We have opened the door on the notion 1) that the state could participate in the new networks as a legitimate actor, or 2) that the state could decentralize to the point of being a network itself. Certainly states participate in networks already, but for many global networks the impetus to their formation is the failure of the state to adequately address their interests. The result is a general antipathy toward the state, a resistance to its inclusion, and an oppositional attitude. On the second point, the primary characteristic of statehood is an embrace of hierarchy (at least one), i.e. that the state is the supreme legitimate representative of the collective will and that all others must be ultimately subject to it. This fundamentally at odds with the “plurilateralist” nature of networks. Therefore, in both instances, it may be that for the state to continue to participate effectively it would have to overcome its own nature, or state-ness, and in so doing would no longer be a state in any real sense.

The above quote is from Paul Hartzog’s master essay on Panarchy:

* Panarchy: Governance in the Network Age

It has a definite relation with our own concept of Partner State.

My conviction regarding the state is that:

1) it is a current inevitability

2) in the long term, we do need an expression of general interests that is separate from a mere federation of private interests, even if these are expressed by peer governed civil society networks

But it is important to realize that the current form of a class-based state, which needs to balance 1) the interests of the dominant factions; 2) the social balance of forces and the interest of the whole system; 3) and its own interests as a separate entity …

is not an eternal form of that general interest.

Our notion of the Partner State is a transitional concept, that would allow the state to evolve from its current corporate welfare orientation, to one where it both becomes an enabler and servant of civil society and its peer networks, and a arbiter in charge of meta-governance between public, private and common/civil functions.

What I’m predicting is that 1) many new functions will progressively replace state functions as they are made progressively redundant; and 2) that for the remaining functions, the very nature of the state as an oppressive entity will change.

It is my understanding that Paul Hartzog’s approach, as evidenced in the quote above, is quite congruent with that.

As he writes, in what could be an alternative definition of the Partner State concept:

it may be that for the state to continue to participate effectively it would have to overcome its own nature, or state-ness, and in so doing would no longer be a state in any real sense.

Yesterday, we presented John Medaille’s presentation of distributism as an economic doctrine. I’m not sure if there is a total linkage between distributism and catholicism, but cleary, John Medaille’s version is, hence the many references to the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

Further browsing through this Distributist Review, I found this distributist treatment of the ’state’, which I find very sensible. It is an excerpt from a larger article which deals with the principle of subsidiarity. (There is also a more lengthy examination on the Church’s position on the state here.)

John Medaille:

“So while “always let the lowest possible level do it” is certainly not an accurate application of subsidiarity, the level of the order in question is a vital consideration. A distributist need not be libertarian-leaning to assert that most functions currently performed at a high level of society ought to be done by one considerably lower.

The reasoning behind not giving a task to the state if it’s not necessary is the same as that behind giving it to the state if it is. That is, the “opportunity to domination” just isn’t great enough to justify it. One must, of course, always consider this factor, even when the state is not in question; private corporations can dominate just as effectively as the state can. However, with the state the issue is much more relevant. The distributist need not be reminded about the benefits of private ownership; ownership and performance of a function by private—by which I mean simply non-governmental—organizations ought to be preferred, wherever possible, to that by state organizations.”

(a republication from February 2006)

Excerpts from a transcript of a video interview with Christoph Spehr.

This interview sets out very clearly the criteria to which contemporary forms of cooperation must abide by.

1. Free Cooperation vs. the Old Utopias

“Political utopia, utopian thinking today has to differ from most of the stuff we are familiar with as political utopias. I think, the first important thing is that it has to be non-prescriptive. Most utopian thinking is prescriptive in the sense that it dictates people what to do. The idea behind it is that if you set up proper rules, then society will run okay. But these rules have to be respected, of course, it’s like a cage built by the author of the utopia, and then you can put people in, and they have to follow the rules, and then it will work. And this, I think, is something that is not acceptable today and can never be a free utopia. So you have to build your utopia on the fact that people do what they want, you cannot impose your ideas of the right consciousness, of right and wrong, you cannot rule out some desires, some actions as wrong, this is what you have to do. I think this is very important. I think it is also necessary that utopian thinking is not elitist in the sense that you have an elite that has the right consciousness, the right knowledge, a group of decision-makers, of scientific thinkers that can define for others what is the real case, but you have to build utopia on an equal community, where it does not matter what people have read and what theories they are acquainted with. Yes, it has to work with different people and they have to have the possibility of participating on an equal basis. They should not be excluded, access to this utopia should not be restricted by the question where people, where a person comes from. I also think that today political utopias can no longer be hierarchical. By this I do not want to stress the point of hierarchy and organization, but a hierarchy of main stuff and minor stuff, of the fields of the social that are seen as important and others that are seen as not so important - which is typical of classical utopias. In fact, we know a lot of utopian thinking that says: “The core business, what we call economy, is what big business does. Is how tools are made, and other aspects like raising children or doing creative work, acting together in a modest and proper way are minor stuff and have to follow the rules of the others. And I think this is illegitimate - because it is always combined with a hierarchy between different people doing different stuff in these utopian societies - and a clear case of inequality. So one could say you have to bring utopia back to the kitchen. It has to work there and the rules of the kitchen have to be the rules of bigger cooperations - not the other way round. Everything that people do together is a kind of cooperation because they share work and they use the work and the experience and the bodily existence of others - also historical and direct and indirect ways. And though there are two extremes, free cooperations and forced cooperations, most of what we know in most societies is forced cooperation.

Capitalist markets have some aspects that cannot be transferred to a free cooperation. For instance, it is unacceptable, that the more successful a participant of the market is, the more they can exclude every other participant. And it’s clear that in capitalist markets the main aspect of competition is not being better or having better ideas, but applying more force against others to produce cheaply. Of course, this cannot be an element of a market in a free cooperation.”

Republication of an editorial from February 2006:

In my view, it is definitely an expression of the left, but, it has the potential to solve the important contradiction between equality and liberty, and thus, to encompass sincere liberals in its embrace. Before the emergence of peer to peer, it really seemed that equality and liberty could not be realized at the same time, that one could only be developed fully at the expense of the other. You could either develop equality, using the state for redistribution but at the expense of inequality-creating individual liberty, or promote liberty, at the expense of equality, as the neoliberal regime is currently doing. I think that it is plausible to say, in parallel with the contrast evoked by George Lakoff below, that the left promoted equality, and that the contemporary right says it promotes liberty.

With the emergence of P2P however, we now know that there is a social formation, a way to produce and govern, where both liberty and equality are integrated, both re-inforcing the other.

The emerging peer to peer left, is different from the old left in an important respect, something that is missing in George Lakoff’s comparison, and that is the following. The old left relied on the state, for reforms, or for revolution, as proposed by respectively social-democrats and Stalinists. That state was either based on the transfer of sovereign rights to the state, in the democratic polity, or to a authoritarian state, again respectively for the two political forces above. The ‘people’, respectively voluntaritly, or involuntarily, ‘delegated’ their autonomy to the state.

But the new peer to peer left is, will be, not focused on the state, but on the Commons. The core of peer to peer is the autonomous development of civil society, to which the market and the state become servants. Peer to peer is about ‘absolute democracy’, i.e. about extending autonomous and democratic governance (peer governance) to the largest extent possible, beyond politics, into the realms of production (peer production) , co-created culture and participative spirituality. The state, still serves the common good where necessary, but has to provide at least neutral arbitrage between the market and civil society.

The peer to peer left is a direct emanation of civil society, and not of sections of the state apparatus. Unlike the people, the multitude does not delegate its autonomy, except in the special circumstances where autonomous peer production and peer governance is unlikely to occur or difficult to realize. The Commons is primary, the State and the Market are secondary.

A republication of January 2006, on my own concept of netarchical capitalism. Some of the references are dated, but I think the main concept is still valid.

(the references to other sections are to my own manuscript, P2P and Human Evolution)

Recall the following: the thesis of Cognitive Capitalism says that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based on the accumulation of knowledge assets, rather than the capital involved in physical production tools. The vectoralist thesis says that a new class has arisen which controls the vectors of information, i.e. the means through which information and creative products have to pass, for them to realize their exchange value. They both describe the processes of the last 40 years, say the post-1968 period, which saw a furious competition through knowledge-based competition and for the acquisition of knowledge assets, which led to the extraordinary weakening of the scientific and technical commons. And they do this rather well.

But in my opinion, both these hypotheses fail to account for the newest of the new, i.e. to take into account the emergence of peer to peer as social format. What is happening?

In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism. And the new information infrastructure, cannot be said to ‘belong’ in any real sense to the vectoralist class.

Therefore, my hypothesis is that a new capitalist class is emerging, which I propose to call the netarchists (since netocracy ‘is already taken’ by Alexander Bard, and I reject his interpretation). These are the forces which both ‘enable’ and exploit the participatory networks arising in the peer to peer era. Examples abound:

1) Red Hat: it makes a living through associated services around open source and free software which, and this is crucial, it doesn’t own, and doesn’t need to own. We now have not only the spectacle of firms divesting their physical capital (the famous example of Alcatel divesting itself from any and all manufacturing, Nike not producing any shoe itself), but also of their intellectual capital, witness the recent gift of IBM of many patents to the open source ‘patents commons’ or the strategy of SUN Microsystems[i].

2) Amazon: yes, it does sell books, but its force comes from being the intermediary between the publishers and the consumers of books. But crucially, it success comes from enabling knowledge exchange between these customers. Without it, Amazon wouldn’t quite be Amazon. It’s the key to its success and valuation otherwise it would just be another bookseller.

3) Google: yes, it does own the search algorithms and the vast machinery of distributed computers. BUT, just as crucially, its value lies in the vast content created by users on the internet. Without it, Google would be nothing substantial, just another firm selling search engines to corporations. And the ranking algorithm is crucially dependent on the links towards document, i.e. the ‘collective wisdom’ of internet users

4) EBay: it sells nothing, it just enables, and exploits, the myriad interactions between users creating markets.

5) Skype mobilizes the processing resources of the computers of its participating clients

6) Yahoo: gets its value for being a portal and intermediary

So we can clearly see that for these firms, accumulating knowledge assets is not crucial, owning patents is not crucial, though, driven by the profit motive and the desire to obtain monopolies, they use it as a secondary strategy. You could argue that they are ‘vectors’ in the sense of Wark, but they do not have a monopoly on it, as in the mass media age. Rather they are ‘acceptable’ intermediaries for the actors of the participatory culture. They exploit the economy of attention of the networks, even as they enable it. They are crucially dependent on the trust of the user communities. Yet, as private for-profit companies they try to rig the game, but they can only get away with so much, because, if they loose the trust, users would leave in droves, as we have seen in the extraordinary volatility of the search engine market before Google’s dominance. Such companies reflect a deeper change into the general practices of business, which is increasingly being re-organized around participatory customer cultures — see section 3.1.B about the cooperative nature of cognitive capitalism, where this shift is already discussed.

Knowledge and other workers using participatory platforms will generally use both the commons and the market, the latter in order to make a living, and forms of distributed capitalism, which lessen their dependence on the larger firms and the salary dependence, may appeal to them. Such workers do have access to their own information machines, but need platforms to connect. Obviously they are drawn to the participatory platforms devised by these new types of companies, even feeling an allegiance to them. At the same time ,the relationship is uneasy since these firms will generally try to evolve towards monopolistic practices, or at least, towards short-term for-profit strategies and tactics which may not be in their interests. Knowledge workers and other forces creating the P2P commons can take a variety of roles in the economy, and in present circumstances clearly need a market, but which they are trying to mold to their own interest. Thus the new forms of distributed capitalism are needed and supported because it lessens the dependence on classic firms and monopolies. The trend fulfills a desire for ‘autonomy within the market’, and allows for various forms of ‘consumer aggregation’ that were hitherto difficult to achieve. Similarly, many of the new netarchical leaders are vocal in their general support for participation.

My conclusion is that the emergence of P2P begets a new capitalist sub-class, which accommodates itself with the networks, places itself at crucial nodes and proposes itself as voluntary hubs, rather than living off knowledge assets. In this sense, vectoralists, even as they ascend to the heights of power through restrictive copyright legislation, have already reached the zenith of their power, and they will eventually be replaced by new formats of capitalist exploitation, which accommodate themselves in much more intelligent ways to the peer to peer realities. The fact that large infrastructural companies such as eBay and Google get a lot of attention should not blind us to the fact that this also is a bottom-up process that enables for a much wider spread of entrepreneurship, sometimes called ‘minipreneurs’. For such minipreneurs, a whole infrastructure is in the process of being set up. A first layer of websites and services allows for the distribution and eventually sale of digital material, i.e. publishing of text through self-publishing (lulu.com, booksurge), of self-produced music (PureVolume.com), and digital art (Deviant Art.com). It is also possible to create and sell self-made physical products such as designs (CafePress.com) and even to use online tools for designing products who ‘first physical models’ can be outsourced, such as with eMachineShop.com. Personal fabricators are an extension of this model but are not yet available; in the meantime sites like iFabricate attempt to fill the gap. A related growing trend is the use of personal outsourcing where by individuals can easily find assistance in the developing countries. There is also a financial infrastructure being on offer. The creation of the Zopabank, where any ‘consumer’ can also be a lender, is an important development as well. Others are experiment with a ‘Corporate Digital Commons’ format to pool resources. EBay, with its 64 million active users and 260,000 associated stores (and similar initiatives by Amazon.com) have create a whole parallel economy of primary or secondary earnings.

Related to the trend of netarchical capitalism is the user-driven innovation process that we explained before. This can happen within companies but also through the creation of new kinds of exchanges where companies offer incentives to communities of researchers to come up with technical or scientific solutions. Among the examples are Innocentive.com. These initiatives blur the distinction between the commons and the market, since the supply is organized with P2P formats, but the corporate incentives create competition for the resources offered, and eventual payment is involved.

At the same time, we might except peer to peer exchanges that fall outside of any for-profit priorities, and businesses from the social economy sector, for whom profit is a subsidiary concern. This new sector may seem marginal today, but is in my opinion, ‘the next wave’ in terms of new types of corporations.

What seems important in a possible evolution towards a participatory society is the following. Although the large netarchical corporations do enable participatory networks, their for-profit nature makes them dangerous trustees of commons-favorable protocols. Their will be a continuous tension between their need to retain the trust of their user base, and the pressure of advertisers as well as their own bottom-line needs. It would be preferable that minipreneurs and those who need platforms to transform use value into exchange value, to have access to open platforms. Projects like the Broadcast Machine of the Participatory Culture Group, or the Prodigal marketplace seem to go into that direction.

There is another aspect in which the concept of netarchy is useful. Throughout this essay we always stress the double nature of P2P: a form in which it is the infrastructure (technical, collaborative, etc..) of the current system; and a form in which it transcends the current system pointing towards an alternative economic organization. In one way, distributed networks and P2P-like processes can be used to re-enforce Empire, in another way, to combat it. Ideologically, there will be those who favor P2P but see capitalism as the endgame of history, who cannot imagine an alternative; while others, including myself, see it as the premise of radical social change. It is easy to see how the first position can be termed netarchical, since it inevitable accepts and glorifies the for-profit appropriation of the participatory networks, while the latter will favors autonomous cooperation.

This is not to say that netarchy does not play a useful role. New classes at first usually play a progressive role, riding on the back of new productive possibilities. And such is the role of netarchy. Compared to the cognitive capitalists and vectoralists, who respectively monopolize knowledge assets and information vectors, netarchists need neither one nor the other. Thus they do not necessarily side with the forces trying to rig computers with digital rights management restrictions, nor with the forces putting young people who share music in jail. Rather they will try to both enable and use the new practices, on the one hand ‘making them safe for capitalism’, but also funding, technologically developing and enabling new P2P processes. Acting as intermediaries between both worlds, they look for ‘reformist’ solutions as it were.

The emergence of a netarchical ideology

The emergence of the netarchy is accompanied by a new ‘ideology’ which both embraces participation, but crucially sees capitalism as the only conceivable horizon for the future of humanity. It is the kind of ideology one can identify with the “California ideology” expressed in Wired magazine.

The netarchical ideology has its expression especially in the international political economy, especially in the form of ‘bottom-of-the-pyramid’ economic development, as championed by C.H. Prahalad. Prahalad and the movement he inspired recognize that the one billion people at the bottom of the pyramid manage to have a cash flow of $2 per day, even though they do not have the capital. And Hernando de Soto, with the social capital movement in general, shows how this capital can be partly generated by ‘formalizing’ the informal capital that they often do have, but that the current institutional framework cannot recognize. Thus Prahalad and others try to convince capital and development institutions to develop solutions like micro-banking, creating bottom-up collectives of the most poor and a virtuous cycle. A bottom-up, distributed form of capitalism if you like, which shows an uncanny resemblance to P2P processes, and this is why we consider this position to be netarchical. The problem with these solutions is that they often aim to ‘capitalize’ everything, and do not have any regard for the surviving forms of the commons which are still very much alive in certain areas of the South, destroying the traditional social fabric. The profit requirement – and one cannot see how the current 15% profit requirement of financial investors and multinational corporations can lead to any permanent engagement of these forces in B.O.P projects.

Jock Gill of the Greater Democracy weblog has criticized BOP schemes for these reasons, and has offered an alternative approach: namely citizen-to-citizen or ‘edge to edge’ development partnerships. Whereby collectives of individuals with capital, would directly provide collectives of individuals without capital, with the necessary amounts of small capital, and without imposing the profit requirement. Such practices are already widespread within the U.S. themselves, in the form of Gifting Circles, whereby local groups collate gifting money of its members, study options for giving together, and decide on appropriate local initiatives to support.”

A contribution from Ryan Lanham:

” The problem of capital (real capital is money not stuff) is that there are uncertain returns. In the past, the uncertainly is managed (by management) and the fee for managing that risk is a percentage of profit. Now, and with the newly planned Internet 2.0 due in about 10 years, we have almost instant access to demand and information for thousands of non-commodity industries…

My guess is that most profit now is due to marketing risk. Take away major media costs (and the fastest shrinking industry in the US now is advertising) and you will eliminate even more profit-earning risk prospects. Consequently, fewer and fewer investments will be logical. Instead, people will co-op. The last barrier is commodities. If peak oil makes transportation expensive, that will shatter fast. “

A republication from January 2006, by Jorge Ferrer, and still the best formulation of the basic metaphysical principle informing peer to peer relationships, i.e. Equipotentiality:

“An integrative and embodied spirituality would effectively undermine the current model of human relations based on comparison, which easily leads to competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy, conflict, and hatred. When individuals develop in harmony with their most genuine vital potentials, human relationships characterized by mutual exchange and enrichment would naturally emerge because people would not need to project their own needs and lacks onto others. More specifically,

It also would bring a renewed sense of significance and excitement to our interactions because we would be genuinely open to the fact that not only can everybody learn something important from us, but we can learn from them as well. In sum, an integral development of the person would lead to a horizontalization of love. We would see others not as rivals or competitors but as unique embodiments of the Mystery, in both its immanent and transcendent dimension, who could offer us something that no one else could offer and to whom we could give something that no one else could give.”

Peer projects do not operate in strict hierarchies of command and control, but rather in heterarchies; they operate “in a much looser [environment] which…allows for the existence of multiple teams of participants working simultaneously in a variety of possibly opposing directions” (Bruns, 2008, p. 26). According to Bruns (2008) peer projects’ heterarchies are not simply adhocracies, but ad hoc meritocracies which, however, are at risk of transforming themselves into more inflexible hierarchies. In a nutshell, peer governance’s main characteristics are the equipotentiality, i.e. the fact that in a peer project all the participants have an equal ability to contribute, although that not all the participants have the same skills and abilities (Bauwens, 2005a, and 2005b); the heterarchy as a form of community; and the holoptism i.e. the ability for any part to know the whole (Deleuze, 1986).

Stadler (2008) submits that leadership in peer projects is not egalitarian, but meritocratic: “Everyone is free, indeed, to propose a contribution, but the people who run the project are equally free to reject the contribution outright”, as “the core task of managing a Commons is to ensure not just the production of resources, but also to prevent its degradation from the addition of low quality material”. Further, benevolent dictatorships are common in peer projects (Bauwens, 2005a, and 2005b; Malcolm, 2008). For instance, these can be found in Linux project where Linus Torvalds is the benevolent dictator (Malcolm, 2008) or in Wikipedia where Jimmy Wales is also the benevolent dictator. Coffin (2006) refers to the necessity for a benevolent dictator (who typically is one of the founders of the project) adding that the foundation developers and the early adopters set the project ethos, as well. The founder, along with the first members, upholds the right to fork out. Axel Bruns (interview with Bruns, 2009) defines the benevolent dictators “as ones of several heterarchical leaders of the community, who have risen to their positions through consistent constructive contribution and stand and fall with the quality of their further performance”. It is obvious that through such leadership roles, they may gain the ability to push through unpopular decisions. So, as Bruns notes, “if they abuse that power, theirs become a malicious leadership” and what we should expect at this point is “a substantial exodus of community members”. Therefore, following Bruns’ narrative, “the continued existence of the project at that moment would depend very much on whether the number of exiting members can be made up for in both quality and quantity by incoming new participants”.

In addition, Coffin (2006) mentions some characteristics of the peer governance of successful open source communities. The membership is open and widespread premised on participation. The collaboration among the members of the project is geographically dispersed, asynchronous and organized in networks. Moreover, the project is transparent and the dialogues among the participants are recorded, and the materials of the project are subjected to open review. There is a mechanism for institutional history, as well as the setting of a compelling foundational artifact around which the production and the participation will be organized is crucial.

I’m republishing a dialogue I had with David Bollier in January 2006, responding to a set of his questions:

David Bollier: How will P2P culture “wash over” and transform existing market-based identities?

Michel Bauwens: My belief is the following: that before a system collapses, it will exhibit the worst of its features. Thus, just as we are witnessing the marketisation, monetization, and commodification of everything, there is the birth of a counter-reaction, the emergence of the seed of the new. Network society itself, is not an answer to market totalitarianism, in fact, it exacerbates many of the current problems. Peer to peer, when harnessed within the for-profit system, seems to lead to an exacerbation of the work culture, as can be witnessed by many who work in the new IT sectors. It has been described by Pekka Himanen as the Fridayisation of Sunday, i.e. the values of the work week are being applied to private and intimate life. But when it creates its own logic, within a context of for-benefit instead of for profit, of production for use value instead of for exchange value, as in the hacker culture of the free software movement, it leads to the free self-unfolding of the individual, who can work at his own pace as democratically-governed cooperative producers. Market identities and sharing identities reside in the same person, ourselves. To survive materially, we need to take on a market identity, but in our free time, an increasing number are taking on sharing identities. In some ways, the exacerbation of market identities actually reflects a deep desire to get away with it, as it was with many youngsters in the dotcom boom: let’s cash in so that we can stop working as soon as possible. As I have tried to argue, the shift towards P2P practices reflects deep changes in ontology (ways of feeling and being), modes of knowing (epistemology), and constellation of values (axiology). The aim of modernity was to “individualize” everything, but we have achieved a stage where further hyper-individualization has become counterproductive. So what we see happening on the internet, and what I call peer to peer, is the “being in relationship” of everything. We are not returning to premodern pre-individual wholism, but to a form of sharing by highly individuated humans. The sharing is in part predicated on the abundance created by the current political economy: an abundance of mass intellectuality, an abundance of low-entry productive machinery, etc.. Negatively speaking: current complexity can no longer be managed without network structures, and these network structures, when the are distributed and not merely decentralized, generate peer to peer social processes. So the key question is: how do we create the conditions, within ourselves and in our institutions, to support the sharing identity as compared to the market identity. The evidence points to the fact that P2P is not a political program of a minority (not a simple left/right division), but the very direction in which an increasing number of humans want to go. So, though we may be for or against capitalism, I’m not sure that the sharing identities (what I would call â˜cooperative individualism”, should be set the market identities. Many programmers move from one field to the other, and do not hold at against anyone of the programming community, who cashes in from the reputation build in FS work. A more general answer is the following: modernity was predicated on the universal, on looking for the sameness in everyone, but we are now seeking for the “common”, a common object of desire. For example, if you are married to a very different type of partner than yourself, let’s say Democrat vs. Republican, you can still be united by the common desire to construct a family, to have an intimate life based on love. So you can bridge the intersubjective gaps by focusing on common goals and objects, i.e. producing use value together. This is why is doesn’t matter, in free software production, whether you are a right-wing libertarian or a left wing anarcho-communist.

2. The clash of different intersubjectivities seems so unbridgeable — and at the root of political polarization on IP and Internet issues. Do you have any thoughts on how the two radically different worldviews might be reconciled or bridged in some way?

MB: I don’t think the different intersubjectivities are so unbridgeable. The current campaigns against filesharing are the work of concrete material interests, who are defending their monopolistic rents, using the political class and the media that they are funding. They are a minority (Paul Ray, in new research, suggests the neoliberal consensus is only supported by 17% of the U.S. population, if I remember this correctly) On the other hand, a radical minority might want to do away with any and all IP protection. But the vast majority of online users support solutions that combine both the possibility of sharing, and that can support individual artists. The problem is not one of convincing a small minority of interest holders but of developing political power so that the majority can be heard, but I agree that this is a difficult problem that goes at the heart of the current crisis of democracy, beholden as it is to corporate interests. A strong commons (or P2P or “open access” movement is a prerequisite for this, but we can see it growing and interconnecting worldwide. It requires the realization by the millions of practicioners of P2P that in the current system, their rights are threatened. I should also add that we see the emergence of a new group within the system: not the owners of media, but the makers of the participative platforms. These new types of companies derive their value from the free flow of information between participants, and are mostly supportive of P2P-induced changes, and equally opposed to the attempts at enclosure.

3. One key arena for resolving the epic struggle between the old paradigm of power and social organization, and the new Internet-based one, is politics and public policy. Yet it is an open question whether dinosaur-corporations will be able to successfully use law and public policy to *thwart* the emergence of a P2P/commons regime and culture. Do you think the technology, as socially embodied, will inexorably transform conventional political power — or does P2P culture exist merely at the suffrance of conventional political power, which will eventually find it too threatening to let it survive?

MB: I do not belong to the pessimists in this area, those that continually predict the end of P2P culture. I see the whole trust of the social processes and technology moving inexorable in the direction of more participation. It will definitely require a major adaptation of the political and economic system, as did the print revolution which eventually led to a wholly new system. The question is how far that change will go. In an earlier essay, I outlined three scenarios: 1) the first is predicated on the use of P2P technologies but on the defeat of the P2P social movement; this is the information feudalism scenario as explained by Jeremy Rifkin. It predicts that traditional private property will make way for generalized licensing under strict conditions set by the owners of the media; 2) the second scenario is a peaceful co-existence, a continuation of the current system. In such a system there is a continuing shift from the profit sphere to the sharing sphere, and back again, much as free software programmers are doing today. But it is predicated on the continued stability of the current system, something which is very unlikely given the current rate of destruction of the biosphere and the instability generating increased inequalities. I’m pretty much like George Soros or Immanuel Wallerstein in this regard, I just don’t see this happening. Rest the third scenario. In my essay, I try to show how four types of intersubjective relations have co-existed over time: reciprocity-based “equality matching” or the gift economy, dominant in tribal times; authority ranking, dominant in the tribute-based agricultural civilizations; market pricing, dominant today. In each of these three broad eras, all four types existed, but they were dominated, in-formed by the dominant mode. The fourth type is called “Communal Shareholding” by Alan Page Fiske. It is the mode whereby a common resource is accessible to all, and all can contribute, without accounting or reciprocity. It was the case in the tribal era, in the communal land of the peasants of the middle ages, and today, it is experiencing a revival through the digital commons which are created through peer production. It is the mode that is best suited for the emerging dominance of immaterial production, a necessary adjunct to distributed networks which are again becoming the dominant organizational form, and can be expanded in every case where capital can be distributed (and this is not just a technical, but a political question). Thus, I believe that we are moving towards a society, which will still have a market and state, but which will be in-formed and re-formed by the dominant P2P relational dynamic, its mode of production, governance and property/distribution. Is this an autonomic process, no. But it is a very very strong undercurrent, supported by the logic of contemporary production and social organization. A conscious social movement, a kind of merger of the commons, open access/open source, and P2P-participative trends, would greatly strengthen this underlying current.

4. What successors and complements to the GPL, open source licenses and Creative Commons licenses need to be invented, esp. for commercial contexts?

MB: This is a technical question, and I am not an expert in it. But we are witnessing a very creative era for the development of open source business models, and the appropriate hybrid licences. The key is to give people freedom to move from one sphere to another, as they see fit.

5. What legal mechanisms or policy regimes can protect collective wealth and sovereignty in the P2P universe, esp. if a reactionary market order is hellbent on enclosing the commons? Or will such “enclosure business models” be easily discarded as archaic & dysfunctional once network infrastructure and culture reach a sufficient scale and cultural acceptance?

MB: The GPL and CC-like licenses, which I call peer property, and share the 2 fundamental attributes of recognition of individual authorship but coupled to the “share-alike” peering principles, are already very strong safeguards. The fact that Lessig complains about license proliferation is actually a witness to the fact that many people are applying its core principles to many new areas. Appropriate governance mechanisms must be found for the protection of physical commons, which do not share the feature of abundance. (I’m thinking of your friend Peter Barnes’ suggestion of trusts as forms of governance in these sectors) As you are suggesting: peer to peer processes of production and governance have very strong advantages: they are more productive, more democratic in their governance (create more happiness for the producers), and create a more generalized and fair distribution of their products. Thus peer production is much in the same position as was capitalist production in the feudal area. It requires ever more restrictive, repressive measures to stop the tidal wave of innovation, which seems only able to slow down the process, but not fundamentally reverse it. But for Commons and P2P advocates, offensive strategies are also needed to speed up and ease the transition. Fighting for open access and open access wherever we can; make sure the infrastructures are really “open”, fighting the second enclosure legislation and their attempts to create artificial scarcities, are certainly important.

6. Do the differences between P2P (as an efficient way to create public goods) and the commons (as a social model of governance and resource-management) matter? Or are these differences merely interesting?

MB: I think P2P is the social dynamic, which arises wherever distributed networks are emerging, in areas where linear and hierarchical organizational modes are no longer adequate to deal with the new complexities. And what they are producing is a digital commons. Thus P2P refers to the mode of production, while the Commons is the instititutional format that it is increasingly taking. They are different facets of the same phenomenon. They are very intertwined but the Commons is important in terms of institutional reform. Finally, open access and open source movements refer, in my mind, to the conditions of success of both other processes. There is some kind of triangular relationship between the three phenomena.

7. How stable, extensible and protectible is P2P, esp. given its dependency on the market order (and on public policies that are congenial with large, backward-looking media/content companies)?

I don’t think there is any doubt that P2P social processes are everywhere springing up, both within and without the market. Some old market and state forces opposed it, some other forces partially support it while trying to subsume it totally under the market. I see however, no realistic way in which a series of processes which are more productive, in certain circumstances, than firms; more democratically governed, and more efficiently distributed, can be stopped in the long run. P2P arises wherever distributed networks are adopted, and is dependent on such distribution: the distribution of intellect, a function on the general educational level of the population and the network infrastructures; the distribution of fixed capital and the means of production, i.e. the general availability of computers and means of desktop manufacturing; and the distribution of financial capital.

Some of these are easier to achieve than others. But I would like to turn your argument around. You stress the dependency of P2P on the market, but the contemporary market simply cannot function without the externalities provided by cooperating minds, which are no longer confined “within the enterprise” but diffused throughout the social body. Thus, trends towards participation are vital for the further development of the market. Since a great deal of peer production is indeed beyond exchange value and difficult to monetize, it would make great sense that the corporate world would give something back for the free use of such externalities, and the most sensible thing to do would be the institution of the basic income, which would give an enormous boost to the expansion of social production. Future society needs a commons sector that is at least as strong (as argued by Peter Barnes), if not stronger (as argued by me) than the private sector.

8. I think that “axiology” — value constellations — will be a real pivot in understanding how the future will unfold. Socially generated wealth is richer, more diversified in kind, and stable — yet it is not necessarily monetizable, portable or publicly recognized as “value,” and so it remains in the shadows, culturally speaking, and is therefore vulnerable to enclosure. But these two “value propositions” are rarely juxtaposed. I think it’s important to put socially based value on thesame epistemological footing as market (exchange) value, or at least to dissect the origins of our sense of “value.” Our cultural sense of “market value” needs to be de-constructed and then re-constructed in light of new market-exchange realities.

Yes, I completely agree with this, but here also I think we can be fairly optimistic as we see these value constellations change, particularly in the new generations. See my comment on quarternary economics, where I discuss value.
9. Identity and reputation commons software protocols may be critical drivers of the transformation you envision. Can you say more about that?

I’m not sure I can be convinced that such technological developments are as crucial as they are said to be. The reason is that, first of all, P2P processes function very well already without them, and secondly, that reputations and identity are not easily transferable amongst projects,the whole process is very contextual, you may be very good in one environment, and less so in another. I think we should resist the urge to apply purely instrumental reason, what’s in it for me, strategically and tactically, to the new commons, where such reasoning is subsumed in the larger field of cooperation. Communal reputation and rating systems are more important for successful cooperation than individualist technologies. The reason is that the former are necessary means to avoid a power transcendence, i.e. they avoid that a minority can represent the common and place itself above it, they are an insurance against private appropriation. I think this is why we see a rapid development of the former, while the latter technologies fail to take off. The market answers the question, what’s in it for me, and needs individualist technologies, P2P processes answer the question, what’s in it for us, and need communal technologies.

10. In your mind, how does P2P compare to prior theories of democratic production and governance — say Marxism or socialism or Jeffersonian democracy? My sense is that P2P is a more humanistic and fluid mode of value-creation than materially based Marxist theories, but it’s hard to speak of it in isolation because it depends so critically upon market structures.

Not being an American, I don’t know enough about the Jeffersonian tradition, but it seems to me that there is a crucial difference with the mainstream socialist tradition. This tradition confused the common and the collective. P2P is based on the commons, while socialism looked at the state. Socialism was also based on power transcendence with party and state officials separating from the popular movement, both in its reformist and Stalinist wings. P2P is an emergence of the social field, of civil society if you like, which has already very quickly developed techniques to avoid such power transcendence, and is in essence non-representational.

11. You leapfrog over the pitched IP debates of today, especially those involving P2P music downloads. Do you consider these mere epiphenomena on the road to P2P transcendence? It would be nice to have some discussion of this terrain, if only to situate it in the larger, big-picture trend analysis.

No, I don’t consider them mere epiphenomena, it’s only that in my work, I have a preference for the long term, and they are enough people covering the news already. Filesharing is an enormous training ground for P2P processes, and in this sense, very very important. Through filesharing, the young generation is practically confronted with the benefits of peer processes, it becomes a natural part of their value constellations. The attacks of the old order against it are also a crucial part in the raising of their political and social consciousness: what they consider natural, to share amongst friends, is considered a crime, so as they are under attack, they start opening up to the broader import of P2P as a central organisating and value principle in their life.

12. Will the great participatory networks/platforms like Google, eBay and Yahoo become evil empires because of their scale and monopolistic control, or will they be constitutionally unable to abuse power because of their open, participatory premises? At the root of this question, I think, is how sustainable the P2P paradigm is if the “big players” decide at some point that open platforms don’t suit their interests any more? Put another way, is “net neutrality” vulnerable or it is inevitable?

This is a very difficult question to answer. Netarchical capitalists, who enable and exploit the participatory platforms, are in this double position: they are beholden to the community, and they are beholden to their shareholders. So they are forced to follow a balancing act. Their temptations to short term greed, have to be balanced against the possibility that if they go all the way, their community may well abandon them. I’m not denying their strength, their proto-monopolistic strivings, as has been argued by Jaron Lanier’s Antigoras essay, but in a heavily distributed environment, the community is not powerless to change, so in the end I think both sides take pragmatic views on this.

Competitive pressures make it likely that corporations will continue to opt for “the reassertion of hierarchy and market rather than community” (p. 65). But over time, it will become evermore evident that interdivisional and inter-firm networking are crucial for competitiveness. As this proceeds, advantages will accrue especially to those firms that can operate according to higher forms of trust.

Inspired through the insights of his TIMN theory, i.e. which distinguishes a historical succession of tribal, institution, market or network based societies, David Ronfeldt looks at the following essay, and comes up with interesting critical remarks.

See: the paper by Paul Adler’s and Charles Heckscher’s “Towards Collaborative Community” (2005 — a chapter for their book The Firm as a Collaborative Community, 2007

Excerpt:

“Adler and Heckscher are convinced but not optimistic about the emergence of collaborative community. It — in particular, the ethic I just summarized above — will not be an easy or natural choice in the business world for quite a while yet. It may take a generation or longer to develop. There will be plenty of setbacks. And the likeliest paths will be halting zigzags.

Today, for societies on the verge of +N, it makes sense that there is/will be a long, intermediate, hybrid phase before quadriform T+I+M+N societies truly take shape. It also makes sense that, this time around, the most prominent hybridizations occur in the interstices between +M and +N — the very areas observed by Adler and Heckscher, as well as by theorists devoted to the growth of a peer-based information commons. What may come after that — the true +N realm — is what interests me the most.”