The original interview is also available in Italian here.

A must read:

“Simone Cicero: First of all, we would like to know from you directly what’s the status of Wikispeed, and get some info about the collaboration with Open Source Ecology. Also, in this framework, how’s the Extreme Manufacturing platform and process growing these days.

Joe Justice: These are three questions back to back, let’s see if I can answer in an clear way. First of all, let me introduce Wikispeed in a one minute and a half version.

Wikispeed builds ultra efficient cars and we do this with seven days development cycles using agile methodologies. Those methodologies include several aspects, for example about managing distributed teams – like with SCRUM – or methods to ensure an high quality bar and focused work – much like Extreme programming and Test Driven Development as part of XP – that we reworked for the manufacturing process labeling it Extreme Manufacturing.

Traditional manufacturing runs in 3 to 25 years long development cycles: this means you can go to a Porsche dealer and buy a brand new Porsche 911 car and that would be the best engineers thought you might want 24 years ago and, if we stuck with this example, Porsche recently announced that the current Porsche 911 wil be with us for the next 14 years.

In Wikispeed we are aiming for mass customization, very rapid development and technologies and efficiencies that haven’t yet existed, that are fully gamechanging and not just and incremental evolution of old and sometimes defunct technologies.

To do that we iterate on seven days development cycles, that means that we can change every aspect of the car every seven days. This is possible through modularity: the car splits into eight modules that are loosely coupled so we can change one and not change the others.

Wikispeed is missionized to rapidly solve problems for social good. We don’t just make cars. I recently gave a talk on methods for vaccine distribution to help eradicate Polio: we worked with a group that develops low cost medical centers and communites for this and we’ve done significant work with them.

Currently, the status is that Wikispeed developed some efficiency proof of concepts: the best is a car that is secure and runs for more that a hundred miles per gallon but we launched an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaing (Ed: last night!) for Wikispeed to build commuter cars that people wants to drive every day and are ultra efficient and that can be manufactured at ultra low cost.

We do this with OSE (Open Source Ecology). OSE gives us the platform to share ours designs, our budgets, our build practices and our maintenance videos with the world so that people can build their own ultra low cost commuter cars.

Imagine in a world when your commuter car goes more than 100 Miler per Gallon in the United States cycles, that is about 1.5 liters per 100 km in Japan cycles for example, and imagine that you could maintain it by yourself – if you are inclined to do it – or that is very inexpensive to maintain if you’ve someone else to maintain it for you. Imagine it to be modular and changeable to follow your life changes, from a convertible to a sedan to a pick up truck, and that’s exactly what we’re bringing to everyone right now and OSE is giving us the platform to share it with as many people as possible.

XM is the metodology to allow other business to make this changes as quickly as wikispeed is prototyping. XM is an agile methodology, it takes the best methodologies as applied by the best software teams and extrapolates them to make them applicable to every industry. In particular we’re applying this to R&D, physical engineering and physical manufacturing and we think that such a process can be used for finance, insurance, energy, law, community management, residential and commercial construction and other businesses as well.

Extreme manufacturing takes the best practices for distributed team management, frugal engineering and frugal design and applies back to the physical world.

The status of that is available on the wiki of OSE as it evolves and explained in videos and I think we’ll have a book and set of lectures soon.

SC: … “Who’s gonna finance this”. … I mean, this is a community driven approach and your project is actually fueled by volunteers: understanding the role of “capital”, of financing, and the investment phase needed is key to understanding what you can actually produce with this approach.

[Joe Justice]: When you produce you need roughly three kind of things: materials, machinery, and person hours. We have volunteers for person hours, and we have donated machines and donated materials – or small amounts of capitals that led us to buy those. With the indiegogo capital campaign we are going to obtain more materials to be able to prototype more rapidly and increase our innovation pace, we are going to acquire faster machinery and that increases our pace of innovation again. We’re also going to be able to finance some graduate schools stipends – this is not a job, it pays too little for being it – that will allow this graduate school students to work almost full time with the team passionately and very quickly and this will end up in an increasing the number of iterations we can achieve, eventually increasing our pace of innovation once again.

So you see capital helps us to improve in all the three things that team wikispeed uses to move more quickly and if you think that we’re already moving at a pace of innovation that – in some ways measuring it – is 10000 % faster than industry norms you can understand what we’re talking about. And we have lots of fun doing it!

[Simone Cicero]: Amazing, we all believe that this wide efficiency differences will make this approach the winning one in the long term. The point is, thinking about the world in say five years, or at least in the future, when this will be potentially the de-facto standard, there will be way less profit in the world, and less traditional money involved in the production of goods isn’t it?

[Joe Justice]: The direction we’re trending is that the same amount of profit will be generated in the world but will be generated by everyone, in a way that is more equitable – in an equitable distribution of wealth mode.

So instead of us going into a traditional employer that keeps a larger percent of our work, and replicating the same approach with people that work under us – as a country we do it for counties that support us and they do the same for countries under them – instead of that, everyone will have an equitable share that is proportional to the amount of value he contributes to the world. We’re not there yet but we’re moving closer: open source hardware movements are making this more possible than ever before.

In addition, with these open source movements, we’re innovating more quicker and that’s compatible with the current financial structure: this allows all companies to have product development cycles that are much more quicker than they are now. But then what we are seeing independently from that, is the democratization of precision tooling: when people can buy machines – or build their own – that have a level of quality that is comparable to mass manufacturing. Suddenly you have the opportunity for a garage manufacturing revolution where people can make a new type of shoes or a new type of car and actually make it via viable competitive components in the marketplace today and that decentralization of manufacturing starts with decentralization of the supply chain and of profiteering.

And if the same level of profit exist in the world we have now the opportunity of equitably distribute that across the world, and the differences between a third world and a developed world country will then reduce.

Certainly there’s the possibility that traditional big business can act to impede that but we didn’t see it until now, on the contrary we’re seeing encouragement by these businesses and political bodies: we’ve seen poor protectionism movements and instead more embracement because rapid development products are appealing.

[Simone Cicero]: I’m not completely convinced that we can seek for embracement from the traditional economic structures since it seems to me that the inefficiencies in the production systems today have been crafted with the aim of actually generating profits from inefficiencies. The exploitation of inefficient work and your process are on very different sides: by increasing efficiency you make actually less work needed for doing things. Another implication of the theories and practices behing XM could be that there will be less paid work and much more socially contributed work and people will be much more involved in actually building and tinkering in the production of their own goods – so they will actually contribute “unpaid” work in directly into building their own things. This means that places where this kind of activities will happen locally are to appear in the future so probably there will be less factories and more labs where I can go and produce or repair things on my own. So the question is: how will these places be made, will they come out from the Fablabs/hackerspaces/makerspaces concept?

[Joe Justice]: When we have things like Arduino, that is absolutely Italian – so you see Italy, as well as every country, is leading this revolution – and we have hackerspaces where people can create with Arduino and sister platforms – such as netduino – in the field of electronics; and we have Fablabs where people can go and produce physical equipments we are coming closer to the capabilities of traditional manufacturing.

But there is a point you raised that I don’t see, at least in the nearest future: will traditional manufacturing disappear and will people be involved themselves directly in the manufacturing process of their own goods? There’s a trend towards localization and community availability of manufacturing that we haven’t seen since the trade guilds days – particularly in Europe – and with these available pieces of manufacturing like the Global Village Construction Set (GVCS), the hackerspaces and fablabs maybe someone in your community will build your next bread owen or window garden, your next cat feeder or your next pair of pants. It might not be you directly – since I’m not that savvy with sheet types, shape templates and so on to make excellent pants – but maybe someone in my community could go to the hackerspace or fablab and make a wonderful pair of cost competive pants and I might acquire those locally.

So I dont’ see me making all the things I need, surely some – I make my own car now! – and by making this open source and modular, someone else can make it without going through the landscape of all, for example, the automotive problems: they maybe can just make a better seat belt – by iterating only the interior module – and make it available to the public domain.

In other words you maybe will not be involved in producing your entire new car – at least not very soon – but everyone might be customizing it and some people maybe will be making some meaningful improvements and maybe everyone will be buying a locally crafted car that is made from locally sustainable materials in the local fablab. I do see this as a fairly near opportunity that will co-exist with traditional manufacturing and eventually be growing in market share.

[Simone Cicero]: Do you think that we will be able to build everything with this approach? I mean, when I think to consumer electronics – for example cellphones – or to the next quad-core chipset I see very complicated processes.

[Joe Justice]: Well, the GVCS, is made of fifty items, our car is just one of those, that represent all the items needed to grant the current level of comfort and livelihood, and once this will be complete – and this is being prototyped right now by OSE, headquartered in the Factor’e’Farm in Missouri in the US – people will be able to build almost everything. There’s not a machine to make cellphones in the GVCS but there’s a machine that can make CNC printed circuitboards and there’s a machine that can make injection molded cases and from those people can make their own cellphones.

I was reading a blog before you and I talk, about people using a CNC printer – that cost about three hundred dollars to build – to print chips, whit two different printing heads one for plastics and one for circuitry. Obviously we can still not print core i7 miniaturized size circuitry but we are getting closer to this and by thanks to the open source community we’ll be able to iterate and improve so I do see us, able to produce our next quad core CPU and I do see us able to reduce and reduce and reduce the amount of energy needed to do this.

[Simone Cicero]: Is there something we are used to have these days that is really hard to imagine to be operated in this cooperative and sustainable way. Let’s think about large chemical factories or planes, giant ships etc.. Is there any possibility that we’ll end up understanding that these kind of goods are not sustainable anymore and we should learn how to live without having access anymore to them in the future?

[Joe Justice]: From my experience and understanding I share your view. Many consumption trends and lifestiles we have developed will be subject to radical change in case we want to inhabit the planet for more years in the future. We have been around since 250 thousand years and when the first home sapiens came out there were less than one million of us and about the same number of chimpanzees. Now we have around 600 thousand chimpanzees and more than six billion humans. Maybe the number of sustainable humans on the planet is about one million or even less – given the changes in the environment that we made so far – and we have now an elaborate network of machinery and chemicals extraction to provide for that number of humans. Unfortunately those processes are based on resources that are limited or, at least, that we consume with a pace that is faster than the pace those resources are replenished. We need absolutely to develop more energy and resource efficient ways of production and maybe local production and local manufacturing coupled with the international network of ideas is the solution to adapt to a more sustainable way of living. Maybe, thanks to open source development we can make a difference, instead of waiting that this solutions are developed in the closed of traditional businesses, and the important think is that we move in this direction, that is worth investigating.

But back into your point, I don’t see us continuing living exactly as we do now, and replicating the exact same level for example of chemical processing or goods procurement, but I see the open source, local manufacturing and local sourcing processes making us able to iterate quickly enough that we may land in something sustainable in time to take care of our planet.

[Simone Cicero]: It seems that, to enable these transition, we are going to create a substantially huge body of knowledge: we must improve almost everything and my question is about whose the owner of this body of knowledge that we’re going to create collaboratively. How will we manage this library of commons that will be used across the world to produce goods that we’ll be using everyday? Do you think that we’ll see, as it happens for the software, for example with the Mozilla, Apache or Linux foundation, not for profit institutions taking care of these design process phase enable us to design the next wikiboat, wikiwashingmachine and so on? What’s the role of these players?

[Joe Justice]: If the information required to improve these materials is not publicly available and noone is allowed to access this information we simply wont achieve the advantage so, with regards to Wikispeed, in terms of availability these designs are totally available to anyone. On the other hand Wikispeed takes the role to ensure this kind of products pass the regulatory testing that makes this products actually usable: without this our car wouldn’t even be allowed to go on the streets, that’s why we carry on safety and regulatory testing. That could be a godd example of the role that these organization can have (Ed: Wikispeed is a for profit business although it follows a substantial ethic and revolutionary manifesto you can check it out here)

Apart from the design, the most important body of knowledge we’re building right now is the process itself. Imagine a world where everything we do takes 1% less time: waiting in the doctors office, filing our taxes, filling up gasoline in our car or in general, innovate in our lives.

XM, by mutuating processes by the most performing software teams in the world, promises even a little bit more and developing this process might be our greatest social good.”

Nanotechnology and Global Equality, by Dr Donald Maclurcan, and Nanotechnology and Global Sustainability, edited by Dr Maclurcan and Dr Natalia Radywyl, build the case that global prosperity now demands innovation without economic growth, and nanotechnology shows such innovation is possible.

“Practices like ‘open source nano-innovation’ offer game-changing avenues for bypassing inhibitive start-up costs and ensuring scientific knowledge is freely shared,” said Dr Maclurcan, an Honorary Research Fellow with UTS’s Institute for Nanoscale Technology.

“For the first time in modern history, the right ingredients have surfaced for us to seriously consider innovating without economic growth,” he said.

A US $254 billion market in 2009, recent data – outlined in the books – shows an expected rise to $2.5 trillion by 2015. More than 60 countries are engaging with nanotechnology research and development at a national level, including 16 ‘developing’ countries.

“Nanotechnology research around the world is largely focussed on creating unnecessary products that ensure big gains for multinational corporations and bigger losses for our ecosystems,” Dr Maclurcan said.

“In a world with biophysical limits and vast injustices, our survival depends on the redirection of science towards human need, not human greed.”

The books were officially launched last week by Dr Vijoleta Braach-Maksvytis, former head of nanotechnology at the CSIRO.

The government has drafted in the Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales to help make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.

The initiative, which has the backing of No 10 and should be up and running in two years, will be announced by the universities and science minister, David Willetts, in a speech to the Publishers Association on Wednesday.

The move will embolden what has been dubbed the “academic spring” – a growing campaign among academics and research funders for open access in academic publishing. They want to unlock the results of research from behind the lucrative paywalls of journals controlled by publishing companies.

Almost 11,000 researchers have signed up to a boycott of journals owned by the huge academic publisher Elsevier. Subscriptions to the thousands of research journals can cost a big university library millions of pounds each year – costs that have started to bite as budgets are squeezed. Harvard University, frustrated by the rising costs of journal subscriptions, recently encouraged its faculty members to make their research freely available through open access journals and to resign from publications that keep articles behind paywalls.

“Giving people the right to roam freely over publicly funded research will usher in a new era of academic discovery and collaboration, and will put the UK at the very forefront of open research,” Willetts writes in the Guardian.

Willetts said he recognised the value that academic publishers brought to the research process. “But, as the world changes, both cultural and technological change, their business model is going to change. I want to work with the Publishers Association as we move to the new model.”

Wales is a vocal supporter of free and open access to information on the web and he was brought in by No 10 earlier this year as an unpaid adviser to government on crowdsourcing and opening up policymaking. On open access, he will assist the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills and the UK Research Councils to develop new ways to store and distribute research data and articles.

He will initially advise the research councils on its £2m Gateway to Research project, a website that will act as a portal, linking to publicly funded UK research all over the web. “Jimmy Wales can make sure that we maximise the collaborative potential, the added value from that portal,” Willetts added. “Wikipedia has become a crucial part of our cultural landscape and having the advice from the person who created Wikipedia as we embark on this big project will be incredibly helpful.”

Wales will also feed ideas into the work of Dame Janet Finch, a former vice-chancellor of Keele University, who was asked by Willetts to convene academics, librarians and publishers to work out how an open-access scheme for publicly funded research might work in the UK. Her recommendations to government are expected in June this year.

A government source said that, in the longer term, Wales would help to set up the next generation of open-access platforms for British researchers. “He’s also going to be advising us on the format in which academic papers should be published and data standards. One of the big opportunities is, right now, a journal article might be published but the underlying data isn’t and we want to move into a world where the data is published alongside an article in an open format, available free of charge.”

This initiative is most likely to result in a central repository that will host all research articles that result from public funding. The aim is that, even if an academic publishes their work in a traditional subscription journal, a version of their article would simultaneously appear on the freely available repository. The repository would also have built-in tools to share, comment and discuss articles.

One of the biggest challenges in achieving full open access for research will be the resistance of journal publishers to changing their lucrative business models. The majority of the world’s scientific research, estimated at about 1.5m new articles a year, is published in journals owned by a small number of large publishing companies including Elsevier, Springer and Wiley.

Scientists submit manuscripts to the journals, which are sent out for peer review before publication. The work is then available to other researchers by subscription, usually through their libraries. Publishers of the academic journals, which can cost universities up to £16,500 a year each to access, argue the price is necessary to sustain a high-quality peer review process.

David Prosser, executive director of Research Libraries UK, which represents academic libraries, welcomed the plans in principle and said the details of their implementation would be crucial.

A parallel system that runs alongside the journals might be difficult to operate, he said. “What would an author put into this parallel system, are they putting in a different type of research output other than the paper?”

Making research data standardised and more available would be valuable, he added. “The worry is that there’s all this data out there and it’s in lots of different formats and it’s not interoperable and it’s not being archived properly and it’s going to disappear and there’s a danger of a data black hole. The fact that the government is talking about doing something for that is absolutely fabulous.”

Platforms can be characterized as resting on already existing networked communication systems, but also as developing discreet spaces and affordances, often using ‘apps’ to circumvent any need to access them via the Internet or Web. For this issue of Culture Machine we are seeking papers that explore the nature and distinctive aspects of the ‘platform’: as something that can be positioned as more than just a neutral space of communication; and as a complex technology with distinct affordances that have powerful political, economic and social interests at stake. In this respect the platform constitutes a zone of contestation between, for example, different formations and configurations of capital; social movements; new kinds of activist networks; open source and proprietary software design. Platforms also constitute spaces of struggle between mass movements and governments, users and the extractors of value, visibility and invisibility: witness the various debates over the role of ‘social media’ in the Arab Spring, anti-austerity, student and occupy movements. Such struggles entail a compelling intersection between technology and design, capital, multitude, the democratization of technology and ‘subversive rationalization’.

The platform represents not just a question of software and control, then; it also connects to wider social struggles in the sense that ‘platform’  can refer to a ‘political platform’, and can thus take on the agenda setting or framing role of political discourse more generally. Accordingly, this special issue will look to understand ‘platform politics’ as a broad social assemblage, complex or form of life. Linking particular platforms across the molecular and molar, it will think about platform politics as a distinct new context of power operating at the intersection of technological development, software design, cognitive/communicative capitalism, new forms of social movement and resistance, and the attempts to contain them by the exiting democracies. As such, platform politics requires a distinct mode of engagement, which this special issue of Culture Machine will endeavour to encourage and provide.

We invite contributions on topics such as:

• Protocols as machinery of the platform – its common language, including ideas of control and/or the possibilities and limitations of open, non-proprietorial platforms.

• The specific relationship between networks and platforms (including the discussion of whether the former are being subsumed by the latter), and distribution vs centralization/aggregation — not least in terms of user created content and content management systems (code politics of algorithms, and the use of APIs).

• The question as to whether a process of enclosure is taking place via the struggle over the creation and expropriation of ‘network value’, or whether it entails a more parasitical engagement with, and enhancement of, the existing network architectures.

• Visibility/invisibility: platforms as political spaces to be seen/heard, or indeed tactically escaped and eluded.

• Resistance: how the above described issues relate to the potential for cultural, political, social and economic praxis, which in turns opens up a space from which to address recent global events. (See, for example, RIMs (Blackberry Messaging’s) enclosure, which ironically creates spaces of resistance as well as disturbance and securitization.)

• New software possibilities: for example, Drupal’s opening up and democratization of content management, which perhaps creates a kind of ‘platform commons’? The potential of ‘Diaspora’, the open source social network, to offer a viable alternative to proprietary social media.

• The role of intrinsic network tendencies, as opposed to political and economic decision-making, taking in explorations of the relevance of graph theory, the role of power laws and the network-specific characteristics of ‘communication power’.

Deadline for submissions of complete articles: 1st November 2012.

Please submit your contributions including contact details by email to Joss Hands: <joss.hands@networkpolitics.org>.

Culture Machine’s Guidelines for Authors:

www.culturemachine.net/index.php/cm/about/submissions#authorGuidelines

All contributions will be peer-reviewed.

Description

“The pursuit of common welfare will not only become the new legal goal of all (private) business, but also the new meaning of entrepreneurial success. The CWE places the human being and all living entities as well as fulfilling interpersonal relationships at the center of economic activity. It transposes standards that bolster human relationships as well as constitutional values to an economic context, rewarding economic stakeholders for acting in a humane, cooperative, ecologically sound, and democratic way; as well as for demonstrating solidarity. A new key balance sheet complementing the traditional balance sheet based on financial data and figures will therefore be established in order to measure the success of every company: the Common Welfare Balance. Instead of measuring success in monetary terms, it employs indicators that measure the contribution of a business to the common welfare. “Common welfare” as well as the set of values and indicators measuring a company’s success will be defined in a broad democratic process. Actively engaged entrepreneurs have already adopted five core values that embody the key elements of the common welfare economy, and should be measured. These values are human dignity, solidarity, ecological sustainability, social justice, and democracy. A company that complies with these values must not only uphold them, but will also pass them on to stakeholders: employees, owners, customers and clients, business partners, suppliers, the regional population, state leaders, future generations, and the environment.

The Common Welfare Matrix (a simplified chart of the Common Welfare Balance Sheet) crosses the five values with the stakeholders of a company. The Common Welfare Criteria in the cross-sections are measurable and attached a certain value: the Common Welfare Points. The sum of all Points provides the Common Welfare Score, at a maximum of 1000 Common Welfare Points. There is also a maximum of 200 points for each of the five value categories. Because all values are considered equally important, neglecting one of them cannot be compensated by points in another value category. An electronic calculation program is used to facilitate processing and to check weighting in the Balance. Knock-out Criteria punish extremely harmful acts to common welfare that are still legal. Companies exercising hostile takeovers, generating electricity by nuclear power, genetically modifying seeds or constructing large-scale power plants in ecologically sensitive regions receive zero points in a whole category of values, regardless of other achievements in this category. Those achievements will still be indicated, but not rewarded.

The Common Welfare Points are awarded exclusively for measurable Common Welfare Criteria, and companies can decide which criteria they will accept, and to what extent. This means that points are awarded only for accepted standards that exceed those set by law. The purpose is as follows: Today, most companies are far from the common welfare ideal (best possible environmental protection, co-determination of staff and other stakeholders, justly distributed income, gender equality). Theoretically, corresponding minimum standards could be formulated in order to oblige companies’ to behave ideally. However, companies’ self-interest (egoism) drives them to fight increases in legally binding standards with all their power. Keep higher standards voluntary while legally rewarding those companies that achieve them (tax incentives, customs duties, interest rates, public contracts, etc) could change this. In this manner, more and more companies would begin to promote this gentle political redirection of entrepreneurial aspiration towards common welfare. The Common Welfare Balance can initiate a process that guides companies from their current state to the target state in accordance with market conditions. The Common Welfare Balance serves as the catalyst in this process: The more companies apply Common Welfare Criteria, approach, and reach the Common Welfare Goals, the more plausible it will become to translate criteria from the Common Welfare Balance into legal minimum standards, thus making room for newer and stricter voluntary Common Welfare Criteria. In this way, the whole entrepreneurial landscape would move towards common welfare, and those companies that keep the “old” set of values would eventually run the risk of going bankrupt!”

The Tea Party, libertarians and other so-called conservatives devoted to slashing all government spending not related to the military, prisons and highways have an easy answer when asked what happens to people whose lives and livelihoods depend on public programs. They point to volunteerism—the tradition of people taking care of each other which has sustained human civilization for millennia.
It’s a compelling idea, which evokes the spirit of the commons (the growing movement to protect and expand the whole sphere of cultural and economic assets belonging to all of us together). Volunteers working largely outside the realm of government—neighborhood organizations, fire brigades, blood banks and other civic initiatives—are obvious examples of commons-based sharing and caring.
So that means Ron Paul, Michelle Bachmann and Mitt Romney qualify as commoners (people working to improve the state of our commons)? Even with their adamant skepticism about Medicare, environmental regulations and campaign finance limits?
Not so fast! Volunteerism never rises above a convenient smokescreen, which right-of-center politicians use to justify shredding the social safety net. Increased support for the people and institutions that strengthen our communities, help the poor and the sick, protect the environment and generally make America a kinder and gentler place (to quote the most ardent proponent of volunteerism, George H.W. Bush) never make the final cut in right-wing blueprints for our future. Republicans (and too many Democrats) are all talk and no action when it comes to actually supporting the kind of cooperative efforts that make volunteerism work.
Theoretically you could imagine a classical conservative model of a commons-based society based upon strong incentives for everyday citizens to handle most of the services now provided by federal, state and local governments—everything from police protection to basic scientific research to the Public Health Service. (Although when you apply this model to the world we live in today, it’s hard to believe the dream of mutual aid could survive the juggernaut of corporate privatization without some kind of government intervention.) Creating such a society, however, would mean sweeping changes to current economic and social policies that today’s right-wing leaders would never tolerate.
For Volunteerism to Work, Everyone Needs More Free Time
To truly encourage widespread volunteerism, we’d need to make sure that everyone (not just the well-to-do) had the time to do it. Most people today, working longer hours for less pay, are frantic just to get through the day. Finding extra time in their crunched schedules to manage upkeep at the local park or take care of elderly neighbors feels impossible.
What it would take to make this happen is dramatically expanded vacation time, family-leave benefits and probably a four-day workweek—or at least stringent enforcement of overtime provisions for all people working more than 40 hours a week.
Even more important to boosting volunteerism would be a return to the days of the family wage—the period before the 1970s when a middle-class household could get by on one worker’s wages. This would trigger a wave of volunteerism that could change the face of America. The first step in making this happen would be enacting a Canadian-style health care systems and tripling the minimum wage. But unlike the days before the 1970s, minorities and low-wage workers would not be excluded from this social contract. And since we live in a different social era now, it’s likely that many couples would elect to both work half time.
I cannot imagine that political leaders who call themselves conservative would stand for any of the ideas laid out in the previous two paragraphs—although some of the people who vote for them might, including evangelicals, traditionalist Catholics and “conservatives” who are actually in favor of “conserving” natural resources and community values rather than sacrificing them in the name of exponentially expanding corporate profits.
Bachmann, Paul, Romney and many Democrats would recoil at these ideas because they shift the balance of power in society from the wealthy who finance their campaigns to the poor and middle-class who, in the famous words of Bill Clinton, “work had and play by the rules.” These pro-volunteer, pro-commons policies would also be unpopular with conservatives because they depend on government playing an important role: Enforcing the new vacation, family leave, work hours and minimum wage laws, as well as making sure everyone has adequate health coverage and access.
Right-wing Naïveté
Politicians and pundits on the right often accuse progressives of being naïve about human nature for not recognizing the true motives that drive people’s behavior. That’s debatable, especially in light of new evidence from many scientific fields that our cooperative instincts are stronger than our selfish ones.
But we certainly have a case of the pot calling the kettle black right here: conservatives laud volunteerism as the best way to maintain our social fabric yet naively believe that this will happen with no provisions to stop unscrupulous employers from stealing people’s time with low wages and stingy vacations policies so that they have almost no time left over to nurture the common good.

V. Stigmergy

Networked organization is based on a principle known as stigmergy. “Stigmergy” is a term coined by biologist Pierre-Paul Grasse in the 1950s to describe the process by which termites coordinate their activity. Social insects like termites and ants coordinate their efforts through the independent responses of individuals to environmental triggers like chemical markers, without any need for a central coordinating authority.

Applied by way of analogy to human society, stigmergy refers primarily to the kinds of networked organization associated with wikis, group blogs, and “leaderless” organizations configured along the lines of networked cells.

Mark Elliott, whose doctoral dissertation is probably the most thorough and comprehensive treatment of stigmergy to date, contrasts stigmergic coordination with social negotiation. Social negotiation is the traditional method of organizing collaborative group efforts, through agreements and compromise mediated by discussions between individuals. The exponential growth in the number of communications with the size of the group, obviously, imposes constraints on the feasible size of a collaborative group, before coordination must be achieved by hierarchy and top-down authority. Stigmergy, on the other hand, permits collaboration on an unlimited scale by individuals acting independently. This distinction between social negotiation and stigmergy is illustrated, in particular, by the contrast between traditional models of co-authoring and collaboration in a wiki. Individuals communicate indirectly, “via the stigmergic medium.”

The distinction between social negotiation and stigmergic coordination parallels Elliott’s distinction, elsewhere, between “discursive collaboration” and “stigmergic collaboration.” The “discursive elaboration of shared representations (ideas)” is replaced by “the annotation of material and digital artefacts as embodiments of these representations.” “Additionally, when stigmergic collaboration is extended by computing and digital networks, a considerable augmentation of processing capacity takes place which allows for the bridging of the spatial and temporal limitations of discursive collaboration, while subtly shifting points of negotiation and interaction away from the social and towards the cultural.” [Mark Elliott, Stigmergic Collaboration: A Theoretical Framework for Mass Collaboration. Doctoral Dissertation, Centre for Ideas, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (October 2007) , pp. 9-10]

David de Ugarte quotes the Rand theorists John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, in “Swarming and the Future of Conflict.” “[N]etwar,” they say,

is a privateers’ war in which many small units “already know what they must do”, and are aware that “they must communicate with each other not in order to prepare for action, but only as a consequence of action, and, above all, through action.” [The Power of Networks (pdf)]

Critics of “digital communism” like Jaron Lanier and Mark Helprin, who condemn network culture for submerging “individual authorial voice” in the “collective,” couldn’t be more clueless if they tried. Stigmergy synthesizes the highest realizations of both individualism and collectivism, and represents each of them in its most completely actualized form, without qualifying or impairing either in any way.

Stigmergy is not “collectivist” in the traditional sense, as it was understood in the days when a common effort on any significant scale required a large organization to represent the collective, and the administrative coordination of individual efforts through a hierarchy. But it is the ultimate realization of collectivism, in that it removes the transaction cost of concerted action by many individuals.

It is the ultimate in individualism because all actions are the free actions of individuals, and the “collective” is simply the sum total of individual actions. Every individual is free to formulate any innovation she sees fit, without any need for permission from the collective. Every individual or voluntary association of individuals is free to adopt the innovation, or not, as they see fit. The extent to which any innovation is adopted results entirely from the unanimous consent of every voluntary grouping that adopts it. Each innovation is modular (meaning the project “can be broken down into smaller components… that can be independently produced before they are assembled into a whole”) [Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks], and may be adopted into any number of larger projects where it is found useful. Any grouping where there is disagreement over adoption may fork and replicate their project with or without the innovation.

In this regard it attains the radical democratic ideal of unanimous consent of the governed, which is never completely possible under any representative or majoritarian system. Consent—the extent of the individual’s partcipation in the decisions that affected her—was the central value of Jeffersonian democracy. The smaller the unit of governance, and the closer it was to the individual, the closer it approached the ideal of unanimous consent to all acts of government. Hence Jefferson’s ward republics, whose chief virtue was the increased role of each individual in influencing the outcome of policy. But this ideal can only be fully attained when the unit of governance is the individual. So majority rule was the lesser evil, a way to approximate as closely as possible to the spirit of unanimous consent when an entire group of people had to be bound by a single decision. Stigmergy removes the need for any individual to be bound by the group will. When all group actions reflect the unanimous will of the participants, as permitted by stigmergic organization, the ideal of unanimous consent is finally achieved in its fullness.

Group action is facilitated with greater ease and lower transaction costs than ever before, but all “group actions” are the unanimous actions of the participating individuals. A good example is Raymond’s “Bazaar” model of open-source development, as illustrated in a hypothetical case by Benkler:

Imagine that one person, or a small group of friends, wants a utility. It could be a text editor, photo-retouching software, or an operating system. The person or small group starts by developing a part of this project, up to a point where the whole utility—if it is simple enough—or some important part of it, is functional, though it might have much room for improvement. At this point, the person makes the program freely available to others, with its source code—instructions in a human-readable language that explains how the software does whatever it does when compiled into a machine-readable language. When others begin to use it, they may find bugs, or related utilities that they want to add (e.g., the photo-retouching software only increases size and sharpness, and one of its users wants it to allow changing colors as well). The person who has found the bug or is interested in how to add functions to the software may or may not be the best person in the world to actually write the software fix. Nevertheless, he reports the bug or the new need in an Internet forum of users of the software. That person, or someone else, then thinks that they have a way of tweaking the software to fix the bug or add the new utility. They then do so, just as the first person did, and release a new version of the software with the fix or the added utility. The result is a collaboration between three people—the first author, who wrote the initial software; the second person, who identified a problem or shortcoming; and the third person, who fixed it. This collaboration is not managed by anyone who organizes the three, but is instead the outcome of them all reading the same Internet-based forum and using the same software, which is released under an open, rather than proprietary, license. This enables some of its users to identify problems without asking anyone’s permission and without engaging in any transactions.

This has had revolutionary implications for the balance of power between networks and hierarchies, and almost unimaginably empowered individuals and small groups against large organizations.

In a hierarchy, all communications between members or between local nodes must pass through a limited number of central nodes. The only communications which are allowed to pass from one member or local node to another are those which meet the standards for distribution of those who control the central nodes. Only a few nodes within a hierarchy have the power to transmit; hence the use of the phrase “one-to-many” to describe its topology. The version of local news that appears in the local newspaper under the byline of a local journalist may be far superior in relevant detail and analysis, but it is the wire service version—even if far inferior in quality—which appears in local newspapers all around the world. It is only the communications approved by the Party Secretariat that are heard by all local cells of a party. [de Ugarte, The Power of Networks]

In a distributed network, on the other hand, every node has the power to transmit, and any two nodes can communicate directly with each other without passing through a central node or obtaining the approval of whoever controls that node. A network is “plurarchical,” in de Ugarte’s terminology, rather than democratic. Instead of the individual members simply selecting who controls the central nodes, “[s]omeone makes a proposal and everyone who wishes to join in can do so. The range of the action in question will depend on the degree to which the proposal is accepted. This system is called a pluriarchy….” Democracy is a “scarcity system” in which decision-making power is rivalrous: “the collective must face an either/or choice, between one filter and another, between one representative and another.” In a distributed network, on the other hand, decision-making power is non-rivalrous. Each individual’s decision affects only herself, and does not impede the ability of others to do likewise. “Even if the majority not only disagreed with a proposal, but also acted against it, it wouldn’t be able to prevent the proposal from being carried out.” “[I]n the blogosphere,” de Ugarte writes elsewhere,

a space where the social cost of an extra post is zero, any blogger’s publishing his or her information does not decrease anyone else’s publication possibilities. The marginal cost is zero. The need to collectively decide what is published and what is not simply disappears. As opposed to scarcity logic, which generates the need for democratic decision, abundant logic opens the door to pluriarchy.

In such a universe, every collective or hierarchical decision on what to publish or not can only be conceived as an artificial generation of scarcity, a decrease in diversity, and an impoverishment for all. [de Ugarte, Phyles (pdf)]

Overview

The growth of the internet has been spectacular. There are now more 1.5 billion internet users across the globe, about one quarter of the world’s population. This is certainly a new phenomenon that is of enormous significance for the economic, political and social life of contemporary societies.

However, much popular and academic writing about the internet takes a technologically deterministic view, assuming that the internet’s potential will be realised in essentially transformative ways. This was especially true in the euphoric moment of the mid-1990s, when many commentators wrote about the internet with awe and wonderment. While this moment may be over, its underlying technocentrism – the belief that technology determines outcomes – lingers on, and with it, a failure to understand the internet in its social, economic and political context.

Misunderstanding the Internet is a short introduction, encompassing the history, sociology, politics and economics of the internet and its impact on society. The book has a simple three part structure:

1. Part 1 looks at the history of the internet, and offers an overview of the internet’s place in society
2. Part 2 focuses on the control and economics of the internet
3. Part 3 examines the internet’s political and cultural influence

Misunderstanding the Internet is a polemical, sociologically and historically informed textbook that aims to challenge both popular myths and existing academic orthodoxies around the internet.