some
authors, like David Ronfeldt and John Arquila of the Rand Corporation, claim we
are moving to a 'cyberocracy', where power is determined by the access to the
networks. While there is indeed a digital divide that can exclude
participation, it is important to stress the flexibility inherent in P2P
networks, which undermines the idea of 'fixed and monopolistic cyberocracies'.
Another author, Alexander Bard in Netocracy, argues that capitalism is already
dead, and that we are already rules by a hierarchy of knowledge-based networks.
At this stage, these are not very convincing arguments, but there is one
scenario in which they can become possible. It has been described by Jeremy
Rifkin in 'The Age of Access'. But this scenario of 'information feudalism' is
predicated on the destruction of P2P networks. Cognitive capitalism in indeed
in the process of trying to increase its monopolistic rents on patented digital
materials, a strategy which is undermined by the filesharing and information
sharing on the P2P networks. If the industry succeeds in its civil war against
its consumers, by integrating Digital Rights Management hardware in our very
computers, and outlaws sharing through legal attacks and imprisonment, then
such a scenario is possible. At that time we would have only private networks
for which a license has to be paid, with heavily restrictive usage rules, and
no ownership what so ever for the consumer. This is indeed a scenario of
exclusion for all those who will not be able to afford access to the networks.
But we are far from that situation still, and personally, I do not think it is
a likely scenario.
At
this moment, P2P is 'winning' because its solutions are inherently more
productive and democratic, and it is hard to see any social force, be it the
large corporations, permanently sabotaging the very technological developments
that it needs to survive. More likely, barring a scenario of a collapse of
civilization and a return to barbarity, it is more likely to see a social
system evolve that incorporates this new level of complexity and participation.
One
element I have yet to mention is the freedom aspect, which seems obvious. P2P
is predicated on the maximum freedom. The freedom to join and participate, to
fully express oneself and one's potential, the freedom to change course at any
point in time, the freedom to quit. Within the common projects, freedom is
constrained through communal validation and consensus (i.e. the freedom of
others). But individuals can always leave, fork to a new project, create their
own. The challenge is to find affinities, to create a common sphere with at
least a few others and to create effective use value. Unlike in representative
democracy, it is not a model based on a majority imposing its will on a
minority.
Despite
the fact that Peer to Peer reverses a number of value hierarchies introduced by
the Enlightenment, in particular the epistemologies and ontologies of
modernity, it is a continuation and partial realization of the emancipatory
project. It is in the definition of Wallerstein, an eminently democratic
project. Peer to peer partly reflects postmodernity, and partly transcends it.
Japanese
scholar Shumpei Kumon has given the following evolutionary account of power. In
premodernity, he says, power is derived from military force. The strong conquer
the weak and exact tribute, part of the produce of the land, labor (the corvee
system). Rome was rich because it was strong. In modernity, military force
eventually looses its primary place and monetary power takes over. Or in other
words, the U.S. is strong because it is rich. It is commercial and financial
power, which is the main criterion. In late modernity, a new form of power is
born, through the power of the mass media. The U.S. lost the war, not because
the Vietnamese were stronger militarily, or had more financial clout, but
because the U.S. lost the war for the hearts and minds, and lost social support
for the war effort. With the emergence of the internet and peer to peer
processes, yet a new form of power emerges, and Kumon calls it the Wisdom Game.
In order to have influence, one must give quality knowledge away, and thus
build reputation, through the demonstration of one's 'Wisdom'. The more one
shares, the more this material is used by others, the higher one's reputation,
the bigger one's influence. This process is true for individuals within groups,
and for the process among groups, thus creating a hierarchy of influence
amongst networks. But as I have argued, in a true P2P environment, this process
is flexible and permanently reversible.
According
to the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, premodern systems are
characterized by the motto 'make die or let live': the sovereign has the power
of life and death, but does not greatly interfere in the life of his subjects,
which is ruled by custom and the divine precepts of the spiritual power. In
modernity, Foucault sees two new forms of power arising: disciplinary power and
biopower. Disciplinary power starts from the point of view that society
consists of autonomous individuals, which are in need of socialization and
'discipline', so that they can be integrated in the normative framework of
capitalist society. Biopower is the start of the total management of life, from
birth to death, of the great mass of the people. The new motto is 'make live,
let die'.
His
contemporary Gilles Deleuze noted a change though. In mass-media dominated
postmodern society, which became dominant after 1968, disciplinary institutions
enter in crisis. What is used is the internalization of social requirements
through the use of the mass media, advertising and PR, with control mechanisms
in place, which focus on making sure the right results are attained. But the
individual is now himself in charge of making it happen.
The
P2P era adds a new twist, a new form of power, which we have called
Protocollary Power. We have already given some examples. One is the fact that
the blogosphere has devised mechanisms to avoid the emergence of individual and
collective monopolies, through rules that are incorporated in the software
itself. Another was whether the entertainment industry would succeed in
incorporating software or hardware-based restrictions to enforce their version
of copyright. There are many other similarly important evolutions to monitor:
Will the internet remain a point to point structure? Will the web evolve to a
true P2P medium through Writeable Web developments? The common point is this:
social values are incorporated, integrated in the very architecture of our
technical systems, either in the software code or the hardwired machinery, and
these then enable/allow or prohibit/discourage certain usages, thereby becoming
a determinant factor in the type of social relations that are possible. Are the
algorhythms that determine search results objective, or manipulated for
commercial and ideological reasons? Is parental control software driven by
censorship rules that serve a fundamentalist agenda? Many issues are dependent
on hidden protocols, which the user community has to learn to see, so that it
can become an object of conscious development, favoring peer to peer processes,
rather than the restrictive and manipulative command and control systems.
|
|
Nature of
Power |
Control
Method |
Monopoly |
Power
Game |
|
Premodern |
Military & Religious |
Force & Custom |
Land & People |
Force Game |
|
Early
Modern |
Commercial
& Industrial |
Disciplinary
& Biopower |
Industrial
& Financial
Capital |
Money Game |
|
Late
Modern |
Financial &
Mediatic |
Control Society
& Manufactured Consent |
Financial & Media |
Money & Celebrity Game |
|
P2P
Era |
P2P Media |
Protocollary
& Memetic Opinion
Storms |
Reputation-based
De-monopolization vs. Attention Monopolies |
Wisdom Game |
Note
the difference in the above section title. Here we are not speaking of
emergence, but rather the recognition or discovery of principles within the
natural world, which obey P2P principles. They were always-already there, but
we have only recently learned to see them. Technology reflects, to a certain
extent, humanity's growing knowledge of the natural world. Technological
artifacts and processes integrate and embed in their protocols, this growing
knowledge. And lately, we have learned to see the natural (physical,
biological, cognitive) world quite differently. The fact that engineers,
software architects, and social network managers are devising and implementing
more and more P2P systems also reflects this new understanding. Studies of
distributed intelligence in physical systems, of the swarming behavior of
social insects, of the 'wisdom of
crowds' and collective intelligence in the human field, show that in many
situations participative distributed system functions more efficiently than
command and control systems which create bottlenecks. In natural systems, true
centralized and hierarchic command and control systems seem rather rare.
Though
there can be said to exist hierarchies in nature, such as a succession of
progressively more enfolding systems, actual command and control systems are
actually quite rare. More common is the existing of multiple agents, which
through their interaction, create emergent coherent orders and behavior. The
brain for example, has been shown to be connectionist, and there is no evidence
of a command center. And there are of course multiple scientific fields where
this is now shown to be the case. Network theory is therefore focused on the
interrelationships of equipotent, and distributed agents, and how complex
systems arise from them. Historians are starting to look at the world in terms
of flows, social science are increasingly looking at their objects of study in
terms of social network analysis.
An
area that I have still have to investigate, for incorporation in later versions
of this essay, is to what extent network theorists are effectively paying
attention to the specific type of network represented by P2P systems. Is there
a specific P2P 'network logic', different from other types of networks? In my
own essay, by comparing the emergence of P2P across social fields, and defining
a number of general principles, I am of course suggesting that it is
effectively so, but my conclusions are born from observations as a
prospectivist, not from a direct inquiry into the logic itself.
I
am here tackling the remainder of the two quadrants relating to
intersubjectivity and subjectivity, considered in their basic linkage: the
individual vs. the collective.
One
of the key insights of psychologist Clare Graves' interpretation of human
cultural evolution, is the idea of the changing balance, over time, between the
two poles of the individual and the collective. In the popularization of his
research by the Spiral Dynamics systems, they see the tribal era as
characterized by collective harmony, but also as a culture of stagnation. Out
of this harmony, strong individuals are born, heroes and conquerors, which will
their people and others into the creation of larger entities. These leaders are
considered divinities themselves and thus in certain senses are 'beyond the
law', which they have themselves constituted through their conquest. It is
against this 'divine individualism' that a religious reaction is born, very
evident in the monotheistic religions, that stresses the existence of a
transcendent divine order (rather than the immanent order of paganism), to which
even the sovereign must obey. Thus a more communal/collective order is created.
But again, this situation is overturned when a new individual ethos is created,
which will be reflected in the growth of capitalism. It is based on
individuals, and collective individuals, which think strategically in terms of
their own interest. In the words of anthropologist Louis Dumont, we moved from
a situation of wholism, in which the empirical individuals saw themselves
foremost as part of a whole, towards individualism as an ideology, positing
atomistic individuals, in need of socialization. They transferred their powers
to collective individuals, such as the king, the people, the nation, which
could act in their name, and created a sacrificial unity through the institutions
of modernity.
This
articulation, based on a autonomous self in a society which he himself creates
through the social contract, has been changing in postmodernity. The individual
is now seen as always-already part of various social fields, as a singular
composite being, no longer in need of socialization, but rather in need of
individuation. Atomistic individualism is rejected.
Thus
the balance is again moving towards the collective. But the new forms of
collective are not individualist in nature, meaning: they are not collective
individuals, rather, the new collective expresses itself in the creation of the
common. The collective is no longer the local 'wholistic' and 'oppressive'
community, and it is no longer the contractually based society with its
institutions, now also seen as oppressive. The new commons is not a unified and
transcendent collective individual, but a collection of large number of
singular projects, constituting a multitude.
This
whole change in ontology and epistemology, in ways of feeling and being, in
ways of knowing and apprehending the world, has been prefigured amongst social
scientists and philosophers.
An
important change has been the overthrow of the Cartesian subject-object split.
No longer is the 'individual self' looking at the world as an object. Since
postmodernity has established that the individual is composed and traversed by
numerous social fields (of power, of the unconscious, class relations, gender,
etc’Ķ , and since he/she has become aware of this, the subject is now seen
(after his death as an 'essence' and a historical construct had been announced
by Foucault), as a perpetual process of becoming ("subjectivation").
His knowing is now subjective-objective and truth-building has been transformed
from objective and mono-perspectival to multiperspectival. This individual
operates not in a dead space of objects, but in a network of flows. Space is
dynamical, perpetually co-created by the actions of the individuals and in peer
to peer processes, where the digital noosphere is an extraordinary medium for
generating signals emanating from this dynamical space, the individuals in peer
groups, which are thus not 'transcendent' collective individuals, are in a
constant adaptive behavior. Thus peer to peer is global from the start, it is
incorporated in its practice. It is an expression not of globalization, the
worldwide system of domination, but of globality, the growing interconnected of
human relationships.
Peer
to peer is to be regarded as a new form of social exchange, creating its
equivalent form of subjectivation, and itself reflecting the new forms of
subjectivation. P2P, interpreted here as a positive and normative ethos that is
implicit in the logic of its practice, though it rejects the ideology of
individualism, does not in any way endanger the achievements of the modern
individual, in terms of the desire and achievement of personal autonomy,
authenticity, etc’Ķ. It is no transcendent power that demands sacrifice of self:
in Negrian terms, it is fully immanent, participants are not given anything up,
and unlike the contractual vision, which is fictitious in any case, the
participation is entirely voluntary. Thus what it reflects is an expansion of
ethics: the desire to create and share, to produce something useful. The
individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the
service of the construction of a common resource. Implicit is not just a
concern for the narrow group, not just intersubjective relations, but the whole
social field surrounding it.
Imagine
a successful meeting of minds: individual ideas are confronted, but also
changed in the process, through the free association born of the encounter with
other intelligences. Thus eventually a common idea emerges, that has integrated
the differences, not subsumed them. The participants do not feel they have made
concessions or compromises, but feel
that the new common integration is based on their ideas. There has been
no minority, which has succumbed to the majority. There has been no 'representation',
or loss of difference. Such is the true process of peer to peer.
An
important philosophical change has been the abandonment of the unifying
universalism of the Enlightenment project. Universality was to be attained by
striving to unity, by the transcendence of representation of political power.
But this unity meant sacrifice of difference. Today, the new epistemological
and ontological requirement that P2P reflects, is not abstract universalism,
but the concrete universality of a commons which has not sacrificed difference.
This is the truth that the new concept of multitude, developed by Toni Negri
and inspired by Spinoza, expresses. P2P is not predicated on representation and
unity, but of the full expression of difference.
One of the
more global expressions of the peer to peer ethic, is the equipotency it
creates between civilizations and religions. These have to be seen as unique
responses, temporally and spatially defined, of specific sections of humanity,
but directed towards similar challenges. Thus we arrive at the concept of
'contributory worldviews' or 'contributory theologies'. Humanity as a whole, or
more precisely, its individual members, have now access to the whole of human
civilization as a common resource. Individuals, now being considered
'composites' made up of various influences, belongings and identities, in
constant becoming, are embarked in a meaning-making process that is coupled to
an expansion of awareness to the well-being of the planet as a whole, and of
its concrete community of inhabitants. In order to become more cosmopolitan
they will encounter the various answers given by other civilizations, but since
they cannot fully comprehend a totally different historical experience, this is
mediated through dialogue. And thus a process of global dialogue is created,
not a synthesis or world religion, but a mosaic of millions of personal
integrations that grows out of multiple dialogues. Rather than the concept of
multiculturalism, which implies fixed social and cultural identities, peer to
peer suggests cultural and
spiritual hybridity, and which no two members of a community have the same
composite understanding and way of thinking.
One
of the recent examples that came to my attention are the annual SEED
conferences in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They bring together, native elders,
quantum physicists, philosophers, and linguists, none of them assuming
superiority over one another, but collectively 'building truth' through their
encounter.
P2P
dialogues are not reprensentative dialogues, in which the participants
represent their various religions, rather, they are encounters of composite and
hybrid experiences, in which each full expresses his different understanding,
building a spiritual commons.
Traditional
mystical and religious paths are exclusionary, based on strong divisions
between the in and the out group. Internally, they reflect the social values
and organizational models of the civilizations in which they were born. Thus
they are premodern in authoritarian manner, patriarchal, sexist, subsuming the
individual to the whole. Or, in their latter manifestations they are run as
corporations and bureaucracies, reflecting the early emergence of capitalism as
in the case of Protestantism, and in the case of the new age, operating
explicitly as a spiritual marketplace reflecting the capitalist monetary ethos.
When traditional religions of the East move to the West, they bring with them
their authoritarian and feudal formats and mentalities. Epistemologically, in
their spiritual methodologies, they are authoritarian as well, far from an open
process, traditional paths start from the idea that there is one world, one
truth, one divine order, and that some privileged individuals, saints, bishops,
sages, gurus, have been privileged to know this truth, and that this can be
taught to followers. The seventies and eighties have been characterized by the
emergence of new religions and cults with a particularly authoritarian
character, and by the appearance of a number of fallen gurus, characterized by
abuses in terms of finance, sexuality, and power. If one decides to follow an
experiental path, it is always the case that the experience is only validated
if it follows the pregiven doctrine of the group in question.
It
is clear that such a situation, such a spiritual offering is antithetical to
the P2P ethos. Thus, in the emergence of a new participatory spirituality, two
moments can be recognized, a critical one, focused on the critique of spiritual
authoritarianism, and with books like those of June Campbell, J. Kripal, the
Trimondi's, the Kramer's, and many others who have been advocating reform
within the Churches and spiritual movements, and the more constructive
approaches which aim to construct a new approach to spiritual inquiry
altogether, those that explicitly integrate P2P practices in their mode of
spiritual inquiry. The two pioneering authors who discuss 'participative
spirituality' are Jorge Ferrer and John Hereon.
Ferrer's
book , i.e. "Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology: towards a participative
spirituality", not only is a
strong critique of spiritual authoritarianism, which integrates the
poststructuralist arguments about absolute knowledge, but also a first
description of an alternative view. In it, a spiritual practice is advocated,
which operates as an open process, in which spiritual knowledge is co-created,
and thus cannot fully rely on old 'maps', which have to be considered as
testimonies of earlier creations, not as absolute truth. Spirituality is
defined as the present relation with the Cosmos (the concrete Totality),
accessible to everyone here and now. Instead of the perennialist vision of many
paths leading to the same truth, Ferrer advocates an 'ocean of emancipation'
with the many moving shores representing the different and ever-evolving
approaches to the spiritual. Ferrer also records new practices that reflect this,
such as the ones pioneered by Romero in Spain: open processes of self and group
discovery that are no longer even cognicentric, but instead fully integral
approaches of the instinctual, emotional, mental and transmental domains.
New
Zealand-based John Heron expounds, in the book "Sacred Science", the
specific peer to peer practice that he has created, called Cooperative Inquiry.
In such a process, individuals agree on a methodology of inquiry, then compare
their experiences, adapting their inquiry to their findings, etc’Ķ thus creating
a collective intelligence, which is totally open and periodically renewed,
experimenting both with the 'transcendent' practices of eastern nondual
religions (transmental 'witnessing') as well as with the immanent grounding
methods of the nature religions, thus creating a innovative dipolar approach
which does not reject any practice, but attempts to integrate them. Peer
circles (check the concept in a web search engine) have sprung up worldwide. My
friend Remi Sussan stresses that the chaos magick groups on the internet,
explicitly see themselves as self-created religions adopting open peer-based
processes.
Throughout
this essay, I have defined P2P as communal shareholding based on participation
in a common resource (with the twist that in P2P it is we ourselves who are
building that resource, which did not previously exist), whereby other partners
are considered as equipotent. We also mentioned the co-existence within P2P groups
of both natural hierarchy, and egalitarian treatment.
There
are very good reasons to believe that we can and should extent this ethos to
non-human forces, be they natural or cosmic, and if you have this kind of faith
or experience, with spiritual forces as well. Thus in a sense, spiritually, the
P2P or 'participative ethos' harks back to premodern animistic attitudes, which
can also be found in Chinese Taoism for example. Instead of considering nature
in a Cartesian fashion as 'dead matter' or a collection of objects to be
manipulated, we recognize that throughout nature there is a scale of
consciousness or awareness, and that natural agents and collectives have their
natural propensities, and that, giving up our need for domination in the same
way that we are able to practice in P2P processes, we 'cooperate', as partners,
with such propensities, acting as midwives rather than dominators. French
sociologists like Michel Maffesioli and Philippe Zafirian have analyzed a
change in our culture, particularly in the new generations of young people,
which go precisely in that direction, and it is of course specifically
reflected in sections of green movement. Again, this is not a regression to an
utopian and lost past, but a re-enactment of a potential, but this time, with
fully differentiated individuals.
There
is a natural progression in scope, from P2P groups, to the global
partnership-based dialogues between religions and civilizations, to the new
partnership with natural and cosmic forces, that forms a continuum, and that is
equally expressive of the deep changes in ontology and epistemology that P2P
represents.
I
hope to have convinced the reader of this essay that Peer to Peer is a
fundamental trend, a new and emergent form of social exchange, of the same
form, an 'isomorphism', that is occurring throughout the human lifeworld, in
all areas of social and cultural life, where it operates under a set of similar
characteristics. In other words, it has coherence.
How
important is it, and what are its political implications? Can it really be
said, as I claim, that it is the premise of a new civilizational order? I want to bring out a few historical
analogies to illustrate my point.
The
first concerns the historical development of capitalism. At some point in the
Middle Ages, starting in the 11th to 13th cy. period, cities start to appear again,
and commerce takes up. A new class of people specialize in that commerce, and
finding some aspects of medieval culture antithetic to their pursuits, start
inventing new instruments to create trust across great distances: early forms
of contracts, early banking systems etc.. In turn, these new forms of social
exchange create new processes of subjectivation, which not only influence the
people involved, but in fact the whole culture at large, eventually leading to
massive cultural changes such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the
Enlightenment and the great social revolutions (English, French, American,
etc..). In this scenario, though the emergent bourgeois class was not directly
political, what it did, i.e. its primary business of conducting commerce,
inevitably created a political and civilisational chain reaction. This class
also had a resource, capital (money), which was greatly needed by the other
leading sectors of the population, especially the feudal class and the kings.
Even today, for capital, politics is a secondary effect, their enormous power
is an effect of what they do in the economic sphere: trading currency and
shares, international capital flows, investments of multinational companies,
the results of a myriad of small decisions by economic regularity bodies such
as the IMF, etc..
Today,
I would argue, we witness a similar phenomena. A new class of knowledge
workers, in its broad sense already the majority of the working population in
the West, and poised to be in the same situation elsewhere in a few decades,
are creating new practices and tools that enable them to do what they need to
do, i.e. knowledge exchange. As they create these new tools, bringing into
being a new format of social exchange, they enable new types of subjectivation,
which in turn not only changes themselves, but the world around them. When Marx
wrote his Manifesto, there were only 100,000 industrial workers, yet he saw
that this new social model was the essence of the new society being born.
Similarly, even if today only a few million knowledge workers consciously
practice P2P, one can see the birth of a new model of a much larger social
consequence. This new model is inherently more productive in creating the new
immaterial use value, just as the merchants and capitalists were more effective
in the material economy. Thus, they have something of value, i.e. knowledge and
innovation, which is needed by the whole society, as even agricultural and
industrial production can no longer proceed without their intervention. As this
feedback loop is reinforcing itself, the political consequences are equally
secondary. By creating new social forms, they, we, are doing politics, in the
sense of creating new realities. This does not mean that civil society alone
can create a full civilisational change, as, inevitably, political conflicts
and new lines of contention arise, that will draw in the adepts of the new
modes of being into the political world. And the great issue will be the reform
of the state and the global governance system. But they come prepared, with
highly efficient modes of organization and knowledge building.
Another
analogy I like is the one exposed by Negri in Empire, where he refers to the
Christians. The Roman Empire, in a structural course of decline, could not be
reformed, but at the same time, within it, the Christians were creating new
forms of consciousness and organization, which, when the imperial structure
collapsed, was ready to merge with the invading Barbarians and created the new
European civilization of the Middle Ages. There are no Barbarians today, only
other rising capitalist blocks such as the East Asian one, but they are in the
process of creating the very same social configuration, which has created P2P
in the West, though it will take a little more time. Civilisational differences
will not, in my opinion, preclude the development of cognitive capitalism and
the emergence of P2P modes of
social exchange.
Finally,
let us put our findings in the context of some social scientists.
First,
Marcel Mauss, and his notion of 'total social fact'; second, to the notion of
Cornelis Castoriadis, that societies are coherent wholes and systems, otherwise
they would collapse, animated by a particular kind of 'social spirit' that is
the result of our social imaginary. Democratic capitalism was prepared by such
an imaginary, the result of the religious civil wars and the strong desire to
go beyond the feudal adversarial model. But today, even as it is being
globalized, its premises are dying at the same time they are being exacerbated.
The emergence of P2P is therefore to be considered both as a total social fact,
and as the birth of a new social imaginary. P2P is a revolt of the social
imaginary about the total functionalization of our society, about its
near-total and growing determination by instrumental reason and efficiency
thinking, that is now even infecting our social and personal lives. It is a
vivid protest, a longing for a different life, not solely dictated by
calculation and the overriding concern for profit and productivity. It is not
just protest against the intolerable facets of postmodern life, but always
already also a construction of alternatives. Not an utopia, but really existing
social practice. And a practice founded on a still unconscious, but coherent
set of principles, i.e. a new social imaginary. It is totally coherent, a total social fact.
Habermas
has another important notion, which is the 'principle of organization' of
society, and he distinguishes the primitive, traditional and liberal-capitalist
principles of organization. He
defines it as the innovations that become possible through 'new levels of
societal learning'. Such a level determines the the learning mechanism on which
the development of productive forces depend, the range of variation for the
interpretative systems that secure identity, amongst others key factors. It
would seem clear that P2P is precisely such a new learning mechanism, described
in most detail in the book by Pekka Himanen, as well as in the new rules I have
identified in this essay. Thus in Habermassian terms, we would have to conclude
that P2P is a fourth principle of organization, emerging at this stage, but
which could become dominant at a later stage.
We'll
leave the latter open as a hypothesis, since history is an open process, and
indeed different logics can co-exist. For example, in democratic capitalism,
the two logics of democracy and capitalism are co-existing together, forming a
coherent whole, even though its fabric is now in crisis.
My
interpretation of P2P is related to the interpretation of Stephan Merten and
the Oekonux group in Germany, but whereas they see the principles behind Free
Software as indicative as a new mode of social exchange, I have broadened their
area of application. Free Software is, in my interpretation, one of the forms
of the P2P form of social exchange. While Free Software appears important,
especially when taken together with the more liberal Open Source format, it is
still more marginal than P2P. When
we look at the same phenomena through the P2P lens, the social changes appear
much more profound, much more important, than Free Software taking alone. We
are much further ahead of the curve if we follow the P2P interpretation.
Nevertheless,
when I talk, in such an optimistic and visionary fashion, about the emergence
of P2P and it being the premise of a coming fundamental civilisational change,
I can of course also see the terrible trends that are affecting our world:
fossil energy depletion, global warming, increased inequality inside and
between countries, the tearing apart of the social fabric, the increased
psychic insecurity affecting the whole world population, the imposition of a
permanent war regime that is dismantling civil rights and re-introducing the
systematic use of torture and lifelong imprisonment without trial in the heart
of the West, the great extinction affecting biodiversity ’Ķ All these things are
happening, and disheartening, even though counter-trends from civil society are
also sometimes hopeful. Certainly, it seems that the power structure of Empire,
the new form of global sovereignty, is beyond reform, that it just routs around
protest and democracy, making dissent marginal and inconsequential, even as 25
million people were protesting an illegimate war in one single day. Corporate
media machines will devote days on end on the trial of a celebrity, but totally
ignore massive literacy campaigns in Venezuela, and millions of people
demonstrating will deserve just a few seconds of coverage. But historically, it
is also when change 'inside' the system becomes impossible, that the greatest
revolutions occur. The evening before the momentous events of May 68, the
columnist Bernard Poirot-Delpech wrote in Le Monde: nothing ever changes, we
are bored in this country ’Ķ
The
question of timing is difficult to answer. Objectively, it could take centuries,
if we take the historical examples of the transition from ancient slavery to
feudalism, or from feudalism to
capitalism. Similar to the current situation, both ancient slavery (in the form
of the conatus system of production, which freed slaves but bound them to the
land, as of the 2nd and 3rd century), and feudalism, had
the germs of the new system already within them. However, the precipitation of
climatic, economic, political crises affecting the current world system, as
well as the general speeding up of cultural change processes, seem to point
towards changes that could proceed on a much more faster scale. If I may allow
myself a totally unscientific prediction, then I would say that a culmination
of systemic crises, and the resulting reform of the global governance system,
is about two to four decades away. But in another sense, such predictions are
totally immaterial to the task at hand. We need P2P today, in order to make our
lives more fulfilling, to realize our social imaginary in our own lifetime, and
to develop the set of methodologies that will be needed, that are needed, to
help solve the developing crisis. We do not have the luxury of waiting for a
dawn to come. A good example of the maturity of the system for change is what
happened in Argentina: when the economy totally collapsed, in a matter of
months, the country's population had built a series of P2P-based barter and
alternative money systems (the largest in the world to date), and the
significant movement of the Piqueteros arose, which, demanded and got from the
state a major concession: that state money for the unemployed would not go to
individuals, but the movement as a whole to invest in cooperative projects. It
all depends on the dialectic between the crises and what the system still can
offer. But if the system fails to provide the hope and the realisation of a
decent life, such an event precipitates the building of alternatives that have
many of the aspects of P2P that we described.
Peer
to peer has clearly a dual nature. As we have showed, it is the very
technological infrastructure of cognitive capitalism, the very organizational
mode it needs to implement in its global teams. P2P exemplifies many of the
flexible and fluid aspects characteristic of fluid modernity (or
postmodernity): it disintegrates boundaries and binary oppositions, blurs the
inside and the outside. Just as
post- or late feudal society and
its absolutist kings needed the bourgeoisie, late capitalist society cannot
survive without knowledge workers and their P2P practices. At the same time, it
cannot cope with it very well. The entertainment industry wishes to destroy P2P
technology, corporations are in constant tension between the logic of self-unfolding
peer groups and the profit-driven logic of the feudally-structured
management-by-objectives system, and by the tension between the cooperative
production of innovation and its private appropriation. The dot.com crisis of
2001 showed how difficult it is for the present system to convert the new use
value into exchange value, and created an important rift between the affected
knowledge workers and the financial capital, which had taken them on that ride.
After the short-term flourishing of greed, they massively turned to the social
sphere, where internet-based innovation not only continued, but it thrived even
more, but now based on explicit P2P modes of cooperation.
Thus,
while being part and parcel of the capitalist and postmodern logics, it also
already points beyond it. From the point of view of capital, it annoys it, but
it also needs it to thrive and survive itself. From the point of view of its
practitioners, they like it above all else, they know it is more productive and
creates more value, as well as meaning in their life and a dense interconnected
social life, but at the same time, they have to make a living and feed their
families. The not-for-profit nature of P2P is at the heart of its paradox.
This
is the great difficulty, and is why its opponents will not fail to point out
the so-called parasitical nature of P2P. P2P creates massive use-value, but no
exchange value, and thus, it cannot fund itself. It exists on the basis of the
vast material wealth created by the presently existing system. Peer to peer
practitioners generally thrive in the interstices of the system: programmers in
between jobs, workers in bureaucratic organizations with time on their hand;
students and recipients of social aid; private sector professionals during paid
for sabbaticals, academics who integrate it into their research projects.
But
P2P advocacy turns the tables around, it says: it is us knowledge workers who
are creating the value in the monetary system; the present system privately
appropriates the results of a vast cooperative network of value creation, as we
argued in our section about the cooperative nature of cognitive capitalism.
Most value is not created in the formal procedures of the enterprise, but
despite it, because, despite impediments, we remain creative and cooperative
against all odds. We come to the job, no longer as workers renting our bodies,
but as total subjectivities, with all we have learned in our lives, through our
myriad social interactions, and solve present problems through our personal
social networks. It is not us knowledge
workers living off on you, but you 'vectoralists' living off on us! We
are the ones creating infinite use value, which you want to render scarce to
transform it into tradable intellectual property, but you cannot do it without
us. Even as we struggle to create a commons of information, in the meantime,
while we lack the strength to totally transform the system, we will be strong
enough to impose important transitory demands. Therefore, in your own interest,
if you want innovation to continue, instead of ever larger number of us
collapsing from stress-related diseases due to your short-sightedness, you have
to give us time and money. You cannot just use the information commons as an
externality, you have to pay for it. Establishing such a system, culminating in
the instauration of a universal wage divorced from work, is in fact the very
condition of your survival as an economic system, and at the same time, allows
us to thrive as knowledge workers, by creating use value, meaning in our lives,
time for learning and renewal, that we will bring back to your money-making
enterprise.
This
is the next great reform of the system, the wise course of action, awaiting its
P2P "neo-Keynes", a collective able to translate the needs of the
cooperative ethos in a set of political and ethical measures. Paradoxically, it
will strengthen cognitive capitalism, and strengthen cooperation, allowing the
two logics to co-exist, in cooperation, and in relative independence from one another,
installing a true competition in solving world problems.
The
world system undoubtedly needs a number of important reforms. Amongst those I
can think of is 1) the shift of the monopoly of violence from the nation-state,
to an international cooperative body in charge of protecting human rights and
avoid genocides and ethnic cleansings; it is no longer acceptable that any
nation-state exerts illegitimate violence; 2) the setting up of regulatory
bodies for the world economy, so that a through world society can emerge, in
the sense of those proposed by George Soros, David Held and others; 3) changes
in the nature of the system of capital in the sense described by Paul Hawken,
David Korten, Hazel Henderson, i.e. a form of natural capitalism that can no longer
appropriate the commons and externalize its environmental costs; 4) a new
integral 'international account' systems no longer focused on the endless
growth of material production, but on well-being indicators; 5) changes in the
structures of corporations so that it no longer exclusively reflects the
interests of the shareholders, but of all the stakeholders affected by its
operations.
Of
course, since a just said that Empire is beyond reform, the above scenario may
seem farfetched. But historically, such a series of fundamental changes are
only to be expected after major structural crises, and a reconfiguration of the
balance of social power towards the multitudes so that the ruling oligarchy
understands the inevitability of such reforms to save the system; they are
probably still 20 to 50 years away.
Such
a course of action may be disappointing to those desiring more radical change,
a revolution, but it is inevitable that any system in crisis first tries to
reform itself, it is only after its failure, that the need for more radical
change is on the agenda, and we are not there yet.
In
our earlier descriptive essay, we already described three possible scenarios
concerning the entanglement of cognitive capitalism with P2P.
The
first scenario is peaceful co-existence. There are a lot of historical
precedents for that. In the Middle Ages and other agriculture-based systems,
the system of authority ranking (feudalism), co-existed with the religious
order, organized in a form of Communal Shareholding (the Church and the
Sangha), which was the pillar of a redistributive gift economy. In South-East
Asia, which accepts temporary spiritual engagement, people would move from one
sector to the other. Similarly, we can envision a continuation of the present
system, with knowledge workers making money in the private sector, but
regularly escaping, as much as they possibly can, to participate in the
edification of the Commons. This is of course the present scenario.
The
second scenario is the dark one. Cognitive capitalism succeeds in partly
incorporating, partly destroying the P2P ethos, and an era of information
feudalism ensues, a netocratic oligarchy based on access to resources and
networks, living on rent monopolies from intellectual property licenses, and
dis-appropriating any form of property from the consuming classes (the
consumtariat, as Alexander Bard has coined them). It will co-exist with a total
control society based on biometric identification, and will use highly advanced
cognitive manipulation. But this scenario is predicated on the social defeat of
the knowledge workers, and we are not there yet.
The
third scenario is, from the point of view of P2P advocates, the hopeful one.
After a deep structural crisis, the universal wage is implemented, and the P2P
sphere can operate with increasing autonomy, creating more and more use value,
slowly creating a cohesive system within the system. At such moment, the new civilization is already born. It has
to be stressed that P2P is not the same as a totally collectivized system, and
that it can co-exist with markets and aspects of capitalism. But it does not
need the current monopolistic system, it can reduce 'market pricing mechanisms'
to their rightful place, as part of the human exchange system.
In
the meantime, while the three scenarios are competing to come into being, what
are we to do. "What is to be done?"
A
first step is to become aware of the isomorphism, the commonality, of peer to
peer processes in the various fields. That people devising and using P2P
sharing programs, start realizing that they are somehow doing the same thing
than the alterglobalisation movement, and that both are related to the
production of Linux, and to participative epistemologies. Thus what we must do
first is building bridges of cooperation and understanding across the social
fields. Amazingly, it has already started, as the last Porto Alegre forum
showed an extraordinary enthusiastic reaction to the Open Source event,
something that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. I hope that
my own essay plays a role in augmenting that awareness. We should also start to
realize our basic commonality with earlier forms of the cooperative ethos: the
communal shareholding of the tribal peoples, the solidarity movements of the
workers, the environmental and other protectors of our physical commons.
Following the analysis of Mckenzie Wark we should say that both knowledge
workers (the hacker class for MW), workers, and farmers as producing classes
share a similar interest in achieving first, a fairer share of the distribution
of the surplus (the reformist agenda), and second, achieving control of the
means of production (the more radical agenda).
The
second step is to furiously build the commons. When we develop Linux, it is
there, cannot be destroyed, and by its very existence and use, builds another
reality, based on another social logic, the P2P logic. Adopting a network
sociality and building dense interconnections as we participate in knowledge
creation and exchange is enormously politically significant. By feeding our
immaterial and spiritual needs outside of the consumption system, we stop
feeding the Beast. It hates opposition, but even more does it fear
indifference, because it can feed on the energy of strife, but starts dying
when it is shunted. To resist is in the first place to create. The world we
want is the world we are creating through our cooperative P2P ethos, it is
visible in what we do today, not an utopian creation for the future. Building
the commons has a crucial ingredient: the building of a dense alternative media
network, for permanent and collective self-education in human culture, away
from the drivel of the corporate media, and for mobilization if need be. Thus,
our offensive strategy is this: to build the commons, day after day, the
creation of a society within society. Within Empire, the counter-Empire is
being born. In this context, the emergence of the internet and the web, is a
tremendous step forward. Unlike in earlier social formations, knowledge workers
and others now have access to an important "vector of information",
to a means for creating, producing, and distributing immaterial products that
was not available in earlier ages. Part of the struggle to build the
information commons is the struggle for the control of the code (achieving
protocollary power) and the creation of a 'friendly' legal framework,
continuing the efforts pioneered by Richard Stallman and the General Public
License and Lawrence Lessig's Copyleft.
The
third step is our defensive strategy. When the commons is attacked, we defend
ourselves and mobilize. We do not accept the intolerable. Above all what we
need is a society that allows the building of the commons, and cannot accept
one that would foreclose this development. Hence the importance of the
intellectual property regime, which imperatively needs to be reformed to avoid
a 'Enclosure of the Digital Commons", and also, we have to develop an awareness
of the intricacies of protocollary power. Since we have no idea about the time
span needed for a fuller transition to a P2P civilization, what me must do in
the meantime is to protect the seed, so that it can grow unimpeded, until such
time as it is called for a greater role.
And
finally, we have a few demands. A decent life for all, through the universal
living wage. So that no one dies from hunger, poverty and exclusion from the
world of culture. So than an increasing number of us can start working on the
creation of real use value, instead of catering to the artificial desires
concocted by the global advertising system.
We
also demand the creation of peer to peer processes that we know can contribute
to solving some of the crucial issues facing the world. This is why the demands
of the alterglobalisation movement are sometimes considered vague. It is
because, in this complex world, we know that we do not have all the answers.
But we also know, that through a community of peers, through open processes, answers
and solutions can emerge, in a way that they cannot if private interests and
domination structures are not transcended. Thus we demand above all a reform of
the global governance system, so that every human being voice can be heard.
This is why we pay so much attention to the IMF, World Bank, UN, WTO, and other
instruments of global domination. As they are organized today, they impede the
finding of solutions. It is thus not just a matter of an alternative political
program, but of alternative processes to arrive at the best solutions. I do not
personally believe, that change can come <only> from the autonomous
processes of civil society, and that attention to the state form is important.
Thus politically, peer to peer advocates are interested in the transformation
of the nation-state, to new forms open to the processes of globality, and
participatory processes, such as the ones practiced with P2P formats.
Peer
to peer also demands self-transformation. As we said, P2P is predicated on
abundance, on transcending the animal impulse based on win-lose games. But
abundance is not just objective, i.e. also, and perhaps most importantly,
subjective. This is why tribal economies considered themselves to live in
abundance, and were egalitarian in nature, although we call them poor. This is
why happiness researchers show that it is not poverty that makes us unhappy,
but inequality. Thus, the P2P ethos demands a conversion, to a point of view,
to a set of skills, which allow us to focus ourselves to fulfilling our
immaterial and spiritual needs directly, and not through a perverted mechanism
of consumption. As we focus on friendships, connections, love, knowledge
exchange, the cooperative search for wisdom, the construction of common
resources and use value, we direct our attention away from the artificial needs
that are currently promoted, and this time we personally and collectively stop
feeding the Beast that we have ourselves created.
We are now
reaching the conclusion of our essay. If I have been successful the reader has
a descriptive, explanatory, and historical view of its emergence and potential.
Of course my
purpose is also political. I believe that a P2P-based civilization, or at least
one that has much stronger elements of it compared with today, would be a
better civilization, more apt to tackle the global challenges that we are
facing. This is why I propose that this essay is not just part of a process of
understanding, but that it can be a guide to an active participation in the
transformation of our world, into something better, more participative, more
free, more creative.
I therefore
announce the creation of a Foundation for P2P Alternatives. It would be
centered around the following conclusions, the support for which you can find
in the essay:
- that technology reflects a change of
consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it
- that the networked format, expressed in
the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political
organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for the political/economic
order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a
variety of dialogical and self-organizing formats to device different processes
for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of 'nonrepresentational
democracy', where an increasing number of people are able to manage their
social and productive life through the use of a variety of networks and peer
circles
- that it creates a new public domain, an
information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the
domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of
reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the
intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free
software movement
- that the principles developed by the free
software movement, in particular the General Public License, provides for
models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life
- that it reconnects with the older
traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time
obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential
of showing that the new egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older
traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an
engaged and meaningful life as expressed
in one's work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective
creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival
- that it offers youth a vision of renewal
and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it
creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of
'cognitive capitalism'; P2P is a language which every 'digital youngster' can
understand
- it combines subjectivity (new values),
intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and
interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each
other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and
growing, but lacking 'political self-consciousness'.
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives would address the following issues:
- P2P currently exists in discrete separate
movements and projects but these
different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds
them
- thus, there is a need for a common
initiative, which 1) brings information together; 2) connects people and
mutually informs them 3) strives for integrative insights coming from the many
subfields; 4) can organize events for reflection and action; 5) can educate
people about critical and creative tools for world-making
- the Foundation would be a matrix or womb
which would inspire the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P
field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of
identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved
- the zero node website would have a website
with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine.
This section is
still a working draft. Very incomplete.
3.2.A.
Aaron Krowne on
CBPP 'authority models', in http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_02/fud_based_encyclopedia/
7.1.C.
About the
transition of one mode of production to another:
Venetian merchants, who had made their fortunes in the midst
of feudalism by selling arms or luxury goods from Asia to European feudal
seigniors, did not constitute the heart of social production. Even if they
brought to the narrowness of feudal life - centered around the fief and its
village church - an opening to world commerce (the courtesans of the European
courts could wear robes made of Oriental products), the relations among the
merchants and between them and the rest of the feudal world remained marginal,
and would appear to be purely subsidiary. The production of essential,
indispensable goods for the subsistence of men (agricultural goods and artisan
ones, principally), was performed under feudal relations. This marginal,
secondary aspect of capitalist relations in the midst of feudal society was so
self-evident that even in the 18th century, the first bourgeois economists, the
French Physiocrats, could, without laughing, pretend that merchants and
manufacturers should not pay taxes because they do not create any true
"net product": They do nothing but transport it or modify its form.
What do we want to deduce? That from their birth, in the
midst of the old society, the superior relations of production, were not
obligatorily born with a complete form, capable of managing the totality of
social production, nor even its most vital part. The fact that, today, free
software and, more generally, digitizable goods concern no more than a part,
again, marginal, of social production and consumption, does not constitute any
argument showing the impossibility that the economic relations that they induce
will not one day become the dominant social relations.
That which has permitted capitalist relations to become
dominant after centuries of existence is not only the ideological, military,
and political victory of the bearers of the new capitalist values against the
old feudal regime, even if they have played a determining role, but the
material, concrete fact - which demonstrates daily and by methods more and more
evident - that the new relations were the only ones that could permit the use
of new productive forces engendered by the opening of commerce and the development
of production techniques. "In the last instance," it is the economic
imperative, the irreversible historical tendency to the development of labor
productivity, that finishes by imposing its own law.
That which today permits one to envision the possibility
that relations of production founded on the principles of free software
(production with a view toward satisfying the needs of the community, sharing,
cooperation, the elimination of market exchange) could become socially dominant
is the fact that these relations are the most able to employ the new techniques
of information and communication, and that the recourse to these
techniques, their place in the social process of production, can only grow,
ineluctably.
Source: Raoul
Victor, Free Software and the Market Society, http://www.oekonux.org
8.1.B
"The meme
business is, in its upper levels, a contemporary pseudo-structure, built on
ancient, authoritarian, entirely individualistic notions of spiritual development.
So the yellow and turquoise memes are filled with holistic ideological rhetoric
devoid of any real psycho-socio-politico-economico-methodology, i.e. forms of
practice. The rhetoric is presumably advice for the deliberations and
policy-making of second-tier-savvy philosopher-sage-kings (e.g. Andrew Cohen!)
guiding integral societies into being. By relegating relational practices to
the green meme, falsely relating them to relativism, and by failing to grasp
their potential for relational forms of spiritual practice which supersedes old
individualistic forms, meme theory is headed into a sterile and autocratic and
deeply incoherent transcendental cul-de-sac." ’Äì John Heron, personal
communication, February 2005)