1. Poor usability for non-experts

Several generations of peer-to-peer technologies have promised a lot, delivered quite much, but still left a lingering taste of underachievement. While GNU/Linux — an operating system crucially dependent on a p2p development model — is clearly one of the resounding successes of open source, it still did not fulfill its promise in one crucial area (which in its early days was seen as one of the most important): desktop computers. Linux powers anything from toasters to supercomputers, but it hasn’t liberated the masses from Windows or Mac OS. In most of smartphones, Linux is in the shackles of Android.

There are many reasons for why GNU/Linux hasn’t taken over, vendor lock-in being one of the major ones. But there is another issue that may be relevant to blockchains. When hackers write software for themselves — scratching their own itch — it is ready when it delivers what is needed. And this point of being ready for use is very different for a hacker and for a regular user. For too long, the installation and use of a Linux distribution was too hard for ordinary users. Even if Ubuntu and similar systems have largely solved that bottleneck now, the lesson stands: superior technology, if polished only to the point where it is good enough for hackers and early adopters, will not escape that ghetto. Let’s be honest: just the visual look of a Bitcoin address “13ktXxaJTPvBPfSyS7XALTP1i7nAeR2oZ9” is going to keep a big chunk of potential users away. At the moment, the user experience of even the most advanced blockchain apps is abysmal.

2. Domestication

The second danger is domestication, or, maybe better yet “commoditization”. As Robert Herian writes in Critical Legal Thinking:

“Disruption, so-called and preached by many of the major global banks, to the extent that IBM are now claiming that more than half of those banks will be using the technology in the next three years, is anything but disruption because it leaves unchanged the conditions (norms and expectations) in which it occurs, namely those in which global financial capital has exclusive dominion over the social.”

It is clear that the way the banks use blockchains in effectivising their databases and other back-office oprations, does very little for a peer-to-peer future. Furthermore, as Herian continues to argue, there is the

Beyond the public and transparent blockchain, and thus any hope of preserving a common space if not exactly or politically-speaking a “commons”, we see a potent indication of the victories of normative liberal and, to a greater extent, global financial capitalism over the blockchain narrative. An ideological victory which is in no small part manifesting itself through the proliferation of permissioned enclosed ledgers which are altering the dynamic of blockchain development […]

Most of the resources in terms of money are certainly going to permissioned and private blockchain development and that will, for sure, lend its flavor to what blockchains are all about in the public mind. Moreover, as Herian indicates, this trend is in a worrying way reminiscent of the way in which other technological developments have encroached digital commons. However, is it so bad that banks and other institutions want to use permissioned blockchains? We are still allowed to use permissionless blockchains and build on them, right?

3. Marginalisation

Domestiction becomes a real problem when combined with another non-technological threat: marginalisation. Again, let’s look at recent history. Torrent technology is a superior way for distributing digital content. However, since its first and most prominent uses were related to illegal file-sharing, legislation and public PR campaigns have pushed the technology to the fringe (can you believe that PirateBay is still the most popular torrent tracking site?). Torrents are, of course, used for legal purposes, too, in many forms of content distribution, but again the full promise of the technology has been curtailed by pushing it into a socio-cultural margin.

All of the three threats ­– marginalisation, domestication and ghettoised user experience — loom large over blockchains. Moreover, the three collude in forming an evil circle, reinforcing each other. There is no silver bullet agaist any of them. A lot of education, both for regulators and the general public, is needed in order to counteract marginalisation. Against ghettoisation, the most urgent need are real-world uses cases that are not limited to currency speculation or to transactions with high counterparty risk. The more diverse the community involved, the greater the possibility of avoiding marginalisation and pushing for overall usability. The free software and open source movements, for instance, have a history of initiatives and procedures for increasing the diversity of the communities and lowering barriers of entry. They can be reused, while at the same time looking for new ways, such as ethical design, of broadening the horizons of p2p technology development.

Originally posted at Medium:

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Vertaisrahasto.fi (literally “Peer Fund”) is a new way of collecting and allocating funding for research. The idea is very simple. There are two roles for volunteer participants: donors and applicants. Everyone is invited to donate to the fund, the minimum sum is 10 euros. Donations are piled up during a predesignated time. During the same time, everyone is invited to supply applications for research funding. The lenght of the applications is limited to 3100 characters, and the applications are anonymized. After the designated time has run out, there is a period of voting, in which donors (one donor, one vote) vote over which application to fund.

The goals of the fund are likewise simple. One is the democratisation of research funding (implying the one donation, one vote rule) and the leveling of the institutional & expert hierachies of doing research (implying anonymisation and limitations to the size of the application). Another is forging a more direct link between researchers, research topics and people not affiliated with research institutions.

The project was initiated by the co-op Rohkean reunaan that developed the concept together with the Demola open innovation platform. The first round of the fund was run during spring 2011. There were over ca. 80 donors, including individuals and institutions, and 8 applicants. The winner of the first round was Tuomo Alhojärvi & Otto Bruun’s research proposal, “Ecologies of freedom in the Finnish countryside”, which was awarded the collected sum of 1100 euros. The sum was lower than hoped, but higher than feared. We hope that the sums awarded during rounds will rise as word gets around and the model gets further embedded into the research landscape.

The software running the operations was written by Miro Nieminen and is, naturally, open source. It would be great to find individuals and partners to develop the software further.

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The demographics of the members of the OSH community resemble the demographics of members of Open Source Software (OSS) communities studied earlier in that they are predominantly male and highly educated. Moreover, the members are mostly volunteers and “altruistically” motivated. There is one reported motivation that sticks out: 70% of the respondents say that they are participating because they want to contribute to employment and competitiveness in Finland. It is hard to imagine this kind of “patriotic” motivation in typical OSS projects.

There is also one difference with regard to typical OSS communities, namely, that the members of the community are significantly older (30<x<40) than “altruistic” volunteers in OSS communities (typically x<30). We believe this is due to the relatively early stage of the project and, maybe more interestingly, because an OSH project like this demands a wider variety of areas of expertise compared to typical OSS projects. Given the possibility of choosing between IT, transport, electricity, cars and marketing as their professional background, over 40 percent chose “other”.

We also discusses some bottlenecks of OSH projects compared to OSS projects, and ways of mitigating the bottlenecks. The three main differences are: slower development cycles, higher costs, and trouble with regulations/regulators. The 62 directives on cars in the EU create considerable friction and costs for the project. Copying the physical objects takes considerable time and resources. In OSH, the raw material and the tools used are not abundant but scarce. The end product can not, typically, be used as raw material for a new development cycle, but may have to be discarded. Consequently, describing the type of OSH present in SN as commons–based (Troxler, 2010) or commons–oriented (Bauwens, 2009) is problematic, as only the digitalized designs are commons, while the raw materials, tools and end products are not.

We believe this is one of the first empirical studies of OSH communities, so all feedback & comments are very welcome.

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Consequently, it seems to me, two hypotheses should be investigated.

First; certain criticisms of capitalism (Marx) and modernism (Heidegger) that present themselves as general and abstract, are rather – without being aware of this – criticisms of a very particular type of capitalism & modernity, one that has been fed with abundant and easy fossil fuels. It is especially devastating that Marxism, supposedly paying attention to material conditions and work, has not had much to say about the stellar amount of work performed by fossil fuels in the last 150 years. But the same goes for theories of capitalism: what if the “invisible hand” is an epiphenomenon of large-scale fossil fuel use, not a virtue of capitalism? Again, if these guesses are even half right, the self-understanding of both the proponents and adversaries of modernism has been way off the mark.

Which brings us to the second, much darker, hypothesis. One technical definition of nihilism is a way of life or a system of beliefs that is not aware of (or is purposefully ignorant of) the grounds on which it is based. In this precise sense, it is possible that modernism is nihilism, and that the blind spot is obfuscated precisely by the belief that our age is only technological (i.e., only tool-orineted, not based on any ultimate grounds). Let me invite you to consider these hypotheses by quoting from an article, Oil and the Regime of Capitalism, just published in Ctheory, in which I try to orient myself in these troubled waters:

“The anthropological record suggests that, typically, in pre-modern and non-industrialized communities the foundation of meaning is not separate from the world of material income: utility objects are beautiful and beauty is purposeful. Contrary to this, industrial civilization has often been described as a divider of the world of values and tools, means and objectives, which, through calculated reason, extracts everything it can without actually knowing why or for what purpose.

There is much truth in this bi-partition theory, but perhaps an even more disturbing picture of industrial civilization is obtained if it too is seen as a uniform culture that reveals the foundation of meaning through its utility objects. In places all around the globe, on land and in the sea, pipes protrude from beneath the ground, meandering towards enormous containers and networks of more pipes. Oil tankers and tank trucks haul acrid-smelling liquids further and further away to increasingly smaller containers and tanks, until the thin pipes end up in a pressure chamber where droplets split into gas are continuously combusted. What does this simultaneous foundation of meaning and for material life say about us? At the very least, it tells us that if it is the foundation we are blind to it, and the bi-partition theory is one form of blindness.”

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What makes the eCars ? Now! project unique is not that it is Open Source (there are several OS electric car projects, such as the c,mm,n), but that the idea is to create a conversion manual and the needed software, not to design a new electric car in need of a manufacturer. In this way, smaller businesses and groups of individuals can make the conversions without large capital outlays or heavy machinery. Based on a survey of the community, it was decided that the first convrsion be made on a Corolla (availability and quality were main concerns). The idea is that once the conversion manual and software are ready, small “garage-companies” can start making the conversions commercially anywhere in the world. Another distinguishing feature of the project is that it has been run more or less on schedule. The first “beta-fleet” of conversions will be made available by the community shortly after the unveiling of the 1.0 model, for the price of ca 20 000 – 22 000 euros. The exact price is dependent on how cheap one can get a used Corolla – best would be one with a broken engine!

(The first conversion was made on a lightly crashed chassis imported from Poland. The Finnish tax system for cars has not yet been harmonized with the EU, making cars more expensive in Finland that the rest of the EU. The community pleaded for a tax exemption on the first chassis on the basis of the public benefits of the project, but the exemption was denied by the authorities. Talk about public support for peer economy! Sometimes even removing active opposition would be nice.)

The community has been working in a garage in Hikiä, southern Finland, and has specialised task forces for the work on the chassis, the batteries, control software, lobbying the authorities, and so on. International communities are also being born, from Australia to Turkey.

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