The current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism.

A blockchain is essentially a distributed database. The technology first appeared in 2009 as the basis of the Bitcoin digital currency system, but it has potential for doing much, much more—including aiding in the development of platform cooperatives.

Traditionally, institutions use centralized databases. For example, when you transfer money using a bank account your bank updates its ledger to credit and debit accounts accordingly. In this example, there is one central database and the bank is a trusted intermediary who manages it. With a blockchain, this record is shared among all participants in the network. To send bitcoin, for example, an owner publicly broadcasts a transaction to all participants in the network. Participants collectively verify that the transaction indeed took place and update the database accordingly. This record is public, shared by all, and it cannot be amended.

This distributed database can be used for applications other than monetary transactions. With the rise of what some are calling “blockchain 2.0,” the accounting technology underpinning Bitcoin is now taking on non-monetary applications as diverse as electronic voting, file tracking, property title management, and the organization of worker cooperatives. Very quickly, it seems, distributed ledger technologies have made their way into any project broadly related to social or political transformation for the left—“put a blockchain on it!”— until its mention, sooner or later, looks like the basis for a dangerous drinking game. On the other side of things, poking fun at blockchain evangelism is now a nerdy pastime, more enjoyable even than ridiculing handlebar moustaches and fixie bicycles.

So let me show my hand. I’m interested in the blockchain (or blockchain-based technologies) as one tool that, in a very pragmatic way, could assist with cooperative activities—helping us to share resources, to arbitrate, adjudicate, disambiguate, and make collective decisions. Some fledgling examples are La’Zooz, an alternative ridesharing app; Swarm, a fundraising app; and proposals for the use of distributed ledgers to manage land ownership or critical infrastructures like water and energy. Many of these activities are difficult outside of local communities or in the absence of some trusted intermediary. However, I also think that much of the current rhetoric around the blockchain hints at problems with the techno-utopian ideologies that surround digital activism, and points to the assumptions these projects fall into time and again. It’s worth addressing these here.

ASSUMPTION #1: WE CAN REPLACE MESSY AND TIME-CONSUMING SOCIAL PROCESSES WITH ELEGANT TECHNICAL SOLUTIONS

Fostering and scaling cooperation is really difficult. This is why we have institutions, norms, laws, and markets. We might not like them, but these mechanisms allow us to cooperate with others even when we don’t know and trust them. They help us to make decisions and to divvy up tasks and to reach consensus. When we take these things away—when we break them down—it can be very difficult to cooperate. Indeed, this is one of the big problems with alternative forms of organization outside of the state and the market—those that are not structured by typical modes of governance such as rules, norms, or pricing. These kinds of structureless collaboration generally only work at very local kin-communal scales where everybody already knows and trusts everyone else. In Ireland, for example, there were several long-term bank strikes in the 1970s. The economy didn’t grind to a halt. Instead, local publicans stepped in and extended credit to their customers; the debtors were well-known to the publicans, who were in a good position to make an assessment on their credit worthiness. Community trust replaced a trustless monetary system. This kind of local arrangement wouldn’t work in a larger or more atomized community. It probably wouldn’t work in today’s Ireland because community ties are weaker.

Bitcoin caused excitement when it proposed a technical solution to a problem that previously required a trusted intermediary—money, or, more specifically, the problem of guaranteeing and controlling money supply and monitoring the repartition of funds on a global scale. It did this by developing a distributed database that is cryptographically verified by an entire network of peers and by linking the production of new money with the individual incentive to maintain this public repository. More recently this cryptographic database has also been used to manage laws, contracts, and property. While some of the more evolved applications involve verifying precious stones and supporting interbank loans, the proposal is that this database could also be used to support alternative worker platforms, allowing systems where people can organize, share, or sell their labor without the need of a central entity controlling activities and trimming a generous margin off the top.

The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative.

Here the blockchain replaces a trusted third party such as the state or a platform with cryptographic proof. This is why hardcore libertarians and anarcho-communists both favor it. But let’s be clear here—it doesn’t replace all of the functions of an institution, just the function that allows us to trust in our interactions with others because we trust in certain judicial and bureaucratic processes. It doesn’t stand in for all the slow and messy bureaucracy and debate and human processes that go into building cooperation, and it never will.

The blockchain is what we call a “trustless” architecture. It stands in for trust in the absence of more traditional mechanisms like social networks and co-location. It allows cooperation without trust, in other words—something that is quite different from fostering or building trust. As the founding Bitcoin document details, proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence and judgment in favor of an algorithmic regulation. With a blockchain, it maybe doesn’t matter so much whether I believe in or trust my fellow peers just so long as I trust in the technical efficiency of the protocol. The claim being made is not that we can engineer greater levels of cooperation or trust in friends, institutions, or governments, but that we might dispense with social institutions altogether in favor of an elegant technical solution.

This assumption is naïve, it’s true, but it also betrays a worrying politics—or rather a drive to replace politics (as debate and dispute and things that produce connection and difference) with economics. This is not just a problem with blockchain evangelism—it’s a core problem with the ideology of digital activism generally. The blockchain has more in common with the neoliberal governmentality that produces platform capitalists like Amazon and Uber and state-market coalitions than any radical alternative. Seen in this light, the call for blockchains forms part of a line of informational and administrative technologies such as punch cards, electronic ledgers, and automated record keeping systems that work to administrate populations and to make politics disappear.

ASSUMPTION #2: THE TECHNICAL CAN INSTANTIATE NEW SOCIAL OR POLITICAL PROCESSES

Like a lot of peer-to-peer networks, blockchain applications conflate a technical architecture with a social or political mode of organization. We can see this kind of ideology at work when the CEO of Bitcoin Indonesia argues, “In its purest form, blockchain is democracy.” From this perspective, what makes Uber Uber and La’Zooz La’Zooz comes down to technical differences at the level of topology and protocol. If only we can design the right technical system, in other words, the right kind of society is not too far behind.

The last decade has shown us that there is no linear-causal relationship between decentralization in technical systems and egalitarian or equitable practices socially, politically, or economically. This is not only because it is technologically determinist to assume so, or because networks involve layers that exhibit contradictory affordances, but also because there’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness continue to pose any kind of threat to capitalism. In fact, horizontality and decentralization—the very characteristics that peer production prizes so highly—have emerged as an ideal solution to many of the impasses of liberal economics.

There’s zero evidence that features such as decentralization or structurelessness pose any kind of threat to capitalism.

Today, Silicon Valley appropriates so many of the ideas of the left—anarchism, mobility, and cooperation—even limited forms of welfare. This can create the sense that technical fixes like the blockchain are part of some broader shift to a post-capitalist society, when this shift has not taken place. Indeed, the blockchain applications that are really gaining traction are those developed by large banks in collaboration with tech startups—applications to build private blockchains for greater asset management or automatic credit clearing between banks, or to allow cultural industries to combat piracy in a distributed network and manage the sale and ownership of digital goods more efficiently.

While technical tools such as the blockchain might form part of a broader artillery for , we also need to have a little perspective. We need to find ways to embrace not only technical solutions, but also people who have experience in community organizing and methods that foster trust, negotiate hierarchies, and embrace difference. Because there is no magic app for platform cooperativism. And there never will be.

Rachel O’Dwyer | An essay originally anthologized in Ours To Hack and To Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, A New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet | OR Books | August 2017| 6 minutes (1,600 words)

Originally published in Longreads.com

Photo by Ars Electronica

The post Blockchain Just Isn’t As Radical As You Want It To Be appeared first on P2P Foundation.

 By Rachel O’Dwyer

Mayo Fuster Morell is the Dimmons director of research on collaborative economy at the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia. Additionally, she is faculty affiliated at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and at Institute of Govern and Public Policies at Autonomous University of Barcelona (IGOPnet). In 2010, she concluded her PhD thesis at the European University Institute in Florence on the governance of common-based peer production, and have numerous publications in the field. She is the principal investigator for the European project P2Pvalue: Techno-social platform for sustainable models and value generation in commons-based peer production. She is also responsible of the experts group BarCola on collaborative economy and commons production at the Barcelona City Council.”

ROD: What brought you to work in peer-to-peer?

MFM: The first time I heard the term peer-to-peer was from an “artivist” friend Leo Martin when we were travelling from the Geneva Contrast Summit to the World Summit of Information Society in Geneva in 2003. In other words, the Internet itself and its defense, and the network as a political metaphor for its decentralized character brought me to work on P2P. Commons appreciation came later.

ROD: What is ‘participative action research’? How have you used it? And what groups have you worked with?

MFM: ‘Participative action research’ refers to research that tends to inform a process in action or depart from explicit aims, and is developed in a participatory manner. This could refer to how the research questions are defined (they could emerge in the context of mobilization), the methodologies (more participative and egalitarian, positioning the researcher as facilitator more than owner of the process) and the distribution of the research outcomes (such as adopting open access and open data). There are different traditions and sensibilities. One of the first books and articles I wrote back in 2004 as part of the collective Investigaccio was on what at that time we called “activist” research and social movements. A later version of this article was published at: Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 1 (1): 21 – 45 (January 2009). Fuster Morell: Action research 21 Action research: mapping the nexus of research and political action http://www.interfacejournal.net/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/interface-issue-1-1-pp21-45-Fuster.pdf

My first action involvement was as part of the global justice movement with the Seattle and Praga mobilization against global institutions like the World Bank, IMF, and European Union. Through that experience I realized how we were generating useful data and how ICTs could contribute to systematizing the knowledge generated in social processes and democratizing access to that knowledge. This brought me to an action research framework.

ROD: You have developed some very interesting research on gender and the commons. In what ways can gender politics inhibit participation in commons-based peer production? And how can we become more aware of it?

MFM: I think it is not accurate to state that I developed research on the commons and gender. There are experts in gender, and gender studies is a specialized field, but I am not one. What happens is that commons theory and practice tend to be dominated by male voices (with the great exception of Ostrom), a lack of engagement with gender perspectives and feminist theories (see for example Bauwens’ work), and an emphasis on class as opposed to identity politics. Sometimes inequality dynamics are even worse than market dynamics (for example, only 1.5 % of FLOSS participants are women, while proprietary software has a 30% female involvement. So in that context, someone like me that has some gender sensibility and feminist appreciation – even if she is not an expert or very involved – becomes the ‘gender voice’ in the room. This makes me feel uncomfortable, because I do not know much and have not written much or made good contributions; my area of expertise is on governance of the commons and public policies for the commons.

ROD: At procomuns, an event that you helped to organize, there was an emphasis on the ways in which women’s contributions had been hidden from peer-to-peer practices. How can we challenge this?

MFM: Regarding how we can change the current gender inequality dynamic of the commons, I think the first step is to recognize that commons approaches have obfuscated reproductive work as much as capitalism. Commons is presented as a third mode of production distinct from the state and the market, but where is domestic work, families and reproductive work – mostly developed by women – in this equation? And where is nature? I really think commons can benefit a lot from engaging with ecofeminist perspectives – with authors like Cristina Carrasco or Yayo Herrero here in Spain for example. This connection can not only bring more justice to the commons but also be very powerful. I think one of the key insights which explains the rise of Barcelona en Comu is the combination of feminism and commons.

What is clear is that there is a lot to be done on gender. I contribute to a wiki for monitoring the inclusion of women in digital commons and ICT conferences, where there are also resources on commons and gender (see http://wiki.digital-commons.net). Conferences with less than at least 35% of women inclusion in the program are shame conferences. The lack of reference to women’s work in the academic literature and in the field literature is even more problematic.

ROD: What distinguishes the commons for you from other traditional hierarchical public and private forms of organization? And do we need a partner state to develop and protect the commons?

MFM: At this moment in time, yes. Neoliberal globalization has constituted an enclosure of global commons, and the expansion of the capitalist dynamic to new areas previously organized through commons and social logics. Digital commons were expanding with the Internet, but now certain layers of the Internet are controlled by corporations, resulting in the enclosure of the digital commons also (see for example the emergence of on demand /corporate collaborative economies and the enclosure of collaborative production online). In this stage of things, I think we need to gain political control over political institutions in order to create public-commons alliances to confront the commons enclosure. A private – public alliance has resulted in the kidnap of political institutions; together they are creating what I call (glossing feminist theory) the “glass ceiling”, working to ensure that the greater capacity for the commons to expand and gain centrality in the digital era is kept under control, and that commons are enclosed for profit purposes. But the process of organizing to gain political power in political institutions should happen in parallel with the reorganization of economic power under commons logic. We need external, social movements to push for policy change, and economical affinity activity in order to be able to perform political changes inside the institution.

ROD: In the last decade we are seeing a growing centrality of forms of commoning and commons-based peer production to capital, particularly in informational and digital spheres. You call this relationship ‘wiki-washing’. What strategies exist to protect forms of commoning from commercial expropriation? Or is this an inevitability? Or maybe not always a bad thing?

MFM: Regarding the case of the collaborative economy, commons collaborative economy was original to the internet with FLOSS, Wikipedia etc. Then we have witnessed several waves of incorporation of collaborative dynamics for capitalism innovation, with the case of platforms like YouTube and Flickr first, and now with the “collaborative economy” of Uber and AirBnb. These have popularized collaboration, but they have also emptied it of its empowering dimension. We should keep working on alternatives that scale (being aware that it is not only a matter of lack of ability, but a ‘glass ceiling’ that I mentioned earlier that ensure such efforts remain small). We must denounce the bad practices of unicorn modalities and their wiki-washing (for a discussion of the use of the wiki ethos to further corporate interests see my article The unethics of sharing: wikiwashing”). Still, we have also to be tactical and take advantage of the situation created – to play the game in our favor. For example, the European Commission did not get interested in commons production until the debate on the collaborative economy gained importance with the controversies connected to the disruption of Uber and AirBnb. I’m often asked to speak about the collaborative economy by organizations who have AirBnb and Uber in mind because they do not know anything else and I take advantage of these opportunities to explain that they were not the first to appear and that there are other running models based on commons logic which can favor a more inclusive economical “growth”.

The capitalist market adoption of commons creativity has ambivalences, and we should be tactical and practical in taking advantage of these depending on the period. This ambivalence of the market can also be applied to social networks. The appearance of Facebook and Twitter was a defeat to autonomous communication alternatives, but nowadays it has also become a tool for social mobilization, and it is right to use it as such. But we also have to keep in mind how we might gain them back for commons governance? There is, for example, a campaign to buy Twitter by the Twitter community and transform it into a cooperative. In sum, politics is done with “what there is”, advancing with the opportunities of each moment – not with great conditions that are not there.

ROD: What does the term ‘digital commons’ mean to you?

MFM: Commons is an ethos and an umbrella term that encompasses many practices and transformative changes. The commons emphasizes common interests and needs. It includes collaborative production, open and shared resources, collective ownership, as well as empowering and participative forms of political and economic organizing.

It is, however, a very plural concept with very diverse ‘traditions’ and perspectives. Some commons, for example, are connected to material resources (pastoral, fields, fishing etc.) and others to immaterial ones (knowledge etc.).

In the area of knowledge commons, the emphasis is on the conditions of access – open access and the possibility to access resources and intervene in their production without requiring the permission of others. It emphasizes knowledge as a public good, a patrimony, and a human right.

I proposed a definition of digital commons as “information and knowledge resources that are collectively created and owned or shared between or among a community and that tend to be non-exclusive, that is, be (generally freely) available to third parties. Thus, they are oriented to favor use and reuse, rather than to exchange as a commodity. Additionally, the community of people building them can intervene in the governing of their interaction processes and of their shared resources” (Fuster Morell, M. (2010, p. 5). Dissertation: Governance of online creation communities: Provision of infrastructure for the building of digital commons. http://www.onlinecreation.info/?page_id=338).

ROD: What do we need to do to cultivate and defend the digital commons?

MFM: The same that we have to do with any common.

At this moment there are, in my view, three key strategies and goals: 1) Create public commons partnerships. Push for political institutions to be led by commons principles and to support commons-based economic production (such as reinventing public services led by citizens’ participation, what I call ‘commonification’). Barcelona en Comu is providing a great model for this. 2) Reclaim the economy, and in particular develop an alternative financial system. 3) Confront patriarchy within the commons – in other words embrace freedom and justice for all, not just for a particular privileged subject (male, white, etc.) and help foster greater diversity in society.

ROD: What for you is the key difference between the digital and the material commons? Do these distinctions hold? Or are they holding us back?

MFM: Over time I think there is less and less of a distinction.

ROD: What do you think of proposals for new forms of technology that scale commons-based peer production such as distributed ledger technologies, the blockchain or new reputation and trustless systems? How do these fit within the broader projects of commons-based peer production?

MFM: Certainly, technological development is important, but much less that what is framed in the blockchain hype. For a period around the early development of the Internet, I thought – and I think this was a general collective feeling – that technological development and creativity towards decentralized modes would be the more effective strategy to gain commons space. I no longer think this (as I previously discussed, I think we have to combine several strategies: political, economical, technical and “genderal”). I think we were wrong. The evolution of the Internet is the best proof of this. This is why I am so surprised by the wave of naïve enthusiasm for the blockchain and its technological solutionism and apolitical vision. It assumes there are not also power struggles and asymmetries in networked and decentralized modalities.

ROD: Can you tell us a bit about your own work on infrastructure governance?

MFM: My doctoral thesis was on the governance of infrastructure for the building of digital commons (the thesis is available here). In this research I challenged previous literature by questioning the neutrality of infrastructure for collective action and demonstrating that infrastructure governance shapes collective action.

ROD: I’ve read that your research challenges the idea that oligarchy, bureaucracy and hierarchy are inevitable products of scaled forms of cooperation. How can we prevent these from kicking in? Are these always bad things? Joe Freedman, for example, writes of the ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ and how the ostensible idea of no structure allows for more insidious forms of structural power i.e. gender/class/race to play a key role and to develop oligarchies.

MFM: The research I developed in my thesis provided an empirical explanation of the organizational strategies most likely to succeed in creating large-scale collective action in terms of the size of participation and complexity of collaboration. In hypothesizing that the emerging forms of collective action are able to increase in terms of both participation and complexity while maintaining democratic principles, I challenged Olson’s classical political science assertion that formal organizations tend to overcome collective action dilemmas more easily, and challenges the classical statements of Weber and Michels that as organizations grow in size and complexity, they tend to create bureaucratic forms and oligarchies. I concluded that online creation communities are able to increase in complexity while maintaining democratic principles. Additionally, in light of my research, the emerging collective action forms are better characterized as hybrid ecosystems which succeed by networking and combining several components, each with different degrees of formalization and organizational and democratic logics. Wikipedia is a great example of hybridism. Wikipedia kept its community decentralized, autonomous and allowed open models of organizing to scale, while at the same time having the Wikimedia Foundation with a more hierarchical and labor-based form. Each piece is necessary for the whole ecosystem to scale.

Regarding your question on the tyranny of structurelessness. It is an important question. I think the work of Ostrom questioning Hardin’s conception of the commons is in the same line of what I want to argue here. Ostrom critiqued Hardin’s piece on ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’, because the example he used (farmers coordinating grazing rights) was not that of a commons organizational form, but an open field without a social contract around its use, as commons provide. So in this line, yes, there is the need for social organizing in order to preserve resources and organize equality and justice etc.; without structure there is no organization and no commons. Then, the question is what type of organizing, what type of structure and how to govern it. And here I want to recall that network forms are also an organizing structure. But its governance should be transparent and inclusive to all its members. Informality is one of the channels for injustice, such as male domination or corruption, and in this sense I agree with Freedman. It is ok to have open and networked forms, but their governance should be transparent and inclusive. By themselves, network decentralization does not assure power equality (this goes back to the debate on the blockchain).

At the same time, I think we have to go beyond Freedman’s critique and say that it is not that we need structure generally. Structure is not enough to solve inequality, but we need an explicit gender equality plan too. Without a specific set of norms and forms to confront the patriarchy, any commons is going to reproduce it – even reinforce it. The case of FLOSS is very clear here. Studies suggest that only 1.5% of contributors to FLOSS communities are women, while in proprietary closed software production, the proportion is closer to 30%. Similarly, communities that manage natural resources, such as fishing commons institutions in Albufera, Valencia restricted women’s participation until very recently. Equality regarding social and economical dimension is not the only aspect to have present, as it is quite common in commons approaches. Patriarchy is previous to capitalism, and to move towards a commons paradigm, as an alternative to capitalism does not assure a solution to a much deep violent system that works against women and diversity generally.

Finally, the third pillar is the preservation of nature. We have to overcome the current “commons” framework in order to create a new framework based on the confluence of the social and the commons, one that includes gender and diversity feminism, and nature and environmental preservation. Any approach that lacks any of these three pillars explicitly does not have much potential.

The post Women in P2P: Interview with Mayo Fuster Morell appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Edited by Giacomo D’Alisa & Cristina Mattiucci. Quadernos, Explorations in Space and Society No. 30 – December 2013

The post A Special Issue on Commoning appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Dear Jean, tell is about your pre-thrivable days and how you came to think about this topic and approach?

Thank you Michel. There are a several important elements of my history that brought me to this work.

Childhood: Much of what I have seen people move to in the last dozen years was already my everyday experience as a kid. I don’t think we did it to save the environment or anything like that. We just lived frugally, in harmony with nature as much as we could.
I grew up in the country on 93 acres of hilly prairie and woodlands in the 70s and 80s. The property was divided into 9 lots of 3 acres each, and then the remainder of the property was a shared commons for everyone who owned a lot to use and enjoy. This was my early sense of how property worked. Also, we grew much of our own food, including an orchard for fruit. My Mom made yogurt or bread, she canned food from the garden or from berries we picked. She made some of our clothes too. Being in the country without garbage service, we composted our kitchen scraps, recycled (in the 70s even) our glass and metals, and we burned what we could not re-use or re-cycle. Most of our heating came from wood burning stove, which meant we were carefully and selectively harvesting firewood from our forests each year. We use a lot of passive techniques to heat and cool the house, which my Dad had built for us. We closed window treatments at the right times to keep heat in or let it out, for example. There was always, for me, a sense of care about food, waste, energy, and experience.

Education: My academic work started in biology, leading me to ask some questions about what our future might be and how ethical our work was. So I switched into philosophy to ask those questions more deeply. I ended up with a double major in Philosophy and English with a focus on Critical Theory. I was very interested in the way we create and express identity and how we signify that identity, individually and culturally. I continued to be strongly guided by a sense of what being ethical meant to me. 
I explored the performance of identity in everyday life through some theater classes. I also worked in the art museum on campus and studied art as a way of creating and troubling meaning. I was very engaged around transformation even then, with an interest in post-colonial studies, art for social change, and the notion of hybridity. I was always bouncing between a critical and theoretical understanding and desire to do something – to be in practice informed by that position.

Economics: In academia, my core mentor was a marxist and a significant partner of mine at that time was at least an anti-capitalist (if not an all out marxist). So I was trained to think about the flows of capital and systems of oppression. What I longed for was a way for society to function that worked better. I found the position of resistance to be pretty depressing. So I went to work in Chicago for an international finance company that had recently gone public – into the belly of the beast you might say. What I found there was that good people get trapped by the incentives of the system – the corporate need for growth – and the performances the organization did to attempt to control wall street perceptions. People tend to be good, but organizations that lose their connection to humanity and start to perform on the stage of wall street focus only on the measure of financial returns on not on the measure of humanity. Ethics get lost in scale.

Transformation: My husband and I were clear we didn’t want to be in the rat race. We sold our Chicago house for a hefty profit, moved to central Illinois where our money went further, and set up a way of simple living with minimal needs so we could focus on raising our children. I started my own consulting company and worked as a ghostwriter for a financial advisor/philanthropic advisor on books about creating meaningful life. I read a lot about concepts like positive deviance, tipping points, positive and negative feedback loops, and other aspects of systemic change. I was trained as a life coach. I was getting the skills I needed to be an agent of transformation in practice – in my own life and in the world at large.
I also was working and playing a lot on the internet learning about social entrepreneurship. I had never had a specific cause that was my own (always seeing the value of many causes) but I also saw how inter-related issues were and sought the biggest and best lever for transformation. That was when, in February of 2007, someone mentioned the word “thrivability” to me, and I knew I found the term that described what I wanted to create in the world. At that time, according to google searches then, there were only 2 people talking about it, one of which set me on my path.

Could you outline for beginners what thrivability means for you, why you think it is important and how it differs from other approaches? I’m thinking of approaches like degrowth or steady-state, which seem to have a quite different connotation. What are you reacting to in particular when you are diffusing your own proposals.

Sure. Thrivability is simple the ability to thrive – to flourish. To me, one of the ways we can contribute to that is if we are generating more value than we consume. How that can happen and what needs to be considered is very lengthy, and I have been working on exploring that for nearly a decade now. For example, my own thriving doesn’t happen at the expense of someone else’s thriving. So I can’t really say I have the ability to thrive if it means that someone else is suffering for me to do so. We can’t look at individual thriving without considering others, communities, ecosystems, and the planet.

When I look at the major movements today, most of them react against what is. Reactionary. The story they tell is about what we have done wrong and need to fix. Thrivability doesn’t do that. For me thrivability invites us to what is great. It accepts what has come before as best-efforts given the conditions and knowledge at the time. It doesn’t shame or ask for sacrifice through guilt. Thrivability invites us to contribute our best selves toward the best world we can imagine. Thrivability encourages us to be proactive.

As I have explored, I keep finding a deep resonance between thrivability and a sense of peer to peer. I think we need massive collective intelligence with everyone contributing their gifts and being treated as peers in the effort, so for me there is a deep alignment of peer to peer as the tools and processes for a more thrivable world.

As for Degrowth and steady state, those are terms used before the word economy. Degrowth Economy. Steady-state Economy. Thrivability is not about the economy. It is about something much bigger than that. It is about aliveness and the flows of life. If degrowth or steady state create more value than they consume and get us to thriving, then great! They each could be tools to get us there, and I am not the best person to say which is a better approach. But I can say, they are about the mechanism of the economy, and they tend to attract people who are interested in how economies work (and get very technical pretty fast).

Thrivability is something anyone can access and consider. What would make my household more thrivable? What would make my life more thrivable? What would make my relationship more thrivable? What would make my community more thrivable? The answers to those questions extend way beyond what economic structures we use. And, they may not be the same over time. Maybe capitalism was a more thrivable economic approach in response to feudalism – at that time.

I am resistant to approaches that tell us what we need to get away from without telling us what we might have, do, or be instead. Furthermore, my interest is in asking the question that collective wisdom can explore – what is thrivable here and what helps us become more thrivable together?

I want everyone asking that question, no matter what your politics or economic position is. I am trying to create and share an aspiration that helps us bridge our divides and gets us all to the table to lend our best ability toward that shared goal. I want a story of a future so compelling and yet possible that we all contribute toward making it happen. I want to be drawn into that future because it is so compelling and alive.

I am focusing a lot now on the science of awe, the effects of playfulness, and the conditions that enable creativity.

 
You are an active facilitator, why do you think this is an important function today ?

I think the age of modernism was about finding fixed and static answers to our questions about ourselves and our world. We since have learned that the answers evolve. This new era is about asking better and better questions. Also, as knowledge has expanded, so has specialization. Yeah! And, the problem with specialization is that it gets too isolated from the whole and integration. My work is often about weaving disparate knowledge and perspectives together to form an integrated understanding. To do that, I need to facilitate a process for people to come together to share and communicate.

Thrivability is so complex, no single person can understand all the layers. For example, we have to consider thriving for individuals, organizations, communities, societies, and the planet, which are all interlocking. Next we have to consider different dimension of thriving such as purpose, passion, profit (value generation), planet (or context), and the well being of people. My colleague, Kathryn Ananda, calls those the 5 Ps of Thrivability. Then we have to think through time. Maybe something doesn’t seem thrivable for us in the short term but is in the long term – how do we weigh the present with the future? I can’t know all of that, so facilitating a conversation among people who can bring value to that exploration is crucial.

And finally, I think facilitation is a practice of helping individuals and collective organisms to discover and practice their own quest and practice of thrivability. It is one of my personal ways of supporting thrivability in practice.

How has your more recent work evolved, after writing and editing the thrivability books?

The first book, The Thrivability Sketch, really encouraged me. I had been writing about this idea, feeling it out, seeing what was emerging in the world that seemed a right fit for generating thrivability. Two of my advisors independently suggested I do a collaborative book project. I really came alive in the process. The first essay was something almost antithetical to what I would have said, so I knew at that early point that the whole thing would be better for showing diverse perspectives. I was blissed out connecting and facilitating the emergence of that work for three months, working 12-16 hour days, and I am so proud of what we were able to do together. It really grounded me in this work of co-creating together. And it led me onto an international stage, speaking about thrivability and methods of co-creation. The Thrivability: Breaking Through book was my cry of possibility into the darkness of fear out there. I wanted to share the ways I think we are creating antidotes to the catastrophes of our time, weaving together insights and approaches from coaching, neuroscience, organizational development, systems science, and so much more to say, “This is possible!”

Now I feel like I have laid out the possibility in broad strokes, my work has turned toward very practical efforts to get the “how to” out there. I have two books coming out soon that are both more workbook like and directed toward practitioners. The first is on social designs that create flow (and leverage human agency and autonomy). It is grounded in research and conversations with 20+ edge-practitioners on their projects to foster compelling complex adaptive systems. And then Action Spectrum, which is the final chapter of the Breaking Through book, expanded out into a full length workbook for social change agents to create and act upon their theory of change using systems science (but written for people who don’t speak systems language).

From there I want to weave between our organizational cultures and microcultures and our (transformation) strategies so we can better make tangible the thrivability we aspire to. I am currently gathering materials and designing workshops around that.

Tell us a bit about the p2p/commons scene in Chicagoland ?

To be clear, while I have lived in Chicago about a decade of my life in total, I am currently a bi-coastal resident of Central Illinois and San Francisco. I am excited to see Chicago engage around P2P. There is something at the heart of Chicago culture and history that lends itself to working shoulder to shoulder together for something that matters. Daniel Burham, said “Make no little plans. They have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably will not themselves be realized.” He was instrumental in the urban planning of much of Chicago in the early 1900s, created the parks along the lakefront (and others in the city) believing that everyone should be within walking distance of a park. (Parks are a commons, right?) I have long believed that there is something magical about art and theater in Chicago, because there is such a culture of doing the work for the work and not for the glory. When I lived in Pilsen, a history professor explained that we lived within a few blocks of the birthplaces of three unions. (I don’t know your position on unions, but in my mind, historically, it is the work of coming together to create a shared infrastructure strong enough to assert and then co-manage our shared interest.) And there is a lot of history around civil rights and the need to work together for our shared interest to address them. Today, I see a lot of amazing work for social innovation in Illinois. So I see a lot of threads that I think can make Chicago a strong place for the practice of a P2P society. (Answering this question thoroughly would probably be an essay in itself, if not a book!)

Chicago also faces some tough challenges. Education in the city is a huge issue hotly debated. Neighborhoods have tended to be rooted in one nationality or another with few genuine examples of integration. The South side of Chicago feels more dangerous than Detroit, but since we can balance that with affluence of downtown and Lincoln Park it doesn’t get as much visibility. But I also hear of efforts to work on addressing the food desert issues, and again, very grassroots, shoulder to shoulder efforts to solve these challenges.

Where do you see the world, and yourself, in say, ten years ?

I have a sense that there are several crucial moments in our near future that will act like a phase change – creating a different way of organizing ourselves that we sort of just jump to wholy. Think about how fast the change to mobile phone and then to smart mobile phones cascaded through the world changing behaviors and beliefs globally. I think we are on the edge of a massive leap toward thrivability.

The movement for thrivability will extend, by that point, far beyond my reach or ability to track. I will be grateful for planting the seed and tending it while others harvest from the fruit it bears in their areas of knowledge and practice.

In 10 years, I hope my partner and I are consulting on thrivable futures from a little cabin in the woods where we live simply and playfully in a tiny house or cabin as part of a local maker culture. All our children will be independent then. My partner is a creator-type, and I know he will be making mischief for the good of the world in his way.
I will continue writing books that describe the practices of thrivability (and I have two more outlined and several more at the germ idea stage). This next phase for me focuses on organization aliveness and creativity. After that, I want to write more about personal thriving, how we communicate with each other, how we create meaningful lives, and how we create living structures for governance of a commons at various scales, for example.

The post 100 Women who are co-creating the P2P Society: Jean Russell on Thrivability appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Journal of Urban Technology, Special Issue: Urban Acupuncture – Routledge

“Finnish architect Marco Casagrande developed Urban Acupuncture as an urban environmentalism theory during work with an illegal settlement in Taipei, Taiwan, named Treasure Hill. Casagrande noted that the area was full of human energy, but through government interventions, the energy had been turned negative and had to be redirected towards construction: “like turning over the compost that has been the smelly part of the farm just to become the most fertile top soil. I was careful to manipulate these hidden energy flows and the small elements that I introduced to Treasure Hill can be compared to the needles in acupuncture. I call this urban acupuncture.”

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Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis (Luis Moreno-Caballud)

Cultures of Anyone studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and social movements such as the Indignados have challenged a longstanding cultural tradition of intellectual elitism and capitalist technocracy in Spain. From the establishment of a technocratic and consumerist culture during the second part of the Franco dictatorship to the transition to neoliberalism that accompanied the ‘transition to democracy,’ intellectuals and ‘experts’ have legitimized contemporary Spanish history as a series of unavoidable steps in a process of ‘modernization.’ But when unemployment skyrocketed and a growing number of people began to feel that the consequences of this Spanish ‘modernization’ had increasingly led to precariousness, this paradigm collapsed. In the wake of Spain’s financial meltdown of 2008, new ‘cultures of anyone’ have emerged around the idea that the people affected by or involved in a situation should be the ones to participate in changing it. Growing through grassroots social movements, digital networks, and spaces traditionally reserved for ‘high culture’ and institutional politics, these cultures promote processes of empowerment and collaborative learning that allow the development of the abilities and knowledge base of ‘anyone,’ regardless of their economic status or institutional affiliations.

Table of Contents

Articles

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Full Paper here

The post Essay of the Day: Can Capitalism Reform Itself and Move Towards a P2P Society? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Interview with Francesca Musiani on Internet governance and the role of the p2p practices

Bio

Francesca Musiani is a researcher at the Institute for Communication Sciences (ISCC), a research unit of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), Paris-Sorbonne, and University Pierre and Marie Curie. She is also an associate researcher at the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation of MINES ParisTech-PSL.

She is currently a member of the Commission « Rights and Liberties in the Digital Age » established by the French National Assembly in June 2014, outreach officer for the Global Internet Governance Academic Network (GigaNet), and co-chair of the Emerging Scholars Network of the International Association for Media and Communication Research (ESN-IAMCR). She is a member of the editorial board for the journals Tecnoscienza, RESET and Journal of Peer Production, and academic editor for the Internet Policy Review, online journal of the Berlin-based Humboldt Institut für Internet und Gesellschaft. Francesca was the 2012-13 Yahoo! Fellow in Residence at Georgetown University and an affiliate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Francesca’s research work focuses on Internet governance, in an interdisciplinary perspective blending, first and foremost, information and communication sciences with Science and Technology Studies (STS). Since 2008, this research has explored the distributed and decentralized approach to the technical architecture of Internet-based services, so as to understand the co-shaping of these architectures and of several different dynamics: the articulation between actors and contents, the allocation of responsibilities, the capacity to exert control and the organization of markets.

Francesca’s work has also explored, or is currently investigating, peer production and the sharing economy (European FP7 project P2Pvalue, 2013-), digital heritage (ANR project WEB90, 2014-), authorship and writing practices in the digital age, the processes of « industrialization » of Internet users’ contributions, net neutrality, ICT-related socio-technical controversies and online dispute resolution systems.

Tell me a little bit about your practice and research interests?

Currently I’m a researcher with the French National Research Council. I’m pursuing work in what is broadly conceived as ‘Internet governance’ and have for a number of years now. By broadly conceived I mean I have a larger definition of what constitutes governance than the traditional political science understanding.

Can you clarify what’s a more traditional understanding of governance and how your approach is a little different?

A more traditional understanding of Internet governance relates to institutions at all levels from inter-governmental organisations to supranational organisations such as ICANN and IGF and including expert community organisations such as the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF). Along with these I’d include private sector practices such as automatic or semi-automatic governance by algorithms as practices that inform Internet governance. I also include some dimensions of user practices and design and the re-appropriation of material aspects of the Internet as forms of ‘governance’. The day-to-day practices of network governance also include these more informal means of norm-making.

Would you describe those informal practices as p2p practices?

Yes, most of them end up being in the realm of sharing, collaborative and cooperative practices. But these informal network practices are also shaped at various stages of the innovation cycle by institutional and algorithmic governance.

What initially drew you to work on Internet governance?

I started to work in Internet governance about ten years ago with my master’s thesis. I actually started with the traditional view of network governance. When I started thinking about my master’s thesis topic it was the first year of the IGF. It was a moment in which the multi-stakeholder label as applied to Internet governance first came into being and became part of the discourse of practitioners, policy makers and researchers. I thought I wanted to research that a bit more. My more recent work is dedicated to following, almost ethnographically, some of the design and innovation processes that are currently shaping Internet governance systems.

This stemmed from a realisation that the institutional procedures of International governance weren’t all there was to Internet governance and there was an important aspect that was informal, including both the private sector and user’s influence in the Internet landscape.

Some of your research has been about the co-shaping of Internet architectures and social practices and dynamics. How do you map these relationships?

When I first got interested in decentralised architectures I was looking for ways to narrow the focus of my work around Internet governance i.e. starting form the fact that specific devices and systems have decentralised architectures and focus in on them. Had I enlarged the study to many different facets of p2p, it would have been too broad. I wanted to see if I could say something specific about what decentralisation at a technical level meant for p2p practices.

Is it always the case that decentralisation at one level implies decentralisation at other levels?

I’ve done some recent work with my ISCC colleague Mélanie Dulong de Rosnay, to elaborate a typology of peer production arrangements. We take a number of dimensions relevant to those platforms: the technical architecture; the governance; the ownership of the means of production; the ownership of the result; and value generation; and we observed the relative level of centralisation and decentralisation of these different dimensions. This is an approach that can help to show that in the same system some dimensions may be decentralised while others may be centralised. In fact, this pertains to most crowd-sourcing or collaborative platforms, where at the level of technical infrastructure they are anything but decentralised, but at the level of practices they may be – I mean, what’s more decentralised than organising to have a complete stranger on your sofa? And vice versa. You can take a platform and see how these dimensions fit for that platform.

So you’re constructing a kind of stratification of p2p systems to explore how different modes of governance operate at different layers. Even if there is a tendency to openness and/or decentralisation at one level there may be enclosure or centralising tendencies at others?

Yes. It’s possible and probable that not all of the different layers are on the same side of the spectrum.

The questions you’re asking are really key in that area, such as how does topology enable or constrain different social practices. This is a key question that needs to be asked. When you look at the different layers, as you’re doing, this equation becomes problematized.

It’s also a great example of how a rigorous approach from Sociology or Science and Technology Studies (STS) has a lot to contribute to research in p2p practices.

I would say that this particular piece of work is not exactly STS. When we did the literature review for our typology article we did have some STS literature related to architectures and politics, but also previous attempts to construct typologies in different fields, from environmental governance to participation. I’m not sure if what I’m doing here, specifically, is STS given that the discipline usually refrains from categorization and systematization in favour of “thick descriptions” of specific cases. So I’m not sure if I fit into my main discipline of reference here — and actually Melanie, my collaborator, is a legal scholar. But overall, my core approach is indeed STS, trying to bring ‘situated practices’ of Internet governance into the picture.

You’ve explored the relationship between P2P and privacy.

Further into my research I became interested in the effect that technical architectures had on personal data treatment and how you could achieve different means of privacy protection through architecture instead of, or in complement to, policy. So that was something that was a common preoccupation of the projects I examined. For example, data protection is currently in the hands of corporations and determined by what they are willing to give you as a contact in return for free services. So what else can we do?

So potentially these decentralised architectures that you came across could help to support user control of data?

Yes, to the extent that they “repatriate” data. In these projects, there is a tendency to be able to do more on user’s computers than we could before, such as encryption, or fragmentation of data before it is spread out to the network of peers, so that nobody, unless they possess a cryptographic key, can reconstruct an entire file or data packet.. The hard part was sometimes to figure it all out, as someone whose computer science knowledge is very uneven and for the most part, self-taught, but overall it was an interesting project.

The Snowden revelations were instrumentally good for doing research in these issues. One of the issues raised very shortly after the NSA leak was to what extent one can remedy the extent of government surveillance through [counter] design. If governments don’t protect us, if companies have 40-page terms of use that they don’t want us to read, what are alternative means of protection such as Freedombox or Cozy Cloud?

So I know Freedombox is about developing personal servers, but I’m not familiar with Cozy Cloud.

It’s not the first of its kind but due to the particular media moment it’s had a lot of exposure. It’s about fragmentation, distribution, and user-hosted cloud alternatives.

Tell me a bit about your involvement in the journal of peer production. You were involved in setting it up?

I was not on the founding team, but I’m on the editorial team now. Mathieu O’Neil is effectively the editor in chief; he’s the one that most frequently takes initiatives. Then there’s Johan Söderberg, Maxigas, Me, Nate Tkacz and Sara Tocchetti also.

I’m happy with the journal. There was a bit of rocky start with some hosting problems. Now we don’t have to chase people to do special issues; people have plenty of ideas for how the idea of peer production can fit with issues – there’s been a special issue on gender and another on alternative internets. There are new submissions all the time. It’s obviously a timely topic to deal with.

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See here for Part One.

Alison Powell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Media & Communications in the London School of Economics. Her research examines the history and future of openness within new media. Alison’s research explores open-source cultures including community wireless networks, free software advocates and people interested in open sourcing knowledge including hardware design. Alison was involved in Île Sans Fil,  a Montreal organisation founded in 2003 and committed to spreading Wi-Fi across the city.

The Peer-to-Peer City

I interviewed Alison last month during IAMCR in Montreal, Canada. In part one of this interview we spoke about the Community Wireless Network (CWN) Île Sans Fil in Montreal and the limited role of technologies in cultivating a p2p society . In this part of our interview,  we spoke about Alison’s work on the peer-to-peer city, an ‘alternative’ participatory governance model for cities that includes practices such as community networks, citizen science and citizen data collection operating alongside more hierarchical imaginaries of the ‘smart city’ or the data city. You can listen to a more detailed description of this concept in Alison’s Talk in Maynooth University Alison Powell – Coding alternative modes of governance: ‘Smart cities’ to ‘data cities’ from The Programmable City on Vimeo.

What drew you to the idea of the p2p city?

I think many cities exist simultaneously. Describing the p2p city is describing one version of the city that exists alongside many others. At the moment I find investigating the p2p city is partly a form of therapy and partly a form of research. It’s partly a form of therapy because I live in Central London, and if you live in Central London at this moment in history there’s such a stratification of the city in economic, political and social terms that it’s almost dizzying. The form of therapy I engage in is to try to find ways that people are not only creating interesting community projects – because this can also be quite retrogressive as in ‘we’re going to construct our own insular community against the outside world and that’s the scale we’re going to live at’ – but also seeking forms of exchange and interchange that, like Île Sans Fil, are imagining the city in a different way and linking things up in a different way, and making pathways between students and community organisations and mobile workers. All of those constellations and ways of thinking about the city were really interesting. I’m on the hunt for more evidence of those p2p cities, where there is another kind of relationship being made between different entities in the city at the same time as we are witnessing this incredible consolidation and hierarchisation of urban resources.

You mentioned something like this at the end of the panel [Data and Democracy] on Monday when you were speaking about the 596 acres project in New York. This hope that anyone working in p2p probably has that there are still enclaves of resistance that we can point to

We had another discussion of resistance this morning, which was about how resistance was changing. And I was trying to provoke people in my group into discussing how resistance is changing by saying that ‘maybe the current situation indicates that we cant have resistance anymore because we don’t have hegemony anymore. We’re not being oppressed from only one place and power is distributed.’ We had this really interesting discussion about how there are always going to be small pockets where other ways were being developed and where things are being done differently. These appear and they disappear and they create a subterranean network of different ways of being and thinking about things and building coalitions and connections that can be mobilised in moments of political possibility.

Do you see that in London or is it very fragmented?

No I actually do see that but I also see a huge amount of frustration. There’s lots of people doing research and activism and artistic projects that critique the smart city, but one of the difficulties with London is that the people most interested in creating an alternative way of being in the city are having to leave the city because it’s so expensive. So I don’t know for that particular city… I’m continuing to try and notice what else is going on and to keep track of different kinds of interventions. There’s been very interesting housing action that’s forming a p2p city because there’s lots of squats and migrant justice work, so housing seems to be something that’s drawing people together and lots of people are organising around housing in different parts of the city in different ways and they’re starting to speak to each other.

I think you’re right that some of the more interesting work around the p2p city is around housing and physical space more so than any kind of technological activism. I’m thinking the amazing work that the PAH has done in Spain, for example, that’s been quite inspirational in Dublin, in terms of people developing strategies to collectively organise against mortgage evictions, rising house prices, rising rents and so on. And p2p technologies are a part of that work but not the primary agenda.

I also think that it’s not technology activism. I think that technology activism is now so heavily colonised by capital and what the technology industry has become that what we will find in p2p cities is probably not necessarily technology activism in the way that community wireless was applying technology as a way of illustrating a different way of having a city. What we might see now is an issue such as housing or economic justice that is itself an organising framework and we’ll see technology used as a way to create links and develop an operational structure for that to happen.

Community radio has been around for 100 years. So that’s inspirational, not just to look at the emergent technology but how already existing technologies can be re-appropriated and ‘commoned’. For example, there’s still a good knowledge base for how to use radio. Pirate radio and community radio stations are another manifestation of the p2p city but they’re completely under the radar. And pirate radio communities have really interesting technologies because they have to have redundancy because the police can shut down their system at any time. So they have quite distributed technological arrangements but they also have really radical social arrangements because they have to be willing to get arrested and have somebody else run the station or have the station go down and come back up someplace else so these are also interesting things to think about and learn from. We can be as innovative as we want with the technology, but we also want to be very innovative with its use and employment and be very open to the different ways that stuff is used.

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