Michel Bauwens asked me to post the background narrative to my Peer Trust Network Project. The project is in its infancy, and is very much an ongoing story. The narrative is long, so I’m breaking it into parts. When I started the project it wasn’t even a project, it was just a list of books and people, and a desire to learn more about issues affecting humanity, and the Earth itself. Although people are sometimes moved by an election (Howard Dean, for example) or a cause, in general, at least in the United States, people have little hope for real improvement and change. Is humanity just doomed? The important question, to me was, “can we do anything?” and by extension, “Can I do anything?” I took the assumption of “we’re screwed, there is nothing we can do” as a hypothesis to disprove. First, I had to identify root global issues, if there were any. I started reading.

Rather than trying to help fix one particular problem or issue, I wanted to try to understand them all, and see how they fit together.

Global issues: too many targets

I came upon the Foundation for P2P Alternatives as I was doing research on global issues and solutions people were attempting. The more I learned, particularly about the how people are and can mobilize to affect change, the more my research crossed the material within the P2Pfoundation.com wiki.

In my research I noticed a lot of organizations that were working toward similar ends, or symptoms, of common root problems. Sometimes these organizations were at cross purposes, but usually they were just in isolation, unaware of each other, and unknown to all the frustrated people who would like to make a difference. These frustrated peers feel isolated and hopeless. I have always been on the edge of that hopelessness, but unwilling to resign myself to it. I also never found anything that seemed the right fit for me; I wanted to find THE cause to focus on.

One of the books I read was Blessed Unrest, where Paul Hawken explores the commonality of civil and environmental movements. He identifies thousands of organizations and millions of people with the desire and the will for change, working toward improving civil rights and the environment. His site, www.wiserearth.org, is a social networking site for these organizations and people. Where he saw a common push, I saw, again, many isolated pushes. The problem wasn’t that desire, ingenuity, or effort was lacking, the problem was there were too many targets. Where he saw a movement, I just saw movement.
I wanted to narrow down those targets–problems and global issues–to just a few. Ideally, one.

Research continues

Early on, Robert D. Steele’s Amazon list of problems and books about them helped me start my investigation. I saw a presentation from him to an Amazon conference of some sort, and he had grand ideas of global intelligence networks and microtransactions. It interested me enough I looked through his presentation, which were slides packed with information and ideas. His booklists helped me amass a solid reading base, even if I didn’t agree with his analysis. In looking through his issues I decided there were too many, and there had to be more common elements. A little later I found another solo effort to piece together the big picture: Anup Shah’s www.globalissues.org. From here I went into everything from the militarism of the United States (Chalmer’s Johnson’s Sorrows of Empire), to Peter Barnes’ Capitalism 3.0, to Yochai Benkler’s Wealth of Networks, to Dee Hock’s One from Many, to Lawrence’s Lessig’s The Future of Ideas. Somewhere in there I read Dan and Chip Heath’s Made to Stick (global issue: getting ideas to stick?).

Lawrence Lessig’s own shift away from “intellectual property” to the issue of corruption, earlier in 2007, was a sign that he realized the hopelessness of legislative reform in the current atmosphere. However, I felt Lessig’s quest would ultimately find similar frustration. Was corruption more root problem, or symptom? Power corrupts, so the root problem seemed to be both distribution of power and accountability. Perhaps he was chasing a bigger picture too, and just didn’t realize it yet.

Thanks to Lessig I discovered there were efforts toward what I had decided was needed: a global network of transaction tracking built from public data and peer-submitted data, the internet incarnation of “follow the money.” With such a tool, I thought the public might be able to identify corruption, increase accountability, and nonviolently attack the worst offenders in the realms of big business and power, using boycotts and peer journalism to cut off the money supply to societal cancers. The Sunlight Foundation was looking to help shed light on these dark corners and backrooms, and Maplight.org was a Congressionally-focused start of the Follow-the-Money idea. However, Maplight.org was limited to the Hill and California. This information was needed everywhere, and their plan was to roll it out state-to-state. State-to-state? That would take a while. Why weren’t they offering to help set other groups up in other states? Surely interested parties could create nodes all over the US (and the world), agree on basic standards, and build a network much faster than a single organization attempting 1-by-1 rollouts. I should have contacted them and raised that point. I thought about trying to start an Oregon version, but I wasn’t satisfied that the “rootest” problem had really been identified. The socioeconomic situation in the United States and the world wasn’t a just a result of corruption, or the flow of money. I needed to dig deeper, see if there was a more fundamental, systemic problem.

The problem of copyright: the tip of the iceberg

I caught a cold from family at the beginning of 2008 and, as I went through boxes of tissues and liters of tea, I followed and posted in a forum discussion on copyright. Through this discussion I began questioning the logic and relevance of the “incentive argument,” the argument behind Article I, Section 8, Clause 8 of the US Constitution. I came to believe, I think reasonably, that it wasn’t valid: restriction was doing more harm than good. In so arguing, it sunk in, again, what a hopeless and pointless struggle removing those restrictions would be. However, something more positive was also emerging: I was having to look at the fears of creators. In some cases, these were reasonable, but in other cases they were irrational, vitriolic hate toward pirates, communists, and idealistic hippies (one-in-the-same, of course). To ask creators to jump ship on copyright was asking too much. The risks were their very livelihoods. They needed to have a viable alternative that was more attractive. They needed a compensation model that would work reasonably in a world where information was free, as in freedom, for all.

I was up for this thought challenge, and I began brainstorming what this meant for films, literature, music, and video games. I figured that scientific literature and patents already followed a service model, as did a lot of commercial software creation and writing; creators were paid to create through either a grant or a wage, and didn’t retain rights. Entertainment was nearly there. The future was a service model.

Looking at file-sharing the need for a solid service model became even more clear. File-sharing is near-zero distribution cost if you’re online. People know this, particularly each new generation. Trying to restrict those freedoms hasn’t worked, isn’t working, and won’t work in the future. So what model do we use right now? The current model, any time someone buys a copy of a work they could download for free, is a donation model. Regardless of any moral judgement, the reality is that the person is choosing to give money, even though they can obtain the work for free. Donation seems like a really weak compensation model, and I couldn’t reasonably expect creators to go for it.

I had thought before about a site that has prize pots for game ideas, and contests between creators to make those ideas. It would be a collaborative, yet competitive, environment. I didn’t like the competitive element much because the internet seems much more collaborative, but I didn’t see a better way at the time. Other people had tried or suggested other models, like digital art auctions (never made if off the ground, but it might work), pledge systems, fund-per-milestone, and on. There wasn’t any reason all those couldn’t be tried, and donations could be possible at any time.

I realized that the problem wasn’t the right model, the problem was enabling every possible model people could come up with. The creators and users needed ownership of the means of facilitation so that transactions would be as liquid, cheap, reliable, and direct as possible. Middlemen had no place in such a commons.