The following is the second part of an interview that excerpted from a conversation/interview with San Kinsley, conducted in the aftermath of the Paying Attention conference.

* Interview: Towards Peer-to-Peer Alternatives: An Interview with Michel Bauwens. Conducted by Sam Kinsley.

* from the special Issue: PAYING ATTENTION: Towards a Critique of the Attention Economy. By Patrick Crogan and Samuel Kinsley. CULTURE MACHINE VOL 13 • 2012

Excerpt, part 2:

SK: There is a key issue of mobilisation there, and I want to push you on a specific point, which is the idea that Eli Pariser (2011) has popularized as the ‘filter bubble’. The idea that actually mobilisation becomes even harder because of the ways in which people are filtered by corporations themselves in the process of the distribution of knowledge. What would a peer-to-peer critique of that be?

MB: Well actually I think the filter bubble theory actually says that we filter ourselves. That we create types of affinity-based communities, so that we are no longer communicating across social strata.

Sam: Yes, but those are then used by algorithms that perpetuate that, distil it.

MB: Yes, you are right. So, that is a difficult question. I believe that people are diverse. I might be a peer-to-peer Buddhist vegan and through this diverse quality of my personality – this is an hypothetical example, I am not Buddhist, I am not vegan – but I would interact in different commons, I would interact with a peer-to-peer commons and there is indeed the danger that I look for people who agree with me and we look to form a social movement around this kind of shared value. But I am vegan and there are a lot of people in the vegan community who absolutely do not agree with me, and there will be a lot of people in the Buddhist community who would not agree with me. So I do not think that you can say that we are isolated in that way. We are engaged in different communities because of this diversity and we still encounter that difference and we still have to cope with it.

This was also the debate ten years ago. Yesterday’s movements could mobilise because we all worked together in big factories and we saw each other every day. What happens with a dispersed labour force? Look at Occupy Wall Street: that was in 2000 cities across the world. It was not as big everywhere, but I do not know any social movement before that was able to mobilise on a global scale in such a fast way, using unified communications. So, I do not necessarily agree with this pessimistic vision, I think we will come up with our own answers. I am not denying it is a real issue, but I think these issues find new answers.

SK: Do you think peer-to-peer is a methodology that provides the coup-de-grace for top-down, party-driven, politics?

MB: Well, I think peer-to-peer is in some way a new paradigm, it is a way of viewing the world that is very different from the way we used to, and by using these tools we socialise people within that new culture. This is what I always stress about peer-to-peer, it is not about technology, it is a form of socialisation. It is a ‘horizontal socialisation’. That is the key thing; and everything else is detail. For example, yes, you have issues with Facebook, but nevertheless in Egypt they had a revolution, to a substantial degree, using Facebook. Why? You could socialise horizontally on Facebook even within the corporate system of control. So it is very similar to the print works, once you had the print logic and the ability to mass produce books and to read books by yourself, no matter what happened, the Catholic Church’s hegemony of culture and ideology was over. The middle ages were over. That does not mean paradise is coming, but it does mean that a new structure and organisation was to be based on that new logic of print, and I think it is the same today.

Whatever is coming, domination or forms of equality, will have to take into account this undeniable fact of mass horizontal socialisation. Only those forms of power and dominance will be effective that are legitimate and strong enough to work within that new environment, as opposed to attempts to hold it back or go back to older ways. For example, in music and cinema the reversion to old techniques of dominance by the MPAA (the Motion Picture Association of America) and the RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) respectively, is not working. However, Apple, for example, is more intelligent. Apple takes into account open applications, people can contribute applications. So this is a much more intelligent adaptation than that of the old media corporations.

SK: But it is still very strongly controlled.

MB: It is, and therefore much more dangerous than the old way, because they operate through seduction. People want their iPad; nobody forces them down this road. So Apple has this very skilful use of seduction. Power in the future will be very much about seduction. Not just for Apple but for everybody. Within capitalism we have corporations, in competition, so we have competing entities, but internally you have to cooperate within those competing entities. Now people are working around problems, they are cooperating but we have competing entrepreneurs and also the commons are eventually competing with each other. So, for example, with open source website content management systems you have the Drupal platform, and the Joomla platform. They do not have any power to force you, it has to be done through seduction. Why would you use Drupal or Joomla? Nobody is holding a gun to your head.

SK: So again the issue of attention is raised: how you cultivate and maintain attention.

MB: Yes, so I think that is what people today are doing. Knowledge workers are engaging in building reputational capital, relationship capital, all these forms of attention are central to our personal and collective influence. You could argue that these two worlds are competing with each other. This is what I call asymmetric competition. We have the old world of mass media and the Occupy Wall Street movement emerges. The first thing the mass media do is ignore it completely, it took two weeks for PBS, the public television in the United States to mention Occupy Wall Street. They thought that if they do not talk about it, it will go away. The alternative world has horizontal forms of attention circulating, so they did not care that PBS was not mentioning them.

Of course the next step is that the mass media talk about it, but they ridicule it. The first coverage was that the [people from the] Occupy movement were using the toilets of the neighbouring businesses and they were making the toilets dirty, and the camp was full of homeless people. Those kinds of derogatory stories arose but did not work either. Then eventually what you see, and I think this is a great victory, is that the whole nature of the debate shifted from austerity to social justice and inequality.

They [the Occupy movement] won. They won a battle. They did not win the war, but they won a very important battle, which was to reset the terms of the debate, and that is not merely a detail. The Right always has done well at reframing the debate. So when you are talking about inheritance taxes it is 90% of people in favour, but if you frame it as a death tax, 90% of people are against. The Right was always dominant because it had this reframing capability, so to see that Occupy Wall Street had this reframing capability in a progressive way is hugely significant. In my view it is a big success. Look at what is happening now in the Republican Party. They are trying to discredit Romney on the basis of his exploitation when he was working for Bain Capital. The right wing is producing a documentary accusing Romney of being a heartless capitalist. It is amazing. That would not have happened without Occupy Wall Street. I think that those two worlds are still coexisting, they are competing with each other, but in my view, the mainstream world is diminishing in its influence, slowly but surely.

Within the new world you have players like Google and Facebook who are trying to use the new dynamics to their advantage. They are not the only ones, we have other people countering their influence as well. They are being challenged by free software, by alternative networks, by all kinds of people actively hacking technology to make it different, to make it more free and participatory and it is somewhat like an arms race. One side develops one particular way of working and then the other side reacts. This is an ongoing struggle and I think we should not assume that the P2P side will lose, because that is the best way to actually lose.

We have to be realistic and see reality as it is, but at the same time we have to have a narrative of victory. Can you imagine Ghandi saying ‘we will never be victorious over the British Empire, it is too strong’? Or can you imagine Martin Luther King saying: ‘we will never get equal rights’? No. So that is my point of view. I am not saying this means we will succeed. However, if you are in a struggle then you have to believe that you can win in the first place. So this is not about being naive, it is a productive attitude: optimism works better. It is more productive to mobilise energies when people believe they can achieve something.

SK: So the peer-to-peer philosophy is something that always acts from within? It is a force for change that always needs to be within the system, it is not something that is set aside, it is always within?

MB: Yes, I do not see how you can be fully outside of the world. There is only one world. You are always operating within an existing reality. And so a counter-economy is always something relative, it is not absolutely different. That is why I think that the hacking attitude is a really good attitude. It asks how can we change reality to our advantage by looking to where we have leverage. Twelve doors are closed and there is a big gang opposing our progress and we are frail, and we cannot change that, but the thirteenth door is open. So let us go through that thirteenth door and hack it for our use. It is a general attitude, I think people are doing that in every sphere of life, they are changing to peer-to-peer commons oriented practices in many, many different fields.

What I would like to see is more mutual alignment. You have the anti-globalisation movement; you have a free software movement. Well, the anti-globalisation movement should be using free software. That is an alignment. That was not the case in the beginning, that is not a given. Or, an interesting social movement I discovered when I was in Rio de Janeiro, quite a substantial social movement there called ‘out of axis’, Foro do Eixo,4 are musicians that are originally from the more peripheral states in Brazil who have created a network of mutualised infrastructure for music: the studios, the instruments, and they use an alternative currency for these exchanges. They have music festivals that bring in the money, the regular money. It has become a huge network, very successful, and they are fielding candidates in the local elections to create policies that are favourable to this new type of economy, where there is no copyright, everything is shared, infrastructures are mutualised, and it is working.

So, I look forward to movements of social forces that can actually create these new forms of livelihood that are substantially outside of the old capitalist logic. I think we can legitimately make a difference, like Manuel DeLanda (1998), and others suggest, between the market and capitalism. You can have market activity with a non-profit maximising utility: that is not capitalism. Yes, you are selling something, you are selling a service, but you are not accumulating capital. It is not the same thing. As long as we do not have infinite growth there is not a problem. The problem of capitalism, one of the problems, is infinite growth. As we enter an era with post-growth requirements, how can we have a system of infinite growth? That does not mean that a market is totally out of the question, we can have combinations, we can have a diverse economy with a commons logic with for-benefit institutions and with new market entities, which are not capitalist entities: that would be an alternative to the system we have today.

For me, essentially, it is not about one view of the future. What is essential is that we have a democracy of citizens which can decide on the future that they want. I think that is what Occupy Wall Street is. They are very diverse, so let us create a democracy, let us create a mechanism through which we can talk together, and this is far more important than saying we all agree on the alternative. ”