P2P Foundation

(via Paul Fernhout)

Here is an abstract from a document about an alternative vision of agriculture related to Charles Fourier’s thinking, written by Joan Roelofs.

The illustrated pdf version is here.

Abstract:

“Charles Fourier has been disdained or ignored by political scientists, even by theorists. Some of his ideas were “mad,” but so many others were brilliant. Now we can see that even some “mad” ideas were simply premature, e.g., global warming. His works are a “whole earth catalog” of solutions to today’s most intractable problems, such as agricultural labor in a democracy, environmental degradation, consumerism, loneliness, the decline of the family, the gradual disappearance of nutritious meals (and shared mealtimes), eldercare, boredom at work, unemployment, and the fragmentation of communities by “identity” politics.

This paper will consider rural dysfunction, reform movements, and policy options. It will revisit the communitarian road that was taken, but then backtracked. It is now especially appropriate to reconsider Fourier, as a new translation of his Theory of Four Movements (material, organic, animal, and social) was published in 1996, after many years without a Fourier English translation in print.”

From her conclusion:

“A detailed communal plan for the United States requires considerable collective thought. Here are a few suggestions. A new communitarianism would be voluntary, and might recruit among farmers and would-be farmers, immigrants, homeless, single people, retirees, and 18-22 year olds (college courses both practical and impractical could be part of the community). A revived Citizen’s Extension Service could facilitate experimentation and electronic exchange of information.

What makes communitarianism a stronger option today is that the family farm experiment has been run, with negative results (in seven-eighths of the cases) despite incredible natural resources, hard work, and government subsidies. All indications are that agricultural problems are getting worse, and rural communities are dying. There is currently world overproduction of food (and textiles, and most stuff) while hunger persists. These very dysfunctions were what set Fourier on his utopian quest, which began when he saw wheat dumped in the sea to raise prices, and the urban price of apples 100 times the farm price. What he would think of the world-engulfing junk food diet cannot be imagined.”

Kudunomics refers to property rights for the information-based economy, the topic of a talk by Samuel Bowles. He looks at the foraging economy to understand the knowledge economy.

(the Kudu is an antelope of some sort hunted in Tanzania for its massive caloric value. When one is killed, it’s widely shared, perhaps 2/3 outside of the nuclear family).

Excerpts from the presentation by Samuel Bowles summarized (liveblogged) by Ethan Zuckerman:

1.

“The big idea behind Bowles’s recent research is that some of the fundamental laws of economics – notably Adam Smith’s invisible hand, may not work in the “weightless economy – the economy that can’t be weighed, fenced, or conveniently contracted for.” Rather than being based on material wealth, knowledge-based economies are based on embodied and relational wealth. In these economies, individual-posession based property rights are difficult to enforce, and socially harmful to enforce.

Bowles suggests that we may gain some insight about the evolution of institutions under these conditions by studying the reverse transition: by studying the transition from the late Plioscene forager economy, where weath was difficult to own, to agrarian and industrial economies, based on ownership. We can study this by “running history backwards” with an agent-based model of the weightless economy. We understand the forager economy fairly well due to ethnographic research, and we might gain insights about the governance of this emergent weightless economy from studying governance dynamics in forager economies.

Bowles offers a model of wealth where the wealth of a person is the sum of network wealth, embodied wealth and material wealth. He puts exponential weights on these types of wealth in a Cobb-Douglas production function. He plots different types of economies in a triangular graph, showing their wealth in terms of these three different dynamics – material, network and embodied wealth. Recent economies based on the domestication of plants and animals concentrate in the material corner, while older economies cluster around the network wealth – embodied wealth axis.

Network wealth is the contribution made by your social connections to your well-being. This could be measured by your number of connections, or by your centrality in different networks. A simple way to think about this is the number of people who will share food with you. Embodied wealth is a combination of what you know and how strong you are. It measures factors like hunting prowess and grip strength. Bowles asserts that we’re moving from a history where network and embodied wealth mattered more that material wealth – we briefly (for about eight thousand years) moved into a world of embodied wealth, and now we’re moving back.”

2.

“In the weighless economy, positive feedbacks and winner-take-all dynamics are very important. Those who get ahead will tend to stay ahead. They don’t need to be the best, just first and good enough. This dynamic tends to generate significant inequality – whether we’re considering pop stars or dentists. Private firms can’t confirm to the price equals marginal cost theory – marginal costs are much less than average costs because of the increased first copy costs. And property rights become both ambiguous and difficult to enforce.”

3.

“The culture of the foraging band emphasizes generosity and modesty. There are norms of sharing. You depricate what you catch, describing it as “not as big as a mouse”, or “not even worth cooking”, even when you’ve killed a large animal. In the Ache people of Eastern Paraguay, hunters are prohibited from eating their own catch. There’s complex sanctioning of individually assertive behavior, particularly those that disturb or disrupt cooperation and group stability. This makes sense – if hunters can’t expect that they’ll be fed by other hunters – particularly by a hunter who suddenly develops a taste for eating his own catch – the society collapses rapidly.

Mobile foraging bands and accompanying collectivist and egalitarian norms were displaced by a society based around property rights, made possible through the domestication of crops and livestock. Initially, this domestication probably reduced individual human productivity… but it increased land productivity. This led to an idea that you should define a set of resource as yours and invest in those resources. This idea preceded states – they were enforced by interpersonal conflict, not by third parties – but the system became more efficient in a system with strong state actors.”

4.

“Bowles’s model (which you can download and run on a Window machine) looks at three different strategies for coping in an economy:

- Bourgeois – if you’re in posession of an item, defend it

- Share – Share and don’t punish those who don’t share

- Civic – share and jointly punish those who don’t share

The civic strategy succeeds if there are lots of civic members in a group. If there are very few, they tend to fail. This is one of the dynamics which leads to multiple equilibria in a system. The bourgeois strategy is stable (an asymptotically stable symmetric Nash equilibrium) if property rights are well defined. But if property rights are ill-defined, the bourgeois stragegy is no longer evolutionarily stable.

The simulation introduces costs for conflicts between “firms”, groups of individuals which share a strategy. Because there’s a cost to conflict, firms that resolve conflicts without much expenditure of energy are going to outlast those that spend resources on conflict. Individuals within these firms are paired with cultural models drawn from a group of possibilities, conveye by “conformist transmission”. Individuals might simply draw from neighbors, or might compare how others are doing and change strategy. Losing groups are not eliminated – instead, they lose resources and tend to adopt the cultural model of the winning group. Individuals who are in losing firms will have a strong tendency to adopt the strategy of winning firms.

In these simulations, some fraction of the time, a bourgeois player will challenge someone over a resource he doesn’t own – i.e., he’ll attempt to steal it. Because of this, if there are very few bourgeois, civics will do well, and vice versa.

It turns out that simulations where all actors are bourgeois are stable. The two strategies where sharing is involved are equivalent if there are no bourgeois actors. A smiluation might drift between sharing and civic strategies without outside influences. As a result, All C (civic) is not a stable equilibrium – it’s subject to drift. And all B (bourgeois) is not stable if property rights are not well defined.”

5.

“As we consider evolution of institutions in the weightless economy, we know of at least three forms of economic governance: communities, states and markets. Markets allocate resources well in conditions where the individual hand applies. States have superior powers of enforcement, which allow for powerful civic strategies. And as Elinor Ostrom has pointed out, communities can handle ambiguity of property rights, but tend to fail where inequalities between members are large.

Hayek’s work questioned the efficiency of central planning versus that of the market. At the center of that question is information – in societies where information is easily available, central planning might be very efficient. If it’s harder to acquire information, markets can act to aggregate that information. To govern in these systems, you can either adjust prices to get an equilibrium or collect sufficient information to engage in efficient central planning. Ostrom suggests that we need different mechanisms to govern by communities”

Is it possible for companies and the users of their products to form mutually beneficial relationships that create value? The concept of value co-creation attempts to answer that question and it is the editorial theme of the November and December issues of the OSBR.

Check the Table of Contents here.

Excerpt from the editor’s summary introduction:

“Value co-creation examines the practices customers and companies use to co-create value. These practices affect the specification, design, production and manufacturing, distribution and support of the companies’ products and services. Co-creation enables a company to better satisfy customers’ demands for personalized products, services and experiences. The term value co-creation is broadly used and needs to be further clarified. This clarification is a challenging task and needs the cooperation of both business scholars and practitioners.

Anna Kirah from CPH Design in Copenhagen argues that customer activism, experimentation, connectivity and knowledge enables people to become active participants in the value creation process. “

I am sure most readers of this essay know well the “community cycle” - the way on-line communities get started, they thrive with peaceful, civil conversations, helpful strangers and kind atmosphere, and later how suddenly some seemingly innocent misunderstandings grow into flamewars, people stop listening to each other and only want to win the fight. And then some other community is started. Or an Open Source project gets started, people get excited, contributor add new features, volunteers write documentation, everybody answers questions at mailing lists and suddenly a difference in opinions about some technicalities grow into a fight and community is split with a fork. It is sad to observe that pattern repeating over and over again and it is also intriguing how it can happen so repetitively when everyone involved knows how it ends. Why does that happen?

According to René Girard a similar cycle of peace and conflict was the basic dynamic of archaic human communities. I am not an anthropologist, but it strikes me how his descriptions of ‘mimetic conflict’ fit the reality of on-line flamewars (or ForestFire or many other modes of on-line strife).

Whether the violence is physical or verbal, an interval of time
passes between each blow. And each blow is delivered in the hope
that it will bring the duel or dialogue to an end, constitute the coup
de grace or final word. The recipient of the blow is thrown
momentarily off balance and needs time to pull himself together, to
prepare a suitable reply. During this interval his adversary may
well believe that the decisive blow has indeed been struck. Victory -
or rather, the act of violence that permits no response - thus
oscillates between the combatants, without either managing to lay
final claim to it. Only an act of collective expulsion can bring this
oscillation to a halt and cast violence outside the community.

While Girard above states that only the collective act can halt the exchange of violence between the two antagonistic sides, I think that the blows exchanged are not without importance, eventually it is the public that chooses the final victim, but they will usually choose the side that fails. This would explain the importance of the public in on-line conflicts, people know that he violence have started and they feel being watched for any sign of weakness.

In a way flamewars could be viewed as a modern stichomythia, a literary technique that is:

exchange of insults and accusations that corresponds to the
exchange of blows between warriors locked in single combat

In our contemporary society we are well guarded against the escalation of violence linked to mimetic conflict and we have lost many intuitions about it, that is why on-line conflicts take us by surprise. We are not aware about the many mechanisms that protect us and we have not copied them on-line making our on-line assemblies much alike the archaic societies that are described in Rene Girard works. We need to relearn these intuitions and rediscover the social mechanisms if we want to consciously build more durable on-line communities. This does not mean that our situation on-line is identical to that of a human in the ancient world, there is one crucial difference - we don’t kill each other via the Internet, it all works only in the sphere of symbols but it seems that there is a similar group dynamic at work. This dynamic is not deadly (as the off-line can be), but it is annoying, wasteful and often cause community splits and in effect the fragmentation so well known in the Open Source world. If we learn how it works we could prevent much of it.

We can use the mimetic theory to: explain the nature of on-line conflicts, understand how humanity copes with conflicts off-line and try to copy the mechanisms on-line, interpret currently used on-­line counter measures and inspire the development of new techniques specially suited for the on-­line world.

According to the theory the first counter-­measure discovered was finding a scape goat, a common enemy that unifies the community,­ this might explain the popularity of the vi-emacs wars. This solution worked for most of the history of our species, but I hope I don’t need to explain that it is somehow unacceptable for our civilized point of view. It is also not very effective online, because the solution is never as ultimate as in off-­line circumstances, it is not possible to silence people on the internet even if they are banned from the community spaces they will easily find another outlet for their voice, and everything is one click away on the internet.

Another counter-measure is reject comparison, refuse to enter the competition for the best text editor, solution for a problem, programming code. This is my interpretation of TIMTOWTDI. Comparing code, argumenting about the best solution etc. is practically never done in void,­ it is always about why my solution is better than your solution,­ and that can so easily start the mimetic circle of attacks and counter-­attacks. Once we understand where the power of TIMTOWTDI comes from we can formulate similar advice like trying not to link ideas to people so that they can be debated without the social balast,­ but that can be difficult.

We can also draw lessons from science and law, which have provided effective strategies to deal with conflict. That means agreeing on some minimal set of basic rules/believes and accepting that there are some objective ways to evaluate claims against that basic set of rules. This can be for example a set of objective measures (like speed benchmarks) and rules about evaluating software according to those measures. Or constitutionalizing the communities (like the Debian project). Effectiveness of these measures depends how much authority can be transferred into the initial basic set of rules, but functioning of our own society relies very much upon similar structures so we can be pretty confident about them.

A recurring characteristic of flame wars is how much offence they cause: in other words, how seriously participants seem to take them, no matter how trivial the object of contention is we seem to fall into the pit of boiling drama. I am not talking here about other people,­ I know it so well on my own example how seriously it all seems when you are in the diabolic circle. This also well resonates with the mimetic theory which says that the object of the mimetic rivalry loses it’s significance over the course of the conflict, often it is destroyed, but this does not end the rivalry which becomes self-sustaining at some point.

As the sacrificial conflict increases in intensity, so too does the
violence. It is no longer the intrinsic value of the object that inspires
the struggle; rather, it is the violence itself that bestows value on
the objects, which are only pretexts for a conflict. From this point on
it is violence that calls the tune.

This characteristic seriousness suggests another way to cope with the conflict,­ use humour for it can destroy the layers of drama and let us see our positions more objectively. I am convinced by my experience that this is a very effective way of restating the problem in a less personal way,­ but I have not yet encountered any theoretical analysis of humour and mimetism.

Another characteristic of the mimetic conflict is the increasing speed of alternations, and this also can be observed in the case of flamewars. It is quite reasonable to expect that slowing the discussion down can help the participants to break the vicious circle of conflict. The good thing about this measure is that it could be done automatically,­ the list server software could detect the increasing speed of discussion and automatically start delaying the emails.

At the very height of the crisis violence becomes simultaneously the
instrument, object, and all-­inclusive subject of desire.

Finally perhaps the most important thing is not to make violence the object of desire. This can easily become the case when administrators of common resources are abusing their powers to show off or vent their anger by ‘baning’ people off them. Sometimes this can work in attracting new followers, who imagine themselves being the violent ruler, but it ultimately leads to a double bind situation and threatens the future evolution of the community.

All quotes above are from “Violence and the sacred” by Rene Girard (it’s google books page).

Acknowledgements

I’d like to thank Gabriella Coleman for numerous comments and editorial advice and Nicolas Messina whos initial remarks inspired me to rewrite my short blog post into this longer essay.

Via Marc Garrett:

“In a move that continues to shake the Second Life community of content creators, merchants, and consumers, Linden Labs has declared that free virtual content will no longer be searchable without listing payments on their website portal

See: (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Managing_Freebies_on_Xs treet_SL_Roadmap_FAQ);

and additional fees will be added with the intention of discouraging content listed for inexpensive selling prices. The move is particularly troubling because the online Web listing service is the de facto search engine for virtual content in Second Life, since the in-world search tools are unable to provide information about an object beyond name and location - basic textual descriptions, pictures, or descriptions of licensing, size, or content-category are not possible. While initially the change was explained as a response to community feedback, the residents involved in this feedback process were revealed to be fewer than 100 in number, primarily larger merchants among a community of millions.

Within 24 hours of the announcement, the feedback thread

See: (https://blogs.secondlife.com/message/38923#38923)

has swelled to over 1,000 overwhelmingly negative responses. Additionally, in-world protests have erupted throughout the day, and over 20,000 objects have been voluntarily removed from the online store by angered merchants.”

More Information

Read on for more details on the brouhaha.

Adding to the controversy are the officially stated justifications in the FAQ

See: (http://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Linden_Lab_Official:Managing_Freebies_on_Xs treet_SL_Roadmap_FAQ),

such as ‘They [free content listings] hinder the shopping experience because a “sort by price” puts all freebies first,’ and the perplexing statement ‘They [free listings] garner so much attention that Residents are driven toward the freebies instead of quality, fairly priced items.’

Various independent virtual content listing sites have been proposed, such as Meta-life.net (http://meta-life.net/) and Slapt.me (http://slapt.me/), but attempts to post this information on the Second Life forums has been met with aggressive administrative censorship of these links.

Eddan Katz (EFF) points at the following article, showing how Spanish judges are quite exemplary in safeguarding public p2p rights: Spanish Court Dismisses Complaint From Nintendo Against Counterfiet DS Cartridges, Since They Add Functionality

“It seems that Spain is a country that is pretty consistently figuring out that we shouldn’t just throw out all other rights the second “piracy” is shouted by the entertainment industry. We’ve noted recently that the country hasn’t just rejected three strikes and declared broadband a basic right, but has also ruled, repeatedly, that personal file sharing is legal. And now, it even has judges who realize that “anti-circumvention” laws should have limits as well.

Spanish copyright law includes an anti-circumvention clause, but as Leo Martins alerts us, a judge in Salamanca, Spain has taken a much more nuanced view of it in a case pitting Nintendo against Grupo Movilquick, who produced alternative cartridges for Nintendo DS devices. The judge’s ruling (translated from the original) appears to find that the alternative cartridges do, in fact, circumvent Nintendo’s DRM and can be used for “pirating” games, but also extend the utility of the devices for perfectly legal purposes. For that reason, the judge dismissed the lawsuit (translation from the original) noting that it doesn’t make sense that the law would be intended to say that only Nintendo can expand the functionality of its devices, and the fact that Nintendo doesn’t offer similar functionality shouldn’t preclude others from doing so. There are areas where Nintendo can still bring a lawsuit, such as for patent and trademark issues, but the judge notes those should be dealt with in a civil court.”

Below is La Quadrature du Net’s response to the European Commission’s communication on “Enhancing the enforcement of intellectual property rights in the internal market” (COM(2009) 467)

Download the memo in pdf here:

On September 11th, 2009, the European Commission released a new
communication on the enforcement of intellectual property rights (IPR)
in the Internal market. The communication addresses a broad range of
issues, notably copyright infringements. In line with the recent leaked
information regarding the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA)
currently under negotiation, the document calls for voluntary agreements between Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and rights holders to deal with copyright infringement over the Internet.

La Quadrature du Net, along with many other advocacy groups across the world, believes that the position of the Commission on the matter
suffers from several misconceptions. These errors, which are discussed
below, reflect for the most part the influence of a few corporate
interests on IPR public policy. Such inaccuracy in the analysis of the
phenomenon of file-sharing is all the more illegitimate given that the
Commission and the Member States3 have failed to consider alternatives to the repression of non-commercial uses of copyrighted works by Internet-users. We also take the view that the proposals put forward in the communication, if they are carried on, will inhibit many of the socio-economic benefits that the Internet offers.

This memorandum uncovers

* (1.). the undesirable outcome of the Commission’s mention of voluntary agreements between stakeholders

* (2.). It also outlines how the view regarding copyright enforcement laid out in the communication could eventually severely undermine the rights and freedoms of European citizens

* (3.). From original analytical mistakes

* (4.) stems a wrongful assessment of the impact of file-sharing

* (5.), and so we urge the Commission to reconsider its copyright policies.

For the sources, go here.

* The Constellation Method of Social Change

In spite of current ads and slogans, the world doesn’t change one person at a time. It changes as networks of relationships form among people who discover they share a common cause and vision of what’s possible.

- Margaret Wheatley and Deborah Freize

* McKenzie Wark on expressive politics

There can be no one book, no master thinker for these times. What is called for is a practice of combining heterogeneous modes of perception, thought and feeling, different styles of researching and writing, different kinds of connection to different readers, proliferation of information across different media, all practiced within a gift economy, expressing and elaborating differences, rather than broad-casting a dogma, a slogan, a critique or line. ? ? ? This expressive politics does not seek to overthrow the state, or to reform its larger structures, or to preserve its structure so as to maintain an existing coalition of interests. It seeks to permeate existing states with a new state of existence. It spreads the seeds of an alternate practice of everyday life.

* David Snowden on idealistic vs. naturalistic sense-making

“In the idealistic approach, the leaders of an organization set out an ideal future state that they wish to achieve, identify the gap between the ideal and their perception of the present, and seek to close it. … Naturalistic approaches by contrast, seek to understand a sufficiency of the present in order to act to stimulate evolution of the system. Once such stimulation is made, monitoring of emergent patterns becomes a critical activity so that desired patterns can be supported and undesired patterns disrupted. The organization thus evolves to a future that was unknowable in advance, but is more contextually appropriate when discovered.” (Kurtz and David Snowden, Bramble Bushes in the Thicket)

* William James on Meliorism

“meliorism treats salvation as neither inevitable nor impossible. It treats it as a possibility, which becomes more and more of a probability the more numerous the actual conditions of salvation become”

“As meliorism takes as its goal to make things better through concerted effort, meliorism is a habit of mind and a mode of practice that aims for realistic optimism rather than passivity, pessimism, or nihilism” (Peter Lunenfeld)

* Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times

“Pessimism is a luxury we can only afford in good times, in difficult times it easily represents a self-inflicted, self-fulfilling death sentence. This insight, to me, is real Realism or real Realpolitik, far from blue-eyed Idealism. We have to courageously resist the current tendency to suspect those who work for a better world to be hopeless idealists. This would mean Realpolitik letting disaster happen (by deepening fault lines instead of transcending them), and us not at least attempting to prevent this. Strange real Realpolitik!” (Evelin Lindner, 2004.)

“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness. What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places - and there are so many - where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction. And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.” (Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train: A personal history of our times, 2004, p. 208)

Against the production of hopelessness

“Hopelessness isn’t natural. It needs to be produced… the last thirty years have seen the construction of a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the creation and maintenance of hopelessness, a kind of giant machine that is designed to destroy any sense of possible alternative futures. At root is a veritable obsession on the part of the rulers of the world with ensuring that social movements cannot be seen to grow, to flourish, to propose alternatives, that those who challenge existing power arrangements can never, under any circumstances, be perceived to win… Economically, this apparatus is pure dead weight; all the guns, surveillance cameras, and propaganda engines are extraordinarily expensive and really produce nothing, and as a result, it’s dragging the entire capitalist system down with it.”

- David Graeber

* Mitch Kapor on Open Politics

“the whole concept of open and equal access to information could do wonders for our politics. Placing information in the open, allowing people to debate both general and very specific aspects of software, and then creating a process for decision-making about implementation could be very important lessons…. There are many other interesting aspects to the open source community that may very well help define new participatory processes that can help us revitalize our democracy.”

* The New Power of Internet-organized Minorities

“The adage that organized minorities are more powerful than disorganized majorities is now more true than ever. However, as these organized minorities multiply and grow, they are challenging the very nature of what power is and how it will be maintained in our society. … Self-organizing groups, and networks that tie these groups into powerful coalitions, are the new players. To alter Time magazine’s formulation, the Person of the Year isn’t “you,” it’s “us.”

- Andrew Rasiej and Micah Sifry

* Dale Carrico on an emergent technoprogressive politics

“The fact remains that there seems to me to be an exciting, vitally important emerging technoprogressive mainstream in the United States of America and across the planet knitting together what might initially have seemed to be disparate concerns into an ever more unified, ever more popular, ever more emancipatory movement, conjoining

(a) democratic and anti-authoritarian education, agitation, and organizing via peer-to-peer networked formations,

(b) research, funding, and institutionalization of decentralized and renewable energy provision,

(c) advocacy of universal informed nonduressed consensual recourse to emerging genetic and prosthetic medicines,

(d) championing universal education to promote critical, literary, scientific, and civic literacy,

(e) defending the right of women to avoid or end unwanted pregnancies as well as to make recourse to ARTs to facilitate wanted ones,

(f) circumventing technodevelopmental wealth concentration via automation, outsourcing, and crowdsourcing through the advocacy of a non-means-tested universal basic income guarantee,

(g) overturning militarist budgetary priorities, regulating the trade in and use of arms of all kinds, dismantling private armies and policing forces, repudiating the ongoing automation and abstraction of death-dealing, and

(h) turning the tide of confiscatory intellectual enclosure by encouraging access to free creative content through public subsidy of citizen participation in networks, universal public access requirements for research funded by the public, limiting current legal copyright terms, widening fair use provisions, radically circumscribing state, corporate, and academic practices of secrecy, and repudiating the legal fiction of corporate personhood.” (http://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/08/trouble-with-technocentricity.html)

* Paul Hartzog on the need for alternative practices

“When faced with the constraints of existing structures, it is often the case that people will choose to, or be compelled, to turn aside and create something new on their own. This is the primary reason, in fact, why I keep returning to Hannah Arendt as a political thinker. From her we gain insight into the ability of people to undermine ostensibly illegitimate political and social practices, not by attacking them, but by simply engaging in some other practice that, by its very nature, calls the existing practices into question and, eventually, to account.” (http://www.re-public.gr/en/?p=201)

And finally, from Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy:

No social order ever perishes before all the productive forces for which there is room in it have developed; and new, higher relations of production never appear before the material conditions of their existence have matured in the womb of the old society itself. Therefore mankind always sets itself only such tasks as it can solve; since, looking at the matter more closely, it will always be found that the tasks itself arises only when the material conditions of its solution already exist or are at least in the process of formation.

Real economic abundance can come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abundance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual point of departure.

Special Issue: Ethics of Waste in the Information Society. International Review of Information Ethics. Issue No. 011, Vol. 11 - October 2009

This special issue of IRIE deals with the dark side of the knowledge economy, e-waste, and also has 2 articles that focus on the relation between waste and abundance, by Soenke Zehle and Roberto Verzola.

Below the abstract of the issue and of the two articles that retain our special interest, and which we hope to present in more detail in the future.

Issue Summary:

“IRIE, designed as a pure online journal, new issues announced by email, downloadable and fully readable as e-paper – in 2003 the founding editors really thought they have created a zero waste journal. But now we learned that much more has to be taken into account if one really wants to calculate the ecological bottom line of IRIE, includ-ing the electricity consumed by hosting the journal as well as reading it and above all the construction and disposal of the hardware engaged. Ultimately this expansion of the scope of our respective self assessment leads to an expansion of the scope of information ethics itself.

Together, the authors offer themselves as interlo-cutors in info-ethical exchanges, some directly, some from within different (perhaps even incom-mensurable) analytical frameworks, recalling that acts of translation are always already involved in any attempt of ethical reflection.”

* Special Abundance essay 1

Essay: Network Ecologies: Geophilosophy between Conflict and Cartographies of Abundance. by Soenke Zehle

“In the context of network-ecological thought, information ethics is perhaps best understood as a transversal reflexive practice, aimed at identifying the stakes attending the creation, consumption, and disposal of infor-mation technologies. To situate itself as well as potential interlocutors, such a thought requires correspondingly complex cartographies, a multidimensional mapping of practices and presuppositions, of individual, collective, institutional actors as well as the conditions of possibility of their mutual engagement. Such cartographies do not assume the existence of the „local“ or the „global“ as a given. Instead, they attend to the way human and non-human actors and the discursive and material practices they are involved in contribute to construction and reconstruction of geocultural formations. Reapproached from within such a „network-ecological“ horizon, information ethics becomes geophilosophy, generating new modalities of intervention in the conflictual dynamics associated with the social-economic life of waste.”

* Special Abundance essay 2

Essay: 21st-Century Political Economies: Beyond Information Abundance. by Roberto Verzola

“As a result of the relatively low cost of digital reproduction, a global transformation is occurring in the nature of products and processes and in types of goods and services. Arising from information abundance, this global transformation is making the phenomenon of abundance a major field of study, not only for economists but also for other social scientists and physical scientists as well. This essay proposes an economic definition of abundance and a typology of sources of abundance. It argues that real economic abundance can come about only when the demand for a good is finite and the plentiful supply makes the abundant good affordable enough to all members of society. It lists an abundance-nurturing ethic as a major goal of abundance management, and encourages economists to make abundance together with scarcity their conceptual point of departure. Finally it links the phenomenon of abundance to the concept of the commons.”

I propose that the point of this isn’t to replicate “open source” as we know it in software. The point is to create the essential foundations for distributed science so that it can emerge in a form that is locally relevant and globally impactful. We can do this. But we have to be relentless in questioning our assumptions and in discovering the interventions necessary to make this happen. We don’t want to wake up in ten years and realize we missed an opportunity by focusing on the software model instead of designing an open system out of which open science might emerge on its own.

Excerpts from John Wilbanks:

“Far too often the focus on “porting” open source to science focuses on the legal aspects rather than performing an analysis of the infrastructure for science. Science is actually not very similar to modern software at this point. In science, especially life science, many of these factors don’t exist. There isn’t democratic access to tools. You tend to need a lab, which means you tend to need to work at a place big enough to afford a lab, which tends to mean you need an advanced degree, which means there is no crowd - thus the fundamentals for distributed science development aren’t there. And when we try to force open source on a knowledge space that is fundamentally poorly structured for distributed development, we’ll not only be frustrated by our failures to replicate the GNU/Linux and Wikipedia successes, we’ll risk discrediting the idea of distribution itself.

I propose that the point of this isn’t to replicate “open source” as we know it in software. The point is to create the essential foundations for distributed science so that it can emerge in a form that is locally relevant and globally impactful. We can do this. But we have to be relentless in questioning our assumptions and in discovering the interventions necessary to make this happen. We don’t want to wake up in ten years and realize we missed an opportunity by focusing on the software model instead of designing an open system out of which open science might emerge on its own.”