P2P Foundation

As I have already argued in the entry on the distribution of everything, for participation and peer to peer modes to flourish, we need to distribute education, the means of production (networked computers and desktop manufacturing), but also financial capital.

This debate is picking up steam, after a post by David Winer, below is what he said, but there are many interesting reactions. From Mitch Ratcliffe, and others.
some of whom have proposals to patch up a broken venture capital industry, which performed very badly leading up to the dotcom crash of 2001.

“There’s a wisp of a discussion materializing in the tech blogosphere about reforming the VC industry. I have been thinking about this for many many years. It’s an exciting time because I think it might actually happen now. Here’s the rough outline of my plan to reshape the VC industry around the philosophy of the web.

1. One word: disintermediate. Take out the middleman. We don’t need the partners, limited or general, they gum up the works. We need money to start new ventures. Luckily we know the people with the money, they’re the users. And we need people to validate the ideas. Same people, the users.

2. It’s not actually a new idea. That’s how Netscape and the dotcommers that followed went through the roof of the stock market. People who traded could see the raw power of the Internet and knew, one way or the other, that this was going to change how everything was done, from business to romance, travel, gambling, everything. So the users of the Internet bid the stock of the Internet up. And up. And up. And so on.

3. So what did the middlemen do exactly? They invested in all kinds of idiotic things. Anyone could have made the bets they did. The users hadn’t had time to fully absorb the Internet in the 1990s so they bought all the garbage the middlemen shipped, leading to online pet food companies with market caps exceeding the largest industrial companies.

4. So now we’re in the middle of the next decade, and the users are caught up, and we’ve got a pipeline going, from entrepreneur to user, and maybe not much inbetween. Matt Mullenweg hasn’t taken on any VC to start wordpress.com. Who knows how far he can go without having to sell stock? I don’t want to say how he’s paying the bills, I’ll leave that up to Matt, but suffice it to say it’s honest, sustainable, and legal.”

In another reaction, Doc Searls concludes that the value chain has disappeared, to be replaced by an investment ecosystem consisting of the user communities, which also happen to be the owners:

“I don’t even see a pipeline anymore. Nor a “value chain” from producer to consumer. Rather, what I see is a new market ecosystem in which everybody can participate, and should get rewarded for their participation.”
Suddenly, the ideas of Dominique Pelbois outlined in his book on Liberal Communism, a system based on the ownership by consumers, start sounding a lot less utopian.