“Manuel Castells The Information Age Trilogy has been one of the most influential works to understand the societal change in the awake of the digital revolution of the last decades. It is, as Frank Webster (2002: 97) points out, one of “the most illuminating, imaginative and intellectually rigorous account of the major features and dynamics of the world today”. The theory of the network society developed in these books “open[ed] up new perspectives on a word reconstituting itself around a series of networks strung around the globe on the basis of advanced communication technologies” (Stalder, 2006: 1). Indeed, the work of Manuel Castells has influenced a generation of scholars, shaped a research agenda and has got important repercussions beyond academia (Bell, 2007).

Yet, more than two decades after the launch of his theory, the network society and the information age have been developing at a faster pace that anyone suspected in terms of: socio-technological and economic transformation (e.g. platform capitalism, sharing economy, robotization, algorithmic driven society, artificial intelligence and IoT, etc.), power geometries, new identities and socio-political contestation (e.g. populism, indignados, gilet jaunes, alt-right, technopolitics, buen vivir, #meetoo, LGBTIQ, black-lives-matters, youth for climate change, etc.) and new geopolitics and geographies of inequality and power (the rise of China as global power, multipolarity, the emergence of the Global South, the uneven impact of environmental crises, etc.).

At the same time, during the last decades a number of theoretical and epistemological trends have developed or consolidated in the social sciences that can be read as either influenced by or challenging the Trilogy position. Among others, the rise of network theories, mobilities paradigm, communication and power theory, technopolitics, post-colonialism or the relation between digital societies and nature.

In this regard, as 2021 will mark the 25th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Manuel Castells’, it is time to revisit the trilogy and explore the relevance of Castells’ pioneering work in the light of the current state of the network society and of the ways to research about it. Thus, our aim is to gather together scholars from a wide range of disciplines – Including Castells himself – to engage with the Trilogy and debate on its contributions, legacies but as well shortcomings and new developments not envisioned at the time of its launch to try to develop a critical perspective on future trajectories of the network society and the information age.

We welcome contributions that sympathetically and/or critically engage with the Trilogy in any theoretical, methodological or empirical topic around the contemporary developments of the network society. Examples of areas and themes that we would like to discuss (but are not limited to) are:

• Information, data, datafication and the (new) sources of economic value;
• Networks, space-times, economy and society;
• Contesting the network society power configurations: politics, social movements and new identities;
• The network society in the world: uneven geographies and geopolitics of the information age;
• The Trilogy of the Network Society in front of the new turns in social sciences;
• The influence on the epistemic communities either geographically (e.g. Latin America, Europe, Asia…) or disciplinary (Sociology, media, geography, STS…).

Important dates

Workshop: Barcelona, 10-11 June 2020

• 23/06/2019 → Abstract submission. 500 words + up to 5 keywords
  Submit your proposals to [email protected]
• 23/07/2019 → Communication of abstract acceptance
• 20/3/2020 → Full paper submission: 5.000 – 8.000 words (mandatory). Papers will be the basis for the comments and discussion during the workshop. They will be submitted to a special issue / edited book

Practical Information

Confirmed keynote speakers:

• Prof. Manuel Castells (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, University of Southern California)
• Prof. Fernando Calderón (FLACSO, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad Nacional San Martín Argentina) 
• Prof. Ida Susser (The City University of New York) 
• Prof. John Thompson (University of Cambridge)

The workshop is free of charge. Food will be provided at the conference for presenters. Accommodation and transportation are not included. 

The workshop presentations should be the basis for a special issue in an international peer-review journal by 2021 to discuss the work of Manuel Castells in the 25th anniversary of the launch of the first volume.

 Organization Committee (IN3)

• Mireia Fernández-Ardèvol
• Ramon Ribera-Fumaz
• David Megías

 Organization

This workshop is organized by the IN3 – Internet Interdisciplinary Institute, Open University of Catalonia. The workshop constitutes a central part of the IN3’s 20th anniversary.”

Further info and queries: [email protected]

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Science-fiction or social reality, the Blockchain. Fact. Fiction. Future. event brought together artists, activists, hackers, designers, scientists, sociologists and political scientists to analyse, question, and discuss the distruptive, cultural and creative potential of this technology. iMAL, Brussels, 4 November 2016.

Alex Pazaitis (GR) P2P Foundation / P2P Lab Blockchain and P2P value creation in the information economy The presentation will concern the techno-economic implications of the blockchain. I will briefly illustrate the economic dynamics of P2P productive relations, specifically in the context of the information economy and in relation to the digital commons. In this picture, I will argue on the potential of the blockchain, as an advanced technology for record-keeping of value, which can effectively encapsulate qualitatively different contributions of labour. About the Speaker Alexandros (Alex) Pazaitis is Research Fellow at P2P Lab, an interdisciplinary research hub, community-driven makerspace and spin-off of the P2P Foundation and the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance. Alex is involved in numerous research activities, including the authoring of scholarly papers and the participation in research and innovation projects. He has professional experience in project management and has worked as a consultant for private and public organizations in various EU-funded cooperation projects. His research interests include technology governance; innovation policy and sustainability; distributed manufacturing; commons and open cooperativism and blockchain-based collaboration.

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The interest for citizens co-production of public services is increasing and many digital participatory platforms (DPPs) have been developed in order to improve participatory democratic processes.

During the Sharing City Summit in Barcelona last November we discovered the DDDC, i.e. the Digital Democracy and Data Commons, a participatory platform to deliberate and construct alternative and more democratic forms of data governance, which will allow citizens to take back control over their personal data in the digital society and economy.

Barcelona is already known as a best practice in this field: the city and its metropolitan area constitute anexceptional ecosystem in terms of co-production of public policies and citizen science initiatives. The City Council has created an Office of Citizens Science and the Municipal Data Office, as well as the first Science Biennial that just took place in Barcelona (from 7th-11th February 2019). At the same time citizen science projects abound.

In this frame Barcelona is famous to have launched in February 2016 Decidim.Barcelona (we decide), a project of the City Council to give citizens the opportunity to discuss proposals using an interface for group-discussions and comments. Decidim is indeed an online participatory-democracy platform that embodies a completely innovative approach. First of all it is entirely and collaboratively built as free software. As remembered by Xabier Barandiaran Decidim is a web environment that using the programming language Ruby on Rails allows anybody to create and configure a website platform to be used in the form of a political network for democratic participation. Any organization (local city council, association, university, NGO, neighbourhood or cooperative) can create mass processes for strategic planning, participatory budgeting, collaborative design for regulations, urban spaces and election processes. It also makes possible the match between traditional in-person democratic meetings (assemblies, council meetings, etc.) and the digital world (sending meeting invites, managing registrations, facilitating the publication of minutes, etc.). Moreover it enables the structuring of government bodies or assemblies (councils, boards, working groups), the convening of consultations, referendums or channelling citizen or member initiatives to trigger different decision making processes. The official definition of Decidim is: a public-common’s, free and open, digital infrastructure for participatory democracy.

Barandiaran remembers also that “Decidim was born in an institutional environment (that of Barcelona City Council), directly aiming at improving and enhancing the political and administrative impact of participatory democracy in the state (municipalities, local governments, etc.). But it also aims at empowering social processes as a platform for massive social coordination for collective action independently of public administrations. Anybody can copy, modify and install Decidim for its own needs, so Decidim is by no means reduced to public institutions”.

As of march 2018 www.decidim.barcelona had more than 28,000 registered participants, 1,288,999 page views, 290,520 visitors, 19 participatory processes, 821 public meetings channeled through the platform and 12,173 proposals, out of which over 8,923 have already become public policies grouped into 5,339 results whose execution level can be monitored by citizens. […] It comes to fill the gap of public and common’s platforms, providing an alternative to the way in which private platforms coordinate social action (mostly with profit-driven, data extraction and market oriented goals)”.

But Decidim is more than a technological platform, it is a “technopolitical project” where legal, political, institutional, practical, social, educational, communicative, economic and epistemic codes merge together. There are mainly 3 levels: the political (focused on the democratic model that Decidim promotes and its impact on public policies and organizations), the technopolitical (focused on how the platform is designed, the mechanisms it embodies, and the way in which it is itself democratically designed), and the technical (focused on the conditions of production, operation and success of the project: the factory, collaborative mechanisms, licenses, etc.). In this way thousands of people can organize themselves democratically by making proposals that will be debated and could translate into binding legislation, attending public meetings, fostering decision-making discussions, deciding through different forms of voting and monitoring the implementation of decisions (not only the procedures but also the outcomes).

Coming back to our DDDC, the main aim of this pilot participatory process is to test a new technology to improve the digital democracy platform Decidim and to collectively imagine the data politics of the future. It was developed inside the European project DECODE[1] (Decentralized Citizen Owned Data Ecosystem – that aims to construct legal, technological and socio-economic tools that allow citizens to take back control over their data and generate more common benefits out of them); it is led by the Barcelona Digital City (Barcelona City Council) and by the Internet Interdisciplinary Institute of the Open University of Catalonia (Tecnopolitica and Dimmons), in collaboration with the Nexa Center of Internet & Society, Eurecat, CNRS, Dribia, aLabs, Thoughtworksand DYNE.

The pilot project was launched in October 18^th 2018 and will end April 1^st 2019, for a total of 5 months. It has mainly three goals:

1. to integrate the DECODE technology with the Decidim digital platform in order to improve processes of e-petitioning, to provide more safety, privacy, transparency and data enrichment;
2. to enable a deliberative space around data law, governance and economics within the new digital economy and public policy, in order to provide a vision oriented to promote a greater citizen control over data and their exploitation in Commons-oriented models[2];
3. to experiment with the construction and use of a data commons generated in the process, in order to improve the inclusion of the participatory process itself.

The goals will be reached through several phases that foresee also face-to-face meetings, inside the dddc.decodeproject.eu platform. The infographic illustrates the phases:

Figure 1 DDDC’s phases. Source: https://dddc.decodeproject.eu/processes/main

The pilot project is currently in its second phase. The first 1 was that of  presentation & diagnosis,dedicated to the elaboration of a brief diagnosis of the state of regulations, governance models and data economy. The diagnosis emerged from a kick off pilot presentation workshop, the DECODE Symposium, aimed to imagine possible proposal to move towards a society where citizens can control what, how and who manages and generates values from the exploitation of their data; i.e. to imagine how use digital technologies to facilitate the transition from today’s digital economy of surveillance capitalism and data extractivism to an alternative political and economic project. In this phase a sociodemographic survey was also launched to collect information about the perceptions on the digital economy and to design communicative actions to improve the inclusiveness of the process.

The current phase (2) is that of proposals for a digital economy based on data commons, lunached considering the current situation of data extraction and concentration and based on the diagnosis made on the digital society in the first phase. During the Sharing Cities Summit for example a dedicated meeting took place, divided into a talk and four group work sessions, one for each axes of the pilot project (legal, economic, governance and experimental – see below). During this workshop 64 proposal were collected and in the next phases they will be voted, discussed and signed. The DDDC staff underlines that the process is prefigurative since they are trying to create and practice data commons while deliberating and talking about data commons.

In this phase the results of the survey on sociodemographic data were also analyzed with the aim to define, implement and experiment data use strategies for inclusion in participation (these strategies can potentially be used in future by platforms such as Decidim). The analysis is made by the Barcelona Now – BCNNOW.

The next phases are:

Phase 3 – Debate: discussion on the proposals received.

Phase 4 – Elaboration by the DECODE team and the interested participants

Phase 5 – Signing: collection of support for the pilot project results using DECODE technology for secure and transparent signature (based on encryption techniques and distributed ledger technologies). Crucial phase: this technology, integrated with DECIDIM, will help in the construction of a more secure, transparent and distributed networked democracy.

Phase 6 – Evaluation: closing meeting and launch of a survey to help in the assessment of the satisfaction or participants with the process and with the DECODE technology

Legal aspects, governance issues and economic topics are the three main axes followed during the different phases, since they provide a differential approach to discuss around data. A fourth axis is the experimental one, dedicated to the use and definition of collective decisions around the database resulting from the data shared during the pilot project. Il will become a kind of temporary commons useful to improve the deliberative process itself, a practice that could be incorporated in future Decidim processes.

At the end of the pilot project a participatory document, with paper or manifesto around the digital economy will be released.

The importance of this kind of pilot project is clear if we think to the huge amount of data that everyday every citizens is able to produce… By now we live in a “datasphere”, an invisible environment of data, quoting Appadurai, a virtual data landscape rich in information, cultural and social data. Our data indeed constitute digital patterns that reveal our behaviors, interests, habits. Some actors, especially big corporations and States, can act upon this data, can use them to surveil and influence our lives, through strategies such as ad hoc advertisements or even intervention in elections (see the case of the Cambridge Analytica or the referendum on an EU agreement with Ukraine) or generation of citizens rankings (such as the Chinese case). These “data misuses” can even influence and affect democracy. Nevertheless, if successful, the knowledge and insight created by the datasphere may become a powerful managing and intelligence tool and the debate about the so-called “datacracy” is indeed growing.

In this frame, and considering the little awareness still surrounding the topic, the DDDC pilot project on the one hand tries to stir critically consciousness and common construction in this arena, on the other tries to provide the necessary tools to go in this direction, improving Decidim and pushing forward the DECODE vision of data sovereignty.

[1]For more information about DECODE browse the projects documents: partners, funding, FAQs or the official website

[2] That is, models where people share data and allow for open use while remaining in control over their data, individually and collectively

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When tomorrow is just like today, boredom can result. We seek novelty. However, in this phase in human history, tomorrow will certainly not be like today. Indeed, we are in the midst of dramatic social and technological change. This includes:

1. A demographic shift in Africa such that 40% of all children worldwide by 2050 live in Africa[i] and by 2100, 39% of all adults globally will live in Africa.[ii][iii]
2. Under-population [iv]in many Western and East Asian nations,[v] creating labour shortages, and the possibility of steady-state economics.
3. The rise of new technologies such as 3d printing, drones, artificial intelligence, driverless cars dramatically increasing productivity, reducing costs, and among other impacts, recongifuring city design (why parking spaces? or why not cars as mobile homes?).
4. The likely major disruption in the global food industry through cellular agriculture – the new pure meat and pure milk and the end of the animal based food supply chain, the possibility of the narrative shift from slaughter houses to greenhouses and food labs. [vi]
5. The shift from coal based energy to solar and wind (and other alternatives) renewable systems.
6. The beginning of the rise of the peer to peer economy and possibly platform cooperativism, certainly the possibility of the uber-ifcation of energy, that is: AI, plus solar, plus energy sharing. This challenges energy hierarchy, changing consumers into prosumers and foundationally challenging energy producers – are fossil fuels the new stranded assets?[vii]
7. A likely hegemonic shift from an American centric world to a China and Asian-centric century, changing what we value, the global hierarchy of truth, knowledge, and beauty.[viii]
8. On top of that, perhaps the most profound shift is the rise of gender equity – the beginning of true diversity and inclusion

For many these changes are heralded as the beginning of a new era, the end of empire, the end of the patriarchy, the end of the coal-oil era, the end of poverty, the end of man over nature – a transition to a new era, what Sarkar has called, neohumanism. [ix] For others, these are frightening as the assets they have held – physical as in coal mines, psychic as in male domination, cultural as in Empire-first are all under threat. “They vow to make their tribe great again”[x]

For sure, in these times of transition, finding a centre to hold on to can become difficult. We feel powerless, vulnerable, lost. Our normal day way of thinking and being may not be enough. We may need super-powers to stay calm, afloat, strong, focused  during these tsunamis of change, as the futurist James Dator has written.[xi]

In my work in Futures Studies and as a student of the mystic, P.R. Sarkar, I offer the following ideas or super-powers, if you will.[xii] I have used these with dozens of nations, hundreds of international organizations, and hundreds of citizens groups throughout the world. May futurists use some or all of these powers.

We hope they help in avoiding the pitfalls and perils coming, and to create the futures you wish for.[xiii]

First, as everything changes, find a quiet time – meditation is best for this. Breathe in, breathe out. Make this a practice, such that the feeling of quietness carries throughout the day. Meditation, mindfulness, zikr, zen, or other methods that help focus on one thought – the mantra, the sound that transports one to shanti, stillness – even when hundreds of thoughts race.

Second, see the future as an asset, part of a learning and creation journey. Instead of being worried about what will happen, use the future to start to create realities you would like to see happen (within your zone of control). Insights about the changing world, what you can do, what your organization can do, to help one chart their way forward. Instead of being lost in the day to day, the litany of events, we find that by challenging one’s assumptions about reality  or double loop learning, the future is easier to create since one is watching for weak signals, watching for what works and what does not. Indeed, misleading assumptions are considered one of the leading causes of strategy failure. Often, we double down, argue even more belligerently for our view even as the data suggests otherwise, as in climate change.

Or we rush to create a list of things to do. But double loop learning is questioning our assumptions. Is the future created or given to us? Do I believe the future is bright or bleak? One large organization paid its managers to conduct a review on the changing external world – the environmental scan – and paid experts to comment on this review. However, it had no intent, as evidenced in board meetings, to change their strategy. They merely wished to inform regulators that they had done due diligence on the emerging future. They did not wish their assumptions challenged.

Third, find the used future. The used future is a practice we engage in that no longer works. For example, many institutions wish to be part of the knowledge revolution but they still engage in clock in and clock out behavior. They remain focused on the assembly line, instead of creating metrics where it is out come not time spent that truly matters. As institutions remain mired in the 19th century, workers experience fatigue, tired of surveillance, and feeling what makes them special is not being counted.

Fourth, understand which disruptions or technologies, cultural mind-set shifts, demographic changes will impact them. And, this is crucial, discern the first and second order implications of these changes. Many argue which will be the correct impact. They seek certainty in a world where the future keeps on changing. Wiser is to ascertain the alternatives. For example, with the rise of cellular agriculture, is it wiser to (1) move towards regenerative agriculture, where farmers are stewards of the land, (2) shift toward pure meat and make the land that was used for animal farming for other purposes, or (3) become a niche organic meat seller, or (4) all the above, or (5) to do nothing in the hope the new technology does not disrupt you and your industry? Instead of being focused on the right answer, the future is full of possibilities. However, without going through the implications, we often resort to defensive postures. One farming federation when presented with the possible future of lab meat becoming prevalent suggested that they needed to eliminate vegetarians and scientists. While this was done in humor, the challenge to move from “there is nothing we can do” to alternative strategies became apparent to all participants.

Fifth, we focus on scenarios, a number of possible stories about the future, instead of the right answer. These scenarios become alternative worlds that you, the organization, and the nation can inhabit. From these scenarios, options can emerge, choices can be created, and conflicts resolved since alternative  futures are now clarified. They can help develop national strategy, for example, as with the recent scenarios below of the Malaysian Ministry of Education.

(Source: https://www.nst.com.my/education/2018/04/361452/way-forward-higher-education-4ir-era.)

Sixth, the future strategy needs an enabling metaphor. Every person or organization has a narrative that underlies how they interact with the changing world. More often than not, when the external world changes, the story is left behind, and individuals live a metaphor that no longer creates the desired vision. Instead, suffering results. One global organization was looking to the future but their metaphor was an old crippled elephant. They needed to find a better story and then en-act from that story, the new future they wished for. In this case, they imagined themselves to be an octopus – intelligent, flexible, and swift to react. Individuals as well carry stories that do not work.

One CEO found that his core skills he had learned over 40 plus years were no longer useful. He described this as coming to play a game of tennis at a grass court only to find out that he was now playing on a clay court. His new narrative became someone who could play on multiple courts. For that, he needed to expand his life skills to include spiritual and emotional intelligence. However, in the long run, he realized, it was not winning (or losing) that mattered but the rally, the love of the game. Thus, a better narrative for him was that of the coach, teaching children how to play.

Seventh, and finally, and perhaps the most important superpower of all is to link the story to the system, to strategy, otherwise, the story is empty, mere words that lead to nothing.[xiv] If, for example, the octopus is the new story, then power needs to be decentralized to the tentacles, to the field. If the octopus is the new story, then there needs to be funding for emerging threats and possibilities. In the elephant story, the organization is unable to  see the future  as the organization has no systematic ways to scan for trends and weak signals. If the octopus is the new metaphor, then the organization needs to focus on outcomes, to actually become flexible. Systemic change also means that the new measurements of success are needed so that the story is not just valued but is the anchor to the desired future. Often organizations wish to move from crisis management (ambulance at the bottom of the hill) to prevention (fence at the top of the hill), however, when they do so, their budgets decline and accolades are not passed  out since they have solved problems before they occurred.  New measures of prevention are required, as for example, with the work of former deputy commissioner of Toronto Police, Peter Sloly. Elected representatives as well are hesitant since they need to be seen cutting the ribbon on new projects. Thus, new measures are required that ensure the vision – prevention, for example – is measured and rewarded.

With this final superpower, the subjective worlds of narrative and vision align with the objective worlds of systems and measurements. The future becomes real: the real becomes the future.

                      Scenarios on Adelaide Park Lands linking strategy with metaphor. David Chick.

To conclude, in times of dramatic change, we don’t simply need better maps of the changing world, we need special powers or super powers to avoid the futures we don’t want and create the futures we do. We need the super power of:

(1) Being able to stay calm and focused through meditation;

(2) We need the power to learn and reflect instead of acting from unchallenged assumptions and past behavior.

(3) We need the superpower to challenge the used future – what we have been doing but no longer works.

(4) We need the ability to understand how the world is changing, and the impacts of these disruptions on our day to day life and strategy.

(5) We need the superpower to understand and create alternative futures instead of being fixated on one view: one future. This means letting go of the train-track worldview.

(6) We need the super-power of narrative, of telling a different story about our lives. And, finally,

(7) We need to link story to systemic change, creating a virtuous cycle of change, ensuring that what we value, we count.

References

[i] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[ii] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-28757054. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[iii] See Sohail Inayatullah, “The Youth Bulge,” Journal of Futures Studies (Vol. 21, No. 2, December, 2016), 21-24.

[iv] See Sohail Inayatullah, “Ageing Futures: From Overpopulation to World Underpopulation,” The Australian Business Network Report (Vol. 7, No. 8, 1999), 6–10.

[v] https://theconversation.com/japan-is-not-the-only-country-worrying-about-population-decline-get-used-to-a-two-speed-world-56106. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[vi] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/china-israel-trade-deal-lab-grown-meat-veganism-vegetarianism-a7950901.html. Accessed 16 2 2019

[vii] I am indebted to the World Bank executive Richard MacGeorge for alerting me to this approach. He moves the discourse away from political interests to sunken psychic costs.

[viii] See, for example, Sohail Inayatullah, Asia 2038: ten disruptions that change everything. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2018.

[ix] See, for example, Sid Jordan, “Era of Neohumanism,” https://gurukul.edu/newsletter/issue-38/era-of-neohumanism/.Accessed 17 2 2019. Also see, Sohail Inayatullah, Marcus Bussey, and Ivana Milojevic, eds., Neohumanisteducational futures. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2006.

[x] See special issue on Donald Trump and the future, , the Journal of Futures Studies. (Vol. 21, No.3,  March, 2017),

[xi] James Dator, “Surfing the tsunamis of change, ” http://www.futures.hawaii.edu/publications/futures-visions/SurfingTsunamisMexico1994.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019. Also see: Christopher Jones, “Surfing the tsunamis of change,” Journal of Futures Studies .Vol. 8, No. 2, 2013, 115-122. http://www.jfs.tku.edu.tw/18-2/S04.pdf. Accessed 16 2 2019.

[xii] See Sohail Inayatullah, Understanding Sarkar: the Indian episteme, macrohistory and transformative knowledge. Leiden, Brill,2002.

[xiii] These are drawn from, Sohail Inayatullah, What works – case studies in the practice of foresight. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

[xiv] This approach is developed in a series of books, the latest being Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojevic, eds.  CLA 2.0: Transformative research in theory and practice. Tamsui, Tamkang University, 2015.

About Sohail Inayatullah

Professor Sohail Inayatullah /sə’heɪl ɪnaɪʌ’tʊla/, a political scientist, is Professor at Tamkang University, Taipei (Graduate Institute of Futures Studies); Associate, Mt. Eliza Executive Education, Melbourne Business School, and Adjunct Professor at the University of the Sunshine Coast (Faculty of Social Sciences and the Arts).

In 2015, Professor Inayatullah was awarded the first UNESCO Chair in Futures Studies. In 2010, he was awarded the Laurel award for all-time best futurist by the Shaping Tomorrow Foresight Network. In March 2011, he was awarded an honorary doctorate by Universiti Sains Malaysia, Penang. He received his doctorate from the University of Hawaii in 1990. Inayatullah has lived in Islamabad, Pakistan; Bloomington, Indiana; Flushing, New York; Geneva, Switzerland; Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; Honolulu, Hawaii; and Brisbane and Mooloolaba, Australia.

Inayatullah is the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Futures Studies and on the editorial boards of Futures, Prout Journal, East West Affairs, World Future Review, and Foresight. He has written more than 350 journal articles, book chapters, encyclopaedia entries and magazine editorials. His articles have been translated into a variety of languages, including Catalan, Spanish, Urdu, Hindi, Bengali, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Indonesian, Farsi, Arabic, and Mandarin. Inayatullah has also written and co-edited twenty-two books/cdroms, including: What Works: Case Studies in the Practice of Foresight; CLA 2.0: Transformative Research in Theory and Practice (2015); Questioning the Future: Methods and Tools for Organizational and Societal Transformation (2007); and, Macrohistory and Macrohistorians: Perspectives on Individual, Social, and Civilizational Change (1997). His latest (2018) book is Asia 2038: Ten Disruptions That Change Everything.

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It’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

It’s not news that human civilization and ecosystems are at risk of collapse in our lifetime or that of our children. Biologists, sociologists, ecologists and others have been issuing dire warnings for easily half a century on all the big issues. We’re well aware of them: climate change, habitat loss, pollution, topsoil degradation, groundwater depletion, rising rates of species extinction, financial meltdown, poverty and wealth inequality, and nuclear war, to name a few. A recent headline captures the flavor: Plummeting insect numbers threaten collapse of nature.

What might be news is that we can do something to help change course, without waiting for governments to act, or even asking governments to act.

First, let’s clarify the goal. We wish to thrive, not just survive. We want healthy communities where collective wellbeing runs high and the environment is protected and restored. Among other things, this means access to quality and affordable education and health care, meaningful jobs, eradication of poverty and excessive income inequality, and systems of organization that are just, transparent, and deeply democratic.

I believe we can reach this goal, in our lifetime, if we think outside the box. The first step is to ask this seemingly obvious question: Out of all conceivable designs for systems of social self-organization, which ones might improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability the most?

It’s a scientific question at heart, begging for rigorous study, not mere opinions. And yet it’s also a question to be pondered by everyone on the planet.

It has a natural follow up: If we were to develop new, high quality systems, how could we best implement and monitor them? This too is a scientific question at heart.

These two questions have the power to change our world. At face value both are utterly sensible to ask. Why wouldn’t we want to know the answers? But beyond that, they embody several profound realizations.

First, if we want bold change, we should look to science for demonstration and assessment of the possibilities, more so than to politics. While science might not have all the answers, it would certainly have a tremendous amount to say. We need and could obtain clear evidence of which system designs might serve us best, and how and to what degree our lives might improve.

Second, our big problems are symptoms of a deeper defect. As societies, we could have long ago taken sensible actions to address pressing problems. But we didn’t. Why? Because the systems by which we self-organize — governance, legal, economic, financial, and more — are too often inadequate, even dysfunctional, when it comes to solving problems, especially big problems.

The dysfunction isn’t due to bad leaders in business or politics, although these exist. The rise to power of too many selfish, dangerous, or unqualified leaders is just another symptom. Rather, the dysfunction is due to the mechanics of our systems — their very designs, built-in motivations, concentration of power, and embodied world views. Because of these, they lack the capacity for solving today’s big problems.

This failing should not be a surprise. Our systems largely evolved to solve a different, older problem, which is how to maintain and concentrate wealth and power for those who already have it. In this they have been wildly successful. Consider how quickly the billionaire class is growing, and how fewer and fewer corporations control ever larger swaths of the world’s economy. Consider how the legal system favors the rich.

The last realization embodied in the question is that bold change is possible. Given advances in science and technology over the past 50 years, the hard work of many on issues of social and environmental justice, and the looming threat of collapse, we’re overdue for an evolutionary jump. We’re ripe for sweeping change.

You might think that universities or research groups would have long ago started work on such important questions. But almost no one has. Perhaps political pressures or funding realities have gotten in the way. Or perhaps it’s because core fields like complex systems science, cognitive science, and ecology needed to mature a bit before questions about societal self-organization could arise. Whatever the reason, the work has barely started.

So let’s get on with it. After all, it’s hard to believe that current systems are the best we can do. They appear dysfunctional now and suicidal in the long run. It’s time to investigate what might work best.

If in this moment you’re thinking about comparing socialism to capitalism, I’d ask you to think bigger and further outside the box. Those are economic systems, not whole-system, integrated approaches to demonstrably improve wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability.

Rather than thinking of isms, it might be better to think of biology. Humans are highly social animals. Our communities and societies are akin to living organisms — metaorganisms, if you will, composed of many interacting individuals. Just like biological organisms, the natural purpose of a society is to learn, rise to challenges, adapt to changing conditions, and solve problems that matter. Learning requires information, and so also information processing. Action requires decisions and thus decision-making processes.

Start there. What kinds of designs for whole, integrated systems might best help us to perceive, process, communicate, learn, predict, make decisions, and orchestrate action, at scale, as communities and societies, in order to solve problems and thereby increase social and environmental wellbeing? And how would they be monitored and measured?

Keep an open mind. In this exploration, the very concepts of business, money, wealth, voting, governance and more might evolve into something new. Wealth, for example, might be understood not as personal financial gain but as the degree of shared wellbeing. Money might be understood not so much as a static store of value but as a transparent voting tool in economic democracy, valuable only through use.

A Viable Path to Development and Implementation

The task of developing and implementing new systems of organization might seem daunting at first glance. But on closer examination, a viable and affordable path can be seen. I’ve described it elsewhere, along with results of a computer simulation that illustrates potential benefits (including eradication of poverty, higher and more stable incomes, greater income equality, and economic democracy).

One bedrock characteristic of the approach is that it’s science based. An R&D program lies at its core. New systems would be thoroughly tested, similar to the way new designs for a jet airliner would be tested. This means simulations, field trials, and more, using various measures of quality that address wellbeing, resilience, sustainability, and problem-solving capacity.

Another key characteristic of the approach is that new systems are designed for implementation at the local, community level through a club model. This allows progress without waiting for governments to act. And it allows for rapid field testing of multiple systems in parallel. A club can be started with just a small percentage of an urban population, perhaps a thousand people, without any legislation. Participation in a club is voluntary and free.

Once field trials demonstrate that better systems are both possible and popular, interest will naturally spread and new clubs will form in new communities. As they do, networks of clubs will also form. Part of the R&D effort is to ensure that these display the same characteristics that make individual clubs successful — like rich communication, deep democracy, and high transparency.

The R&D program is affordable. The annual budget in the first decade would likely be no more than several tens of millions of dollars, which is modest enough that the world’s young adults could fund the program alone through donations, if sufficiently motivated to do so. So too could any other group or set of groups. A social investor could fund it, and receive reasonable economic returns — a social business model exists.

We could fund it — the collective we who are aware, concerned, willing to think outside the box, and willing to take action and try something new. For arguments sake, let’s say we’re 5 to 15 percent of the world population. We’re large enough and powerful enough to see this through to fruition. It doesn’t matter if the other 95 percent or so have no interest. Enough will, later. All that’s needed to start are early supporters; feedback, ideas, and assistance during bench scale and usability testing; and in time, early adopters who will participate in scientific field trials. The rest will follow naturally.

If we initiate this R&D program, much of the scientific community will be on our side. They’ll understand its potential and view the project as exciting and timely. Even the big players — the Harvards, MITs, and Stanfords of the world — might eventually join in.

The potential gains are large and downsides small. With better systems of self-organization we could increase our capacity to solve problems and improve conditions within our communities. Transparent and deeply democratic systems could build trust and engender a greater sense of shared purpose and hope.

If systems are well designed and deliver what they promise, worldwide participation will grow. At some point along the way, and it might take several decades, a tipping point will be reached where new systems spread like wildfire to become the norm. When that happens, communities almost everywhere, or maybe everywhere, will be enjoying greater wellbeing, resilience, and sustainability. They will cooperate, by design and by choice, in successfully solving problems that matter.

By John Boik, PhD. To learn more about the wellbeing centrality R&D program, the LEDDA economic democracy framework, or to download (free) Economic Direct Democracy: A Framework to End Poverty and Maximize Well-Being (2014), visit https://principledsocietiesproject.org.

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The following abstract is republished from academia.edu.

BA Dissertation: In blockchain they trust. Now, power to the people or to the invisible hand? An analysis of the ideological tensions and affinities between crypto-libertarian and crypto-commonist visions, projects and aspirations for the blockchain revolution.

By Mateo Peyrouzet Garc’a-Si–eriz BA Dissertation University of Exeter Department of Social Sciences and International Studies, May 2018

Abstract

This dissertation provides an analysis of the ideological component behind the crypto-anarchist enthusiasm for the highly topical emerging technology of distributed ledger technology, commonly known as blockchain. Philosophy of technology scholars have drawn attention to the fact that technologies can possess political properties and serve to reinforce or challenge power structures. Public blockchains have an unquestionable social and political character due to their capacity to facilitate the emergence of cryptographic, decentralized and reliable peer-to-peer networks. The exponential adoption of this disruptive technology, which is poised to cause transformational changes across socio-technical systems and organizational structures, means that both its political properties and the ideological forces behind its development as a political technology must be recognized. Accordingly, this dissertation engages with some of the most ideologically-driven projects aiming to tap into blockchainÕs political and economic potential, namely those of Bitcoin, FairCoin, Democracy Earth and Bitnation. These projects exemplify what is posited as the main ideological cleavage within crypto-anarchism, which revolves around the privileged agent and vision that should be empowered and trusted to capture the decentralizing potential offered by blockchain technology. The paper offers an original contribution by conceptualizing the cleavage as separating; crypto-libertarians, whose neo-Hobbesian individualistic vision sees the invisible hand of the free market as the privileged agent driving a trustless technology; and crypto-commonists, whose collectivist vision regards blockchain as a trust-enabling technology that should be used to facilitate collaborative economic paradigms and participatory forms of e-democracy. The dissertation concludes that while both strands of blockchain enthusiasts have a shared interest in promoting personal privacy, radical transparency, and eroding the authority of nation-states, their diametrically opposed views on human nature and socio-economic organization seem presently irreconcilable. The research undertaken for this paper has covered a substantial breadth of the existing academic material concerning the philosophy and politics of blockchain technology, consulting books, journals, white papers and online articles. This dissertation contributes with an ideological conceptualization to the fields of techno-politics and blockchain studies, an academic intersection still in its infancy, but which will undoubtedly attract increasing academic attention.

Contents

Given the dissertation’s focus on ideological features, the first chapter is dedicated to framing a proper framework to understand the ideologies of crypto-libertarianism, which has been commented by several scholars, and crypto-commonism, a neologism proposed by this paper. The former is characterized by its individualist approach to human interaction, its capitalist approach to economic organization, and its market-based approach to governance. The latter is characterized by its collectivist view of social interaction, its commonist approach to economic organization, and its democratic approach to governance. Decades after the emergence of crypto-anarchism, these differences remain largely under-conceptualized in academic and informal circles, creating an epistemic void that requires attention given the relevance of these ideological forces in the digital era.

Having constructed the ideological profiles that configure the crypto-anarchist divide concerning blockchain technology’s political and economic potential, Chapter 2 will present the technical specifics of the technology and its ontological properties, situating it within the debate regarding the political nature of technologies that was mentioned earlier. Then, the philosophical and political values embodied and advanced by blockchain will be examined. This will make it easier to understand how crypto-libertarian and crypto-commonist ideas fit within the technical properties of blockchain technology and its potential applications.

Chapter 3 will evaluate the radically different socio-economic visions held by crypto-libertarians and crypto-commonists. By analysing Bitcoin and FairCoin it will be shown that a crypto-commonist approach prioritizes blockchainÕs potential to enhance collaborative models of economic organization and commons-based peer production, while the crypto-libertarian perspective revolves around blockchainÕs facilitation of a trustworthy platform for unfettered markets to emerge. Following this, a consideration of how blockchain can affect data ownership and privacy from governments and tech giants will bring to light several affinities within the crypto-anarchists, as well as other points of contention.

Finally, Chapter 4 will focus on several approaches to governance that have either been proposed or, indeed, been made possible by the decentralized and transparent qualities of blockchain technology. This chapter will look at how blockchain enthusiasts are aiming to transform voting, democracy and governance, focusing on Democracy Earth’s application of ‘liquid democracy’ through blockchain technology and Bitnation’s project of ‘decentralized borderless voluntary nations’ Pinpointing the differences between these approaches will provide a comprehensible image of the way in which positioning along the libertarian-commonist axis influences visions of governance in an ideal blockchain future. The dissertation finishes by answering the second question, concluding that although crypto-libertarians and crypto-commonists may share an interest in eroding the power of states and grounding socio-economic organization on voluntary interactions facilitated by blockchain technology, their ideological aspirations are ultimately incompatible. While crypto-anarchists may be seen as a single ideological force, their differing visions on whether blockchain projects should facilitate unfettered capitalism or a commonist and democratic system seem currently irreconcilable.

References

• Scott, Brett. Visions of a Techno-Leviathan: The Politics of the Bitcoin Blockchain. E- International Relations, 1 June 2014, www.e-ir.info/2014/06/01/visions-of-a-techno-leviathan-the-politics-of-the-bitcoin-blockchain/.

• De Filippi, Primavera, and Benjamin Loveluck. The Invisible Politics of Bitcoin: Governance Crisis of a Decentralised Infrastructure. Internet Policy Review, vol. 5, no. 3, 30 Sept. 2016
• Dyer-Witheford, Nick. Species-Being and the New Commonism: Notes on an Interrupted Cycle of Struggles. The Commoner , no. 11, 2006, pp. 15Ð32. (p. 30)
• Gielen, Pascal, and Nico Dockx. Exploring Commonism – A New Aesthetics Of The Real. Valiz, 2018
• Velasco, Pablo R. Computing Ledgers and the Political Ontology of the Blockchain. Metaphilosophy, vol. 48, no. 5, 2017, pp. 712Ð726. (p. 721)

Alternative Strategies

• Scott, Brett. How Can Cryptocurrency and Blockchain Technology Play a Role in Building Social and Solidarity Finance? United Nations Research Institute for Social Development, Feb. 2016. (p. 19)

Photo by tompagenet

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(e.g., open knowledge and design) with local manufacturing and automation technologies (from 3D printing and CNC machines to low-tech tools and crafts). This convergence could catalyze the transition to new inclusive and circular production models, such as the “design global, manufacture local” (DGML) model. DGML describes the processes through which design is developed as a global digital commons, whereas the manufacturing takes place locally, through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in check. COSMOLOCALISM is a pilot-driven investigation of the DGML phenomenon that seeks to understand relevant organizational models, their evolution, and their broader political economy/ecology and policy implications. Through the lens of diverse case studies and participatory action research, the conditions under which the DGML model thrives will be explored.

COSMOLOCALISM has three concurrent streams: democratization; innovation; and sustainability. First, DGML governance practices will be studied, patterns will be recognized, and their form, function, cultural values, and structure will be determined. Second, the relevant open innovation ecosystems and their potential to reorient design and manufacturing practices will be examined. Third, selected DGML products will be evaluated from an environmental sustainability perspective, involving both qualitative and quantitative methods. The interdisciplinary nature of COSMOLOCALISM will explore new horizons to improve our understanding of how to create sustainable economies through the commons.

CANDIDATE PROFILE

The candidate is expected to focus on the sustainability stream of the COSMOLOCALISM project. The objective is to assess the environmental sustainability of DGML artifacts empirically. What is the ecological footprint of a product (e.g., a 3D printer, a digitally fabricated beehive) that has been globally designed and locally manufactured? How well does it fit into the existing natural and cultural environment of its application?

The candidate will conduct life-cycle assessments (LCA) of at least two DGML technological solutions. The candidate should have a strong background in the field of LCA with relevant technical skills and practical knowledge. Master students with practical experience in LCA will also be considered. The position is an excellent opportunity for engineers looking to expand their expertise in social science research given the interdisciplinary nature of the project. Feel free to contact Prof. Vasilis Kostakis for any inquiries: vasileios.kostakis at taltech.ee.

The ultimate goal is to contribute to sustainable transitions research, formulating a groundbreaking research and action agenda which will identify techno-economic opportunities and challenges that are often fundamentally different from any our society has experienced before. COSMOLOCALISM attempts to advance our understanding of the political ecology of alternative technological trajectories; and of the future of the organization in the age of automation and beyond.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

The primary responsibility of the doctoral candidate is to conduct an LCA of at least two technological solutions that have been globally designed and locally manufactured, vis-a-vis similar products of conventional industrial production. This also includes primary data gathering and analysis, as well as involvement in the respective scientific publications and reports.

SALARY AND BENEFITS

The successful candidate will receive a three-year contract, renewable for six months after positive evaluation (so 3,5 years in total). Depending on qualifications and previous experience, the net salary will range between 1,100 to 1,300 euros per month (including Ph.D. scholarship and salary). Thus, a Ph.D. from TalTech will be acquired, for which residency in Estonia would be required.

APPLICATION
The position will only be filled when a potential candidate fully meets the project’s requirements, but not later than 1 June 2019. The application procedure can be found here. Should you have any question, feel free to contact Prof. Kostakis before application.

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Knowledge, Spirit, Law is a de facto phenomenology of scholarship in the age of neoliberal capitalism. The eleven essays (plus Appendices) in Book 1: Radical Scholarship cover topics and circle themes related to the problems and crises specific to neoliberal academia, while proposing creative paths around the various obstructions. The obstructions include metrics-obsessed academia, circular and incestuous peer review, digitalization of research as stalking horse for text- and data-mining, and violation by global corporate fiat of Intellectual Property and the Moral Rights of Authors. These issues, while addressed obliquely in the main text, definitively inform the various proscriptive aspects of the essays and, via the Introduction and Appendices, underscore the necessity of developing new-old means to no obvious end in the production of knowledge — that is to say, a return to forms of non-instrumentalized intellectual inquiry. To be developed in two concurrent volumes, Knowledge, Spirit, Law will serve as a “moving and/or shifting anthology” of new forms of expression in humanistic studies. Book 2: The Anti-Capitalist Sublime will be published in Autumn 2017.

About the author

Gavin Keeney is an editor, writer, and critic. His most recent books include Dossier Chris Marker: The Suffering Image (2012) and Not-I/Thou: The Other Subject of Art and Architecture (2014), both produced as part of PhD studies conducted in Australia and Europe from 2011 to 2014. He is the Creative Director of Agence ‘X’, an editorial and artists’ and architects’ re-representation bureau founded in New York, New York, in October 2007.

Photo by La caverne aux trésors

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Dehui Chen: This is an idea about a new model of social network, to solve some common problems we have on the current social network platforms, such as data safety, the life span of personal data, distribution of personal data, fake news…this new model can also bring new features that we have never experienced until now.

ANYI network system is a decentralized social network composed by personal data units which is managed by users themselves. The data unit represents the individual of ANYI network, the units and the connections among them constitute the entire network.

General principle: Like physical properties, An individual should have full authority of his/her personal information, including personal data, social relationships, and so on.

Goal: To improve the social network both online and offline by rebuilding the relationships among the individuals, based on personal information units.

Features:

• Individuals manage their personal information by themselves and contact with others directly without using any servers.
• Ensure the security of data storage and transmission by using the asymmetric encryption technology.
• Achieve efficient and reasonable info resource interaction based on personal information units.
• Realize the circulation of reputation, help to spot fake news, amplify the effect of reputation in the real world.
• Realize the circulation of information resource in the social network which to maximize the benefits of social resources.

1. Current Troubles in Social Lives

We are enjoying the excellent benefit and convenience of the rapid development of the Internet and various technologies both online and offline. However there are still many outdated processes and new problems which are followed by the rapid changes.

• Data breaches occur frequently on various network platforms, It has already become a worldwide problem. Most people don’t think it is safe to save and manage important information on social softwares, And “Delete XX” movement also got massive support. Current social softwares only stay at the entertainment level and it is difficult for the social softwares to assist people’s social lives better without getting enough trust.
• Large amount of fake news and vague information on the Internet are seriously bothering us. The bad information spread so fast that we can not protect innocent people such as children from them.
• People identify information based on their own judgment. The limitation of individuals’ judgment gives the fake news much space. Furthermore, the fake news on the internet influences more widely and endless.
• It is an important way for people to get information from real social environment in daily lives. Currently, the information on the internet is disordered, Most of times, people obtain useful information from social environment occasionly. People cannot utilize the resource information in their social environment with high efficiency.
• Crisis of Trust. The Internet makes people’s social scope wider but there is no corresponding credibility support system. People don’t know the credibility of a new friend, so we are bearing the risks of being cheated or losing opportunities.
• It is common to use personal sensitive information (such as name,address, phone number, email…) as keyword to build the the relationships with different institutions. Our sensitive information is spreading widely due to the diversification nowadays.The risk of personal information leakage is high. Correspondingly, the institutions also have to cost on keeping these data safely. Moreover people can not manage the relationships easily.
• Nowadays, Filling out the application forms online or offline is normal to submit personal information. Everyone suffers the process of filling out the forms and waiting in long queues for the clerks to check. It will be worst if some mistakes happen. This incompetent way is wasting so much time again and again.
• In most business models, the customers’ data are stored and managed centralized. that makes individuals exist around various platforms like “fragments”. Personal social information is heavily dependent on the commercial platforms, influenced by the the rules and life cycle of them. Individual autonomy in current information age is rarely noticed.

To solve these above mentioned issues, We strongly believe that the ANYI network system is the best solution.

2. Introduction

Personal information unit is the basic element of ANYI network system. (hereinafter collectively referred to as ‘node’) The nodes are interconnected by peer-to-peer network technology (P2P) to form ANYI social network.

The node is composed of two parts: data and software (processing of data). In order to secure the data, the software part should be subdivided into two layers: intermediate layer and application layer.

The asymmetric cryptography technology is used to ensure the security of data storage and transmission, and the public key is used as the unique ID for the node in ANYI network.

The peer-to-peer network technology is used to realize direct communication among nodes by unified interaction rules, and center server is not needed anymore.

Individuals manage their own personal information autonomously; ANYI community customizes and maintains the interaction rules. The software that obeys the rules can be freely provided by any software vendor. No one can access or use any data without node owner’s permission.

2.1 Data

Personal data are only controlled by the node owner.
Data are independent of the application and users can freely choose applicaions to manage the data.

The data are divided into personal information (personal basic information, resource information, social information, access control, etc.) and ANYI network system setting information. Personal information is stored encrypted, the items is stored in a key-value form and the item-keys are uniformed defined. The owner can store any information on the node, including the information from outside.

ANYI node uses asymmetric cryptography technology to secure data. We also use the public key of the asymmetric cryptography as infividual’s ID at ANYI network. The ID will be used when building new relationships, sending/receiving messages with other nodes, and manage the access control. Moreover, multiple IDs can be derived from the original ID, to satisfy the anonymity requirements fo certain scenarios.

2.2 Intermediate layer

The intermediate layer is responsible for data processing, network interface and application software layer interfaces.

In the aspect of data, the intermediate layer realizes encryption/decryption of data and accesses data by using item-keys; In the aspect of interaction with the network, the common interaction interface of ANYI network should be realized; In the user interface aspect, the intermediate layer encapsulates data and keys to provide basic functional interfaces to the application layer.

2.3 Application Layer

The application layer uses the interfaces provided by the intermediate layer to perform data processing and network interaction, and provides a user-friendly operation interface.

To ensure security, the application layer does neither directly process data and keys, nor interact with the network directly.

2.4 Basic rules of personal nodes

ANYI network system runs on a peer-to-peer network protocol and adheres to the following rules to ensure network communication:

• When a node logins to the network, it broadcasts IP to the network if necessary and refreshes the IP info of the related nodes.
• The IPs are used to send messages to ohter nodes.
• If there is no IP of the target node, or the IP is invalid, the message will be sent by broadcast, The IP info will be updated when a valid response is received.
• The IP info will be auto-maintained if necessary when current node receives request or response.

Information exchange rules between personal nodes:

• Can send message or request proactively and have fault-tolerant processing when communication fails.
• Receives message.
• Synchronizes the updates in the network automatically.
• Responds query requests: Checks the permission and returns the result automatically.

3. Application Scenarios of ANYI Network System

3.1 Social network +

ANYI network system implements social functions by obeying the common interaction rules in the real world. User ID (The public key of the asymmetric cryptography) serves as the core part for the functions.

3.1.1 Establishing Relationships and Sending Messages

The two individuals establish the relationship by exchanging IDs, and manage the authorities and groups by using ID.

Messages for a certain node are encrypted. The sender encrypts the message with the recipient’s ID, a signature generated by the sender’s private key is also attached. The receiver can decrypt the message with his private key and verify the signature to confirm the message is not from a impostor.

3.1.2 Groups

Groups can be created and managed freely.

The group management is also based on IDs. There could be multiple administrators, and rules of the group can be freely customized. There will be no more limit from any platform, such as maximum number limit of members.

The sender uses the hashcode generated by all members’ ID to encrypt group messages, using a multi-signature rule (1-N) with a threshold of 1, so any member who contributed to the hashcode can decrypt the group message.

3.1.3 Management of different types of information

Personal daily life information can usually be divided into the following categories:

• Private information for oneself, such as schedule, memo.
• Instant information shared in a small scopes like family, friends, such as moments.
• Resource information such as business-related, like job opportunities, product discount, etc.

The life circles and targets of the above information are different. ANYI nodes can manage different kinds of information by classification and authority designation for each category.

For resource information, it is necessary to obey appropriate rules so that others can judge if the resource is still avalible. Generally, time, period, location, target people and conditions should be clear. The appropriate rules for different field will not be the same, ANYI community will keep on improving them.

Within the permission scope, the node can obtain real-time information updates of other nodes, and can search with keywords for certain resource information in the personal social network scope. Every node maintains their own node well, post resource to share with family or other scopes. So everyone can get precious resouce information based on trust.

3.1.4 Social network with Reputation

Reputation is an extremely important part of human social activities. Credit management in business has a long history. Personal credit management in the financial industry involves almost every social individual.

However, we don’t have a social product that can help managing and circulating dignified information in the daily lives. Offline people can only use reputation information in their social networks occasionally. People often miss opportunities or suffer losses because they can not get reputation information timely and effectively. This also provides huge space for continued scams and fraudulent business activities.

ANYI network system seeks to achieve the circulation of reputation information:

• Store the reputation info on ANYI node, and share it to social network.
• Relate people’s daily activities with their reputations.

The circulation of reputation can make people in social networks more self-disciplined, enable people to be able to identify a new face by referring to the reputation info from the proper network scope. The circulation of reputation can help to identify and mark the fake news and the creator, can amplify the influence of reputation and can also affect the development of the real society.

3.1.5 Management of Authority

As the amounts of information is increasing so fast that people can not catch up with it. People are losing the control of massive information. Currently we are involved in more and more social relationships. It is necessary for us to start managing information around us.

ANYI node supports flexible authority management which is based on the public keys(ID). We can manage the authority by minimum unit(each information item).

1. Pre-set permissions: The application processes the information according to such permissions. This is suitable for social relationships.

• You can classify various kinds of relationships.
• You can classify different types of information.
• You can set authority for any information (or information category).

1. Temporary authorization: It is for the situations such as the submission of personal information forms to non-friendship organizations.

3.2 Individual-centric new application scenarios

3.2.1 One-click information submission

Submitting personal information by means of paper or electronic forms is a very common routine. This is necessary but cumbersome, and it is easy to become a bottleneck in busy places such as airports. It will be worst if hand mistakes happen.

ANYI network system can improve this interaction. Using ANYI System, an individual can finish the submission by clicking one button.

• The organization prepares the request for ANYI interface. The request contains the specific request items and associated information.
• The individual scan the request with the node app and the app extracts the information from the node and generates the response content for the owner to confirm.
• The individual confirms the content and clicks the confirmation button to approve the submission,then the response content will be transferred to the organization at once.

Advantages:

• Efficient (fast, accurate):
  People can do the submission without filling out their basic information by hand repeatedly. There is nothing to worry about hand mistakes, and we don’t need to wait long in a queue for the clerks to check the papers.
• The interaction records will also retain on the personal node, so that the individual starts to be able to master personal interaction history.
• Organizations also can save costs accordingly.

Standardization:
Users have the right to know why these data are collected and how these data will be used. There should also be regulations to make sure the data are properly collected and used.

3.2.2 Reducing the usage of sensitive information & de-entity membership cards

Once one person has a node It means he has at least one ID that uniquely identifies himself. The ID can be used to establish relationships with organizations in daily life.
Sensitive information such as name, address, phone number, email, etc. are not necessary anymore in such cases. It will become safer because the frequency of sensitive information usage will be significantly reduced. Correspondingly, the organizations side can also save cost on keeping sensitive information.

On the other hand, the ID can take place of the entity membership cards or point cards. It does’n only eliminate the cumbersome card management for individuals, but also saves the costs around card issuance.

3.2.3 Individual-centered use of basic information

At the moment, our basic information is scattered in various organizations such as banks, insurance companies, government departments etc. When the basic information changes, we have to inform the organizations of the change one by one. And because we can not list up all the concerned organizations easily, it is possible that we forget some less important organizations like online shops. So we will be affected correspondingly, and the organizations also suffer the loss caused by the outdated data.

ANYI network system can solve this problem by this way:
The organizations stop storing customers’ data. They request the data from individual nodes if necessary.

• When establishing a relationship, the organization requests the individual’s permission of accessing certain items of data(without collecting the data at the moment).
• When some data changes, node owners just update the node.
• The organization requests the latest data through ANYI network system when necessary. (Personal nodes serve as unique source of personal basic data)

Advantages:

• When personal data changes, the only thing for a person to do is just to update his own node.
• We start to be able to manage the relationships, which means all are stored in our personal nodes. We can also inform concerning organizations of the change easily through ANYI network if necessary. When a certain business service is no longer needed, just disable the permission, so that the corresponding organization can not obtain the data anymore.
• The organizations can reduce the period of holding customers’ information or avoid to keep it, low-risk or no risk on leaking customers’ information. Confidentiality matters the most.
• The organizations can avoid the loss caused by outdated information.

3.2.4 Rationalization of information assets

We are used to more and more information services, such as online music, e-books, online education, insurance and so on. These services are our assets. However, we can not deal with such assets like the tangible assets, such as the exchange of ownerships.

Why can’t we sell/give an e-book or music to others?
In ANYI network system, we can use node ID to declare the ownership of the information assets, and the exchage of the ownerships can be realized through a change of the owner ID.

Let us take the online e-book as an example to explain how to realize it:

When the platform delivers a book to a purchaser A, First the platform uses A’s public key to declare that the e-book belongs to A, and encrypts the e-book with A’s public key. In this way, only A can decrypt the e-book.

When A wants to give/sell the e-book to B, A requests the platform to change the owner to B. After the platform verifies the ownership of A, the platform uses B’s pulbic key to re-declare the owner of the e-book and re-encrypts the e-book with B’s public key.

As a result, the e-book is available for the new owner, meanwhile the former owner of the e-book can not decrypt the e-book anymore.

Similarly, physical assets can also be managed by this mode. Because there is no easy-to-copy feature, the transfer of physical assets is simpler.
Furthermore, the manuals, quality guarantees, etc. of physical products can aslo exist in form of electronic information in ANYI network system. So we can get rid of the management of mass appendant materials of various products.

3.3 The future of individual information management

In addition to the cases above, there should be much more possibilities in all aspects of our daily lives. In current information era. the individuals are fragmented:

• In the field of e-commerce, the shopping histories are kept on the e-shops side. It is difficult for one person to view his all shopping history from a personal perspective.
• In medical aspect, medical institutions have personal medical records, but the individuals don’t . We have no a easy way to collect our health information from the medical institutions.
• In the social network aspect, people have their preference on different social network platforms. To keep necessary relationships, many people have to “seperate” themselves to use multi-social softwares.
• For education, a person may use different schools, websites, apps to learn a certain skill. we can not add up how much time we spent on it. This might be a strong encouragement if we can review the process of studying.

The personal node model of ANYI network system ensures personal priority. Individuals are able to collect all the information regularly, so that we can manage all the transaction information and points status across the organizations in the e-commerce aspect; We can check and use our own health information; We can manage social relationships naturally without being restricted by any third-party platforms; And also, referring clearly to studying our history data, we can adjust how to study in a better way.

On the internet world,the equality with the organizations ensures that we get back our own rights for information. Based on this, I believe everyone will enjoy a better life.

4. Centralization

4.1 Commercial decentralisation

Individual users are not free to migrate data between different social platforms. They cannot freely sell/give out information resources (such as music and e-books) they purchased. Users are enduring the risks of personal information being abused and leaked. Legitimate decision-making changes of commercial companies may affect ordinary users seriously(such as the termination of Email service).
These restrictions and risks on users are the inevitable outcome of the commercial centralization model. Without revolutionary change, the status quo cannot be changed or even prevented from deterioration.

The GDPR (General Data Protection Regulations) issued by the EU declares the rules for business and organizations and rights for citizens, However, GDPR only restricts enterprises by punishment after bad things happened, there is no effective damage recovery measures.

ANYI network system separates personal data from business platforms, individuals will not be so seriously influenced by the business organizations whatever happen on the business organization side.

The controversies about who is the data owner and who has right to control data also can be settled easily.

4.2 Administrative Centralization

As per mentioned in 3.2.1, we need professional judgement if the items collected are reasonable. We need the corresponding legal protection. The legitimate enforcement agency is needed when the information asset is treated the same as the properties. When keys are lost or stolen, we need a mechanism to help recover the control of our own nodes. ANYI network system also requires a real-name authentication mechanism to meet some certain needs.

In conclusion, we need legal lawmakers and law enforcers to protect and manage the world of information assets. This responsibility should only be taken by the governments.

5 Conclusions

Limited by the development of hardware and technology, the server-serving mode(both the client-sever mode and the browser-server mode) of software applications is the best long term solution. Commercial companies provided the resources that not everyone can afford, such as, storage, computing, security and so on that almost everyone can enjoy the applications easily.
However, In such server-serving structures, almost all the users’ data are stored on the servers. There is no independent existence of individuals on the internet. People are fragments around the platforms and anyone could be heavily influenced by the changes of the center platform, even if the changes are legit. Everyone can not collect all the personal data easily. It is impossible to build a real personal priority internet enviroment. As of now it is hard to say that we can continue to improve well in such condition.

Currently, we have got all the necessary conditions of hardware and technology to go without center-platforms. These are the following:

• The popularity of smartphone has enabled people to have independent storage, computing, management and network interaction capabilities.
• P2P network technology makes it possible for individuals to communicate without the third party.
• Asymmetric cryptography technology proves the security of information storage and transmission from theoretical and practical applications.

ANYI network system hopes to establish a new network that is reliable, persistent, efficient and reasonable to people’s lives.

Photo by z.b.p.

The post ANYI: A Dcentralized Social Network System Constituted by Personal Information Units appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Michel Bauwens, founder of P2P Foundation, had a fireside chat in the Commons Foundation Korea office on Oct 2. Titled “Blockchain and commons, the connecting link” the discussion focused mostly on the origin of commons and the open source movement.

Michel Bauwens interview in Germany during the meetup of PlatformCoop-Berlin

Below a partial summary of the lecture. For the last decade the Belgian activist has been researching how open source communities work and function. Market economies and capitalism are fundamentally based on the double entry ledger accounting, separation of capital and labor, private corporations, financing as well as technological breakthroughs from steam engine to internet. Open source communities are permissionless aggregations of people working on common projects, based not on commodity or labor, but based on contributions to create shared resources. These free aggregations around mutualized resources have no command hierarchy, but only a control hierarchy (i.e. there are gatekeepers, often called ‘maintainers’, who protect the integrity of the ecosystem). Open source communities are more inclusive, but also more competitive at the same time. When innovation becomes collective, they can outcompete isolated private companies, having more global and broader base of contributors than any single R&D department, no matter how big the company: e.g. Wikipedia is an open source encyclopedia that can not easily be replicated by private enterprises, nor even by the state. Commons are shared resources, managed by stakeholders or the communities of contributors in peer to peer (P2P) networks and governed by the norms and rules of the communities they serve. Primary ways people interacted through history were commons as in clans and tribes of the premodern collectivism era and later with corporative guilds in twelfth century Europe. According to Mr Bauwens capitalism deprived commons of natural resources: for example the common land in agriculture has seen its spaces appropriated through private property, while the excess number of landless farmers were forced to migrate and develop the industrial cities. There are four phases or types of commons: natural resources, social, open knowledge and urban commons. The latter are recently increasing exponentially in mobility, housing, food and energy projects to such an extent they are present in nearly every provisioning system where citizens can now choose between private, public and commons options. For example, in mobility there are private cars, public transportation but also shared transportation systems such as nonprofit or cooperative car-sharing; similarly for housing there are privately owned houses, public housing but also social or cooperative housing. When and where markets and states fail, civic associations are created to cope and this is what happened after the crisis of 2008, when urban commons started mushrooming. Urban commons are not generally producing but usually only redistributive initiatives, for example car sharing solutions redistribute mobility, but do not yet make cars. However food and energy commons are the two exceptions: organic agricultural commons do not split between consumption and production, but use commonly managed ecosystems, while renewable energy localize energy production closest to where consumption is needed. “Cosmo-local” production system can be simplified as follows: “everything light is shared and global, everything heavy is local” says Mr Bauwens. In this model, there is a convergence of social commons with the distributed manufacturing systems, that are currently coming online with the new technologies around 3D printing and which is distinct from the protectionist economic agenda of the Trump administration to repatriate manufacturing factories back to the US. In the cosmo-local model, intellectual property (IP) is globally shared in global open design communities.

Bettina Warburg, How the blockchain will radically transform the economy — TED 2016

“What do you need to do to scale this system globally?” Open source already means the cooperation and coordination of immaterial production at global scale, but in order to shift this model to physical production, it is necessary a particular kind of knowledge intermediation, i.e. accounting, and this is where the blockchain revolution comes in, by making possible global open and shared distributed ledgers where every transaction for physical goods can be verified. Accounting is at the core of civilization as it created the state system (the first writing found where ledgers in the Temple states of Sumer), while double entry book accounting, invented by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan monk in 15th century Venice, sees the world in terms of the growth and accumulation of private assets, making possible the development of capitalism. Blockchain in this respect can be seen as making possible new forms of digital accounting that consist of ‘post-double-entry’ bookkeeping, namely: 1) open and contributive accounting (such as practiced by the Canadian Sensorica project), 2) REA (resource event action) ecosystem accounting, which let us see flows in shared circular economies involving multiple players and 3) biocapacity accounting, which is based on direct vision of the flows of matter and energy and therefore not only financially driven. Open shared ledgers are a key mutual coordination mechanism to shift open source coordination from software to manufacturing. This contributive accounting allows fairness, openness, transparency, security and environmental friendliness. All the necessary technologies and tools are already existing or in development, but are fragmented and not integrated yet. One P2P interoperable ledger for all could be scalable infinitely if it used the right distributed ledger technology. Asset based coins and mutual credit cryptocurrencies are necessary, since they link directly to natural resources and human labor, while purely supply-demand driven digital assets are mostly speculative and do not give a view of the real world.

Don Tapscott, How the blockchain is changing money and business — TED 2016

“How do we reward for these structured regenerative activities?” Capitalism rewards only extractive activities without consideration for externalities (in Microeconomics courses externalities are studied as cases of market failures). In welfare state model the state is outside the capitalist model, in a market model the role of the state is weakened even further. One solution could be to internalize externalities directly in the production system. Mr Bauwens mentions that a study on the top forty companies in France revealed that none of them would be profitable, if they internalized pollution costs. As an example of a potential alternative methodology to fund regenerative activities in a systematic way, Mr Bauwens mentioned the Regen Network, which proposes the concept of an “ecological state protocol”, verifying the state of an ecological resource, lodging it on the blockchain and tokenizing that value creation. For example, organic farming results in less polluted water, with water agencies saving millions of Euro, but these environmental benefits cannot be rewarded in the present system. There is a need for structured funding of regenerative work and activities, that minimize the human impact on the environment and reduce the use of limited natural resources. Market economies reward only values created within markets, redistributing them in the best case scenario, while other kind of values are ignored. Value creation should be centered around commons.

“What to do with the private sector?” Societies need to establish new economies for the common good, which can be made explicit with new indicators and metrics [Economy for the Common Good (CG) has developed a full CG financial reporting with balance sheet and a whole new more ethical economic model]. Economies should serve communities as constitutions already mandate that the economy should serve the common good : e.g. corporations performing common good results could be entitled to pay less taxes. “In France the Napoleonic code established in 1804 did not recognize commons, allowing only public or private aggregations; in US, whose legal framework was developed later in time, regulations are even more purely market based” said Mr Bauwens.

Capitalism is in structural crisis amidst combined environmental problems and social tensions (increased income inequality and youth under/unemployment). Mr. Bauwens suggests that capitalist market economies should transform in ethical market economies, in which markets are embedded and society functions around commons: if the final goal of companies is to maximize value for stakeholders, the definition of value should not be restricted to profits, but include broader social and ecological impacts. States should also facilitate the transition to commons oriented sharing economies without commanding, but by incentivizing mutualization in a shared and contributed way. Non profit car sharing program require only one hundred cars for one thousand persons, ceteris paribus guaranteeing full mobility with only 20% of the ecological footprint.

“What to do with the liberated resources from automation and optimization?” Basic income could be an alternative, although commons economies can redeploy work forces in different sectors: e.g. organic farming requires 12% of workforce in the countryside, compared to the current 2% occupied in the agricultural sector. According to Mr Bauwens organic small sized farming is profitable or breaking even, while extensive industrial farming is losing money (he says in Europe industrial farmers would have negative incomes without European subsidies, a statement to be verified). “How to drive the transition from market centric to commons centered societies and economies?” To indicate the potential speed of change, Bauwens says that guilds in the twelfth century Europe were formed in the span of seventy years, for example in Ghent a progressive and innovative area in Belgium. Today digital nomads are spread around the world, collaborating in co-working spaces scattered globally: in Thailand (where Mr Bauwens lived extensively in Chiang Mai) there is a community of open source activists and software developers of the Mozilla Foundation for instance and many are already making a living through the token economy or bounties. This under the radar trend may transform from trans-local civic power to a transnational one, aiming to change entire metropolitan areas: redefining societies and economies in two hundred cities can have eventually a global impact. Mr. Bauwens is convinced that shared economies are scalable and replicable anywhere, leading to a broader social change. He stresses that commons are not utopia, commons are not necessarily ideally inclusive and the network status of individuals can be fluid, contentious and difficult: but even if they are not ideal, they are necessary to transition to new systems.

Michel Bauwens: Are We Shifting to a New Post-Capitalist Value Regime? — Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University.

The two hours, dense in unconventional and anticonformist concepts and ideas from different fields (anthropology, history, economics, finance, sociology and technology) provoked many questions in the participants, but time was limited and translation consumed more than half of the time available. However good discussions usually end with more open questions than definitive answers, in this respect the fireside chat with Mr Bauwens was very insightful and stimulating to maintain a sane skepticism about the future: to suspend judgement and keep on searching.

Article revised on Oct 9 by Michel Bauwens and Ann Marie Utratel to clarify some of the point of views expressed during the lecture and following Q&A discussions.

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