P2P Foundation

Belgian futurist Nik Baerten has conducted a lengthy interview on peer to peer.

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Here, we are just excerpting one question on peer governance vs. democracy:

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P: Indeed, while the online world facilitates p2p action, the effect of it moves beyond the online-offline screen into our daily physical world. When you speak of ‘peer governance’, do you see it as limited to ‘governing’ peer-produced projects or can you also see a new generation of political systems based upon its principles? How would those look like according to you?

MB: I see peer governance in the narrow sense, as the way that peer groups and peer production projects are governing themselves; these are self-constituted groups that are following a logic of affinity, and they operate as distributed networks. The crucial characteristic of distributed networks is that agents are free to act and create relationships; this also means there is an a priori consensus of what needs to be done, so consensus, i.e. the participants deciding together on what must be done, is more easily achieved. Since there is no outside actor that can coerce them, it is the most logical way to decide. However, in decentralized (as opposed to distributed) networks, central power has been divided up in hubs, and these hubs set the rules, so that agent is much more constrained. My argument is that society as a whole is not a distributed network but a decentralized network, with various groups following a logic of hegemony, and without a priori consensus of what the goal of society is. So, while we have direct self-management in peer groups, this seems quite impossible to achieve for society as a whole; so in society we need forms of representational democracy.

In the future though, I think that the space of autonomy of self-constituted peer groups will increase even further; taking a lot of the political space now taken up by democracy; and secondly, that democracy will be reformed to more peer-informed, that is, partnership-based, forms of governance. I expect democracy to be informed more and more by multistakeholdership (of course it can also evolve in a negative way, towards more authoritarian forms). I think it is no secret to anybody today that democracy itself is in crisis, not just because the system has become so beholden to corporate interests, but even if this were not the case, people need and want more autonomy in their lives. They do not merely want to vote for whom represents them every few years. They wish for autonomy in every field of social life, including production and the economy, not just in politics.”