Quite cyber-utopian, but fun to watch and well produced, reminds us of the promise of Open Government, Open Data, Open Source. Watch the video here:
Searched for "Peak Hierarchy"
The Gordon Cook Interview (4): Peak Hierarchy and Open Agriculture
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… Continue reading
Paul Graham’s variation on the Peak Hierarchy Theme
Large organizations will start to do worse now, though, because for the first time in history they’re no longer getting the best people. An ambitious kid graduating from college now doesn’t want to work for a big company. They want to work for the hot startup that’s rapidly growing into one. If they’re really ambitious,… Continue reading
David Bollier on the financial meltdown as sign of Peak Hierarchy
David Bollier engages with our Peak Hierarchy hypothesis in his remarkable On the Commons blog. Peak Hierarchy is the hypothetical inflection point at which time at which distributed organizations become stronger and more versatile than centralized hierarchies. Bollier asks: what if the financial meltdown would be a sign of this happening? He states: “The fall… Continue reading
From Peak Oil to Peak Hierarchy
In the beginning was the Horizontal, and it was everywhere, but it was local. Then came the Vertical, and it was stronger, and became global, eventually tempered by the Diagonal. But one day, the Horizontal learned to interconnect, and it too became global, outshining the Vertical. As it became the strongest, it became tempered by… Continue reading
Hierarchy Is Not the Problem… It’s the Power Dynamics
We hosted a workshop on decentralised organising for the Civicwise network in Modena last week. At one point I said, “I don’t care about hierarchy, hierarchy is not the problem,” and immediately felt the temperature in the room drop by a few degrees. I know I can be provocative with my overly-concise use of language, so I… Continue reading
Rethinking the balance between equality and hierarchy: 1) How to maintain reverse dominance
In a system of reverse dominance, however, the many act in unison to deflate the ego of anyone who tries, even in an incipient way, to dominate them. The following article makes an important point: Egalitarian societies didn’t just happen, they had a culture and ‘techniques’ that maintained it and Peter Gray calls it “reverse… Continue reading
Abundance/Scarcity and Equality/Hierarchy: Four Basic Scenarios for the Future
A very important essay: * Frase, Peter. Four futures. Jacobin. 2012 Winter; 5:27–34. “Frase considers the endgame of our current political struggles, locating future scenarios along two axes: scarcity versus abundance, and social hierarchy versus equality. This yields four possibilities: * communism (abundance with equality), * rentism (abundance with hierarchy), * socialism (scarcity with equality),… Continue reading
The Problem of Growth as Related to Hierarchy
This text by Jeff Vail, from March 2008, is still very much worth reading and pondering. The non-excerpted part of this text deals with the positive construction of a rhizome-based world, but in this excerpt, he convincingly links hierarchical social forms to the problem of infinite growth. Thanks to Ryan Lanham for the suggestion. Jeff… Continue reading
Hierarchy and peer to peer – a recap
(note: also proposed as a discussion on our Ning network site) Though there are many kinds of networks , they all seem to have a hierarchy This seems to be the logical conclusion from recent research reported in Nature We quote: “researchers at the Santa Fe Institute (SFI) have shown that it’s possible to extract… Continue reading
More selected citations on the commons
From the P2P Foundation wiki section on the commons, where you can find the sources of the following citations: * Sam Rose on Transition Economics “Where people work together to both share those resources that are shareable now (software, designs, knowledge, waste that can be used as food, surplus capacities and resources) and cooperate to… Continue reading
What is the P2P Foundation all about? The Gordon Cook Interview series
Because of increased attention to our work, we are relinking to an interview series conducted by Gordon Cook: The Gordon Cook Interview * (1): On the origins of our engagement with P2P * (2): Phase transitions, scarcity, and abundance * (3): From the commons to open and distributed manufacturing * (4): Peak Hierarchy and Open… Continue reading
A double review of: The Firm as Collaborative Community
the entire book is filled with really interesting insights. If you’re interested in the transformation of work and work organization, as I am, or if you’re just interested in how macro changes are affecting rhetoric and values, I highly recommend this book. Tom Haskins has been reading this important book, and took extensive notes. And… Continue reading
The Argentinian interview
The interview was conducted by Facundo García, a journalist from an argentinian newspaper called Pagina12. It appeared on 23 August, with the 2 first answers translated into Spanish. Interview: 1) Recently you said that p2p is about to become a political force. However, some very interesting groups, like The Pirate Party in Sweden, seem to… Continue reading
The unitary democracy of peer governance, vs. the adversary democracy of representation
The subversive effect of adversary procedure on unitary feeling makes it essential that the necessary dominance of adversary democracy in national politics not set the pattern of behavior for the nation as a whole. The effort to maintain unitary elements in the nation in turn depends on widespread rejection both of the cynical doctrine that… Continue reading
Civilisational competition, social change, and P2P
The evolution of civilization can be seen as dialectic between the systematic selection for power and the human striving for a humane world, between the necessities imposed upon humankind regardless of their wishes and their efforts to be able to choose the cultural environment in which they will live. Book: The Parable Of The Tribes…. Continue reading