Gordon Cook has finished the first half of what is planned to be an extensive book-length treatment of the massive collaborative ‘optical’ networks that are being built for global science, with an application layer built on top.

In this part, which is also the February-April 2011 issue of his famous newsletter, he also refers generously to the work of the P2P Foundation and Kevin Carson in particular.

The draft version is available here, with intro here.

Gordon Cook writes:

One of the threads that I have developed in these first five chapters, and will continue to develop over the next several months with the remaining chapters is an understanding of what a full-fledged optical network based information and communication technologies ecosystem looks like in the Netherlands and should look like in the USA. It is time to make more people aware of what is happening and the possibilities inherent in what it can enable within SURFnet and the GLIF and by Internet2 in the United States.

He continues:

“I also address a more ambitious goal. I am seeking to establish whether or not there is, or can be, a community-of-interest between the high-end research groups and a rapidly growing grassroots “edge”. These are efforts of small communities of mostly younger people located currently at the edges of 20th century large corporate-based capitalism. This is an archaic capitalism that is being challenged on all levels and is very likely unsustainable for many reasons – political, economic, resource-based, ecological, and a general inability to manage the emergence of new networked technologies that undermine the sustainability of the old centrally-based, hierarchical, corporate mechanism. I begin this discussion with my Preface and Chapter 1 which point out, in language that a decade ago would have been unthinkable, the capture and corruption by financial elites of the political and social structure of especially the United States, and only to a somewhat lesser extent Europe and most of the developed world.

To do this I use the analysis of John Robb and his blog Global Guerrillas, as well as the broad community-of-thought represented by Michel Bauwens in his Peer-to-Peer Foundation that seeks to organize a globally-based effort on behalf of the open-source knowledge -commons. Increased awareness of these new technologies has spread in such a way as to place the future locus of economic and political sustainability in local communities and cities rather than where they are currently located namely in the capitals of what Robb calls the “hollowed-out nation states.”

In the conclusion, he writes regarding Kevin Carson’s contributions:

“I have had two lengthy conversations with Kevin A. Carson, author the Home Brew Revolution: A Low Cost Manifesto. This extraordinary work should earn him a PhD were he to ever want one. More important though for my purposes is my hope that he, Michel Bauwens and others will assist me in connecting with the folks who are building these local alternatives. I have the high end expertise. One critical thing that at the moment I lack are bridges to local “tribal” leaders along with feedback telling me what they think of the information that I am trying to convey, as well as how to do this job more effectively. Kevin who has been reading a draft of this publication told me today:

“My main reaction so far is that this is a more reliable and secure specific mechanism for guaranteeing the communications prerequisites for the kind of phyle or resilient community network Robb describes, and in general for a society where exchange of CAD/CAM files, teleconferencing, etc., replaces most of the physical movement of goods and people”.

“In general, I think most of the solution will be automatic, as this is a sort of perfect storm given the crisis conditions of capitalism. People are becoming underemployed and being thrown back on the informal economy, looking for means of self-provisioning through networking with their neighbors, etc, at the very same time that we’re experiencing a singularity in the possibilities of low-cost small-scale production technology. So networked local micro-manufacturing economies will emerge from this “time of troubles” because it’s the only solution possible given the tools to hand.”