P2P Foundation

“Localization may describe production of goods nearer to end users to reduce environmental and other external costs of globalization.

“Relocalization” is “…a strategy to build societies based on the local production of food, energy and goods, and the local development of currency, governance and culture. The main goals of Relocalization are to increase community energy security, to strengthen local economies, and to dramatically improve environmental conditions and social equity.”

Another way to consider localization is to see it as the shrinkage of distance between the point of production and the point of utilization or consumption. “It is the conversion of bits and bytes into material form as close as possible to where that form will be used. In contrast, globalization is the virtualization of experience, knowledge, and innovation so that intellectual property created can travel from anywhere to anywhere quickly, easily, at minimal cost.”

Steve Bosserman sees Localization occuring in four key domains:

1. affordable / green construction,
2. 100-mile agricultural production,
3. renewable / distributed energy generation
4. community governance / capacity building.

But an important question is: is such localization really more economically beneficial than the old model of centralized industrial production?

Kevin Carson tackles this issue in his most recent essay, Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles, from which we have been quoting liberally the last few days.

Today, we excerpt his discussion on the economic benefits of localization.

Kevin Carson:

“Leopold Kohr, in the same vein, compared local economies to harbors in a storm in their insulation from the business cycle and its extreme fluctuations of price.

Bill McKibben made the same point in Deep Economy. Most money that’s spent buying stuff from a national corporation is quickly sucked out of the local economy, while money that’s spent at local businesses circulates repeatedly in the local economy and leaks much more slowly to the outside. According to a study in Vermont, substituting local production for only ten percent of imported food would create $376 million in new economic output, including $69 million in wages at over 3600 new jobs. A similar study in Britain found the multiplier effect of ten pounds spent at a local business benefited the local economy to the tune of 25 pounds, compared to only 14 for the same amount spent at a chain store.

- The farmer buys a drink at the local pub; the pub owner gets a car tune-up at the local mechanic; the mechanic brings a shirt to the local tailor; the tailor buys some bread at the local bakery; the baker buys wheat for bread and fruit for muffins from the local farmer. When these businesses are not owned locally, money leaves the community at every transaction. (Bill McKibben, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future (New York: Times Books, 2007), p. 165.)

Second, it would drastically increase the bargaining power of labor. Since the rise of the factory system and large-scale wage employment, capital has depended on the ability to externalize many of its reproduction functions on the non-monetized informal and household economies, and on organic social institutions like the family which were outside the cash nexus.

The household economy has allowed to function to the extent that it bears reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but it has been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when it threatens to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor.”

Kevin Carson concludes:

“We are now experiencing a revolutionary shift in competitive advantage from wage labor to the informal economy, far beyond anything the propertied classes of two hundred years ago could have imagined in their worst nightmares. The rapid growth of technologies for home production in the twentieth century, based on small-scale electrically powered machinery and new forms of intensive cultivation, has radically altered the comparative efficiencies of large- and small-scale production. This was pointed out by Ralph Borsodi almost eighty years ago, but the potential of cheap desktop machine tools like the multi-machine shifts the balance even further.

We’re experiencing a singularity in which it is becoming impossible for capital to prevent a shift in the supply of an increasing proportion of the necessities of life from mass produced goods purchased with wages, to small-scale production in the informal and household sector. The upshot is likely to be something like Gupta’s “Unplugged” movement, in which the possibilities for low-cost, comfortable subsistence off the grid result in exactly the same situation, the fear of which motivated the propertied classes in carrying out the Enclosures: a situation in which the majority of people can take wage labor or leave it, if it takes it at all, the average person works only on his own terms when he needs supplemental income for luxury goods and the like, and (even if he considers supplemental income necessary in the long run for an optimal standard of living) can afford in the short run to quit work and live off his own resources for prolonged periods of time, while negotiating for employment on the most favorable terms. It will be a society in which workers, not employers, have the greater ability to walk away from the table. It will, in short, be the kind of society E. G. Wakefield lamented in the colonial world of cheap and abundant land: a society in which labor is hard to get on any terms, and almost impossible to hire at a low enough wage to produce significant profit.”

Has “the rapid diffusion of information communication technology has had any statistically significant impact on anti-government protests in countries under repressive rule?”

The answer from researcher Patrick Meier:

(details of the study’s methodology and results are here)

We found that both variables, Internet and mobile phones, were statistically significant, and negative, with the mobile phones coefficent being larger the Internet coefficient. This would suggest that mobile phones have more of a disruptive impact on repressive regimes.

Evgeny Morozov gives interesting background to such studies, noting that alternative online media, such as Indymedia, did not play a large role during the recent protests (this statement contradicts however the eyewitness report we reproduced earlier on our blog).

Evgeny writes:

“The most impressive of such networks- the Independent Media Center (or Indymedia)– sprang up in the wake of the Seattle anti-WTO protests of 1999, acquiring a cult status in the anti-globalization community overnight. Since then, Indymedia has been busy supplying their contributors with reporting equipment, organizing media trainings, and helping their stringers get their stories out to the general public. The years that followed - with a plenty of protest action around WTO and G8 summits - marked the renaissance of the alternative media.

With so much riot-related digital content generated elsewhere, the anti-globalization media faces oblivion and needs to find a new role. Curating all the numerous amateur photos, videos, and comments emerging from the riots would be one meaningful contribution they can make. Consider thousands of videos uploaded to YouTube, photos uploaded to Flickr, as well as blog and Twitter messages flying around the Web – it was virtually impossible for Greek and foreign observers alike to make sense of what was going on. And although Indymedia and several other anti-globalization outlets did try to aggregate some of this content at the outset of the riots, they attempts were short-lived, leaving the global public without the curator it needed so badly.”

His conclusion is the following:

In today’s ultra-networked world, an unaffiliated individual with a laptop and an Internet connection is often more influential and resourceful than an organization with a staff of twenty and a fax machine was only twenty years ago. This is a truly strange period of institutional change when an organization’s vast assets also look like its greatest liabilities.

We continue our presentation of Kevin Carson’s important essay on decentralized production.

In our previous summary, Kevin argued that we are ready for a ‘distributed’ neotechnic era of organization of production, that this format has been derailed, but is about to become dominant. The first sign of this, he argues, is what we see happening in the culture industries.

I present the general argument, then a example that Kevin has chosen to illustrate the crisis, and that concerns the iPhone.

1. General argument

Kevin Carson:

“The unsustainability of the old corporate framework is most apparent in the culture industries. The copyright-centered business model of the old corporate dinosaurs simply cannot survive in an environment where the basic capital equipment for recording and sound editing, podcasting, software design, and desktop publishing are affordable on an individual basis, and in which bittorrent and strong encryption make copyright obsolete. The old gatekeeper corporations originally owed their power to the enormous capital outlays required to start a newspaper, a radio station or a record studio, with twentieth century technology–often amounting, at a minimum, to hundreds of thousands of dollars. The main function of the traditional corporate firm was to govern the tangible assets, hire labor to work them, and supervise the labor to make sure it was acting in the interests of the corporation. Today, in contrast, the basic item of capital equipment for desktop publishing, sound editing or podcasting is the personal computer, which is in more than half the homes in the country. The networked environment, combined with endless varieties of cheap software for creating and editing content, makes it possible for the amateur to produce output of a quality once associated with giant publishing houses and recording companies. In this environment, the only thing standing between the old information and media dinosaurs and their total collapse is their so-called “intellectual property” rights–which, once again, are becoming unenforceable.

In the information and culture industries, where the basic production equipment is affordable to all, and bottom-up networking renders management obsolete, it is likely that self-managed, cooperative production will replace the old managerial hierarchies. Music, publishing and software will be governed by peer production on the Linux model. But how is it possible to realize value from open-source production with zero cost of reproduction? The answer is suggested by the business models of Red Hat, Phish and Radiohead. Red Hat, a Linux distributor, can’t make money from ownership rights over the software itself. But it does quite well selling customer support and product customization. Phish gives the basic product, its music, away free; it makes money from concert tickets and concessions. Radiohead experimented with offering an album for free download from its website, coupled with the collection of voluntary contributions via what amounted to a glorified PayPal tip jar.

The interesting thing about Radiohead’s business model is that, because there is no physical reproduction process (the downloader burns his own CD), the overhead cost (mainly hosting and administering the website) is close to zero when spread over all the downloads. So even if the downloaders only average a buck or two per person, or even less, the revenue is essentially free and clear. Apologists for copyright like to say “you can’t compete with free.” Actually, though, there is still a significant rent entailed in the time and trouble of entering the market, even when there are no proprietary rights to the content. For the largest bestselling authors, like Stephen King, it may be worth it to offer his content at a unit price of fifty cents over production cost, even when King is selling his books for only a dollar over cost. But for the vast majority of writers and musical artists with small to medium-sized market profiles, so long as they sell their product for a modest markup over production cost, the profit to be gained by undercutting them by such a small amount simply isn’t worth the trouble. It’s only those who charge a large markup who would make it worth the competitor’s while to undercut them. As for manufacturing, the new economy that emerges from the Time of Troubles, if anything, will be more Emilia-Romagna than Emilia-Romagna itself.

Product design will be revolutionized around modular components, for durability and cheap reparability.

2. The iPhone: sabotaging repair

“Julian Sanchez’s discussion of the i-Phone is a good example of the effect of proprietary technology in reinforcing planned obsolescence.

Julian Sanchez:

(1) Some minor physical problem afflicts my portable device—the kind of thing that just happens sooner or later when you’re carting around something meant to be used on the go. In this case, the top button on my iPhone had gotten jammed in, rendering it nonfunctional and making the phone refuse to boot normally unless plugged in.

(2) I make a pro forma trip to the putative “Genius Bar” at an Apple Store out in Virginia. Naturally, they inform me that since this doesn’t appear to be the result of an internal defect, it’s not covered. But they’ll be only too happy to service/replace it for something like $250, at which price I might as well just buy a new one….

(3) I ask the guy if he has any tips if I’m going to do it myself—any advice on opening it, that sort of thing. He’s got no idea….

(4) Pulling out a couple of tiny screwdrivers, I start in on the satanic puzzlebox casing Apple locks around all its hardware. I futz with it for at least 15 minutes before cracking the top enough to get at the inner works.

(5) Once this is done, it takes approximately five seconds to execute the necessary repair by unwedging the jammed button.

I have two main problems with this. First, you’ve got what’s obviously a simple physical problem that can very probably be repaired in all of a minute flat with the right set of tools. But instead of letting their vaunted support guys give this a shot, they’re encouraging customers—many of whom presumably don’t know any better—to shell out a ludicrous amount of money to replace it and send the old one in….

Second, the iPhone itself is pointlessly designed to deter self service. Sure, the large majority of users are never going to want to crack their phone open. Then again, most users probably don’t want to crack their desktops or laptops open, but we don’t expect manufacturers to go out of their way to make it difficult to do. Again, in the instance, this was 15 minutes screwing with the case for a problem that took literally seconds to fix.”

Kevin concludes:

With due respect to Sanchez, the point of deterring self-service is the price of a new phone. It’s a fairly common business model: sell printers cheap, but sell product-specific toner at an enormous monopoly markup; sell blood glucometers cheap, but charge $100 a box for the testing strips. In the old days, it was cheap electric typewriters and expensive ribbons. And of course, thanks to “intellectual property” law, it’s illegal to manufacture generic accessories for someone else’s product.”

Via Identity Woman:

“AOL has been shutting down its free Web services, in some cases with little or no notice to users, and they are not the only ones. This blog post on the coming “datapocalypse” makes the case that those who host Web content should be required to provide notice and access to data for a year, and be held strictly accountable the way landlords are before they can evict a tenant. Some commenters on the post argue that you get what you pay for with free Web services, and that users should be backing up their data anyway. What do you think, should there be required notice and access before online hosts take user data offline for good?“

“Production with small-scale, free-standing, electrically powered machinery was the defining feature of what Lewis Mumford called the neotechnic era, which in his periodization of technological history followed the paleotechnic era of steam, coal and Dark Satanic Mills.”

Kevin Carson’s latest essay which we mentioned yesterday, contains an important argument about which form of technology is most adapted to current possibilities. In short: the availability of distributed electric power leads to the superiority of a distributed model, which has been historically derailed by the industrial model, but can no longer be stopped.

To understand it, one needs to know a little bit of Lewis Mumford’s periodization of technological history, which I have to present first. This will be followed by Carson’s argument, so please, do read on.

1. The three stages of technological history

Kevin Carson, summarizing Lewis Mumford:

“The idea of resurrecting old technologies in a modern context is also suggested by Mumford’s periodization of technological history in Technics and Civilization. Mumford divided late medieval and modern technological development into three considerably overlapping periods: the eotechnic, the paleotechnic, and the neotechnic.

To put it another way, if the object is to have the highest quality flour with bran and germ intact, at a reasonable cost, as opposed to nutritionally dead wallpaper paste, the small mill is the most efficient means available. The larger mills are only more “efficient” if the consumer is subordinated to the needs of large-scale production.”

2. The two phases of derailment

As it is cleary that this neotechnic age has not been fully carried out, one must ask the question why this is so.

Kevin Carson:

1. Earlier Mis-adaptation of neotechnic potential

“The fulfillment of this potential, unfortunately, has been delayed. Mumford argued that the neotechnic technologies developed from the late nineteenth century on, based on the decentralizing potential of small-scale electrically powered machinery, have not been used to their full potential as the building blocks of a fundamentally new kind of economy; they have, rather, been incorporated into the preexisting paleotechnic framework. Neotechnic had not “displaced the older regime” with “speed and decisiveness,” and had not yet “developed its own form and organization.” He explained the phenomenon with reference to Spengler’s idea of the “cultural pseudomorph” (a fancy version of path dependency):

…in geology… a rock may retain its structure after certain elements have been leached out of it and been replaced by an entirely different kind of material. Since the apparent structure of the old rock remains, the new product is called a pseudomorph. A similar metamorphosis is possible in culture: new forces, activities, institutions, instead of crystallizing independently into their own appropriate forms, may creep into the structure of an existing civilization…. As a civilization, we have not yet entered the neotechnic phase…. [W]e are still living, in Matthew Arnold’s words, between two worlds, one dead, the other powerless to be born.

…Emerging from the paleotechnic order, the neotechnic institutions have nevertheless in many cases compromised with it, given way before it, lost their identity by reason of the weight of vested interests that continued to support the obsolete instruments and the anti- social aims of the middle industrial era. Paleotechnic ideals still largely dominate the industry and the politics of the Western World…. To the extent that neotechnic industry has failed to transform the coal-and-iron complex, to the extent that it has failed to secure an adequate foundation for its humaner technology in the community as a whole, to the extent that it has lent its heightened powers to the miner, the financier, the militarist, the possibilities of disruption and chaos have increased.

The new machines followed, not their own pattern, but the pattern laid down by previous economic and technical structures.

We have merely used our new machines and energies to further processes which were begun under the auspices of capitalist and military enterprise: we have not yet utilized them to conquer these forms of enterprise and subdue them to more vital and humane purposes…. Not alone have the older forms of technics served to constrain the development of the neotechnic economy: but the new inventions and devices have been frequently used to maintain, renew, stabilize the structure of the old social order….

The present pseudomorph is, socially and technically, third-rate. It has only a fraction of the efficiency that the neotechnic civilization as a whole may possess, provided it finally produces its own institutional forms and controls and directions and patterns. At present, instead of finding these forms, we have applied our skill and invention in such a manner as to give a fresh lease of life to many of the obsolete capitalist and militarist institutions of the older period. Paleotechnic purposes with neotechnic means: that is the most obvious characteristic of the present order.”

2, Current Misuse of Neotechnic Potential

“But the cultural pseudomorph is unsustainable and riddled with contradictions, in ways that Mumford did not anticipate in the pessimism of his later years. In the earlier stage of the cultural pseudomorph that Mumford remarked on, neotechnic methods were integrated into a mass-production framework fundamentally opposed to the technology’s real potential. Rather than integrating electrically powered machinery into craft production, despite the chief rationale for the large factory being gone, Sloanist production instead integrated the new machinery into the Dark Satanic Mill. As Waddell and Bodek observed, the layout of the machinery in a Sloanist factory followed the same exact pattern as if it all had to be hooked to belts running off the drive shaft from a central steam engine or water-wheel.

So long as the state successfully manages to prop up the centralized corporate economic order, libertarian and decentralist technologies and organizational forms will be incorporated into the old corporate framework. As the system approaches its limits of sustainability, those elements become increasingly destabilizing forces within the present system, and prefigure the successor system. When the system finally reaches that limit, those elements will (to paraphrase Marx) break out of their state capitalist integument and become the building blocks of a fundamentally different free market society.”

(the citation in block-quote is from: Lewis Mumford. Technics and Civilization. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Company, 1934)

We dived into the deep ocean of free music and came back with this adventurous compilation. Explore with us music from all over the globe, from Indie-Pop to Techno to Drum’n’Bass to Ambient.

Phlow Magazine has a number of compilations of the best ‘netlabel’ music out there.

As Netlabelism wrote already quite a while ago:

“The goal is to bring every month an anthology of the best tunes around the world. The title of the series is “Their Finest Hour”. We are very happy with this initiative, because there’s tons and tons of music on the internet and netlabels, and we welcome every effort to filter and organise this stuff. Thanks Phlow! The releases are made with much care, love and respect. There’s streaming, download per tune, zip-file and a nice cover.”

These netcompilations are freely available.

“The purpose of copyright law has been to promote learning and the progress of knowledge. Two features of copyright law should provide the guide for how to respond to access concerns. First, copyright is an author’s right. This is definitional….

Second,…copyright is a time-limited right. Copyright expires so that the public may ultimately gain unlimited access and use rights. This also is definitional….

Therefore, by design, all copyrighted works are destined for the public domain….”

Michael Carroll makes a strong case that we need a specifically defined ‘digital’ public domain, which needs to be actively digitized, made accessible, and tagged and marked for easy usage by the authors and producers of the material, as a matter of public duty, in particular by the research community and universities who receive public money.

The following excerpts contains the definition of the digital public domain and his call to the research community.

1. On the need for a digital public domain:

Michael Carroll:

“In the age of the Internet, we need to reconceive the public domain as the Digital Public Domain. In the Digital Public Domain, it is not enough that a work is free from copyright restrictions. A positive commitment to universal access to the public domain requires first that public domain works be digitized or at least be subject to a protocol that enables digitization when cost effective.

Consequently, those public and private bodies that laudably have been investing in efforts to digitize public domain works should increase the returns on their investment by marking and tagging public domain works as such. Creative Commons provides a metadata standard for digitally marking works with their use rights, the Creative Commons Rights Expression Language (ccREL). Specifically, Creative Commons provides a means of marking a public domain work as such. Creative Commons requires support to implement plans to update this protocol to provide more robust information about public domain works.”

2. The role of the research community

“Faculty authors and other professional researchers have a responsibility to manage their copyrights in a way that ensures public access to the scholarly record well before copyright expires in these works. Why? Because the standard justification for granting author’s rights does not neatly apply to these scholarly authors. They are motivated by the desire to be read and are not remunerated by journal publishers for publishing their work.

Faculty authors are coming to the realization that the way they manage their publishing rights should reflect their core values and the university’s core commitment to disseminating knowledge. A number of faculties have adopted resolutions recommending open access, but these have led to very few results. Just as was the case when the NIH policy was voluntary, authors at these institutions generally continue to sign away their rights to make their work available on the Internet or fail to use such rights when they have them by depositing manuscripts in an open access repository.”

3. In conclusion:

“In sum, the initiatives to digitize public domain works and to provide open access to contemporary learning share the common goal of making the Internet a repository for human knowledge and a more powerful resource for researchers, students, teachers, and learners of all kinds around the world. Three principles derived from the purposes of copyright law, should guide these efforts: (1) the works should be freely available; (2) public domain works should be free from any contractual restrictions on use; and (3) the works should be marked with their use rights.”

The two blockquoted citations are followed by a important and inspiring reflection on the role of optimism by Alex Steffen. Really worth reading.

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

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

Full article is here .

Excerpts from a text by Alex Steffen:

1.

“Optimism is a political act.

Great movements for social change always begin with statements of great optimism.”

2.

“Consider, instead, the politics of optimism:

Ultimately, though, we need something more than better answers. We need millions of people who are willing to teach the teachable, comfort the disheartened and confront the scoundrels. We need to take our politics public and take on the whole culture of cynical defeatism. On some days, I think we need an optimism uprising.”

The Peer-to-Peer Research Institute gives a review of technological developments. Go here for the full articles and the links.

Excerpt:

“As we have written about before on this blog, BitTorrent is not good for streaming video due to its rarest-first download ordering policy. In order to stream video, or music, or whatever - you want it to arrive in a predictable order. Typically that order is linear, starting at the start. This way data arrives in the order of consumption. But BitTorrent does not provide this. In fact, it almost explicitly guarantees that it will not order data in a linear fashion. BitTorrent trades predictable ordering for replication increases. Under BitTorrent, the rarest pieces of data will be replicated the most, and so become less rare.

And of course BitTorrent, Inc have been working to develop their own video streaming version of their protocol.”

One of my sparring partners is Kevin Carson of Mutualist.org. We do not agree on everything, I guess I’m still a social-democrat at heart, but I always find his thinking to be open and clear, and we find ourselves in our mutual preference for peer to peer dynamics, including on the level of economic transactions.

I guess the commonality is: if we control our own means of production, we are more able to voluntarily aggregate them in common production projects (or do it individually and exchange those goods).

Kevin’s particular perspective, as I understand it, is this: there is a strong connection between the current form of state-maintained, subsidized and protected ‘capitalism’ (which Kevin holds is the opposite of a true free market), and the size of the state. If it because the current system is so fundamentally flawed and crisis-ridden, that we need such a big state in the first place.

In this vision, stopping subsidies to unsustainable ‘bigness’, would be the best strategy not just for a more sustainable society and economy, but for achieving a more moderate state size.

Kevin Carson has explained this argument in detail, in a latest essay, available here.

It is entitled: Industrial Policy: New Wine in Old Bottles

Excerpt:

“Their vision of how to restore “the economy,” naturally, amounts to a return to an economic “normalcy” defined by giant corporations and mass consumer society. The problem is, the present model of industrial production is about as sustainable as the Titanic. It came into existence only through government policies to subsidize the operating costs and inefficiencies of big business, and a regulatory framework (including “intellectual property”) to protect it from competition. And that industrial model is hitting a wall, a systemic crisis, in which government will no longer have the resources to subsidize inputs at the level at which they are demanded. The present industrial model, identified with GM’s Alfred Sloan and celebrated by Alfred Chandler, is based on enormous market areas and costly, product-specific machinery. The only way to keep the unit costs of such machinery down is large-batch production to utilize full capacity, and then worrying about making people buy it only afterward (commonly known as “supply-push distribution.”2 So Sloanist industry, under “Generally Accepted Accounting Principles,” produces goods to sell to inventory, regardless of whether there are orders for it or even of whether the product works, and has an astronomical recall rate.3 It follows a business model based on consumer credit and planned obsolescence to keep the wheels running. As Ralph Borsodi described it, the push distribution system required by Sloan-style mass production amounted to making water run uphill.”