On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, will be serialized separately.

This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

Gordon Cook’s Summary:

“Looking at the apparent ramping up of a fresh stage in the economic crisis, one has to begin to wonder about the sustainability of the global economic system that is generally thought of as “free market capitalism.” Michel Bauwens set the stage for this issue by asking: “what will replace it? A reactionary power structure of increased exploitation, in a global struggle for dwindling resources amongst overpopulation, food and water and resource depletion and climate change, with scattered pockets of resilient communities … or a new p2p system centered around open commons of knowledge, code and designs, linked to relocalized and more distributed property formats, with forms of global governance that protect the planet?” In an interview done earlier this year in Bangkok. Michael Bauwens explains how over the last several years he has built the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. “P2P is nothing else than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive,” he says.

Whereas Yochai Benkler identified peer production in the context of the Internet, Michel has gone on well beyond that to identify a broad array fundamental changes underway that are burrowing, termite like, at the foundations of global capitalism.

The intersection of the internet, and Moore’s law are reshaping the environment of what it is possible to do with in a decentralized collaborative environment that needs far less capital that could ever have been imagined before. Michel points out that “With the bursting of the internet bubble there was Big crisis. No more money. But instead of stopping innovation accelerates. Now why?”

“My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital. At least this is true when you make advances in knowledge in software and in design. Of course there are always exceptions where you need resources for a really big machine. But as a general rule what you need is smart people working together with computers and having access to a network.”

“The role of capital is that it is needed after innovation is done. It is needed to scale what can be done rather inexpensively with the new digital tools. However, especially with things digital and with the network “when capital intervenes it is to enclose.”

Michel continues: “Think about what happened to Rome many centuries ago. In was a crisis of extensive globalizaton. The slave-based Roman empire could no longer afford to conquer and administer the territory it needed in order to get new raw materials. What happened as a reaction was a return to localization. The smart slave owner must have thought: if I free my slaves and transform them into serfs, then I will need no longer a thousand soldiers to discipline them, but I can accomplish this with only 100 soldiers. I will let them work for themselves, take half of what they produce and will better off than I was before. Those who did this were better suited to survive than those who did not.’

“But you also had an open global design community operating in early feudal Europe – this community was the Catholic Church. The itinerant monks were the guarantors of the old knowledge and as they traveled, they were also means for spreading new knowledge. The monastic orders were the ones turning forests into new agricultural lands. They invented new techniques that, unencumbered by copyright, they happily share across all Europe.’ ‘Think about this. It is what we have now. A crisis of extensive globalization. Technological advances can play a role in playing around some limits, but technology is not a magical wand that can wish away resource depletion and social contradictions.”

“So, what we have is that, in the face of this people are beginning to relocalize while we have a global open design community that is the internet. As the old structure slowly collapses, you have to be ready with something else because going on the streets and saying give us this or give us that when there is no one there to give it to you anymore just doesn’t work very well. What peer to peer would like to do is see that society has choices by which it can rebuild other than ones dependent on centralized force. But, and this is crucial, localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter. The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons.”

Globally there are tens of thousands of people involved in creating and building the new knowledge commons that Michel speaks of. What he is doing is an unusual but extremely valuable function of connecting globally sprouting independent seedlings into a global web of interest where participants can learn from each other and reinforce the building of life rafts to give humanity a better chance of successfully transitioning the huge changes it faces.

The interview contained in this issue describes much of the content and thinking behind these changes. In doing so it gives an added picture of how the internet is affecting the global economy. A picture that is something of a grassroots parallel to the more corporate and traditional take of the Power of Pull June COOK Report issue. The content and ideology of the peer to peer knowledge commons – the “what” and the “why” is the primary subject matter of this issue. As I have worked on this material I have realized the HOW of michel’s doing this is very likely as important or even more o that the what and the why? I have already begun work on material that will explain that.

One of the problems addressed by the authors of the Power of Pull is the need to increase the speed of learning to organize what is learned so that it is findable and useable by others. I believe that Michel has developed a methodology of doing this by means of very novel ways of using social networking tools in a well thought out framework that accomplishes what cannot be achieved by their use in isolation. We are talking about the ability to create a knowledge and wisdom infrastructure far more substantial than anything seen before.”

Interview part 1): On the origins of our engagement with P2P

This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

COOK Report: What did you do before you became the chronicler of the “commons?”

Bauwens: “I was an idealist in my youth, but meeting with reality I had mostly a business career.

My last job in regular business from 1999 to 2002 was working for Belgacom – a large telecommunications firm. Towards the end I became very uneasy about the creative accounting principles that seem to be required for survival in such a large company.

In my view what was required to maintain accounts of large companies was almost entirely political and about as trustworthy as the statistics used in the five-year plans of the former Soviet economies.

That made me uncomfortable. This set me on a course of re-thinking to adapt to what society is when I looked around at all the indicators – land, water, climate, energy supplies, – if you see all those indicators going in the wrong direction and you see the world not reacting in any serious way, I felt that I could not play the game anymore. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010

I became convinced that the corporate world could not change anymore on its own – that it would only change when impelled to do so by external threats to its survival. Consequently the onus of needed change is to be found in civil society. Let me give you an anecdote that was important for me. I was something of an internet guru in my own country. In the 1990s my first major task at Belgacom was to make it into an “e” company – one that understood the Internet.

The second task was to integrate all the different internet companies into a coherent strategy. Finally a third task was to head an internal think tank on long-term strategy.

It was a phone company by culture. It wanted to change but never could figure out how to do so.

As a result it was unstable and characterized by a lot of infighting. In April 2001 the Internet bubble burst in a big way and people began to say that it was a catastrophe because the internet innovation machine was stuck. There was no more capital left for startup companies. Now I made an observation that Clay Shirky did as well – that instead of slowing down, innovation actually accelerated. This was an apparent anomaly. Big crisis. No more money. But instead of stopping innovation accelerates. Now why?

My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital.

COOK Report: Because it was coming from a different place?

Bauwens: Exactly. What it showed me was that the assumed linkage between capitalism entrepreneurship and innovation no longer functioned in the same way so that the assumed old Schumpeterian model where risk capital supports innovators and then uses intellectual property to seal the advantages it obtains just did not seem to operate because innovation was not stopping. I had to find an explanation. My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital. At least this is true when you make advances in knowledge in software and in design. Of course there are always exceptions where you need resources for a really big machine. But as a general rule what you need is smart people working together with computers and having access to a network. It is only when they become so successful that the multitudes start to crush their server that they need access to capital. You can invent a Facebook, a Bittorrent, and an e-Bay or a Google basically by means of a few people who sit down and write code. What this showed me was that innovation had moved in an arguable way to civil society. Capital needs come at the end of the process rather than at the beginning, and I consider this a very significant change, because it means that ‘social’ innovation is becoming productive and more significant than any internal R & D.

Not only does this mean that no corporate group can hope to compete with a whole universal network, but also that the conditions for success are quite different. Social innovation requires social innovation and sharing, as otherwise it discourages participation.

COOK Report: In 1992 I found myself shoved in that direction when, in two year’s time, the number of supercomputer centers in the USA went from 5 to 4 and my job at OTA ended. Dave Hughes pointed out that I could use the new technology to write about and describe for others what was going on because the cost of entry needed to do so was extremely low.

Bauwens: Yes you were one of the pioneers. But for young people now the role of capital is that it is needed after innovation is done. It is needed to scale what can be done rather inexpensively with the new digital tools.

But even this can be questioned by saying scaling is necessary IF you want to play that game. I think the key thing that we must understand is that when capital intervenes it is to enclose.

For example as Ebden Moglen of the Free Software Foundation has argued, there is no reason why Facebook should have to be highly centralized. Today you can scale small group dynamics globally without having to have centralization. The reason that Facebook wants centralization is because it is determined to capture all the user’s data and control it in one place.

If you want to scale what you are doing in a way such that it can be monetized and monopolized, then you need capital. But its is possible to imagine other ways which is what people at the Peer to Peer Foundation are looking at is how to scale by internetworking. In this case you do loose control over a marketable scarcity. Movement away from centralized scaling is a choice that causes all kinds of problems but it is also one that increasing numbers of people want to make. In a way, what is changing is a shift from the scarcity engineering of the market, to the abundance engineering of a commons. (However, it is often ‘surrounded’ by an entrepreneurial coalition creating market value around it)

COOK Report: I would imagine that many people are very thirsty for an opportunity to become self-sustaining.

Bauwens: I think about the experience of my own father. A self-made man who did not go to school and who was happy and proud just to have a job, even if that job was in itself potentially meaningless. In his generation people who were unemployed were depressed and suffered from a loss of self-worth. But in the current generation many people can find meaningful pursuits regardless of pay. They sometimes must move away from a meaningful pursuit in order to survive but generally they want to be able to return there and survive.

This is a real social revolution. This means that the peer-to-peer dynamics of this social revolution that I am trying to describe to you are continuous regardless of how the economy is doing. When the economy is good there is always a surplus of people having time on their hands in between projects, on weekends and so on but when things are bad like with the current meltdown, then people have even more time on their hands. That cognitive surplus is actually always there, in one way or another. So peer-to-peer profits from both cyclical and counter-cyclical trends.”