This article looks at three crucial insights for the future of economics:

• Complex adaptive systems
• How technologies of cooperation enable commons-based peer-to-peer networks
• Why we need complex adaptive systems to understand new economies

Complex Adaptive Systems

The Edge of Chaos

Complex adaptive systems has enjoyed considerable attention in recent decades. Chaos theory reveals that out of turbulence and nonlinear dynamics, complex systems emerge: order from chaos.

We learned that complex systems are poised on the “edge of chaos” and generate “order for free” (Stuart Kauffman). They are composed of many parts connected into a flexible network. As matter and energy flow through, they spontaneously self-organize into increasingly complex structures. These systems, continuously in flux, operate “far from equilibrium” (Ilya Prigogine). Beyond critical thresholds, differences in degree become differences in kind. “More is different.” (Phil Anderson)

Complexity science reveals the difference between prediction and attraction. We can know that a marble in a bowl will reach the bottom even though we cannot predict its exact path because of sensitivity to initial conditions. Deterministic chaos means path dependence, where future states are highly influenced by small changes in previous states. A typical economic example is the lock-in of the now-standard “QWERTY” keyboard.

Networks

We see network effects: adding another node to a network increases the value of all other nodes exponentially, because many new connections are possible, economically “increasing returns to scale” (Brian Arthur). Reed’s Law goes even farther, because new groups can be formed, exhibiting a much greater geometric growth. We know about “small-world,” or “scale-free,” networks, so called because there is no statistic at any scale that is representative of the network as a whole, e.g. no bell-curve average, but instead a “long tail,” mathematically a logarithmic “power law.” Some networks are robust to random failures but vulnerable to selective damage, i.e. network attacks that target nodes with a higher centrality. Furthermore, “centrality” means different things inside different network topologies. Network structure affects the frequency and magnitude of cascades. Like avalanches in sand piles, power laws create “self-organized criticality” (Per Bak).

Information Landscapes

Complex systems constitute “fitness landscapes,” exhibit cycles of growth and decline, are punctuated by explosions of diversity and periods of stasis, and show waves of ebb and flow, seen in traffic patterns. On fitness landscapes, algorithms that pursue merely maximization, without the ability to observe remote information from the landscape, freeze in local optima. Without system diversity, there is no improvement. Swarms escape because they not only read information from the landscape but also write to it, creating shared information environments.

Landscapes and occupants impart selection pressures on each other. Good employees and good jobs both outperform bad ones. Agents and strategies evolve. Adaptation can become maladaptation when selection pressures change.

Dynamics and Time

When we study the spread of disease through a forest we see a slow progression of infected trees.However, when we study the spread of fire, we see the same pattern enacted much faster.

Complex systems and their dynamics are not new. What is new is that human systems have accelerated to the point where political, economic, and social changes now occur rapidly enough to appear within the threshold of human perception. We change from slow social movement to an era of “smart mobs.” Consequently, while it may be true that we did not need the tools of complex systems in the past, because economic change was slow and did not require a dynamical viewpoint, the current speed of economic change demands this new lens.

The Emergence of Commons-Based Peer-to-Peer Networks

A crucial global economic phenomenon is the rise of commons-based peer-to-peer networks. “Technologies of cooperation” (Howard Rheingold) enable people to self-organize in productive ways. Open-source software was one first clue to powerful new ways of organizing labor and capital. “Commons-based peer-production” is radically cost-effective (Yochai Benkler). By “governing the commons” (Elinor Ostrom), shared resources managed by communities with polycentric horizontal rules, without reliance on either the state or the market, escape the “tragedy of the commons.” Our thinking about production, property, and even the state, must evolve to reflect the growing participatory economy of global stewardship and collectively-driven “platform cooperatives” (Michel Bauwens). New commons include food, energy, “making,” health, education, news, and even currency.

The rise of 3D printing and the Internet of Things combined with participatory practices yields new forms of value production, paralleling new forms of value accounting and exchange. We witness a “Cambrian explosion” of new currency species, like BitCoin, and innovative trust technologies to support them: the blockchain and distributed ledgers. Just as 20th century electrical infrastructure remained fragmented until standards enabled a connected network (Thomas Hughes), new infrastructure matures when separate solutions merge and the parts reinforce the stability of the whole.

The Future Fate of Economics

Economics as a discipline can only remain relevant as long as it can provide deep engagement with contemporary reality. Overly-simplified models and problematic axioms cannot guide us forward. The world is an interwoven, heterogeneous, adaptive “panarchy.”

Harnessing complexity requires understanding the frequency, intensity, and “sync” of global connectivity. Analyzing many futures demands better tools. To analyze “big data,” first we need data. Complexity science utilizes multi-agent simulations to investigate many outcomes, sweep parameters, and identify thresholds, attractors, and system dynamics. Complexity methods provide unique metrics and representations, animated visuals rather than static graphs.

This is not just big data; it’s dynamic data. With distributed systems, it becomes peer-to-peer data: shared infrastructure. Just as ants leave trails for others, shared infrastructure bolsters interoperability through a knowledge commons. Restricting connectivity and innovation, e.g. with intellectual property rights, carries extreme costs now. Fitness impedes uncooperative agents and strategies. Fortunately new commons have novel “copyleft” licenses already, promoting fairness and equity.

Complexity science shows us not only what to do, but also how to do it:  build shared infrastructure, improve information flow, enable rapid innovation, encourage participation, support diversity and citizen empowerment.

This article was originally published in cooperation with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) at The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons and on OECD Medium at The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons

To engage with the original please go to The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons by Paul B. Hartzog

The post The Future of Economics: From Complexity to Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Complex Systems and the Energy Commons

In this article, we look at the future of the Energy Commons, and how using a complex adaptive systems lens can lead to effective solutions. As an example, I’m going to demonstrate how this method can lead us to a solution I call “swarm micro-solar.”

Complex adaptive systems as a lens tells us that the dynamic energy solution of the future should:

• be made up of many small components
• be fluid and flexible, utilizing component diversity
• be aware of and respond to its environment, by being mobile

From a complex systems perspective, we can predict the properties of a future solution even though we do not yet know the details. We can know that a marble in a bowl will settle at the bottom even when we cannot predict the specific path it will take. We can know that a percentage of a population will become adults even when we cannot know which ones will survive.

Similarly, we can understand that “small pieces loosely joined” should be more efficient even though we do not yet know precisely how. The reason this works is because all complex systems exhibit instances of deeper patterns found in the universe.

Disaggregate the Solar Panel

Our first understanding above was:

1. be made up of many small components

So, take, for instance, the solar panel. A single solar panel converts solar energy into usable electricity but suffers from the loss of some of that energy as heat. Solar panels don’t work when they exceed their tolerance thresholds for heat buildup.

Heat radiation occurs on the edges of the solar panel, so more edge length means more radiation and a cooler system. It just so happens that an array of smaller panels:

• covers nearly the same area, and so generates about the same amount of energy, and
• has significantly more edge length and so radiates heat more effectively and can run for longer.

In addition, these smaller pieces can be individually enabled not only to produce energy but also to store it, using individual mechanisms (such as batteries). Energy could be “uploaded” into larger storage networks when the individual units are in range of an upstream connection to the Energy Commons. Since the swarm components are connected horizontally, only one component would have to be in range in order for the entire system to communicate upstream.

Decenter the Solar Array

Our second understanding above was:

2. be fluid and flexible, utilizing component diversity

So the next step would be to detach the entire solar array from it’s “center” and instead connect the parts directly to each other. There are two ways to operationalize this:

• connect them together physically into a “mesh” or “net”
• connect them together virtually into an information network

Physically connecting them could be advantageous if you needed them to exist as a single unit for some reason. More useful however would be to connect them digitally into a “swarm.” A swarm of panels could communicate information about the sunlight they are converting, local conditions, etc. Moreover, you could even have the units send energy to one another to balance the energy storage. In other words, a unit that has more storage available could store energy for one that has less storage available.

The effect of horizontal connectivity is to make the entire system function like a brain. The swarm could essentially “rewire” itself by monitoring inequalities in the system and balancing its members’ behavior accordingly.

Detach the Swarm

Our third understanding was:

3. be aware of and respond to its environment, by being mobile

Solar panels need sunlight. The earth rotates. The complex adaptive systems lens suggests that the system should be able to perceive its environment and adjust its collective behavior accordingly. For example, slime molds exist as individual cells, but when changes in resource conditions demand, those cells come together to form a multi-cellular organism, which is mobile, and can move elsewhere to a better resource environment.

So, too, can our solar array. If it is a flying drone array, then it could be positioned in the sky as an actual swarm.

• It could move away from clouds or other obstacles, and even orbit the planet in order to avoid ever being on the dark side. A swarm of swarms, all autonomous but capable of cooperation and communication, could effectively perceive their environment and adjust accordingly to target better environments.
• Also, the diversity of the units would enable them to behave differently as individuals. Each unit could angle itself into the sun, or adjust to wind conditions, etc. Because every component adjusts its own behavior in response to every other component, individual behaviors would create systemic effects. Just as a swarm can fly around obstacles without a leader, so, too, could a micro-solar swarm dynamically adjust to changes in its environment.

D-words and Micro-Solar Swarms

This article has demonstrated how using complex adaptive systems as a lens can lead to an innovative solution in the Energy Commons. We focused on a language of:

1. Disaggregate
2. Decenter
3. Detach

There are many other facets to a fully-developed and organically evolving Energy Commons. There are other solutions, and there are also other commons (food, things, etc.).

We gain a significant advantage when we realize that solutions across these commons exhibit the patterns seen in complex adaptive systems, and when we focus on a “pattern language” for those future solutions.

I hope this article contributes to that effort in some small way.

Read More:
If you would like to learn more about robot swarms, take a look at:
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/06/the-bees-of-the-future-that-can-pollinate-and-save-disaster-victims

To engage with the original please go to Solving the Energy Commons with Micro-Solar Swarms by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Solving the Energy Commons with Micro-Solar Swarms appeared first on P2P Foundation.

There is a lot of buzz around “Industry 4.0,” “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and “smart factories.” Much of it is great, so, before we get started, please take less than 5 minutes to watch this excellent video from Bosch.

Even if you don’t watch the video, I will briefly note the points in it that are relevant to this article (but, seriously, watch the video).

• People are at the center.
• This will not change.
• People want more choices.
• People want more personalization.

In response to those perceptions about people and their needs, Industry 4.0:

• can adapt quickly in a changing world.
• provides connectivity across companies.
• utilizes data mobility and virtual design.
• listens to preferences to define how the factory will be assembled
• is composed of modular production units which are autonomous but also trainable.
• monitors the entire value chain in the “Internet of Things” (IoT) cloud.

In other “Industry 4.0,” “The Fourth Industrial Revolution,” and “smart factories” resources, we find similar revelations. The Internet of Things will be self-describing; value-chains will auto-update, and networks of sensors will enable production systems to be aware of themselves and their components at all times.

Why Industry 4.0 Matters

So, if the promise of Industry 4.0 is legitimate, then we should end up with happier people because of better matching between their preferences and their consumption options. This is certainly not terrible, but it doesn’t really address the questions surrounding:

• too much production
• too many people
• too many choices

My belief is that the reason for this oversight, apparent in much of the Industry 4.0 material, is that all of it originates from and is produced within an outmoded economic context. In other words, it attempts to fit all of these amazing new changes into an old economic paradigm rather than ask how these new technologies and connectivity resonate with, and in fact drive, a new economic paradigm.

In other words, the real revolutionary potential for Industry 4.0 is not that can improve efficiency in the old paradigm, but that it can do something radically new.

I believe that Industry 4.0 can (and should) play a key role in solving the economic crises of late capitalism, and in turn, solve climate change, pollution, poverty, and inequality, by changing economics at its base.

Here’s how.

The Economics of Over-Production and Demand

First, a quick flashback:

1. The Economy is driven by a production-to-consumption feedback loop, called supply and demand.
2. The Market is where consumers exercise their preferences to provide the feedback that producers need.

While there is not enough room here to expound all of the features of the 20th century global economy, there are a few of relevance. Notably, the economy exists in a state of perpetual overproduction. This overproduction exists and is supported and stimulated for a variety of systemic reasons, but reason that is useful here concerns the relation between consumer choice and options as noted in the above video.
Specifically, if consumers want choices then a key way for producers to provide those choices is to produce many variations of a particular product or product type. This means making cars of every color because the market does not know what color a particular consumer will want. It means making an endless variety of media, games, and entertainment, because the market does not know what the audience desires. (Much of the activity in 20th century economics has revolved around the problem of anticipating consumer demand and preferences.) This production/consumption ambiguity generates 2 different kinds of waste:

1. Waste that is generated during overproduction processes themselves (pollution, labor, etc.), and
2. Waste that is generated from all of the already produced things that go unconsumed (food, media, etc.).

The consequence of all of this ambiguity about consumer demand and preferences is overproduction in advance. And a key consequence of that overproduction is that it creates a necessity to artificially stimulate overconsumption in return. Furthermore, overproduction

1. consumes more resources than appropriate, generating intolerable strains on our environmental wealth, and
2. produces more waste than appropriate, generating pollution, climate change, and other global impacts.

This cycle is a vicious downward spiral, and everyone knows it, but the economic and political conversations that we see in the world are all still about how to “stimulate consumption” to “foster economic growth” and to “boost production.” This is backwards.

Make. Less. More

Meanwhile, the solution to the spiraling runaway 20th century economy is not “more more more” but “less less less.” More to the point, as my colleague Richard Adler and I agreed, we need to “Make. Less. More.”

We need to make things ourselves; we need to make less of it by making the right things; and we need to get more out of what we do make by connecting things together into shared commons.

There are two particular factors in Industry 4.0 (and in the video) that point us in the right direction.

1. The factory is composed of many smaller autonomous, trainable, production modules, and
2. The information layer is in the cloud. Global, accessible.

In other words, because of the information layer is accessible from the noosphere, the actual factory modules do not have to all be in the same place. Instead, clusters of modules involved in comprehensive sub-processes, can (in general) be spread globally, closer to their resource inputs and/or closer to where their outputs will be needed next. This doesn’t have to be just information either because physical machines occupy an “ambient commons.” So, for example, heat from one set of processes can be used to benefit elsewhere in the system. The change is learning to think ecologically.
Industry 4.0 points out the potential that we have to connect networks of smaller makers into a global web that shares information. (I have written about this global maker web in Pioneering The Thing Commons). Consequently, by capturing and resolving the ambiguity of consumer demand and preferences into a data infrastructure that is inherently portable, we can transform the what/when/where in order to make:

1. what is needed: via consumer customization which is simply the expression of consumer demand and preferences in advance, and
2. when it is needed: via on-demand production and modular flexible production
3. where it is needed: via open source peer-to-peer connections that deliver production design specifications to local production devices

The resulting economic circle of “Make. Less. More.” means less production, less consumption of resources, less waste, etc. because we create to demand on demand and at demand. This is a virtuous circle, not a downward spiral.

Industry 4.0 and the principle of “Make. Less. More.” lets us create 1) to demand (what), 2) on demand (when), and 3) at demand (where).

(This is much like putting a solar panel on a street lamp, but that exploration will have to wait for my article on The Energy Commons…)

To engage with the original please go to Make. Less. More. — Why Adaptive Production Can Save The Planet by Paul B. Hartzog

Lead image: screenshot from “Future production with Industry 4.0” from Bosch Global (see below)

The post Make. Less. More. — Why Adaptive Production Can Save The Planet appeared first on P2P Foundation.

This article seeks to respond to an important issue that arises a lot in the conversations and spaces in which I participate. Moreover, I think it is timely and important in relation to the divisiveness made apparent by the recent election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States.

There is a general usage in our language (which doesn’t necessarily indicate a cognitive consensus) that cooperation and competition are opposites or mutually exclusive. More importantly, there is a conviction that competition and cooperation are somehow ontologically “real,” which is to say that they exist, i.e. that they are a property of the system being observed, rather than a property of the observer.

An alternative viewpoint, however, and one that I find crucial, is that the presence of cooperation or competition is in the eye of the beholder.

We will look at three examples:

1. Predator/Prey interactions
2. Sports
3. The Nation-State system

Predator/Prey

An example from complex systems is illustrative. Take an ecology of predators and prey with complex systems dynamics between, say, wolves, sheep, and grass. There are several competitions happening here.

• sheep compete for grass
• wolves compete to eat sheep
• sheep compete to not be eaten by wolves
• grass competes to not be eaten by sheep

However, out of this complex system we get Lotka-Volterra cycles of the rise and fall of populations. An increase in grass can feed an increase in sheep which, in turn, can feed an increase in wolves. An increase in wolves results in less sheep, which takes pressure off of the grass, but subsequently puts more pressure on the wolf population as food becomes scarce. Populations rise and fall over time, a dance across time. These dynamics have been extended to any system containing resources and consumers of those resources, such as economics. The parts of a systems are always cooperating to maintain the system as a whole in the midst of larger systems and dynamics.

Sports

Another useful example is the dynamic between sports teams in competitive sports. Certainly we are all familiar with the arena in which one sports team competes against another in a match where there is only one winner and one loser. Beneath the surface however there are other complex dynamics occurring.

The resources for both teams are not infinite: financial resources, time, attention, etc. Many resources are in scarce supply. The ecology of sports teams and individual players seeks to maintain its popularity and importance inside larger systems. Sports desires our attention; it requires our resources, and it takes actions in order to achieve those goals, e.g. to keep sponsorships alive, and to keep salaries high. Even when competing, sports teams strive to bolster and sustain the network. Even a simple chess game between friends, while seeming competitive, may serve broader goals of companionship and time spent. When we zoom out from a limited viewpoint, we can see that competitions serve cooperative ends.

The Nation-State System

Another place where competition and cooperation occur simultaneously is in the nation-state system, i.e the realm of international politics. This does not refer to competition and cooperation between states, however. Instead we are talking about a level of understanding that shows that even when states are apparently competing (even when they are at war), their activity, seen through another lens, is fundamentally one of cooperation.

A quote from Hedley Bull is instructive:

“[States’] goal [is] the preservation of the system and society of states itself. Whatever the divisions among them, modern states have been united in the belief that they are the principal actors in world politics and the chief bearers of rights and duties within it. The society of states has sought to ensure that it will remain the prevailing form of universal political organisation, in fact and in right.”

— Hedley Bull, “The Anarchical Society,” 1977, p. 16

For some scholars, this is demonstrably evident with regard to the 1936 anarchist revolution in Spain. Foreign powers, both capitalists and communists, many of whom were already in direct conflict, cooperated to eliminate the success of Spanish anarchism because it was not merely a threat to individual states themselves but, more importantly, a threat to the entire nation-state system’s validity as the dominant means of managing peoples (internally) and international order (externally).

Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently

The crucial consequence of the perspective that I have attempted to illustrate above is this.

Even when we are in conflict with an opponent, there is some cooperative dynamic that is occurring by our acting in relation to that opponent.

For example, in society and politics, when social groups oppose each other with hatred and violence, there are those who benefit. The media and the arms industry supply us with both the pens AND the swords for us to keep the merry-go-round revolving. In addition, the larger system that defines the terms of participation, benefits whenever players slip themselves into predefined slots that the system knows how to handle: predator; prey.

The solution then is neither to disavow competition in favor of cooperation, nor disavow cooperation in favor of competition, but, instead, to realize that:

Competition and Cooperation have no independent existence, i.e. they are not objective properties of the world. Competition and Cooperation are called-forth into being, into the world, only as a function of the way in which we choose to observe a domain.

Consequently, the challenge for us all is to be more cognizant, open and aware, of the contexts in which competition and cooperation are highlighted by our choices. The responsibility lies squarely in ourselves.

In other words:

Competition is Cooperation: See Differently

To engage with the original please go to Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Competition IS Cooperation: Seeing Differently appeared first on P2P Foundation.

So let’s take a look at the future of manufacturing and production, what myself and others often refer to as “maker culture.”

To envision how a future economy will function, all we have to do is apply the principles of complex systems and panarchy and see what emerges:

• Many to Many
• Peer to Peer
• Do It Ourselves

Many to Many

Many to Many means that participants in the network will not be connected to other participants in a hierarchical fashion. Instead, connections will span up and down a multiplicity of networks that operate at different scales.

Peer to Peer

Peer to Peer refers to the fact that many of the extra connectivity in the network is going to be horizontal, i.e. across networks. In other words, in order to communicate with nodes elsewhere in the network, it will not be necessary to first go up some hierarchical chain and then back down it somewhere else in the network. Many to Many means the avoidance of bureaucratic obstructions.

Do It Ourselves

Do It Ourselves means that rather than relying on large centralized institutions, a vast network of much smaller participants take on the active role of making things. This much larger community of participants is subsequently more diverse, a feature that is crucial to healthy complex systems (as Scott Page has noted in his book “The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies”).

Small Pieces, Loosely Joined

In keeping with the dynamic of “small pieces, loosely joined” (first articulated by David Weinberger), we can see how a future network will function. A large array of participants in “making” will constitute in an extended network of cooperative commons. As “small pieces” they will make less at a time, but the power of their making comes from the fact that they are “loosely joined” into a flexible decentralized cooperative network. They achieve this through communication, coordination, and what Howard Rheingold calls “technologies of cooperation.”

DGML — Design Global, Manufacture Local

Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis have a useful bit of coinage called “DGML” or “Design Global, Manufacture Local.” This dictum helps remind us that the mobility of bits is cheap, but the mobility of atoms is costly. In other words, rather than keeping the information local and making the thing, we can distribute the information and make the thing closer to where it is needed.

This is a reversal of traditional economics, about which Michel Bauwens once said (of my work on the transformation of Social Publishing):

Not “select, then publish,” but “publish, then select.”

And so for manufacturing and production we might also say:

Not “make, then distribute,” but “distribute, then make.”

Making the Thing Commons

The production of immaterial common pools is already regulated through mutual coordination…, i.e. coordination based on open and transparent signals of what is needed by the system; but physical production cannot be coordinated without similar signals…

There are two key infrastructures required for the Thing Commons.

First, there is the actual manufacturing or “making” infrastructure. This can range from larger factories, to medium sized “maker hubs”, to small personal-scale 3D printing devices. The primary empowerment of this infrastructure rests in making it easy for new entrants to join the existing network and extend and innovate the current tools and practices. Much of this exploration is already present in the global communities of “open hardware” and 3D-printing advocates.

Second, there is the information infrastructure, which (echoing Ostrom) consists of two layers of information tools: 1) information for making things, and 2) information for managing the community itself.

In practical terms, this means means building the infrastructure necessary for a healthy Thing Commons. For example, many manufacturing machines require older proprietary equipment and software which, in several cases are barely available from a rapidly disappearing cadre of developers. Often the only alternative is newer (but also proprietary) software and tools that are only available at very expensive prices, resulting in large barrier-to-entry into the market. Barriers-to-entry are the precise opposite of how to build a large scale open network.

As people like Yochai Benkler, Michel Bauwens, Eric Raymond, David Bollier, and others have shown, “commons-based peer-production” distributes and coordinates work, but also achieves efficiencies that traditional firm-based economic organization have failed to realize.

Imagine rather a global community of tinkerers, but also a global community of physical production houses, that can download the design and can produce things much more locally.

But, as complex systems scholar Stuart Kauffman has pointed out, systems change. At one level systems can adapt to be better. At another level they can improve how they adapt. And at even another level, they can adapt how they learn. All of these levels are present in a healthy making ecology.

Complex systems “explore and embrace” evolutionary pathways by allowing the parts to evolve and innovate, and then by adopting successful adaptations back into the system or organism as a whole.

Thus, the diversity of participants is acutely necessary to the future improvement of the system, which only cares about the value being brought into it by a multitude of diverse players, i.e. an “open value model”:

The open value network model abolishes the distinction between the commercial entity and the community!

What It Means For You (and/or Your Organization)

Given a picture of a future network of production and manufacturing, it becomes possible to subsequently envision various strategies for success.

The success of the Thing Commons requires (as pointed out by Nobel Economics recipient Elinor Ostrom) us to actively “govern the commons.” We have to do this on at least two levels: 1) manage the resource, 2) manage the community that uses the resource:

1. “Managing the resources” means realizing that just as your inputs are some one else’s outputs, your outputs are someone else’s inputs. There is no such thing as waste. This means that connecting to other parts of the system that can effectively utilize your “waste” is crucial. Because wealth-generating ecologies: reduce, reuse, and recycle, these processes become part of the normal operation of the network.
2. “Managing the community” means openness, transparency, and making available the rules and tools that allow for the governance of the resources and community. This refers to how decisions are made, how disagreements are resolved, and how institutional change is handled over time.

By far the largest crucial commons is the information infrastructure that fosters widespread network participation. As the success of open systems demonstrates, the route to a healthy commons is to create a network which will:

Promote Participation

This means that the system must encourage players to actively contribute to the commons. A crucial element of participation is not only contributing to the existing system but also being able to extend and innovate the network’s operations.

Prevent Depletion

This means that the rules of the system must secure the benefits of the commons for all participants, by excluding the capture of those benefits for someone’s gain at the expense of the commons. For some commons, unmanaged open-access can result in depletion, whenever inappropriate incentives interfere with the smooth operation of the commons.

The Success of Open Design

Anyone active in open source communities or in public domain science, also knows from experience that shared innovation is happening on a continuous basis in open communities.

The winning strategy then is one that I have termed “winning by playing.” The mechanism is as follows:

1. Gather the potential participants who would benefit from the reduced costs and economic sustainability that results from building shared open infrastructure.
2. Brainstorm, share, and test network designs, standards, schemas, structures, and rules, with those participants. Release early; release often. Faster cycles of exploration and adaptation equal rapid innovation.
3. Let go. An ecology is not something you can control. As Tom Malone said in “Future of Work” the goal is to “coordinate and cultivate” rather than “command and control.”

In his “New Rules for the New Economy” Wired editor Kevin Kelly said “feed the network first.” The rules of software interoperability tell us “build your API first.” Either way, the message is clear:

Whatever persons, communities, organizations, industries, firms, and/or governments (most likely all of the above) facilitate the creation and evolution of the Thing Commons will gain the opportunity to be on the ground floor in establishing key rules and practices. These front-runners will find themselves in the best position to contribute, excel, and succeed in the future economy.

Some References:

Here are more insights on all of this from Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Dmytri Kleiner:

• The Emergence of Open Design and Open Manufacturing: http://www.we-magazine.net/we-volume-02/the-emergence-of-open-design-and-open-manufacturing/
• Mutual Coordination: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination
• Open Value Model: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Value_Network_Model
• Why Is Open Hardware Inherently Sustainable: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Why_is_Open_Hardware_Inherently_Sustainable

Thanks to R. Keith Smith

To engage with the original please go to Panarchy 101: We Can Make It — Pioneering the Thing Commons by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Panarchy 101: We Can Make It — Pioneering the Thing Commons appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following are the key “lenses” through which I view and discuss the ongoing transformation to panarchy. Each of these lenses provide crucial understandings and insights into facets of panarchy, but panarchy itself emerges only as a result of the interactions between all of these elements. Like all complex systems, panarchy itself is an emergent property.

• Commons
• Complex Systems & Networks
• From the Bell Curve to the Long Tail
• Plurality & Diversity
• Cooperation
• Peer Production
• Open Design

Commons

Commons are systems of shared resources. A lifetime of work by Economics Nobel Prize Recipient Elinor Ostrom reveals a plethora of case-studies with insights and strategies for governing our commons. There are many kinds of commons — ecological, social, information, and technological — but the one thing they all have in common is the need for thoughtful management in order to insure sustainability for future generations.

Complex Systems & Networks

Complex systems and networks are systems that are more than the sum of their parts. Because the parts are interconnected, dynamic relationships between the parts result in emergent properties at the system level. In complex systems “more is different.” Complex systems and networks can range from too rigid to too fluid, but the most interesting of them have mechanisms of self-organization that move them towards a robust and resilient balancing act at the “edge of chaos.”

From the Bell Curve to the Long Tail

The bell curve defines systems with normal distributions where averages are meaningful (because populations are homogenous) and “mass” dynamics are the norm. The long tail, or power law, distribution makes averages meaningless and replaces the “mass” with a plural multitude of diverse members. The transition from the bell curve to the long tail is as relevant in philosophy and culture as it is in economics and politics.

Plurality & Diversity

Plurality refers to the fact that new dynamic systems consist of many interacting parts, whereas diversity refers to the condition that exists when those parts are different. Neither plurality nor diversity is itself sufficient for panarchy, but together they provide an accurate description of the new landscape. This new “multitude” is unlike any civil polity that has existed before, and it will demand infrastructures for governance and economics that are equally unique.

Moreover, governance itself has to exhibit authority, legitimacy, and continuity. We are on the cusp of a “Greek moment” wherein we are faced with the challenge of creating new forms of governance that can be responsive to the needs and demands of a diverse and mobile “global civil society.”

Cooperation

Cooperation is responsible for everything you see around you. Civilization itself would not exist if humanity had not overcome the challenges to cooperation. Much is known about the conditions necessary for cooperation to emerge and succeed, and recently we have seen an explosion of technologies that allow for new forms of cooperation. Much of that cooperation manifests in the new economy where community currencies, smart contracts, and peer production exist in a zone of experimentation and innovation.

Peer Production

Peer production (or as Yochai Benkler terms it “commons-based peer production”) is a new form of bottom-up collaboration to fulfill economic needs and wants. The emergence of “maker” culture is predicated on the consequences of technologies of cooperation. Peer production does not have to be merely economic however. The world of peers produces information at an ever-increasing rate, and also produces new shared understandings, cultural norms, social movements, and political pressures. The new infrastructure that connects people catalyzes peer production in a feedback loop with crucial consequences for our world.

Open Design

Open design refers to the challenge of planning for an unpredictable system what futurist Rick Smyre calls “Preparing for a World that Doesn’t Exist — Yet.” But we can design for adaptability if we follow the insights from Stuart Kauffman’s investigations into evolution and biology. Namely, evolutionary process result in complex systems that maximize their own evolvability. In other words, they evolve to evolve better.
Consequently, Michel Bauwens has claimed that what we need is “an infrastructure for open everything.” This means crafting social and technological systems that are based on a diversity of open standards and are easily extensible. Such an approach insures continuous innovation as landscapes shape their inhabitants and in turn those inhabitants shape new landscapes.

Panarchy: A Multifaceted View

So, how then do these lenses combine to give us a better view of panarchy as a whole?

1. Technologies of cooperation allow human beings to collaborate in ways never before possible, i.e. 1) faster, 2) mobile, and 3) global.
2. A heightened awareness of the climate crisis and the earth as a literal ecological commons compels people to do more with less, i.e. to “make less more” to reduce the combined footprint of 7 billion people by sharing physical as well as information resources. Because technologies of cooperation are ideally suited to building global sharing mechanisms, the result is the emergence of new global commons.
3. Because these new networks are complex systems, they behave ecologically, with similar dynamics, except at faster time scales with larger global reach. In addition, understanding them requires understanding the shift from the bell curve to the long tail.
4. If we are to embrace these changes rather than retreat into an imagined idyllic past, we must embrace both plurality and diversity as core elements of a healthy future civilization. The only structure that can do so is one that operates on what I have called “The Difference Engine” and it embodies principles of open design in social, economic, technical, and political spheres.
5. That system of overlapping, interwoven, interpenetrated, diverse, cooperative networks is panarchy.

To engage with the original please go to Panarchy 101: 7 Crucial Lenses by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Panarchy 101: 7 Crucial Lenses appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The Ethereum Foundation stated quickly on its website that they identifed and effectively froze the hacker’s account. Also, Stephan Tual (the founder of Slock.It, the group that created the DAO) said:

“All stolen funds will be retrieved from the attacker.”

Now if you change the “will” to “can” in that sentence you get an interesting and crucial new reality:

“All stolen funds can be retrieved from the attacker.”

No other financial system ever has been able to make that claim.

The point is that peer-to-peer validation systems that store history well can provide a mechanism for reversion. In other words, a damaged system can immediately revert to a state from before the damage occurred! (wiki much?)

In the case of currencies, this is a huge win for the user-base of any currency. In the case of other distributed systems, the same is true.

Moreover, this is an example of a more general property of panarchy and the peer-to-peer future as a whole, that stems from understanding of complex systems. Some complex systems are not only resilient to certain kinds of attacks, but but actually improve as a result of disruptions! Popular scholar and author Nassim Taleb coined the term “antifragile” (his book, “Antifragile”) to refer to this phenomenon:

“The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the anti-fragile gets better”.

While there are still ongoing, and healthy, debates about the response and the solution, they will invariably leaded to a wide variety of technological implementations, some of which will be adopted as improvements to the alternative economy as a system. It can be argued that this kind of evolution also happens in the currently dominant financial system of banks, etc., but that current system is run by elites with very private agendas. By contrast, the alternative peer-to-peer panarchical economy is, a system we can celebrate because it includes a global community of interested and motivated participants and makers.

In other words, there is no need for a huge financial bailout which incurs enourmous economic costs and does little to alleviate the actual damage done or to improve the future situation. Ethereum (and any other systems we develop) can be changed by us simply by getting more involved and saying “We think this needs to be done differently.”

You certainly won’t get far trying that at your bank.

Further Reading:

• http://www.wsj.com/articles/investment-fund-based-on-digital-currency-to-wind-down-after-alleged-hack-1466175033
• http://www.coindesk.com/dao-attack-good-thing-ethereum/

The post Why the Ethereum/DAO Hack Proves They Are Better Than Banks appeared first on P2P Foundation.

“What makes political systems cross over the threshold into parameter transformations? Some breakpoints occur when a technological development enables individuals to engage in previously unimagined activities and collectivities to pursue previously inconceivable policy goals…. a turning point that occurs when the resources or practices of a system can no longer cope with one more increment of change and its parameters give way under the cumulative load.”

James N. Rosenau, Turbulence in World Politics: A Theory of Change and Continuity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1990), 83.

Reposted from: Panarchy 101 by Paul B. Hartzog

Panarchy 101, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Global Collapse is a public draft of a collection/syllabus/network that seeks to illuminate

• not only what is collapsing (and why) but,
• more importantly, what is emerging (and why)

Panarchy 101 explores a point of view as revealed through various lenses including complexity theory, political & social theory, economics, etc.

Panarchy 101 is a network of ideas that can be digested in any order.

Panarchy 101 is an excursion into the unknown but not unknowable global complexity that lies ahead.

On Non-Linear Processes

When an organism forms, it doesn’t form a full-sized completely-developed head, and then a full-sized completely-developed foot, etc. Rather, it develops an entire impression of its future self, and then continues to develop all of its parts in parallel over time. We might call this an embryonic process, rather than something like an academic book where each chapter is fully formed and arranged in a linear fashion. Embryonic development is non-linear (as are complex systems dynamics).

In Panarchy 101, I will attempt to give a broad “embryonic” overview of the big picture, and then continue to delve into the details over time.

What’s So Exciting About Global Collapse?

Contemporary trends seem to focus overmuch on the symptoms of global collapse: increasing inequality, global poverty, environmental crises, etc. While it is useful to understand the unraveling, it is equally important to learn to see something else.

Like air moving from one balloon into another, the collapse of an archaic system actively drives the emergence of a new system. The logic of this transformation is as follows:

1. Failure: The existing system ceases to be effective at meeting the needs of and solving the problems of human civilization.
2. Emergence: As systemic failures become evident, the demand for new innovative solutions increases.
3. Coherence: As new solutions connect to each other and become interoperable, they cooperate and collectively become new infrastructures.

The fear of collapse is understandable, but it is all too often grounded in an inability to recognize that collapse per se is only a partial truth. Collapse is coupled with emergence, and we can look from one to the other to identify the dynamics of transformation.

What Is Panarchy?

“Panarchy”, in a nutshell, is a term used to describe a historically unprecedented emerging global civilization. This civilization is an ever-changing landscape of overlapping and interacting elements. Some key features it exhibits include:

• Large ponderous infrastructures transform into dynamic networks of smaller adaptable interacting parts. These transformations can be seen in social action, industrial manufacturing, cultural creation, political access, energy systems, and food/water production.
• Hierarchy gives way to heterarchy (or panarchy), i.e. networks of participants. These networks are primarily peer-to-peer, many-to-many, and “do it ourselves” systems.
• The economy defined by producers and consumers transforms into economies of “makers” who innovate and provide using technologies of mass collaboration.
• Exclusive regimes give way to cooperative commons collectively shared and managed by the cooperators themselves.
• The politics of territory and identity give way to the politics of global multitudes.
  As complexity becomes the norm, evolution and adaptation drive systems to the “edge of chaos” where the potential for future adaptability is maximized.

On Uncertainty

Umberto Eco provides wise words of comfort for those who would attempt this kind of exercise:

“There is only the risk of contradiction. But sometimes you have to speak because you feel the moral obligation to say something, not because you have the ‘scientific’ certainty that you are saying it in an unassailable way.”

Umberto Eco, Travels in Hyper Reality: Essays, 1st ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1986), p. xii.

Thanks For Playing

Thanks to all of you in advance for listening, reading, commenting, sharing, highlighting, debating, and generally participating in this upcoming effort. Many people have told me for many years to get this material “out there” and with your help I intend to finally do so.

— Paul B. Hartzog

To engage with the original please go to Panarchy 101 by Paul B. Hartzog

The post Panarchy 101: A Primer appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Introduction

Twenty-first century wealth-generating ecologies need to remain robust and flexible in order to allocate resources quickly and efficiently, and to mitigate the effects of constant fluctuations and redistributions. Nobel Prize recipient Elinor Ostrom’s work on “commons” provides vital thinking towards a solution: peer governance and information transparency.

This overview attempts to provide the following:

1. a brief summary of the requisite theoretical framework on the production of “commons”
2. an example implementing the theory in a technological deployment

Taken together, it is the authors’ hope that this document can be a springboard for interested practitioners in the world.

Theory

There is a considerable and growing body of work devoted to understanding shared resources, or “commons.”

When open-access resources are depletable, then they have a unique dynamic, traditionally known as the “Tragedy of the Commons.” First articulated by Garrett Hardin in the 1960s it states, in essence, that when the rate of resource use exceeds the rate of resource production the system is said to be “unsustainable.”

Elinor Ostrom, winner of a 2009 Nobel Prize in Economics, has spent her life showing how commons can be managed sustainably. She notes that

“All efforts to organize collective action, whether by an external ruler, an entrepreneur, or a set of principals who wish to gain collective benefits, must address a common set of problems. These have to do with coping with free-riding, solving commitment problems, arranging for the supply of new institutions, and monitoring individual compliance with sets of rules.”

In addition, Ostrom noted that there are two co-existing dilemmas that require management:

• the interaction of participants with the resource
• the interactions of participants with each other

Consequently, her solution to creating sustainably managed commons are

“self-governed common-property arrangement[s] in which the rules have been devised and modified by the participants themselves and also are monitored and enforced by them.” (Ostrom, 1990, p. 20).

Ostrom arrives at the following design principles:

1. Group boundaries are clearly defined.
2. Rules governing the use of collective goods are well matched to local needs and conditions.
3. Most individuals affected by these rules can participate in modifying the rules.
4. The rights of community members to devise their own rules is respected by external authorities.
5. A system for monitoring member’s behavior exists; the community members themselves undertake this monitoring.
6. A graduated system of sanctions is used.
7. Community members have access to low-cost conflict resolution mechanisms.

(For more information on Elinor Ostrom and Commons see Paul Hartzog’s Stanford Lecture)

The absolutely essential understanding to be absorbed here is that commons management is not primarily a technical problem but a social one and that the key ingredient in the solution is information transparency. Therefore, implementation requires a thorough grounding in both social dilemmas (Kollock) as well as technology design.

Implementation

A system to effectively deploy and manage resource sharing must make visible the two kinds of interactions above:

• interactions of participants with resources
• interactions of participants with each other

However, when deploying socio-technical infrastructure, there is also a third component:

• interaction of participants with the infrastructure itself

An example might look something like this (with additional details available by clicking deeper into any given category):

Member	Participation	Ratios	History
Member 1	Money:  Time:	Money: 0.226677 Time: 40	2 yrs
Member 2	Money:  Time:	Money: 0.226677 Time: 40	1 yr

Similar to natural ecologies, interaction levels and resource renewal rates will vary across time as well as space. For these reasons, history must also be made visible in the implementation.

Also (and not shown in the example above), the system needs to manage visibility to whom such that interactions can be seen by:

• the participants themselves: for self-monitoring and self-adjustment
• other participants: for community monitoring and sanctions

It is a design choice whether to rely on the community to manage their interactions, or to build the checks and balances into the software. For example, the popular file-sharing application BitTorrent provides a “share ratio” that is visible to users, as well as prioritization and bandwidth rules built right into the software itself (Legout, et al).

Either way, a well-functioning community and it’s tools, need to address all three of the interactions above with information transparency. These layers of transparency not only make possible the management of the resources and participants but can also provide for the infrastructure that supports the resource management. A similar approach to self-organizing self-sustaining public resources has recently been dubbed “Public Open Source Services” (POSS).

Conclusion:

Twenty-first century wealth-generating ecologies need to remain robust and flexible in order to allocate resources quickly and efficiently, and to mitigate the effects of constant fluctuations and redistributions. Nobel Prize recipient Elinor Ostrom’s work on “commons” provides vital thinking towards a solution: peer governance and information transparency.

Notes:

Kollock, Peter. “Social dilemmas: The anatomy of cooperation,” Annual Review of Sociology 24, 1998. pp. 183-214. ( http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/390 )

Ostrom, Elinor. “Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ( http://www.cooperationcommons.com/node/361 )

Legout, Arnaud, G. Urvoy-Keller, and P. Michiardi. “Rarest first and choke algorithms are enough.” In Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGCOMM conference on Internet measurement, 203-216. Rio de Janeriro, Brazil: ACM, 2006. ( http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1177106 )

The post Resource Sharing – Grounding the 21st Century Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1. I was spurred to write this after reading Douglas Rushkoff’s CNN piece “Are jobs obsolete?” (Sept 7, 2011)
2. Some of what follows was in a work I originally did in 2003 called “The Unemployment Economy.”

Having said that, let us move on.

The first time I ran across the idea of “unemployment” as a desirable goal was in 1979 in Robert Anton Wilson’s work, in particular the “Schrodinger’s Cat Trilogy.”

If memory serves, Bob mentioned the idea of a public stipend paid to anyone who could invent a device that would make their job obsolete. At first glance, this seemed to be yet another in a long line of failed promises left over from the days of “the dreams of automation,” but the idea of paying people to create new efficiencies in infrastructure lodged in my cranium. So did the idea that changes in technology would produce massive unsustainable structural unemployment. I was 11 years old.

The Logic of Leisure

In 1932, Bertrand Russell wrote “In Praise of Idleness” ( http://www.panarchy.org/russell/idleness.1932.html ) in which he states:

“Modern technique has made it possible to diminish enormously the amount of labor required to secure the necessaries of life for everyone….. [T]he road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.”

The logic of “production” goes like this:

If the world requires a certain amount of something, then there are two choices:

1. some number of people work ALL of the time to produce the desired amount, or
2. some larger number of people work PART of the time to produce the desired amount.

Ah, but,
the logic of “consumption” is quite different, and goes like this:

1. we need to employ people all the time,
2. such employment produces a surplus,
3. people need to be convinced to purchase the surplus through marketing and advertising,
4. the surplus has to be quickly converted to waste, so people will purchase again,
5. this is accomplished by denying basic needs to everyone so that they have to work in order to consume.

The first story is a recipe for a civilization that spends some of its time meeting its obligations to society and the rest of its time in pursuit of leisure and other interests and projects. The second story is a recipe for a civilization with waste, pollution, and mass slavery.

The spread of information technologies and mass computerization creates unemployment. Daniel Yankelovitch notes:

“In today’s global economy, employers can grow and be profitable by restructuring their operations so as to be less dependent on large numbers of full-time, full-benefit, locally recruited employees. They systematically can reduce their own work force, utilize the work forces of other nations, and organize their work in such a way that much of it can be done by a contingent labour force, a labout force that does not have to be paid benefits, and that does not have to be granted even the most limited job security… [In this way, they] achieve economic growth by employing only a fraction of the total number of people who are seeking jobs. The result either is high unemployemnt, as we are seeing in Europe, or the steady substitution of low-wage, low-benefit jobs for high-wage high-benefit jobs, as we are seeing in the U.S. (“A Critique of the ‘Information Society’ Concept, Daniel Yankelovitch, in “Changing Maps: Governing in a World of Rapid Change, Steven A. Rosell, 1995)

Unemployment indicators in the entrenched [developed] countries have risen steadily since the 1950s. In addition, the decline in birth rates already experienced in these countries will generate increasing numbers of elderly with less of the younger generation in the workforce. Even if birth rates rise again, those children will be unemployable during their youth, straining the system even further. The total number of non-working individuals cannot be handled using traditional economic methods.

The Income Crisis

So ultimately it comes down to this. For the employers, which is to say, predominantly large hierarchical structures that exist by skimming surplus value off of their workers’ work and simply paying them some portion of that value as a wage, there is an “employment crisis.” However, for the people, a job merely serves as a conduit for income, and consequently, the crisis is not an “employment crisis” but an “income crisis.”

This is a crucial point, so I’ll make it again another way.

An Employment Economy has to make people think of their “income crisis” as an “employment crisis.” An Unemployment Economy has no such necessity.

An Unemployment Economy begins with the premise that people perform best at activities in which they enjoy intrinsically and for which they volunteer. This self-selection principle is a key ingredient of current open-source coding economies, and was even used by Google to allow it’s employees to self-direct a portion of their daily work-time. Self-selection is not volunteerism; it’s compensated work. Otherwise someone is still exploiting you and getting the benefit of your labor, only for free.

Furthermore, calling it an “employment crisis” implies that the solution is to create more employment, but calling it an “income crisis” implies that the solution is to create more income. This can be done in a variety of ways, many of which have nothing to do with getting a job.

For example, in 1980, as part of the birth of cyberpunk, ZBS Media aired an award-winning radio drama (Produced by Thomas M. Lopez. Written by Meatball Fulton) called “Ruby, the Galactic Gumshoe” which featured a conversation with an alien named “Monet” from a society which had purportedly solved these issues. Monet tells Ruby:

“Unemployment is not a disease that needs to be cured by creating more employment. Unemployment is the cure. So we devised a better system.”

Maker Culture Means Freedom

As we move forward, the numbers of people making their own things and self-organizing into “maker” communities is encouraging. Nevertheless, these activities are parasitic on a legacy economy that still requires people to work jobs in order to provide basic needs for themselves and their families. In this sytem, some get rich, but most stay poor, rather than everyone having “enough.”

The emerging peer-to-peer economy then is one which functions more like Kropotkin’s “mutual aid” (thank you, Howard Rheingold), than the “help yourself and let others help themselves” that arises when citizens are pitted against each other in a struggle for jobs and resources that are made scarce just so that the people will not cooperate to provide their own shared infrastructure.

It is worth noting here that the political theorist Hannah Arendt pointed out in 1951 that preventing the masses from having or doing anything which would result in the production of a “common” (something that only exists horizontally between individuals and groups) is a recipe for tyranny, oppression, and ultimately fascism. She called it “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”

Furthermore, Kropotkin had foreshadowed this very point in his “Mutual Aid” saying:

“[T]he institutions in which men formerly used to embody their needs of mutual support could not be tolerated in a properly organised State; that the State alone could represent the bonds between its subjects.”

Referring to the birthplace of Western democracy, Arendt stated it best:

“Not Athens, but the Athenians, were the polis.” (The Human Condition, 1950)

(This is why if you are going to work a job, I have always felt it is best to work where you can feel like you are helping others, for example, at a non-profit or university).

Not An Employee – Better Without Bosses

http://www.notanemployee.net/

Again we clarify the difference between employment, i.e. labor which is coerced by the necessities of survival, vs. an individual’s career or passion. Bob Black, in his essay “The Abolition of Work” defines work as “production enforced by economic or political means, by the carrot or the stick” (Black, 1985). In an economy where accurate information is crucial, economic decisions based on having to have a job to survive are neither fruitful nor desirable. The information economy needs recombination, reification, and innovation, and it also needs a lifestyle solution to free up the collective creative potential of its members and allow them to fulfill their roles in the information economy. Enter unemployment. The general causality of this is:

• Computerization creates unemployment
• Unemployment creates free-time
• Free-time generates innovation

What is wrong with unemployment is not its increase, but the unsustainability of a system where employment is “good” and unemployment is “bad”. The end of employment is by no means the end of doing things. Human beings are by nature creative, innovative, and vigorously pursue their goals. This is why the first tier of a panarchy economy provides necessities: to give individuals and groups the foundation on which they can make informed decisions and communicate those decisions to the system in a cybernetic way.

The Simple Solution

The solution to all of this is simple, really:

Pay people to create shared infrastructure.

Shared infrastructure is co-developed, co-owned, co-maintained, and is not subject to appropriation by anyone, i.e. it’s existence as shared infrastructure is supported by legal and political mechanisms that secure its basic freedoms in perpetuity. It’s good for people, governments, businesses, because it reduces costs and shares the workload required for upkeep. Anyone building that should be well compensated for their labor indeed.

——
If you want to discuss these ideas in more detail with Doug and me and other interesting folks, join us at the Contact Summit in NYC in October.
——

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