Peer2Politics

“Thanks for this book, Michel and Vasilis. “Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy” is exceedingly timely and I would recommend it to anyone interested in the Commons specifically, or in political economy more generally. In response, I’ve written something in between a review and a letter to the authors. I address Michel because he posted it. Hopefully he will respond to a few of my comments!

Cosmopolitanism has become a powerful current in the development of alternative globalisation discourses. Cosmopolitanism springs from strong moral intuitions. In the simplest terms it describes ‘the view that all human beings have equal moral standing within a single world community’ (Hayden, 2004, p. 70). It is a moral-normative conception which gives direction to a number of variants (For example see Binde (2004)). Hayden writes that ‘legal cosmopolitanism contends that a global political order ought to be constructed grounded on the equal legal rights and duties of all individuals’ (Hayden, 2004, p. 70). There are also descriptive accounts which, by contrast, focus on the way planetary governance is being constructed as ‘cosmocracy’ (Keane, 2005) ‘civil society going global’ (Kaldor, 2003) or as ‘sub-political’ agency (Beck, 1999).

The internet and technology are often essentialized which then results in versions of technological gnosticism, where technology is either seen as a false god that inevitably plays an evil role in human society, or the different forms of cyber-utopianism. In its most recent iterations, the dark vision takes root in the revelations of Edgar Snowden about NSA and other surveillance, to argue that the internet has become a tool of control and oppression; while for example the bitcoin enthusiasts often see the mis-identified ‘peer to peer’ currency as the tool that will bring down governments and large banks to usher in a anarcho-capitalist utopia.