Four Futures Scenarios for Power in the Network Era (3): p2p patriots or google republic?

with respect to the value of the fullest expression of human empowerment, scenario four is clearly the most desirable. In this fourth scenario, a federation of the commons, citizens and communities are actively engaged in shaping the fabric of their lives and societies through a process of ‘deep democracy’

We continue and conclude our serializing of p2p futures by Jose Ramos, today presenting the four scenarios, and their general conclusion.

* Article: The Futures of Power in the Network Era. By Jose Ramos. Journal of Futures Studies, June 2013, 17(4): 71-92

The Four Scenarios

* Scenario 1: Caged Chickens

[Formula: Gov. and business collude / citizens dis-empowered]

The Occupy movement of 2011 could only be squashed through coordinated paramilitary force. Elites in the United States quickly understood that they were on the precipice of losing power, and began to reformulate a more aggressive strategy for power maintenance. Systems developed for counter terrorism, such as TrapWire and Echelon, began to be focused on citizen activists. Bloated government security agencies had ample resources to infiltrate and identify dissidents and agitators, be they 17-year-old anarchists or 70-year-old libertarians. New laws were put into place that blurred the line between foreign-born terrorist activity and political radicalism.

A series of terrorist attacks, attributed to political radicals, but which many suspected were planted, galvanizes the United States. Adbusters and Democracy Now! are designated terrorist-affiliated organizations and shut down, along with hundreds of other politically active organizations. As in the aftermath of 9/11, thousands of suspected terrorists are rounded up and rendered offshore for detainment, interrogation and processing. The state apparatus uses systems like Palantir to easily anticipate civic protests and neutralize protest leaders.

In the aftermath of a weakened and cowed civil society, the further maintenance of power using soft means becomes easier. Ambiguous legislation is used to silence institutional dissent. Media companies can lose their licenses when television and online news reporters say the wrong things. Self-censorship becomes the order of the day. The pervasiveness and power of the corporate-state surveillance system allows the government to neutralize dissent in its most nascent forms. An email to a friend expressing dissatisfaction, a random joke about the government, or association with the wrong person at the wrong time. A culture of fear begins to seep into everyday life. Many ask will I be next, or when will they come for me?

The 21st-century corporate-state becomes stronger. The circulation of power from government to business and vice versa interlocks. The massive influence of corporate money to government is not only normalized, but a cottage political science industry (funded by industry but convenient for government puppets) emerges that constructs the corporate-state as a “natural state of affairs” in the evolution of society. It is argued the corporate-state offers people great efficiency, safety and security, and identity.

While the stratification of wealth was an issue at the turn of the century, the second order consequences of hyper-stratification could never have been imagined. But by the first quarter of the 21st century strong patterns emerge. The elite now get global educations, traveling widely and gaining crucial worldly experience, while the vast majority are locally trained in a technical capacity – liberal and reflective learning is prohibited left wing propaganda. New medicine can prolong the life of elites into their 120s and 130s, but the vast majority live till their 60s, succumbing to a variety of industrial illnesses connected to the biological environments they ingest or live in. The wealthy live in safe enclaves, the rest must deal with substandard security and policing. Most law making reflects a struggle between powerful interests, wealthy families and corporations mobilizing large sums of money to mount sophisticated legal battles that dwarf the common wage. Increasingly the ‘inner commons’ or ‘mental commons’, ones mind, attention, time, is enclosed and commodified. To gain momentary satisfactions, people are encouraged to sell ‘personal futures’ (future labor and loyalty) as a commodity. One can ‘leverage’ their future mind or body. The age of network endenturement arrives.

Netarchical conglomerates enable people to connect, but all networking is through sanctioned channels. Citizens are monitored, and all nongovernment organizations are registered and tightly regulated. Those people which offer countervailing wisdom are silenced, often through a series of “bad luck” incidents, the loss of a job, inability to find a new job, or if that does not work through more severe intimidation. People disappear and rendition, torture and terror exist behind a veil of silence.

Research and technology development is geared toward making production and consumption more efficient across the system. Networks allow allocation optimization. The state has an interest in middle aged healthy citizens who produce for the industrial state and who make loyal workers, but not much interest in older people, or those that do not fit into this system. You have become a caged chicken. Don’t stop laying eggs, or you end up in the pot.

* Scenario 2: Peer to Peer Patriots

[Formula: Gov. and citizens collude / big business disempowered]

Under pressure from international competition, rising energy prices, traditional primary and secondary (resources and manufacturing) sectors go into major decline. The anticipated post-recession recovery from the great financial crisis of 2008 never materialized. Instead, recession led to a “new normal” of out of work but active class of “creatives”. In the early 2010s new sharing startups begin to emerge that allowed people to peer procure basic services like transport, health services, and entertainment. But as the crisis of the new normal deepened, with more straight out of college jobless, more intensive “post-industrial” enterprises emerged to satisfy the basic needs of people.

The mix of creative classes, from artists, graphic designers, architects, entrepreneurs, and others, with time on their hands and needs to meet, begin building a new economy based on peer systems of production. Grow-your-own solidarity farms, micro-manufacturing based on open-source design pools, cradle to cradle collectives, 3D / additive manufacturing for highly engineered products, and other peer enterprises begin to take hold as new forms of economic activity.

At first these new peer based industries offer basic livelihoods for those who cannot get a “regular” job in the new normal. But as these enterprises grow in strength and popularity, they begin displacing traditional industrial forms. Wikispeed was only the first of hundreds of “design your own car” enterprises that churned out high-efficiency and low-cost modular automobiles. Traditional automotive companies attempted to enforce legal monopolies to support their traditional scale based manufacturing, but provincial and state-based citizen campaigns targeting and attacking politicians with close industry ties force legislatures to open a wide variety of activities to peer production communities. Soon these communities are legally enfranchised and competitively displacing older economies of scale based production and services.

“traditional American industrial corporations come up against a situation in which cheapening, distributed means of production means no profitable outlet for all the investment capital sitting around. “Capitalism is eating itself …. The days of companies with names like General Electric and General Mills and General Motors are over.” Desperate Fortune 500 corporations, selling off corporate jets and other assets at fire sale prices, attempt to buy into garage micromanufacturing operations as a Hail Mary pass to stave off irrelevancy and bankruptcy.” Doctorow (2012) in …Kevin Carson (2012)

And yet these nascent industries also understand that without political support with the right legislation, the fledgling revolution could be reversed. Already, finance capital and netarchical conglomerates attempt to buy out peer production enterprises. Google and others develop competing sharing and micro-manufacturing platforms in the hope of cashing-in on the surge. Backroom corporate lobbyists attempt to convince government regulators that citizen-based enterprises are not capable of proper regulation. The issue comes to a head when a Christian extremist group massacres 52 people using weapons produced through homemade 3D printing devices. A battle ensues between an alliance of Netarchical and industrial capitalists that wish to enclose or lock out p2p capabilities into rentier platforms, while hundreds of thousands of peer production and sharing communities come together into political federations.

Local and state governments know that a return to a pre-p2p economy would mean increasing joblessness and a weakened economy unable to compete globally. Yet the radical potential opened by p2p processes is potentially destabilizing. People are also worried about the shadow of decentralized production and finance (BitCoin has become the primary platform for money laundering by global mafias).

Governments increasingly take the role of guarantors of security. While they leave the economic engine in the hands of the p2p pioneers, issues related to terrorism, the availability of 3D printable weaponry, the increasing threat of nano weapons, homemade drones, child pornography and other network era pathologies further push citizenry to accept the state’s much needed role in surveillance and control. A consensus emerges that all people must be surveilled in order to maintain security. Yet the ‘surveillor’ must also be surveilled. Institutions exists in a complex and interlocking system of surveillance. As well, the state’s role evolves toward increasingly disciplined eco-governance / eco-efficiency, where resources are strictly monitored for reuse. “Eco-crimes” are punished with severity. Additive manufacturing cooperatives must abide by strict disposal and re-use laws.

The collapse of the industrial sector precipitates a weakened Wall Street, with citizen initiated reform of speculative practices. However, the bigger shift is how p2p financing displaces Wall Street, as crowd and community funding are the engines that propel p2p enterprises.

While government is not in the business of primary production of goods and services, the state plays a key role in regulating emerging p2p industries, such as peer banking, peer manufacturing, and peer media. Citizens appreciate the government’s oversight role in these key sectors, and there’s an acceptance of the intrusive, if not soft authoritarian approach that government now takes. Government, in partnership with citizen-based ubiquitous monitoring, makes sure that p2p production adheres to basic standards.

Because government is still the power base for surveillance, instances of corruption and abuse of surveillance powers exist. However, government surveillance powers must draw upon citizen based mobile sensing, and thus requires power sharing. In addition government sits in un-easy tension with respect to the new economic power of p2p communities. Peer producers, through economic federations, are able to influence policy outcomes.

The values of the creative class that created the p2p revolution become more solidly embedded in the legitimacy of government based surveillance and enforcement. While it started as a counterculture movement in the 60s and 70s, and transformed into the creative class in the first decades of the 2000s, oddly this group has morphed into a type of ‘green conservativism’. While socially very liberal (e.g. pro GLIBTI rights etc.), these people are hardworking savers and community builders, the Protestants of the 21st century. A new type of wealth emerges from green practices, eco-efficiency, whole systems design, education and conservation. This creates a new class dynamic based on the ascendancy of the green conservatives vs. 20th century ‘unconscious consumers’, previously known as modernists (Ray and Anderson 2000).

While many find the intrusiveness and extent of social control within this new system unbearable: antisocial (e.g. anti-homophobic) and anti-green behavior is quietly and efficiently removed through the ubiquitous regulation of fellow networked citizens, the majority are content that the primary needs of security and economic provision are satisfied, and society has become more eco-friendly.

* Scenario 3: Republic of Google

[Formula: Big business and citizens collude / gov. disempowered]

The 192 companies bought by Google from 2002 to 2011 was only the beginning. As p2p enterprises began to emerge driving a shift towards sharing and micro-manufacturing, big conglomerates like Google did not fail to notice.

The dynamics and power struggle for control of these new enterprises was complex. On the one hand, traditional industries, like taxi companies and supermarkets considered network sharing and peer-based systems enemy # 1: ride-shares and grow-your-own farm solidarity schemes. They lobbied government to shut them down, arguing they were unregulated forms of enterprise, dangerous and were not paying taxes. On the other hand, network conglomerates coveted these emerging enterprises as a source of network rents. Network conglomerates naturally sympathized with the p2p enterprises, but wanted in on the action.

A pincer movement emerged by which netarchic capital displaced traditional industries while enclosing and buying out community-based p2p enterprises. Netarchical pre-eminence in the early 21st century ensured its influence on government. A series of netarchic-sponsored laws were enacted which provided tax loopholes for peer based production, while at the same time requiring costly regulation, insurance and oversight. This had the effect of simultaneously legitimizing network based service provision which would displace traditional industries, while making it hard for small p2p community scale enterprises to run.

Unsurprisingly, as netarchy wins the legal battle, companies like Google buyout or “out-attention” thousands of small-scale p2p enterprises (under threat of duress) at fire sale prices, or p2p community leaders are co-opted (“you can work with us or work with no-one, your choice”). Soon services like “Google Manufacture™”, “Google Grow™” and “Google Share™” are thriving platforms that allow people to network and peer produce basics, from transport, to food, to health services, and just about anything else, but require a new class of digital sharecroppers to offer an ongoing network rent to participate.

A new dynamic begins to emerge in the political landscape. Governments are increasingly weakened through round after round of fiscal austerity (especially with netarchic capital offshored) following major financial crises related to the economics of debt. Governments print money but are ultimately unable to service financial commitments, and topple like dominoes, as strong states become weak states, leaving impoverished pensioners whose paper dollars revert to the value of wallpaper.

Network industries thrive, as the de-territorialized flows of ideas, designs, services and goods, based on individual talents and productive capabilities, underpin a dynamic and emerging cosmo-local economy. At first this network economy faces the challenge of decoupling from state-based currencies which are volatile and are losing value as states print money with abandon. BitCoin and other alternative currency enterprises are the first to address the need for this decoupling. However, with the enclosure of p2p enterprises by netarchical capital, the high-value flows in the emerging network economy are captured by platforms developed by conglomerates. The conglomerates require their own currencies by which they force users to transact business within the corporate family, that are fully integrated across the variety of peer-based sharing and micro manufacturing bases. Currencies are developed by conglomerates, GCoin, FBCoin, based on the BitCoin open-source protocol, which become credible and tradable on exchanges globally.

The netarchic conglomerates become powerful economic islands that span across city states and regions. As governments lose their economic capacities, the big netarchic conglomerate platforms take their place as providers of basic needs and services. Conglomerate platforms provide the funding for education, driven by network capabilities and requiring corporate loyalty. Employees can access peer-based health services, while health service providers are ensconced into rentier systems.

Netarchic conglomerates, which become transnational network entities that also connect with localized sharing and micro manufacturing, require the development of new legal codes and frameworks, and thus expand their jurisdictional and jurisprudential capabilities in the face of weakened states. Contract law between conglomerates, or between a company and a peer provider become central. Protection services are connected with those who are closer to the centers of corporate power. Research is driven by the Corporation for the Corporation, and large-scale energy provisioning for the corporation becomes a priority, while those outside of any number of corporate families experience the harsh realities of long-term post-peak oil energy decline. Ragged feral nomads live beyond the network families.

As state finances crumble they lose the capacity to surveil the population. On the other hand, citizens are ubiquitous in the halls of government. The capacity for citizens to share and peer into the world of government becomes more extensive, information which is automatically shared with big netarchic conglomerates, Google, Facebook, and other powerhouses of the network age. Citizens, ensconced into a system of perpetual ambient data gathering become the instruments by which government is undermined. Government loses the weapon of secrecy, which is now reserved for the rentier class of netarchic capitalists.

Citizen attempts to use government to tilt the balance of power are met with subtle yet effective marginalization. Successful p2p managers and digital sharecroppers cannot be political. Businesses have become disproportionately powerful, and, unlike government, are able to control flows of information much more effectively than government, and can counter citizen attempts to make business transparent.

Yet the netarchic conglomerates must remain somewhat accountable. Digital sharecroppers can jump corporate ship if desperate, people can move physically and virtually in this globalized world of economic islands and city-states. People’s ‘enfranchisement’ within the Corporation, through stock, reputation systems, and contracts form the basis for their survival, and is the counterbalance to the exploitative nature of the rentier systems that privileges the netarchical capitalists.

* Scenario 4: Federation of the Commons

[Formula: Citizens divide and subdue market and state]

The 2010s were marked by a pitched struggle between an insurgent citizen movement and the ruling political and economic elites. Different manifestations of the movement, in the US, Russia, China, the EU and elsewhere, were correct in their diagnosis of power, the fundamental challenge to democracy was the influence of big business on government, and politician’s reliance on corporate monies to maintain power.

The Occupy movement and Arab spring were only the beginning, as wave after wave of techno-political activism swept the world. WikiLeaks was the first of many platforms that began to dismantle the inner workings of government secrecy (Greenberg 2012). In response to this, using the pretext of the threat of terrorism, governments attempted to surveil and detain the most radical agitators. And yet, the government’s capacity for surveillance increasingly could not be matched by the sousvalent capacities emerging across civil society. Leaks proving government-business collusion continued to hemorrhage out of leaky institutions. Repressive government tactics, the use of paramilitary force and unlawful detainment, was quickly made public and condemned. The government-business power complex began to lose its popular credibility in many countries around the world. Civil society’s soft power was winning.

This culminated in a globally coordinated campaign to break the power nexus between many governments and big business. The campaign used general strikes, protests and sit-ins that aimed at national referendums for constitutional reform. The reforms would limit the power of corporations to influence government, limit the power of corporations to produce media to influence the public, and limit the power of government to use media as a tool for self-promotion and self legitimation.

Throughout this period netarchic capital had been attempting to cash in on the p2p enterprise and sharing economy. Influencing government to enact laws and policy that forced sharing and p2p enterprises into costly regulation and insurance, the network conglomerates attempted to legally lock out public and commons based enterprises, and offer their own substitutes on their rentier platforms.

Yet throughout this period p2p guilds had become a new economic and political force. They were able to wage defensive political actions to resist the strategic enclosure of relationality as orchestrated by netarchic capital interests. The guilds mobilized the public to choose citizen based platforms.

P2p guilds had expanded into complex trans-local entities that exerted power locally but coordinated and pooled across national and global scales. They had become politically fearsome forms that influenced government policy toward supporting peer production.

When the new constitutional referendums came into play, p2p guilds, no longer hobbled by the imposition of laws imposing artificial scarcities, restrictions and monopolies, are able to expand rapidly, replacing, substituting and making obsolete many of the core functions provided by both netarchic platforms, as well as older industrial forms that had protected their interests through lobby influence on government policy.

New sophisticated cosmo-local investment pools drawing from p2p networks provide the financial mechanism within which long-term investment is funneled into p2p enterprises. A new financial ecosystem, using new currencies, allow peer producers to exchange abstract value (currency value) with other peer producers globally, with greater efficiency and lower cost then with pre-existing currencies. The result is a new range of circulatory systems across peer producing industries.

Cosmo-localization becomes the new global norm. P2p guilds increasingly interlock with other peer producing guilds to form complementary ‘social metabolisms,’ complex organs of peer producers reciprocating dynamic value. While manufacturing in primary production is localized and customized, through 3D printing and p2p cottage industries, reciprocally, these localized manufacturing processes draw from an explosion of global commons content in artifice design. The end of artificial immaterial scarcities, which were maintained through the influence of incumbent business interests, leads to a productivity boost and a new wave of wealth creation.

New social formations flourish. Community sourced but globally enriched education drives transformations in learning. Health becomes multi-spatial across local barefoot doctors, to national insurance schemes, linking with global commons oriented expertise. A new commons oriented jurisprudence emerges to articulate new types of commons based rights and responsibilities. Research and development is increasingly driven by diverse citizen and stakeholder needs. Micro manufacturing forms into ‘meta’ manufacturing processes across thousands of producers enabling large-scale and complex, highly polished products and services. As industry becomes flexibly scalable, energy production too is decoupled from the grid, developed for thousands of contextually specific applications, making huge reductions in energy use. Protection services are citizen directed, peer managed and inclusive.

* Conclusion

The four scenarios offer one way to discern power dynamics and strategies in the evolution of the network era. They can be used to inform how we may begin strategizing toward our preferred futures. As proposed in the appendix, we may find that particular nations are in or moving toward one of the four scenarios already. We may ask, what is the pathway from one scenario position to another?

A more fundamental question, however, is normative: what are our values, and how does this influence what futures we consider desirable? From the author’s vantage point, with respect to the value of the fullest expression of human empowerment, scenario four is clearly the most desirable. In this fourth scenario, a federation of the commons, citizens and communities are actively engaged in shaping the fabric of their lives and societies through a process of ‘deep democracy’ (Ramos 2012). But others may find greater affinity with a different scenario. Paraphrasing Ashis Nandy (1992), one person’s utopia may be another’s tyranny.

This exercise was merely a starting point. This paper was intended to provoke conversation, hopefully toward the refinement of our understanding of social forces, political dynamics and the alternatives we confront. It is neither conclusive nor all encompassing. There are of course other axes that can be used. There are other scenario development methods. There are other assumptions that can be employed. For example, it may be that citizens partner with the state to create new p2p governance systems, challenging the assumption that one side must win over the other (Ramos et al 2011).

The stakes are high, and if we are serious about creating the futures we prefer, we will need to create high visibility public conversations that catalyze new intelligent pathways for making our ideals a reality. A central theme and argument of this paper, following in the footsteps of others (Dator, 2005) is simply that there is no given future, the future is shaped by our capacity to imagine alternative futures, visualize and design them, strategize pathways and implement effective actions. No better example exists than the late Aaron Swartz’s efforts to stop the SOPA legislation. It is true that some people and groups have more power than others, economically, politically, and culturally – but no person or group has a monopoly on human aspirations. Visions are by design hard to achieve, but with intelligence and determination they are realizable.”

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