*I like the way this Bauwens guy talks. Not that I believe in his speculative peer-to-peer politics or anything; I just simply like the way that he talks.
* "I'd like a grilled cheese sandwich please." "That will require some voluntary permissionless self-aggregation around the production of common value." "Okay, can I have a bag of popcorn then?" "Certainly, as soon as our hyper-productive peer to peer dynamics grow from seed form to parity form." The ol' sci-fi dialogue practically writing itself here.
http://infochangeindia.org/200907137829/Technology/Features/Dreaming-of-a-peer-to-peer-world.html
Dreaming of a peer to peer world
By V Sasi Kumar
(...)
Michel Bauwens is one of those who believe in open spaces and creation
without incentive. Like Richard Stallman who left his prestigious job
at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and started the Free
Software Foundation, Michel also left a remunerative corporate job to
start the Peer to Peer Foundation that tries to study the evolving
peer to peer production and distribution systems exemplified by Free
Software and Wikipedia. Michel Bauwens was in Thiruvananthapuram,
Kerala, in December 2008, to participate in the Free Software Free
Society conference and talked about the work of the Foundation. In
this interview, done through email after his return to Thailand,
Michel speaks about how he decided to leave his job and start the P2P
Foundation, what principles the Foundation is based on, what its work
is, and how the work has been progressing.
You were an information scientist and magazine editor before you
started the P2P Foundation. Can you tell us about this evolution? How
did it happen?
My first job (but without any formal library and information science
training, as I studied political science) was nine years as reference
librarian and information analyst for a centre in Brussels. In 1990, I
started working as strategic business information manager at the
headquarters of the agribusiness wing of British Petroleum. At that
time, I reformulated the role of librarian into that of ‘cybrarian’,
ie managing “just in time, just for you” information streams to senior
management who were not in any real sense using the physical library
resources anymore.
As the animal feed businesses were divested by 1993, I moved on to
creating a Flemish magazine that was a mix of Mondo 2000 and Wired,
and then became one of the Internet evangelists in my home country,
leading to work as a serial Internet entrepreneur.
From my very first encounter with the Internet, ie collective mailing
lists combining experts from around the world, I knew this was a
technology that would change the very fabric of our world. Never
before had there been such real-time possibilities for human
cooperation and collective intelligence on a global scale. From now
on, the privileged communication infrastructures that were only in the
hands of multinationals and the State, would be distributed and
democratised, a shift at least as important as the effect of the
printing press.
At the same time, I became increasingly dissatisfied with the
corporate world, seeing how the neoliberal system not only created
increased social inequality, exacted a terrible psychic cost from even
its privileged managerial layers, while also creating havoc in our
natural world. I started seeing the system as a giant Ponzi scheme (a
scheme in which the profit of those who invest earlier comes from
those who invest later), so what surprised me was not the meltdown of
2008, but why it took so long to actually manifest itself!
At the same time, there was a revival of social resistance starting in
1995, and I was noticing, as a professional trend-watcher, that there
was a common template in the new forms of social organisation, the one
I now call the ‘peer to peer’ dynamic, or ‘voluntary permissionless
self-aggregation around the production of common value’.
Key for me was the observation of the Internet bust in April 2000,
which I witnessed from a privileged position as I was working in the
same sector. As the stock market imploded, pundits were predicting the
end of the Internet because no more capital was available for
innovation and development. In fact the opposite happened – rather
than diminishing, innovation increased, entirely driven by the social
field of aggregating geeks, giving birth to the Web 2.0, the first
social model based on an interrelationship between new forms of
capitalism and user-generated production of value. I knew then that I
would study this phenomenon more deeply, and in particular since I
consider peer aggregation to be a non-alienating form of work, how it
could be leveraged as a force for social change.
So in October 2002, I decided to quit my corporate engagement, take a
sabbatical to think things through, and moved to Thailand to create a
global cyber-collective to research and promote P2P dynamics.
Is there a basic set of hypotheses from which the Foundation starts?
Yes, I formulated the following principles when I started the Foundation:
That peer to peer-based technology reflects a change of consciousness
towards participation, and in turn, strengthens it.
That the ‘distributed network’ format, expressed in the specific
manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political
organising and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current
political/economic order, ie I believe that peer to peer allows for
‘permission-less’ self-organisation to create common value, in a way
that is more productive than both the state and private for-profit
alternatives. People can now engage in peer production that creates
very complex ‘products’ that can achieve higher quality standards than
pure corporate competitors.
I also believe 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 universal common property
regimes, ie modes of peer property such as the general public licence
and the creative commons licences should be promoted and extended.
These principles developed by the free software movement, in
particular the general public licence, and the general principles
behind the open source and open access movements, provide for models
that could be used in other areas of social and productive life.
If we can connect this new mode of production, pioneered by knowledge
workers, with the older traditions of sharing and solidarity of
workers and farmers movements, then we can build a very strong
contemporary social movement that can transcend the failures of
socialism.
I think it also offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a
world that is more in tune with their values.
I call the new peer to peer mode a ‘total social fact’, because it
integratively combines subjectivity (new values), inter-subjectivity
(new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and
inter-objectivity (new forms of organisation) that mutually strengthen
each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the
offensive and growing, but lacking ‘political self-consciousness’. It
is this form of awareness that the P2P Foundation wants to promote.
Was this mostly your work, or were others involved in formulating
these principles?
I formulated the principles on my own, but also after at least two
years of reading, and of being attuned with the zeitgeist (zeitgeist
describes the intellectual, cultural, ethical and political climate,
ambience and morals of an era). Others were formulating similar ideas,
though in different ways. So as usual we should not claim too much
personal merit; we are standing on the shoulders of the giants of the
past, and are simply lucky to accompany a deep shift in human
consciousness that would be taking place without us just as well. At
the most, we can try to put some extra grease in the machine.
What exactly does the Foundation do?
We want to be an interconnecting platform for people involved in
realising the new open and free, participatory and commons-oriented
paradigms in every social field. So, we are monitoring and describing
real-world initiatives, theoretical efforts, creating a library of
primary and secondary material, and trying to make sense of that
aggregation by developing a coherent set of concepts and principles.
We do this with a wiki, with nearly 8,000 pages of information, which
have been viewed over 5 million times; through a blog reaching about
35,000 unique users last year, a Ning community with a few hundred
members, and a number of mailing lists.
The most active is the peer to
peer research list, where academics and non-academics can
collaboratively reach understandings. We also had two annual physical
meet-ups in Belgium and the UK, and have some national groups such as
in the Netherlands and Greece. There’s a lot of hidden activity acting
as connectors between various initiatives, which, despite the global
Internet, often don’t know they are working on very similar projects
that could reinforce each other.
Peer to peer happens without us, but we want to add a little
interconnecting grease to the system. My ultimate aim is to create a
powerful social movement that can support the necessary reforms for
social justice, sustainability of the natural world, and opening up
science and culture to open and free sharing and collaboration, so
that the whole weight of the collective intelligence of humanity can
be brought to bear on the grave challenges we are facing.
How do you see the work that has already been done? Is it progressing
according to your expectations?
I’m pleased on some levels, frustrated at others. In three years, we
have constructed a sizeable amount of interrelated information and
knowledge, and a ‘community of understanding’. I think we have a
‘really existing virtual community’ that cares about the ideals that
we formulated. Each of these people are themselves active in their own
real-world projects, some of which will be crucial change agents in
the near future.
Undoubtedly, the P2P Foundation is a global brand at
least on the level of Internet users, as we have not crossed the
boundary to mass media reporting. Our growth seems slow, but organic
and rather strong, with not so much turnover and a lot of loyalty. Our
internal culture of civil discourse seems very strong. On a personal
level, I have a little more social and reputational capital, and have
been privileged to explain P2P in several countries on four
continents, which has allowed me to relate physical presence with the
virtual network – a strong combination.
My big frustration is that I failed to develop a ‘business model’ to
sustain myself and my family, so I’m returning to paid employment in a
few weeks, which will necessarily diminish my engagement, which has
been full-time for the last three years, with the P2P Foundation’s
work. (((
