Peer2Politics

« We need to pioneer technical, organizational and financial forms that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing ». Excerpted from David Bollier: “Our imaginations and aspirations must begin to shift their focus from open platforms to digital commons. Self-organized commoners must be able to control the terms of their interactions …

Last week, I figured out that I am a part-time locust. Here’s how it happened. I was picking the brain of a restauranteur for insight into things like Groupon. He confirmed what we all understand in the abstract: that these

So, to try to explain what “venture communism” is, which is my own project, predating the term “peer production”, but very relevant to it. I think we’re talking about the same thing, even if I was using different terms. As a technologist, I was also inspired by the functioning of peer networks and the organization of free software projects. These were also the inspiration for venture communism. I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods. The Internet gives us a very efficient platform on which we can share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.

Our current political economy has the weirdest DNA. It considers nature to be a perpetually abundant resource, i.e. it is based on a false notion of material abundance; on the other hand, it believes that intellectual, scientific and technical exchange should be subject to strong proprietary constraints, and subjects innovation to internet restrictions. Thus the paradoxical but also dramatic contradiction of the present system: while it is rapidly overburdening the carrying capacity of the planet, at the same time it inhibits the solutions that humanity might find for it.

This is an important synthesis of ten years of research at the P2P Foundation, on the emerging practices of the new productive communities and the ethical entrepreneurial coalitions that create livelihoods for shared resources. I’m working with Neal Gorenflo of Shareable on a more accessible version for a broader public, but this one is for …

Work on developing Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (or CBRLs, for short) continues apace here at the P2P Foundation. When speaking of the types of licenses, we often find it hard to explain how they fill a niche in the alt. license spectrum, falling somewhere between the straight up copyleft and the popular Creative Commons Non-Commercial License.

“In a locust economy, you cannot just decide to go somewhere and get in your car to drive there. You have to coordinate with other potential users of that shared resource. You have to keep your apartment clean and sharing-ready. You have to do minimum-wage work that you might consider beneath you (though such status concerns don’t bother me, annoying chores do). In the sharing economy, we may not be eating each other literally, but we’re certainly eating into what Richard Dawkins called the extended phenotype of our neighbors. To the extent that your belongings are a logical expression of your genes and memes sharing them amounts to allowing others to eat them. So the harsh bottomline of the locust economies, once the Jeffersonian middle class prey base has been bankrupted, is that we locusts turn on each other. We call it peer production and prosumer economics, but it isn’t Jeffersonian producerism. It is locusts in their cannibalistic phase.”

It’s been quite a hectic period during Xmas break, and the year started big with a superb workshop session in Barcelona. Indeed I had the chance to run the third workshop about the Platform Design Toolkit, this time again with more than 50 participants. It was a great experience that spurred new ideas and feedbacks I’m going to incorporate soon in the Toolkit.