I agree with this part:-

Gorz reminds us that innovation is less about meeting real needs than about creating monopoly rents: “The proportion of the price of a commodity that is rent may be ten, twenty or fifty times larger than its production cost. And this is true not only of luxury items; it applies also to everyday articles like trainers, T-shirts, mobile phones, CDs, jeans, etc.”

the problem I see at the moment is exactly this:- big capital is working very hard to retain existing rent power and scarcity in traditional areas like housing, food – and simultaneously turn the potential of new technologies to be tightly focused on either/both of achieving market dominance to then extract monopoly rent (e.g. Uber with P2P cars), or build a data collecting + advertising diffusion platform around a service to profile our consumption needs/desires and stimulate them (Facebook, Twitter, …).

I am a little less sanguine that these technologies have such a liberatory potential/underlying logic that they are going to somehow “undercut” big capital. Yes the music industry and journalism have been disrupted and suffered – but in hindsight they hardly seem the worst offenders do they? And it seems the ‘little guys’ are the ones that often suffer most in those disruptions – a few musicians are still big successes but it’s harder for many to make a middle-class living, same for journalists.

In the days of intellectual capitalism – the point of Capital is that it can afford to buy large amounts of time and loyalty of lots of really smart, motivated and sometimes ruthless people (S/W developers, strategists, accountants) to avoid this potential undercutting.

None of this means people building alternatives should give up:- but I think it means being realistic about the sophistication of your opponent. And for me it reaffirms a view of being more of a “Social Democratic P2P-ist” rather than an “Anarchist P2P-ist” – seems to me that contesting for and employing the power of the democratic state is crucial for limiting what Piketty calls ‘patrimonial capital’ and supporting alternatives. Which is why it will be very interesting to see how Syriza and the social movements progress in Greece.