Introduction

E.F. Schumacher’s seminal work Small Is Beautiful (1973) champions the idea of smallness and localism as the way for meaningful interactions amongst humans and the technology they use. Technology is very important after all. As Ursula Le Guin (2004) puts it, “[t]echnology is the active human interface with the material world”. With this essay we wish to briefly tell a story, inspired by this creed, of an emerging phenomenon that goes beyond the limitations of time and space and may produce a more socially viable and radically democratic life.

We want to cast a radical geographer’s eye over “cosmolocalism”. Antipode has previously published an article by Hannes Gerhardt (2019) and an interview with Michel Bauwens (Gerhardt 2020) that have touched upon “cosmolocalism”. Cosmolocalism emerges from technology initiatives that are small-scale and oriented towards addressing local problems, but simultaneously engage with globally asynchronous collaborative production through digital commoning. We thus connect such a discussion with two ongoing grassroots developments: first, a cosmolocal response to the coronavirus pandemic; and, second, an ongoing effort of French and Greek communities of small-scale farmers, activists and researchers to address their local needs.

Cosmolocalism in a Nutshell

Τhe most important means of information production – i.e. computation, communications, electronic storage and sensors – have been distributed in the population of most advanced economies as well as in parts of the emerging ones (Benkler 2006). People with access to networked computers self-organise, collaborate, and produce digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Initiatives such as the free encyclopedia Wikipedia and myriad free and open-source software projects have exemplified digital commoning (Benkler 2006; Gerhardt 2019, 2020; Kostakis 2018).

While the first wave of digital commoning included open knowledge projects, the second wave has been moving towards open design and manufacturing (Kostakis et al. 2018). Contrary to the conventional industrial paradigm and its economies of scale, the convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing machinery (from 3D printing and CNC milling machines to low-tech tools and crafts) has been developing commons-based economies of scope (Kostakis et al. 2018). Cosmolocalism describes the processes where the design is developed and improved as a global digital commons, while the manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check (Bauwens et al. 2019). The physical manufacturing arrangement for cosmolocalism includes makerspaces, which are small-scale community manufacturing facilities providing access to local manufacturing technologies.

Unlike large-scale industrial manufacturing, cosmolocalism emphasizes applications that are small-scale, decentralised, resilient and locally controlled. Cosmolocal production cases such as L’Atelier Paysan (agricultural tools), Open Bionics (robotic and bionic hands), WikiHouse (buildings) or RepRap (3D printers) demonstrate how a technology project can leverage the digital commons to engage the global community in its development.

Two Cases of Cosmolocalism

While this essay was being written in March 2020, a multitude of small distributed initiatives were being mobilised to tackle the coronavirus pandemic. Individuals across the globe are coming together digitally to pool resources, design open source technological solutions for health problems, and fabricate them in local makerspaces and workshops. For example, people are experimenting with new ventilator designs and hacking existing ones, creating valves for ventilators which are out of stock, and designing and making face shields and respirators.

There are so many initiatives, in fact, that there are now attempts to aggregate and systematise the knowledge produced to avoid wasting resources on problems that have already been tackled and brainstorm new solutions collectively.[1] This unobstructed access to collaboration and co-creation allows thousands of engineers, makers, scientists and medical experts to offer their diverse insights and deliver a heretofore unseen volume of creative output. The necessary information and communication technologies were already available, but capitalism as a system did not facilitate the organisational structure required for such mass mobilisation. In response to the current crisis, an increasing number of people are working against and beyond the system.

Such initiatives can be considered as grassroots cosmolocal attempts to tackle the inability of the globalised capitalist arrangements for production and logistics to address any glitch in the system. We have been researching similar activity in various productive fields for a decade, from other medical applications, like 3D-printed prosthetic hands, to wind turbines and agricultural machines and tools (Giotitsas 2019; Kostakis et al. 2018).

The technology produced is unlike the equivalent market options or is entirely non-existent in the market. It is typically modular in design, versatile in materials, and as low-cost as possible to make reproduction easier (Kostakis 2019). Through our work we have identified a set of values present in the “technical codes” of such technology which can be distilled into the following themes: openness, sustainability and autonomy (Giotitsas 2019). It is these values that we believe lead to an alternative trajectory of technological development that assists the rise of a commons-based mode of production opposite the capitalist one. This “antipode” is made possible through the great capacity for collaboration and networking that its configuration offers.

Allow us to elaborate via an example. In the context of our research we have helped mobilise a pilot initiative in Greece that has been creating a community of farmers, designers and fabricators that helps address issues faced by the local farmers. This pilot, named Tzoumakers, has been greatly inspired by similar initiatives elsewhere, primarily by L’Atelier Paysan in France. The local community benefits from the technological prowess that the French community has achieved, which offers not only certain technological tools but also through them the commitment for regenerative agricultural practices, the communal utilisation of the tools, and an enhanced capacity to maintain and repair. At the same time, these tools are adapted to local needs and potential modifications along with local insights may be sent back to those that initially conceived them. This creates flows of knowledge and know-how but also ideas and values, whilst cultivating a sense of solidarity and conviviality.

Instead of Conclusions, a Call to Arms

We are not geographers. However, the implications of cosmolocalism for geography studies are evident. The spatial and cultural specificities of cosmolocalism need to be studied in depth. This type of study would go beyond critique and suggest a potentially unifying element for the various kindred visions that lack a structural element. The contributors (and readership) are ideally suited to the task of critically examining the cosmolocalism phenomenon and contributing to the idea of scaling-wide, in the context of an open and diverse network, instead of scaling-up.

Cosmolocal initiatives may form a global counter-power through commoning. Considering the current situation we find ourselves in as a species, where we have to haphazardly re-organise entire social structures to accommodate the appearance of a “mere” virus, not to mention climate change, it is blatantly obvious that radical change is required to tackle the massive hurdles to come. Cosmolocalism may point a way forward towards that change.

Acknowledgements

The authors acknowledge funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant no. 802512). The photos were captured by Nicolas Garnier in the Tzoumakers makerspace.

Endnote

[1] Volunteers created the following editable webpage where, at the time of writing, more than 1,500 commons-based initiatives against the ongoing pandemic have been documented: https://airtable.com/shrPm5L5I76Djdu9B/tbl6pY6HtSZvSE6rJ/viwbIjyehBIoKYYt1?blocks=bipjdZOhKwkQnH1tV (last accessed 27 March 2020)

References

Bauwens M, Kostakis V and Pazaitis A (2019) Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto. London: University of Westminster Press

Benkler Y (2006) The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press

Gerhardt H (2019) Engaging the non-flat world: Anarchism and the promise of a post-capitalist collaborative commons. Antipode DOI:10.1111/anti.12554

Gerhardt H (2020) A commons-based peer to peer path to post-capitalism: An interview with Michel Bauwens. AntipodeOnline.org 19 February https://antipodeonline.org/2020/02/19/interview-with-michel-bauwens/ (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Giotitsas C (2019) Open Source Agriculture: Grassroots Technology in the Digital Era. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Kostakis V (2018) In defense of digital commoning. Organization 25(6):812-818

Kostakis V (2019) How to reap the benefits of the “digital revolution”? Modularity and the commons. Halduskultuur: The Estonian Journal of Administrative Culture and Digital Governance 20(1):4-19

Kostakis V, Latoufis K, Liarokapis M and Bauwens M (2018) The convergence of digital commons with local manufacturing from a degrowth perspective: Two illustrative cases. Journal of Cleaner Production 197(2):1684-1693

Le Guin U K (2004) A rant about “technology”. http://www.ursulakleguinarchive.com/Note-Technology.html (last accessed 27 March 2020)

Schumacher E F (1973) Small is Beautiful: A Study of Economics As If People Mattered. New York: Harper & Row

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In this post, we analyze Wikipedia — a site that has achieved tremendous success and scale through crowd-sourcing human input to create one of the Internet’s greatest public goods. Wikipedia’s success is particularly impressive considering that the site is owned and operated by a non-profit organization, and that almost all of its content is contributed by unpaid volunteers.

The non-commercial, volunteer-driven nature of Wikipedia may cause developers from the “decentralized web” to question the site’s relevance. However, these differences may be merely cosmetic: IPFS, for example, has no inherent commercial model, and most of the open source projects that underlie the decentralized web are built, at least in part, by volunteers.

We believe that a site that has managed to coordinate so many people to produce such remarkable content is well worth a look as we search for solutions to similar problems in the emerging decentralized web.

To better understand Wikipedia’s success, we first survey some key features of Wikipedia’s battle-tested (to the tune of 120,000 active volunteer editors) coordination mechanisms. Next, we present some valuable high-level lessons that blockchain projects interested in human input might learn from Wikipedia’s approach. Finally, we explore vulnerabilities inherent to Wikipedia’s suite of mechanisms, as well as the defenses it has developed to such attacks.

Wikipedia: key elements

While we cannot hope to cover all of Wikipedia’s functionality in this short post, we start by outlining a number of Wikipedia’s foundational coordination mechanisms as background for our analysis.

User and article Talk Pages

While anyone can edit an article anonymously on Wikipedia, most regular editors choose to register with the organization and gain additional privileges. As such, most editors, and all articles, have a public metadata page known as a talk page, for public conversations about the relevant user or article. Talk pages are root-level collaborative infrastructure: they allow conversations and disputes to happen frequently and publicly.

Since talk pages capture a history of each editor’s interaction — both in terms of encyclopedia content and conversational exchanges with other editors — they also provide the basis for Wikipedia’s reputation system.

Clear and accessible rules

If we think of the collection of mechanisms Wikipedia uses to coordinate its editors as a kind of “social protocol”, the heart of that protocol would surely be its List of Guidelines and List of Policies, developed and enforced by the community itself. According to the Wikipedia page on Policies and Guidelines:

“Wikipedia policies and guidelines are developed by the community… Policies are standards that all users should normally follow, and guidelines are generally meant to be best practices for following those standards in specific contexts. Policies and guidelines should always be applied using reason and common sense.”

For many coming from a blockchain background, such policies and guidelines will likely seem far too informal to be of much use, especially without monetary or legal enforcement. And yet, the practical reality is that these mechanisms have been remarkably effective at coordinating Wikipedia’s tens of thousands of volunteer editors over almost two decades, without having to resort to legal threats or economic incentives for enforcement.

Enforcement: Peer consensus and volunteer authority

Upon hearing that anyone can edit a Wikipedia page, no money is staked, no contracts are signed, and neither paid police nor smart contracts are available to enforce the guidelines, an obvious question is: why are the rules actually followed?

Wikipedia’s primary enforcement strategy is peer-based consensus. Editors know that when peer consensus fails, final authority rests with certain, privileged, volunteer authorities with long-standing reputations at stake.

Peer consensus

As an example, let’s consider three of the site’s most fundamental content policies, often referred to together. “Neutral Point of View” (NPOV), “No Original Research” (NOR), and “Verifiability” (V) evolved to guide editors towards Wikipedia’s mission of an unbiased encyclopedia.

If I modify the Wikipedia page for Mahatma Gandhi, changing his birthdate to the year 1472, or offering an ungrounded opinion about his life or work, there is no economic loss or legal challenge. Instead, because there is a large community of editors who do respect the policies (even though I do not), my edit will almost certainly be swiftly reverted until I can credibly argue that my changes meet Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines (“Neutral Point of View” and “Verifiability”, in this case).

Such discussions typically take place on talk pages, either the editor’s or the article’s, until consensus amongst editors is achieved. If I insist on maintaining my edits without convincing my disputants, I risk violating other policies, such as 3RR (explained below), and attracting the attention of an administrator.

Volunteer authority: Administrators and Bureaucrats

When peer consensus fails, and explicit authority is needed to resolve a dispute, action is taken by an experienced volunteer editor with a long and positive track record: an Administrator.

Administrators have a high degree of control over content, include blocking and unblocking users, editing protected pages, and deleting and undeleting pages. Because there are relatively few of them (~500 active administrators for English Wikipedia), being an administrator is quite an honor. Once nominated, adminship is determined through discussion on the user’s nomination page, not voting, with a volunteer bureaucrat gauging the positivity of comments at the end of the discussion. In practice, those candidates having more than 75% positive comments tend to pass.

Bureaucrats are the highest level of volunteer authority in Wikipedia, and are also typically administrators as well. While administrators have the final say for content decisions, bureaucrats hold the ultimate responsibility for adding and removing all kinds of user privileges, including adminship. Like administrators, bureaucrats are determined through community discussion and consensus. However, they are even rarer: there are currently only 18 for the entire English Wikipedia.

Since there is no hard limit to the number of administrators and bureaucrats, promotion is truly meritocratic.

Evolving governance

Another notable aspect of Wikipedia’s policies and guidelines is that they can change over time. And in principle, changing a Wikipedia policy or guideline page is no different than changing any other page on the site.

The fluidity of the policies and guidelines plays an important role in maintaining editors’ confidence in enforcing the rules. After all, people are much more likely to believe in rules that they helped create.

If we continue to think of the policies and guidelines for Wikipedia as a kind of protocol, we would say that the protocol can be amended over time and that the governance for its evolution takes place in-protocol — that is, as a part of the protocol itself.

Lessons for the decentralized web

Now that we have a little bit of background on Wikipedia’s core mechanisms, we will delve into the ways that Wikipedia’s approach to coordination differs from similar solutions in public blockchain protocols. There are three areas where we believe the decentralized web may have lessons to learn from Wikipedia’s success: cooperative games, reputation, and an iterative approach to “success”.

We also hope that these lessons may apply to our problem of generating trusted seed sets for Osrank.

Blockchain should consider cooperative games

Examining Wikipedia with our blockchain hats on, one thing that jumps out right away is that pretty much all of Wikipedia’s coordination games are cooperative rather than adversarial. For contrast, consider Proof of Work as it is used by the Bitcoin network. Because running mining hardware costs money in the form of electricity and because only one node can get the reward in each block, the game is inherently zero-sum: when I win, I earn a block reward; every other miner loses money. It is the adversarial nature of such games that leaves us unsurprised when concerns like selfish mining start to crop up.

As an even better example, consider Token Curated Registries (TCRs). We won’t spend time describing the mechanics of TCRs here, because we plan to cover the topic in more detail in a later post. But for now, the important thing to know is that TCRs allow people to place bets, with real money, on whether or not a given item will be included in a list. The idea is that, like an efficient market, the result of the betting will converge to produce the correct answer.

One problem with mechanisms like TCRs is that many people have a strong preference against playing any game in which they have a significant chance of losing — even if they can expect their gains to make up for their losses over time. In behavioral psychology, this result is known as loss aversion and has been confirmed in many real-world experiments.

In short, Proof of Work and TCRs are both adversarial mechanisms for resolving conflicts and coming to consensus. To see how Wikipedia resolves similar conflicts using cooperative solutions, let’s dive deeper into what dispute resolution looks like on the site.

Dispute resolution

So how does a dubious change to Mahatma Gandhi’s page actually get reverted? In other words, what is the process by which that work gets done?

When a dispute first arises, Wikipedia instructs the editors to avoid their instinct to revert or overwrite each other’s edits, and to take the conflict to the article’s talk page instead. Some quotes from Wikipedia’s page on Dispute Resolution point to the importance of the Talk pages:

“Talking to other parties is not a mere formality, but an integral part of writing the encyclopedia”

“Sustained discussion between the parties, even if not immediately successful, demonstrates your good faith and shows you are trying to reach a consensus.”

Editors who insist on “edit warring”, or simply reverting another editor’s changes without discussion, risk violating Wikipedia’s 3RR policy, which prohibits editors from reverting 3 changes on a given page in 24 hours. Editors who violate 3RR risk a temporary suspension of their accounts.

If initial efforts by the editors to communicate on the Talk Page fail, Wikipedia offers many additional solutions for cooperative coordination, including:

• Editor Assistance provides one-on-one advice on how to conduct a civil, content-focused discussion from an experienced editor.
• Moderated Discussion offers the facilitation help of an experienced moderator, and is only available after lengthy discussion on the article’s Talk page.
• 3rd Opinion, matches the disputants with a third, neutral opinion, and is only available for disputes involving only people.
• Community Input allows the disputants to get input from a (potentially) large number of content experts.

Binding arbitration from the Arbitration Committee is considered the option of last resort, and is the only option in which the editors are not required to come to a consensus on their own. According to Wikipedia’s index of arbitration cases, this mechanism has been invoked only 513 times since 2004 — a strong vote of confidence for its first-pass dispute resolution mechanisms.

A notable theme of all of these dispute resolution mechanisms is how uniformly cooperative they are. In particular, it is worth observing that in no case can any editor lose something of significant economic value, as they might, for instance, if a TCR was used to resolve the dispute.

What the editor does lose, if their edit does not make it into the encyclopedia, is whatever time and work she put into the edit. This risk likely incentivises editors to make small, frequent contributions rather than large ones and to discuss major changes with other editors before starting work on them.

“Losing” may not even be the right word. As long as the author of the unincluded edit believes in Wikipedia’s process as a whole, she may still view her dispute as another form of contribution to the article. In fact, reputation-wise, evidence of a well-conducted dispute only adds credibility to the user accounts of the disputants.

Reputation without real-world identity can work

Another lesson from Wikipedia relates to what volunteer editors have at stake and how the site’s policies use that stake to ensure their good behavior on the system.

Many blockchain systems require that potential participants stake something of real-world value, typically either a bond or an off-chain record of good “reputation”. For example, in some protocols, proof-of-stake validators risk losing large amount of tokens if they don’t follow the network’s consensus rules. In other networks, governors or trustees might be KYC’d with the threat of legal challenge, or public disapproval, if they misbehave.

Wikipedia appears to have found a way to incentivize participants’ attachment to their pseudonyms without requiring evidence of real-world identity. We believe this is because reputation in Wikipedia’s community is based on a long-running history of small contributions that is difficult and time-consuming to fake, outsource, or automate.

Once an editor has traded anonymity for pseudonymity and created a user account, the first type of reputation that is typically considered is their “edit count”. Edit count is the total number of page changes that the editor has made during his or her history of contributing to Wikipedia. In a sense, edit count is a human version of proof-of-work, because it provides a difficult-to-fake reference for the amount of work the editor has contributed to the site.

If edit count is the simplest quantitative measure of a user’s total reputation on the site, its qualitative analog is the user talk pages. Talk pages provide a complete record of the user’s individual edits, as well as a record of administrative actions that have been taken against the user, and notes and comments by other users. The Wikipedia community also offers many kinds of subjective awards which contribute to editor reputation.

Reputable editors enjoy privileges on Wikipedia that cannot be earned in any other way — in particular, a community-wide “benefit of the doubt”. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual’s page on vandalism and spam provides a good high-level overview, instructing editors who encounter a potentially problematic edit to first visit the author’s talk page. Talk pages with lots of edits over time indicate the author should be assumed to be acting in good faith, and notified before their questionable edit is reverted: “In the rare case that you think there’s a problem with an edit from this kind of editor, chances are you’ve misunderstood something.”

On the other hand, the same source’s recommendations for questionable edits by anonymous editors, or editors with empty talk pages, are quite different: “If you see a questionable edit from this kind of user account, you can be virtually certain it was vandalism.”

Blockchains which adopt similar reputation mechanisms might expect to see two major changes: slower evolution of governance and sticky users. And while no public blockchains that we’re aware of have made significant use of pseudonymous reputation, it’s worth noting that such mechanisms have played a significant role in the increasing adoption of the Dark Web.

Assigning power based on a long history of user edits means that the composition of the governing class necessarily changes slowly and predictably, and is therefore less subject to the “hostile takeovers” that are a fundamental risk for many token-voting-based schemes.

Sticky users are a consequence of the slow accretion of power: experienced users tend to stick to their original pseudonym precisely because it would be time-consuming to recreate a similar level of privilege (both implicit and explicit) under a new identity.

All in all, Wikipedia’s reputation system may represent an excellent compromise between designs offering total anonymity on one hand and identity models built on personally identifying information on the other. In particular, such a system has the benefit of allowing users to accrue reputation over time and resisting Sybil attacks by punishing users if and when they misbehave. At the same time, it also allows users to preserve the privacy of their real-world identities if they wish.

Iteration over finality

Wikipedia’s encyclopedic mission, by its very nature, can never be fully completed. As such, the site’s mechanisms do not attempt to resolve conflicts quickly or ensure the next version of a given page arrives at the ultimate truth, but rather, just nudge the encyclopedia one step closer to its goal. This “iterative attitude” is particularly well-suited to assembling human input. Humans often take a long time to make decisions, change their minds frequently, and are susceptible to persuasion by their peers.

What can Radicle, and other p2p & blockchain projects, learn from Wikipedia in this regard? Up to this point, many protocol designers in blockchain have had a preference for mechanisms that achieve “finality” — that is, resolve to a final state, with no further changes allowed — as quickly as possible. There are often very good reasons for this, particularly in the area of consensus mechanisms and yet, taking inspiration from Wikipedia, we might just as easily consider designs that favor slow incremental changes over fast decisive ones.

For instance, imagine a protocol in which (as with Wikipedia) it is relatively easy for any user to change the system state (e.g. propose a new trusted seed), but such a change might be equally easily reverted by another user, or a group of users with superior reputation.

Or consider a protocol in which any state change is rolled out over a long period of time. In Osrank, for instance, this might mean that trusted seeds would start out as only 10% trusted, then 20% trusted one month later, and so on. While such a design would be quite different from how Wikipedia works today, it would hew to the same spirit of slow, considered change over instant finality.

Attacks and defenses

While the previous section covered a number of ways in which Wikipedia’s mechanisms have found success up to this point, the true test of a decentralized system is how vulnerable it is to attacks and manipulation. In this section, we introduce Wikipedia’s perspective on security. We then examine some of Wikipedia’s vulnerabilities, the attacks that play upon them and the defenses the Wikipedia community has evolved.

How Wikipedia Works: Chapter 12 discusses the fact that nearly all of the security utilized by Wikipedia is “soft security”:

“One of the paradoxes of Wikipedia is that this system seems like it could never work. In a completely open system run by volunteers, why aren’t more limits required? One answer is that Wikipedia uses the principle of soft security in the broadest way. Security is guided by the community, rather than by restricting community actions ahead of time. Everyone active on the site is responsible for security and quality. You, your watchlist, and your alertness to strange actions and odd defects in articles are part of the security system.”

What does “soft security” mean? It means that security is largely reactionary, rather than preventative or broadly restrictive on user actions in advance. With a few exceptions, any anonymous editor can change any page on the site at any time. The dangers of such a policy are obvious, but the advantages are perhaps less so: Wikipedia’s security offers a level of adaptability and flexibility that is not possible with traditional security policies and tools.

Below, we discuss three kinds of attacks that Wikipedia has faced through the years: Bad Edits (vandalism and spam), Sybil Attacks, and Editing for Pay. For each attack we note the strategies and solutions Wikipedia has responded with and offer a rough evaluation of their efficacy.

Bad edits: Vandalism and spam

The fact that anyone with an internet connection can edit almost any page on Wikipedia is one of the site’s greatest strengths, but perhaps may also be its greatest vulnerability. Edits not in service of Wikipedia’s mission fall into two general categories: malicious edits (vandalism) and promotional edits (spam).

While Wikipedia reader/editors are ultimately responsible for the clarity and accuracy of the encylopedia’s content, a number of tools have been developed to combat vandalism and spam. Wikipedia: The Missing Manual gives a high-level overview:

• Bots. Much vandalism follows simple patterns that computer programs can recognize. Wikipedia allows bots to revert vandalism: in the cases where they make a mistake, the mistake is easy to revert.
• Recent changes patrol. The RCP is a semi-organized group of editors who monitor changes to all the articles in Wikipedia, as the changes happen, to spot and revert vandalism immediately. Most RC patrollers use tools to handle the routine steps in vandal fighting.
• Watchlists. Although the primary focus of monitoring is often content (and thus potential content disputes, as described in Chapter 10: Resolving content disputes), watchlists are an excellent way for concerned editors to spot vandalism.

Given the incredible popularity, and perceived respectability, of Wikipedia, it’s safe to say that the community’s defenses against basic vandalism and spam are holding up quite well overall.

Sybil attacks

Sybil attacks, endemic to the blockchain ecosystem, are known as “Sockpuppets” in Wikipedia, and are used to designate multiple handles controlled by the same person. They are usually employed when one person wants to seem like multiple editors, or wants to continue editing after being blocked.

While Sockpuppets are harder to detect in an automated fashion than vandalism and spam, there is a process for opening Sockpuppet investigations and a noticeboard for ongoing investigations. Well-thought-out sockpuppetry attacks are both time-consuming to mount and defend against. While dedicated investigators (known as clerks) are well-suited to the task, it is impossible to know how much successful Sockpuppetry has yet to be discovered.

Hired guns — Editing for pay

Hired guns — editors who make changes to in exchange for pay — are becoming an increasingly serious concern for Wikipedia, at least according to a 2018 Medium post, “Wikipedia’s Top-Secret ‘Hired Guns’ Will Make You Matter (For a Price)”, in which Author Stephen Harrison writes,

“A market of pay-to-play services has emerged, where customers with the right background can drop serious money to hire editors to create pages about them; a serious ethical breach that could get worse with the rise of—wait for it—cryptocurrency payments.”

In the post, Harrison draws on a number of interviews he conducted with entrepreneurs running businesses in this controversial space. According to Harrison, businesses like What About Wiki, operate in secret, utilizing large numbers of sockpuppet accounts and do not disclose the fact that that their edits are being done in exchange for pay.

In the past, Wikipedia has prohibited all such activities and in fact, businesses like What About Wiki violate Wikipedia’s Terms of Use — a legally binding agreement. However that seems to be changing. According to Harrison,

“A 2012 investigation discovered that the public relations firm Wiki-PR was editing the encyclopedia using multiple deceptive sock-puppet accounts for clients like Priceline and Viacom. In the wake of the Wiki-PR incident, the Wikimedia Foundation changed its terms of use in 2014 to require anyone compensated for their contributions to openly disclose their affiliation.”

The upshot is that since 2014, paid editing is now allowed on the site so long as the relationship is disclosed.

And yet, major questions remain. For one thing, at least according to Harrison’s analysis, companies acting in compliance with Wikipedia’s disclosure policy represent just a small fraction of the paid editors working (illegitimately) on the site. For another, he argues that complying with Wikipedia’s policies leads to paid editors making less money, because there’s a lower chance their edits will be accepted and therefore less chance the clients will be willing to foot the bill.

This leads to a final question, which is whether paid edits can ever really be aligned with the deep values that Wikipedia holds. For instance, one of Wikipedia’s main behavior guidelines is a prohibition against editors who have a conflict of interest in working on a given page. It’s hard to imagine a clearler conflict of interest than a paid financial relationship between the editor and the subject of a page.

DAOs

Wikipedia’s success is inspirational in terms of what can be accomplished through decentralized coordination of a large group of people. While we believe that the decentralized web still has many lessons to learn from the success of Wikipedia — and we’ve tried to touch a few in this post — a great deal of work and thinking has already been done around how a large organization like Wikipedia could eventually be coordinated on-chain.

Such organizations are known as Decentralized Autonomous Organizations (DAOs), and that will be the topic of a future post.

Photo by designwebjae (Pixabay)

The post What the decentralized web can learn from Wikipedia appeared first on P2P Foundation.

All the powers of the old-world have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: liberal States and dictators, banks and FANG, regulators and speculators.

Where is the State that hasn’t attempted to muzzle freedom of communication and information, or to expand surveillance of its own citizens? Which major online service hasn’t monetized their users’ data without their knowledge or closed user accounts without possible recourse? Which banker hasn’t publicly opposed the right of everyone to have personal and absolute ownership of one’s assets through cryptocurrencies?

Two things result from this fact:

1- Peer-to-peer is already acknowledged by all world powers to itself be a power.

2- It is high time that peer-to-peer supporters should openly, in the face of the whole world, publish their views, their aims, their tendencies; that they counter oppressive forces with their diverse and energetic initiatives. To this end, peer-to-peer contributors will assemble in Paris from the 8th to the 12th of January 2020 at the Paris P2P Festival, the first event dedicated to all forms of free interplay between peers: technical, political, cultural, social, and economic.

If we indulge in allusion to a much more famous Manifesto, it is because we believe that p2p technology projects (Bitcoin, blockchains and Web3, distributed Web and Solid, self-sovereign identities, decentralized protocols…) need to be put in perspective.

In 2019, people’s protests and social demonstrations have flooded the streets of every continent: Sudan, Chile, Hong Kong, Catalonia, Algeria, Iran, India, and of course, in France, our Gilets Jaunes. In many cases, governments reacted not only through police or military crackdown but also with censorship of electronic communication: the internet shutdown in Iran, the censorship of social networks in Hong Kong, the prohibition of decentralized identity systems in Spain… Unfortunately, it is now well-established that internet censorship effectively protects the police states that use it.

Therefore, it is no surprise that we’re seeing an increase in infringements of freedom of the press and physical attacks against those who spread information. Antoine Champagne, journalist and co-founder of reflets.info, will come to the festival to talk about the current state of the protection of journalists and whistleblowers.

Along with the cypherpunk tradition, we believe that cryptography and decentralization are essential means to protect individual and collective civil liberties. We hope that talks on the history of the cypherpunk movement and on the history of decentralization will spark conversations about this point of view among the festival participants.

Peer-to-peer technology is a concrete way to arm the resistance against oppressive powers by providing the resilient and confidential communication channels needed to coordinate social movements in hostile environments. Multiple initiatives in this domain will be presented, from the research work of the LIRIS-DRIM team (CNRS) on streaming and Web request anonymization, to Berty‘s decentralized messaging protocol, to talks and workshops on libtorrent and ZeroNet, Ethereum’s network protocol, cjdns, ZKP and identity, and homomorphic encryption.

For the general public less comfortable with the nuts and bolts of p2p cryptography, the documentary Nothing to Hide will give evidence of how mass surveillance impacts everyone and why we have come to accept it so easily. The festival will also host a show on mentalism and social engineering and a serious game which aims to help everyone learn about effective cybersecurity practices.

Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are another branch that stems from the cypherpunk movement. Over the last few years, the importance of having a form of money that is independent from political powers and financial institutions became obvious. At first it was ignored, then it prompted only laughs and sarcasm, and finally, open hostility. Now states and mega-corporations try to compete with their own digital and centralized currencies.

Hence the necessity of articulating and educating the public about what makes decentralized currencies so special! We will tackle this challenge in many ways: a talk on Bitcoin by the founders of Cercle du Coin, a screening of the documentary Protocole with its director in attendance, workshops introducing how to use wallets and cryptocurrencies, presentations and workshops on Libre Money (Monnaie Libre), Dash, Ark…

Since the inception of Ethereum, the scope of the blockchain, this decentralized ledger which stores cryptocurrency transactions has exceeded its monetary applications. Blockchain-based Dapps, DeFi and DAOs refer to new ways to perform peer-to-peer interactions and new approaches for managing common resources in more open and less inegalitarian ways. The audience will be introduced to several programmable blockchains such as Ethereum, Holochain, Tezos, or Aeternity.

DAOs, or Decentralized Autonomous Organizations, are a way to introduce self-governed and transparent rules in place of the arbitrary exercise of centralized power in organizations. We will review the most interesting DAO initiatives such as Aragon, DAOstack and MetaCartel, with a panel, talks and two workshops: co-designing a DAO using DAOcanvas and participating in a decentralized jurisdiction with Kleros. Lessons learned with iExec and Paymium will shed light on decentralized marketplaces and exchanges, another form of decentralized and programmable entities.

But blockchains are not the only way to decentralize the internet. The Solid standard, created by Tim Berners-Lee, aims to re-decentralize the Web, which today lies under the control of a small number of global mega-firms such as Google and Facebook. In France, this standard is actively supported and extended by several teams gathered in the Digital Commons Consortium, present at the festival. They will give talks and workshops covering the Virtual Assembly and Startin’Blox.

Blockchains and distributed Web are closely associated with open source and free software, considered a type of digital commons. More generally, the question of the commons, is defined as a shared resource that is co-governed by its user community according to the community’s rules and norms and is an essential aspect of peer-to-peer networks.

The P2P Foundation, which will give one of the opening talks of the festival, claims the autonomy of the commons with respect to both the private and public sectors. An event within the festival, the Public Domain Day, organized by Wikimedia France and Creative Commons France, will invite open conversations about multiple aspects of intellectual property in the age of the commons: open science and open education, free licences and development aid, and the implications of IA and blockchain on art production. We will also screen a documentary telling the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, the freedom activist behind Creative Commons, and Hacking for the Commons, a brand new documentary about the clash between supporters of intellectual property and those who stand for open and free knowledge. Several members of the Coop des Communs will also participate, such as the Digital Commons Consortium and Open Food Network. Finally, a talk by The Commons Stack will show how blockchain, DAOs and commons can be tightly coupled.

The last major theme of the festival will be shared governance and peer collaboration, as these are critical to all the other topics mentioned above, from blockchain upgrades to management of the commons to the ability of people to act as free citizens and economic agents. We will open the festival with the Citizens’ Convention for the Climate, the first experiment of direct democracy embedded in the institutions of the French republic, as a response to the demand for real democracy expressed the Gilets Jaunes, in the context of climate emergency. The association between climate and collective intelligence will also be discussed during a talk and workshops on the Climate Collage. Tools, practices, and ideas for distributed governance and collective sense-making will be discussed and experienced with Jean-François Noubel, Open Source Politics, the Open Opale collective, and a Warm Data Lab by Matthew Schutte.

In short, peers and commoners everywhere support every revolutionary movement against the existing social and political order of things.

In all these movements, they bring to the front, as a leading question in each, the intellectual and physical property question, no matter its degree of development at the time.

Finally, they labour everywhere for a unanimous agreement on initiatives supportive of civil liberties and the construction of the commons.

Peers and commoners disdain the concealment their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the overthrow of the prevalent logic of concentration of power, wealth, and information.

Free Peers of All Countries, Unite!

Lead image: Close view of Hong Kong Lennon Wall by Ceeseven under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. Special thanks to Kirstin Maulding.

The post The P2P Festival in Paris: Unite the Peers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

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As much as it may seem that the nuts and bolts of resource and waste management is about sorting machinery, storage, bins and collection systems, it is really ultimately about people.

We know that if people are to use resources mindfully, to manage them well, and to both demand and correctly use appropriate end of life systems, then we need to design systems that they are easy and convenient to use.

There are two ‘muscles’ that can be flexed in relation to resource and waste management – the Circular Economy muscle, and the Access Economy muscle. A lot of muscle-building effort has gone into the former, and the latter is a muscle we’ve only just discovered we can build.

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The Circular Economy is a concept and model which has been around for some time now, but is increasingly gaining traction – the UK’s leading waste & recycling organisation, WRAP UK have recently rebranded themselves as ‘Circular Economy and Resource Efficiency Experts’.

The Circular Economy seeks to shift activity from a linear to a circular model by making better use of materials, by keeping materials in circulation through reuse and recycling, industrial symbiosis and other efforts to divert material from landfill.

It displaces some demand for new materials, but does not address the rate at which materials enter the circle, as evidenced by total material demand continuing to grow faster than recycling rates improve.

It is vital to maintain a focus on bending the Linear Economy (‘take-make-waste’) into a Circular Economy, but it is not enough.

There is an entire, parallel area of territory yet to be explored, which I will call The Access Economy (aka Sharing Economy, Collaborative Economy) – or being able to access what we need by better using what we already have.

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The Access Economy seeks to minimise the demand for materials, and is as – if not more – significant than The Circular Economy. There are also overlaps between the two eg. reuse could be considered Circular and Access.

The rapidly-gaining momentum of the collaborative (aka sharing) economy holds huge potential for addressing how we consume resources, and ways it could result in less waste.

The Access Economy is focused not on managing material at end-of-life, of better managing ‘waste’. It is focused on designing systems that facilitate more efficient, cost effective and in many case, community-enhancing ways of enabling people to meet their needs by tapping what is already available and leveraging idle assets (be they stuff, time, space, skills).

This means looking at the design of our living systems – how we grow food and prepare it; how we clothe and transport ourselves; how we meet our daily needs. We need to look at how we can solve the pain points of people’s lives – cost of living, time poverty –in a way that also delivers on environmental objectives.

The systems for The Access Economy are different from those for The Circular Economy – and significantly they may be more appealing to people who don’t see themselves as ‘green’, or really care about recycling. 

Successfully meeting sustainability challenges means we need to stop focusing on ‘reducing’ and ‘managing’ energy, emissions, water, waste and everything else (which are symptoms, outcomes of how people live) and start looking our systems through a lens of design (not just physical design) and social innovation.

Ultimately, environmental organisations and programs are not really about ‘environment’ at all – they are social innovation, because they set out to create new patterns of behaviour among human beings in order to lessen our impacts on the ecological systems which sustain all life. And social innovation is a design process.

We are now far from the traditional, familiar territory of the Circular Economy, but into an exciting new realm we have scarcely begun to explore that is fast gathering momentum around the world.

What would we be capable of if we combined the existing strength of the Circular Economy with the emerging juggernaut of the Access Economy?

Further references:

Circular Economy – Ellen Macarthur Foundation – a series of articles about the circular economy model, its principles, related schools of thought, and an overview of circular economy news from around the world.

Shareable – an award-winning nonprofit news, action and connection hub for the sharing transformation.

OuiShare – a global community empowering citizens, public institutions and companies to build a society based on collaboration, openness and sharing.

Collaborative Consumption – comprehensive online resource for collaborative consumption worldwide and network for the global community, curating news, content, events, jobs, studies and resources from key media outlets and industry blogs, as well as original content.

If you’d like to get Cruxcatalyst via email, click here to subscribe to this blog.

If you liked this post, please consider sharing it using the buttons below or to the left of this post.

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Originally published in 2014 on cruxcatalyst.com

Header image: Matthew Perkins, Flickr

The post The Circular Economy and The Access Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Peter Harris: 2018 was the year where the twisted intersection of apps, data exploitation, privacy and corporate tech giants went mainstream.

While the issues had been brewing for a while — such as the revelation of addiction design in most apps, the Cambridge Analytica scandal and Mark Zuckerberg’s subsequent testimony before the U.S. Congress — it seems like 2018 was when questioning the tech giants became the norm. A new term called surveillance capitalism also entered the public lexicon.

A recent report from the ICA (International Co-operative Alliance) summarizes this situation well, describing the larger dynamics at play:

As technology shapes and reshapes how people interact, it shapes and reshapes economic activity, including how people work and trade. In line with this, there is a growing trend of work that is funneled through digital platforms owned by just a few large corporations. These platforms offer flexibility and independence, but they can also be viewed as exploitative — extracting the value of the connections made by the 99% for the 1% of outside investors.

The network effects of scale in a digital economy has led to the dominance of these Big Tech companies, which in turn has made it harder for people to envisage an alternative future to the current model. However, alternative futures do exist and for now, it is the co-operative alternative in the form of platform co-ops in particular that is attracting interest.

A movement to create member-owned, technology-based firms has birthed this new genre of startups — the #platformcoop. While no single definition has been found, we would define such an enterprise with the following characteristics:

• Connection of members via networks (the essence of the Internet itself)
• Collective ownership, decision-making and profit-sharing
• Emphasis on fairness and justice for all stakeholders
• Design and business development aiming towards global scalability

These four essential qualities have been the driving force behind the formation of the music streaming service Resonate. A multi-stakeholder co-operative, Resonate addresses inequities in the streaming market, where the work of musicians is often undervalued, and meaningful connections between artists and fans are almost totally non-existent, due to intentional design on the part of the mainstream services.

This combination of unfair economics and artificial separation between member classes is a key characteristic of the gig economy and many of the large scale platforms that have received frequent criticism for their practices:

Today, more and more people manage their work and resources through digital platforms that offer boundless flexibility and independence. However, they can also be exploitative and monopolistic, owned largely by a small number of Big Tech corporations which enable the precarious gig economy, exacerbate systemic inequalities and facilitate data surveillance and data capture. The dominance of this form of platform capitalism, as well as the network effects created, means it is hard to see anything beyond this prevailing model.

However, this must be challenged because other futures are possible — platform co-operativism is a network of trading businesses that might look and feel like the established Big Tech platforms, but are democratically controlled and collectively owned. They are a route to a fairer, more inclusive outcome, that generates tangible advantages for workers and consumers alike.

The above quote, from a joint report by Co-operatives UK and Nesta, clearly defines both the challenges and hopes of this growing movement to create truly fair, digital-based economies.

We long ago detailed the problem with co-ops and traditional startup investors. At the heart of this new Nesta/Co-ops UK report is a profound question — can people-power finance a new wave of community-owned apps and online services?

Given some recent developments both in the UK and Germany, we’re hopeful that the traditional co-operative sector — which represents over $2 trillion in market turnover — is ready to enter the relatively new #platformcoop sector.

With well established markets, enterprises and memberships in a variety of sectors, the time has never been better for the co-op world to fully embrace the digital realm, helping take a wide range of fresh apps and online services to new heights through their investment and support.

A short history of Resonate’s funding and development

Initiated in early 2015, our first two years saw the formation of the co-op, a modest crowd campaign, development of an Alpha version of our #stream2own app and growth of the first 5000 members*.

In the second phase of Resonate, we received an investment** via the RChain co-op, a blockchain platform based in Seattle, WA. Accomplishments included a complete rebranding and new product design, a near doubling of the membership and two-thirds of a new codebase designed to scale to hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of members.

Now firmly in our third phase, we have launched our new branding and #stream2own player, which has been subsequently open-sourced. We’ve also recently started working with several large distributors and labels which is going to dramatically increase the size of our existing catalog.

While we stand on the threshold of significant growth, one thing is profoundly clear — tech startups stand in need of investment and support ahead of development. We remain optimistic that both the Resonate community and the long-established co-op world are committed to seeing a service such as ours succeed.

We invite you to learn more about Resonate by visiting our homepage, supporting our endeavor by becoming a member, or through the purchase of Supporter Shares.

*In this instance we use the term “member” in a general sense, as not all users are technically co-op members. For example, artists earn their member share only after uploading their first song and listeners when they buy a 5 euro membership.

**One of the primary goals of this investment was to launch a token sale, intended as a long term investment vehicle, which was (unfortunately) hindered by the crash of the crypto market in late 2018.

The post People-powered finance to the rescue? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Toward what? Most of us probably aren’t sure. But the people involved in a Wellington, New Zealand-based network called Enspiral have done more than just about anyone to figure out — to figure out where we’d want the future of work to be headed if the better angels of our nature were in charge. I’ve had the chance to visit them (and lived to tell the tale for Vice). Now, a trip down to Wellington, although I absolutely recommend it, is a little less necessary. The Enspiralites have created a book, Better Work Together, which chronicles in conversational stories and pictures their attempts to create a kind of community worth working toward.

Enspiral is fairly small, as organizations go — a few hundred active participants, a modest budget. Rather, it’s lean. Most of the Enspiralites’ businesses exist outside the organization, but attached to it, allowing Enspiral itself to take risks, learn lessons, and reinvent itself when necessary. It’s a community of early adopters. They offer themselves as beta-testers for a suite of collaboration software they’ve co-produced, such as Loomio and Cobudget. They relentlessly explore challenging governance frameworks like sociocracy and teal. They even funded the book’s production through a new blockchain-enabled platform called DAOstack (which still crashes my browser when I try to use it). These are not ordinary workers; they’re people with the passion, the patience, in many cases the privilege, and the fault-tolerance to repeatedly try stuff that may or may not work.

In the book, you’ll see why. There is a generosity and pleasure and even a spirituality in how they talk about their efforts that makes it all seem less like, well, work. There are typos, but these pale in comparison to the challenges we collectively face. The upshot is not a final theory or doctrine or destination, but a mode of working toward it, of declining to accept disguised versions of feudalism as good enough. Order it, digitally or physically, here.

Cross-posted at the MEDLab website and on Medium.

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Jeremy Lent: Some of the leading thinkers of our time are unleashing a stream of warnings about the threat of artificial intelligence taking over from humans.  Earlier this month, Stephen Hawking predicted it could be “the worst event in the history of our civilization” unless we find a way to control its development. Billionaire Elon Musk has formed a company to try to keep humans one step ahead of what he sees as an existential AI threat.

The scenario that terrifies them is that, in spite of the best intentions, we might create a force more powerful than all of humanity with a value system that doesn’t necessarily incorporate human welfare. Once it reaches a critical mass, this force could take over the world, control human activity, and essentially suck all life out of the earth while it optimizes for its own ends. Prominent futurist Nick Bostrom gives an example of a superintelligence designed with the goal of manufacturing paperclips that transforms the entire earth into one gigantic paperclip manufacturing facility.

These futurists are right to voice their concerns, but they’re missing the fact that humans have already created a force that is well on its way to devouring both humanity and the earth in just the way they fear. It’s called the Corporation.

“Government by corporations”

When corporations were first formed back in the seventeenth century, their inventors—just like modern software engineers—acted with what they believed were good intentions. The first corporate charters were simply designed to limit an investor’s liability to the amount of their investment, thus encouraging them to finance risky expeditions to India and Southeast Asia. However, an unintended consequence soon emerged, known as moral hazard: with the potential upside greater than the downside, reckless behavior ensued, leading to a series of spectacular frauds and a market crash that resulted in corporations being temporarily banned in England in 1720.

Thomas Jefferson and other leaders of the United States, aware of the English experience, were deeply suspicious of corporations, giving them limited charters with tightly constrained powers. However, during the turmoil of the Civil War, industrialists took advantage of the disarray, leveraging widespread political corruption to expand their influence. “This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations,” lamented Rutherford Hayes who became President in 1877.

Corporations took full advantage of their new-found dominance, influencing state legislatures to issue charters in perpetuity giving them the right to do anything not explicitly prohibited by law. The tipping point in their path to domination came in 1886 when the Supreme Court designated corporations as “persons” entitled to the protections of the Fourteenth Amendment, which had been passed to give equal rights to former slaves enfranchised after the Civil War. Since then, corporate dominance has only been further enhanced by law, culminating in the notorious Citizen United case of 2010, which lifted restrictions on political spending by corporations in elections.

Sociopaths with global reach

Corporations, just like a potential runaway AI, have no intrinsic interest in human welfare. They are legal constructions: abstract entities designed with the ultimate goal of maximizing financial returns for their investors above all else. If corporations were in fact real persons, they would be sociopaths, completely lacking the ability for empathy that is a crucial element of normal human behavior. Unlike humans, however, corporations are theoretically immortal, cannot be put in prison, and the larger multinationals are not constrained by the laws of any individual country.

With the incalculable advantage of their superhuman powers, corporations have literally taken over the world. They have grown so massive that an astonishing sixty-nine of the largest hundred economies in the world are not nation states but corporate entities.

Corporations have been able to use their transnational powers to dictate their own terms to virtually any country in the world. As a result of decades of globalization, corporations can exploit the free movement of capital to build factories in nations with the weakest labor unions, or locate polluting plants in countries with lax environmental laws, basing their decisions solely on maximizing returns for their shareholders. Governments compete with each other to make their nations the most attractive for corporate investment.

Corporations wield their vast powers to control the minds of consumers, enthralling them into a state of perpetual consumption. In the early twentieth century, Edward Bernays, a mastermind of corporate empowerment, boldly stated his game plan as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses.” He declared ominously that “those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government that is the true ruling power of this country.” The sinister words of Wayne Chilicki, chief executive of General Mills, show how Bernays’ vision has been perpetuated: “When it comes to targeting kid consumers, we at General Mills… believe in getting them early and having them for life.”

The result of this corporate takeover of humanity is a world careening out of control, where nature is mercilessly ransacked to extract the raw materials required to increase shareholder value in a vortex of perpetual economic growth, without regard to the quality of human life and with no concern for the welfare of future generations.

Corporate takeover of global governance

Instead of being pilloried for their vast destruction, those who dedicate themselves to their corporate overlords are richly rewarded and elevated to positions of even greater power and prestige. ExxonMobil, for example, has been exposed as having lied shamelessly about climate change, knowing for decades about its consequences and yet deliberately concealing the facts, thus condemning present and future generations to havoc. Instead of facing jail time, the CEO during much of this period, Rex Tillerson, is now the U.S. Secretary of State, overseeing the global relationships of the most powerful country in the world.

In fact, the current U.S. cabinet represents the most complete takeover yet of the U.S. government by corporations, with nearly 70% of top administration jobs filled by corporate executives. In the words of Robert Weissman, president of Public Citizen, “In the Trump administration, auto industry lobbyists are setting transportation policy, Boeing has a top perch at the Department of Defense, Wall Street is in control of financial policy and regulatory agencies, and corporate defense lawyers staff the key positions in the Justice Department.”

Corporations are inserting themselves into international agreements, so they can further their interests even more effectively. At the 2015 World Economic Forum in Davos, a new Global Redesign Initiative set out an agenda for multinational corporations to engage directly in global governance. The UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, proudly announced in 2015 as a vision to reduce poverty, adopted their approach by inviting corporations to a seat at its table to impact UN policy, while calling for further globalization. Fossil fuel companies have infiltrated the annual global COP meetings on climate change, ensuring they can compromise any actions that might hurt them, even as the world faces the threat of climate catastrophe.

The takeover of global governance by multinational corporations has permitted them to undermine human welfare everywhere in the pursuit of profit. Nestlé remorselessly buys control of rural communities’ groundwater reservoirs to sell as bottled water, leaving them to foot the bill for environmental cleanup, with the result that in countries such as Columbia sugary bottled drinks are frequently cheaper than plain water. As a result of the chemicals sold by global agribusiness companies such as Cargill and Monsanto, it’s been estimated by UN officials that the world’s topsoil can only support about sixty more years of harvests. In these cases, and countless others like them, humans and the earth alike are mere fodder for the insatiable appetite of an amoral, inhuman intelligence run amok.

There is an alternative

The corporate takeover of humanity is so all-encompassing that it’s difficult to visualize any other possible global system. Alternatives do, however, exist. Around the world, worker-owned cooperatives have demonstrated that they can be as effective as corporations—or more so—without pursuing shareholder wealth as their primary consideration. The Mondragon cooperative in Spain, with revenues exceeding €12 billion, shows how this form of organization can efficiently scale.

There are also structural changes that can be made to corporations to realign their values system with human welfare. Corporate charters can be amended to optimize for a triple bottom line of social, environmental, and financial outcomes (the so-called “triple Ps” of people, planet, and profit.) A “beneficial” or B-Corp certification, which holds companies to social and environmental performance standards, is becoming more widely adopted and is now held by over 2,000 corporations in over fifty countries around the world.

Ultimately, if we are stop this force from completely taking over humanity, these alternative approaches need to be codified into our national and international governance. Imagine a world where corporate charters were only granted if they adopted a triple bottom line, and where shareholder lawsuits threatened every time a company broke one of its own social and environmental standards. Until that happens, it may be that the “worst event in the history of our civilization” is not the future development of modern AI, but the decision by a group of 17^th century politicians to unleash the power of the Corporation on an unsuspecting humanity.

Reprinted from the blog of Jeremy Lent

Featured image: “Loss of Ice in Greenland, Icebergs in Disco Bay” by GRIDArendal is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 

The post AI Has Already Taken Over. It’s Called the Corporation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Meet people who are doing it. Learn how to do it. Build it together.

Internet of Humans is a track within our annual Edgeryders festival. It is dedicated to bringing together existing projects into a demo of a Next Generation Internet that supports values of openness, cooperation across borders, decentralisation, inclusiveness and protection of privacy.

Edgeryders is a company living in symbiosis with an online community of thousands of hackers, activists, radical thinkers and doers, and others who want to make a difference. We believe that a smart community outperforms any of its members; this is the result of people working together, improving on each other’s work.

We are on a journey to help one another navigate the changes that are happening in different parts of the world.

• How are we building good lives against a backdrop of massive social, economic, ecological and political challenges?
• How are we creating opportunities for ourselves and where can we support one another better? In work, health, family, community life?
• How are we building the evolution of the Internet and our digital technologies so that they support these efforts?

We are interested in what participants already are doing in different parts of the world, and what we can do together.

Are you our next Fellow? Tell us what you would like to build, explore or learn about building a Human-Centric Internet!

Fellows will receive bursaries of up to 10,000 EUR, a travel budget of up to 1,000 EUR, and the opportunity to learn from and connect the next generation of working solutions in building a human-centric internet.

Internet of Humans is a gathering of contributors to the Next Generation Internet, a 3 year research project that engages hundreds of original initiatives. The fellowship program offers participants an opportunity to explore, learn from and connect with people building working solutions for an Internet that supports our ability to thrive as individuals, communities and societies.

As an Internet of Humans Fellow, you commit to :

1. Read what other participants are working on and share your own experiences/work.
2. Arranging and documenting a series of online calls to which you invite people from whom you wish to learn or collaborate.
3. Engage the people you invite to join us at activities for project matchmaking, partnership building and fundraising.
4. Articulate a burning question to move everyone’s work forward, and turn it into a proposal for a research theme and track of a distributed festival.

We are looking for Fellows who are passionate, curious and driven, as well as willing to collaborate using online platforms and community building methodologies. If this is you, we want to hear from you!

Questions or nominations? Create an account on edgeryders and post them in a comment below.

About the program, process and selection criteria

Internet of Humans is a track in a highly participatory, distributed festival showcasing working solutions and demos produced by community members, as well as pathways for working together towards their sustainability and scaling. It will take place in November, 2019 in a number of cities and brings together the broader Edgeryders scene that involves hundreds of original initiatives.

Aiming to deepen community collaboration, during May – November 2019, Edgeryders will appoint 3 “students” to support research, community building and content curation for the Internet of Humans community. We use “students” in the Latin sense, of people that will apply themselves to the subject, as fellows of a Internet of Humans Alliance, and not in any sense as an indication of career status.

What you will get if selected:

• A bursary appointment: Up to 10,000 Euro to reimburse your working time, distributed on the basis of winners’ financial needs
• A travel budget: Up to 1,000 Euro, to be authorized in advance by due justification.

Process and timeline:

• April 12 Mar – May 30. We collect submissions in the form of published proposals for Human Internet Festival.
  • Review of submissions
  • Announcement of winners
• May 30 – June 30. Fellows host online calls and invite
• June 30 – November 30. T.b.d with each fellow so as to not disrupt their other activities.

Who can participate?

Anyone with a story relevant to building working solutions for an Internet that supports our ability to thrive as individuals, communities and societies. You need to be interested in learning and collaborating with others online and offline.

Selection Criteria

We will consider individuals who have demonstrated an interest in and alignment with building a Human Centric Internet in the folllowing ways (each item will receive a score from 0 the minimum, to 5 the maximum, which will be summed to define the final score used to choose the winners):

• are registered on edgeryders.eu 8 and have introduced themselves in the Internet of Humans online community workspace: Tell Your Story! 6
• are operating at the grassroots level or are heavily interacting with such groups
• Are open in their work, use of methodology, technology, results (public and transparent communication, open processes for participation, commons licensing, open source code etc.)
• their contribution is validated in positive responses by their peers in the Internet of Humans community (as seen from the Comments section)
• have storytelling and content production skills for presenting the initiatives they come across to various community groups and audiences
• demonstrate willingness to collaborate with others and use online environments for communication, engagement, documentation of work and social media

What happens if I am selected?

You will be working closely with the Edgeryders team to build the Internet of Humans community conversation and together with it’s members, put together the program for it’s track of sessions and events within the Edgeryders Festival which convenes our global community.

What happens if I am not selected?

You eligible to get a symbolic 200€ reward for your contribution if it meets the selection criteria. More information about this here: http://bit.ly/2LbQvyD 1

How to get started?

Join the process of building the Internet of Humans sections of our festival program

1. Interview a person relevant to your burning question.
2. Transcribe interview and have the interviewee post it here 7. You will need to create an edgeryders.eu 8 account to do this.
3. Comment in depth on at least one other transcribed interview.

Once you are done use #internetofhumans and #edgeryders to draw our attention to your comments, story and proposal for the program. This will encourage others to get in touch and build support for your work!

The deadline for applications is May 30th 2019 , but the sooner you start and complete your application, the higher your chances!

For more information come to our weekly online community gatherings every Wednesday in May at 16:00 GMT+2 (CST Brussels time) or sign up on the Edgeryders platform and leave a comment below.

Partner organisations

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 825652

Reposted from Edgeryders

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12.00pm, Thu 23 May 2019 – 6.00pm, Sat 3 August 2019

Arts Catalyst
74-76 Cromer Street
London
WC1H 8DR

FURTHER INFORMATION

Free, no need to book

we-are-in-this together-but-we-are-not-one-and-the-same” — Rosi Braidotti

Towards the Planetary Commons is a new exhibition investigating agency and autonomy in the face of global ecological crises. Encompassing artist film, an evolving installation and a programme of talks and workshops, the programme reflects on different ways of living and how new knowledge can emerge from struggles against current ecopolitical challenges.

Part I
Showing Marwa Arsanios: Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) and Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2(2019)
23 May – 6 July 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 22 May, 6.30pm 

Part II 
Showing Paloma Polo: The earth of the Revolution (2019) 
11 July – 3 August 2019 | Preview: Wednesday 10 July, 6.30pm 

Neoliberal policies imposed on communities of humans and non-humans reinforce strategies of land grabbing and monoculture, threatening the land and its biodiversity. Whilst corporations and governments alike remain removed from accountability for pollution, natural resource extraction and displacement of entire communities, across the world, in regions such as the Philippines and Kurdistan, people are collectively adopting new modes of decision-making and self-governance through approaches inspired by eco-feminism, class struggle and planetary commoning practices. 

In one room of the exhibition is a rotating programme of artist films by Lebanese artist Marwa Arsanios and Spanish artist Paloma Polo, all of which are presented for the first time in the UK. 

In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part I (2017) Arsanios addresses forms of self-governance and knowledge production that have emerged from the autonomous women’s movement in Rojava. Shot in the mountains of Kurdistan and through recorded testimony, the film tracks the practical work of the movement – how to use an axe, how to eat fish within its biological cycles of production, when to cut down a tree for survival and when to save it. It explores how individuals come to a conscious participation in the movement; how they become part of the guerrilla, highlighting group learning as essential to the movement itself. In the film, the soundtrack of testimonies, analyses, and critical histories from those within and in proximity to the movement are edited together in a single, solid density. In Who’s Afraid of Ideology? Part 2 (2019) Arsanios focuses on the ecofeminist groups that form part of the movement, honing in on the alliance between communities of women, nature and animals and problematising the care roles ‘naturally’ assigned to women. 

The second phase in the programme, will see artist Paloma Polo’s The earth of the Revolution (2019) premiered for the first time. Emerging from Polo’s research in the Philippines, cultivated over three years, and during which time the artist located herself at the heart of the ongoing democratic struggles in the region – a struggle in which marginalised countryside communities are actively fighting for democratic and progressive transformations, emancipation and the common good – this new work offers viewers a glimpse into the political practices that underlie the revolution. Segmented into scenes, the film closely follows the guerrilla as they go about their everyday tasks, from lessons and habitual meetings, reporting and assessments to personal conversations and confidences, moments of solitude and rest. Blurring the distinctions between documentary and artist film, The earth of the Revolution seeks to expand our understanding of how revolution manifests itself in a contemporary context, reflecting on some of the positive human elements and processes that might arise from such conflicts. 

Arts Catalyst’s second space will take the form of a ‘living room,’ an evolving installation showcasing case studies that emerge from the programme, presented within the framework of a modular environment designed by artist Lorenzo Sandoval. Works by collective practice They Are Here, artists-in-residence throughout 2019, will be presented alongside Sandoval’s installation. They Are Here draw from research over the past two years into Wardian Cases, a botanical container developed in the early 19th Century to transport plants across great distances. Prototypes for New Wardian Cases (2019) are material structures modelled on non-European architectural histories that function as a form of speculative design. In the context of the public programme, They Are Here will present a live-mix of their new audio-visual work, BRUNO, an enveloping, free-ranging meditation on the relationships between ecology, migration and the urban environment. 

Towards the Planetary Commons is part of Arts Catalyst’s Test Sites programme, an ongoing co-inquiry exploring the rapid transformations in human and non-human lives caused by environmental change. Featuring works by international artists, this next phase in the project opens up the programme to broader planetary perspectives. An accompanying programme of talks, conversations and workshops will be announced soon via Arts Catalyst’s website.

Image: Paloma Polo: Still from ‘The earth of the Revolution’ (2019), courtesy the artist

Reposted from the Arts Catalyst website: https://www.artscatalyst.org/towards-planetary-commons-reimagining-infrastructures-autonomy

The post Arts Catalyst Event in London, UK – Towards the planetary commons: reimagining infrastructures for autonomy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Todd Weaver

Founder and CEO
PGP Fingerprint: B8CA ACEA D949 30F1 23C4 642C 23CF 2E3D 2545 14F7

(transcript follows)

Let me set the tone by using a quote from a great person of history:

“The ultimate tragedy is not the oppression and cruelty by the bad people, but the silence over that by the good people.” ~ Martin Luther King Jr.

Let me start by stating: I believe we can change the future of computing for the better. However, currently something is wrong with our digital world; something basic, something is rotten at the core. I want to talk to you about what that is, how it came to be, and why we must change it. And I want you to care… because:

“A person who won’t care, has no advantage over one who doesn’t care.” ~ Mark Twain

This talk comes in three parts:

Part 1. History

The history of the mistreatment of our digital rights.

Most Big Tech companies that abuse people are based in the US, therefore I will describe the history from that perspective. Some things you need to understand: Governments write the rules of the game that society plays. There are always rules, and governments influenced by Big Tech are writing those rules. If you are somebody who wants no rules whatsoever, you will quickly realize rules will be written that govern you, without your involvement.

My sage advice to you: Write the rules. Let’s write the rules that we want to see in an ethical society that respects freedoms and liberties.

Nearly everybody knows that exploitative Big Tech abuse our digital rights, because it’s at the core of their business. It’s the root problem. It will not “get better” unless any one of three things happen:

1. Government regulation (that is ethical for society)
2. Business models change (to something ethical for society)
3. People switch (to something ethical for society)

Big Tech—corporations whose business model exploits humanity for profit—they all suffer from a systemic toxin, that discourages personal freedoms and removes any digital rights we as society demand. Big Tech corporations are already starting the marketing to try to differentiate themselves from it. But marketing alone will not remove the poison within their business model.

Minor disclaimer: You may ask “But… You’re a Company?” Actually, we’re a Social Purpose Corporation (SPC). And that is not just a series of buzzwords, it’s a legal framework of a business that carries with it significant importance. it is the reason we can’t ever exploit people for profit, it is the reason we are unlike all Big Tech who were formed to strip your digital rights in the name of maximizing shareholder value.

There was a recent article in Inc. magazine about us:

“Purism is what is called a ‘Social Purpose Corporation,’ which allows a business to prioritize social objectives over fiduciary duties.” ~ Christine Lagorio-Chafkin – Senior writer Inc.

Let me dive deeper into the problem. All corporations, including all Big Tech giants, have a single goal: Maximize Shareholder Value. That’s it. That’s the only goal. But it’s not just a goal. Under eBay v. Newman, a lawsuit setting legal precedent stating:

The law makes it literally malfeasance for a corporation not to do everything it legally can to maximize its profits.

So if given the choice of making $1 by exploiting people online, or opting to treat people ethically, the Corporation must exploit people online for the dollar, or the board of directors and executives could face a lawsuit from any shareholder that claims they did not maximize the value of their shares.

The regulations at the foundation of Big Tech are forcing the exploitation of our digital rights.

Quoting Chancellor William B. Chandler, III who sums up the problem perfectly in his Delaware Court opinion when eBay sued Craigslist for not maximizing its shares:

“Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the directors are bound by the fiduciary duties to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders.” ~ Chancellor William B. Chandler, III

We have centuries of legal precedent in the physical world, advanced by science and society guiding our moral compass, trespassing laws, freedom of speech, privacy rights, protection against personal harm and abuse. We have nearly no digital rights. Big Tech trespasses on your data, restricts speech, obliterates privacy entirely. Big Tech exploits people, causes harm and inflicts abuse upon our society.

If somebody approached your bedroom window from outside, put a camera up and started recording, you would immediately call the authorities and report the numerous laws broken—a case would be opened, arrests could be made, charges could be pressed, trials could ensue, criminals could go to jail; but in the digital world none of that exists—you are forced to leak far more details than a camera in your bedroom would share, and you are forced to leak that personal data from your phone all the time.

Big Tech exploits you every millisecond of every day.

All future government regulation will be influenced, funded, and lobbied by Big Tech. Could you imagine a future regulation where Big Tech wins to cryptographically sign everything with their keys, under their control on their products? What a nightmare scenario… Could you imagine your mobile phone under the complete control of Apple or Google?

We need to write the rules based on values we want in society.

AI algorithms from Big Tech have one input variable: $Maximize_Shareholder_Value. That translates directly into

1. Gather everything on all of the society
2. Keep people digitally captive
3. Maximize exposure time
4. Polarize opinion to elicit more profit

That is not what AI should be taught. Due to data manipulation, no two people in society are getting the same information; it is impossible to have a sane debate about any polarizing topic because we aren’t starting with a foundation of shared knowledge. What if the input request to AI algorithms was “Build an ethical society that respects freedoms and digital rights”? What would society look like then?

Maximizing shareholder value in a society that has nearly no digital rights, guarantees exploitation of that society. Why did we let this happen? How did we let this happen? I know why. Because… It’s convenient to give up control. It is convenient for you to download a proprietary application that exploits you, agree to the legal binding terms of service you didn’t read, and blissfully believe Big Tech is helping you in the digital world. It’s inconvenient to stand up for your freedom.

It seems we are offered to choose between convenience and control or inconvenience and freedom

I believe we can have both convenience AND freedom. We can actually build technology that benefits society faster when they are based on principles we deem ethical.

Society’s technology genius is not lacking, its moral genius is. Trust in Big Tech is eroding rapidly. No Big Tech company has core values that help our digital rights. The largest challenge we will face is the marketing budgets of Big Tech, when they claim things like:

“We protect your privacy” ~ Big Tech
Actually, You exploit personal private data without a persons knowledge
“We use encryption” ~ Big Tech
Actually, It’s inside proprietary apps that you control
“We are secure” ~ Big Tech
Actually, You hold the master keys controlling society
“You can trust us” ~ Big Tech
Actually, You won’t let anybody verify anything

Part 2: The present

Currently, Big Tech is maximizing shareholder value without values. The products, software, and services offered by Big Tech will continue to mistreat people unless we can establish what digital rights are and change society for the better.

Then we advocate, regulate, and build products that adhere to those digital rights.

Mark Twain famously wrote:

“It is curious that physical courage should be so common in the world and moral courage so rare.” ~ Mark Twain

I believe there are five fundamental digital rights:

1. Right to Change Providers
   If a person wants to change a service provider, they can easily move to another. (Decentralized Services)
2. Right to Protect Personal Data
   A person owns and controls their own master keys to encrypt all data and communication, nobody else. (User-controlled Encryption)
3. Right to Verify
   Society has the freedom to inspect the source of all software used, and can run it as they wish, for any purpose. (Software Freedom)
4. Right to be Forgotten
   A service provider only stores the minimal personal data necessary to provide the service. Once the data is no longer required, it is deleted. (Minimal Data Retention)
5. Right to Access
   A person must not be discriminated against nor forced to agree to any terms and conditions before accessing a service. (Personal Liberty)

If we can do those things, we can change the future of computing for the better.

Part 3: The future

As technology gets closer and closer to our brain, the moral issues of digital rights become clearer and clearer.

It started with computers, where we would leave them and come back to them. Then phones, that we always have on or near us with millisecond leakage of personal data beyond human comprehension. Then wearables, that are tracking very private details. IOT devices are everywhere— I have to stop to remind everybody: “The S in IOT is for Security” ~ Anonymous—and finally, surgically implanted.

A question to consider: What Big Tech Company would you purchase your future brain implant from? This is coming.

However, I believe we can change the future of computing for the better. Let’s stand together and invest, use, and recommend products and services that respect society.

What future will you choose?

Reposted from Purism

The post The Future of Computing and Why You Should Care appeared first on P2P Foundation.