Neural magazine is an excellent ‘print’ magazine on digital art and culture, whose issue #38 was dedicated to the inter-relation between ‘digital peer to peer’ and ‘physical face to face’ dynamics, and carried, amongst many other interesting articles, interviews with Superflex, Platoniq and Dmytri Kleiner. It’s well worth purchasing a copy here.

Here is the text of my own interview:

“1.* Why you founded the “Foundation for P2P Alternatives” and which are its goals?

The Foundation is two things, a legal organization based in the Netherlands; but most of all a global collective of people interested in the emergence and spread of the peer to peer paradigm. Our primary aim is to create a knowledge commons around peer production, governance, and property; or also in other words, the open, participatory and commons oriented paradigms, and this for every field of human activity. So we created a wiki/blog for knowledge creation and diffusion, and different community tools. But our ultimate goals are really political, i.e. contributing to the creation of a successor civilization and political economy, with the ‘common'(s) as its core. My own aim is how to extend the commoning, sharing, and cooperation that we discover is possible through distributed networks, into other areas of our life, including the social reproduction of life and its material reproduction. At the same time, we are pluralist, we have a general idea of where we want to go, but there are many different paths that dialogue together. My own goal is that the P2P Foundation can be co-constitutive of a grand alliance for the commons, consisting of free culture movements (representing knowledge workers), social justice movements (the traditional value producing classes, i.e. workers, farmers, progressive enterpreneurs), and the forces defending the biosphere (the green movement).

2.* You’ve extensively researched peer-to-peer mechanisms and their historical roots. Can you explain the parallel between the ancient Roman Empire evolution into the feudal system and the current peer-to-peer relation with neoliberal  capitalism? Did you find other historical roots of its core mechanisms, before the computer networks?

To determine the presence of peer to peer dynamics, in which individuals have long-term reciprocal relations with a whole and not with other individuals, which is also technically called communal shareholding, I use Alan Page Fiske’s relational grammar, summarized here.

Before the advent of digital media, it was much more severely limited in time and space because of the existence of high transaction costs for communication, but commons and commoning have been of all times, and are only seriously under threat under capitalism, through paradoxically late capitalism is reproducing new commons in the digital sphere.

The parallel I’m making with the Roman to feudal transition is therefore not exactly that it is involving peer to peer networks, but that there are interesting similarities in the type of phase transition we can expect when we move from one system of dominance to another.

My core argument, which differs substantially from Marxism, is that phase transitions occur when both producing and managerial classes find some type of mutual benefit in a new mode of production and social organization. Both the Roman system and our current global system suffer from a crisis of extensive globalization, they can no longer expand at a sustainable cost. In the case of the Roman system, it reached a peak of affordable complexity (peak agriculture, peak gold and peak slavery), sometime in the 2nd-3rd century. Given the declining tax base, lack of expansion, drying up of slaves, lack of gold and declining acreaage of agricultural land, there was both an exodus (slave revolts), but also an interest of members of the ruling elite, to switch from slave-based landholdings to coloni (serfs). The interesting parallel is that the new feudal system, which consolidated after the First European Revolution of 975, combined a relocalization of production around the domain system, with a global open design community that shared innovations on a continent-wide basis, i.e. the system of monasteries and travelling monks of the Catholic Church. I believe the transition to a peer- or commons-based political economy, will combine relocalized production under the form of open and distirubed manufacturing, global open design communities for innovation. It is quite likely that several aspects of the new evolving society may have a neo-medievalist flavor. Thus, there may be more parallels between the transition from capitalism to peer production, and the Roman transition, than the last transition between feudalism and capitalism.

3.* On your peer-to-peer foundation blog there are plenty of real life examples of small communities that daily applies peer-to-peer strategies to re-appropriate and enhance some parts of their life. Do you think that peer-to-peer structures can be one of the most effective strategies to make our capitalist society sustainable, or they can be one of the possible definitive tool to start a real radical change? How do you relate your analysis with classic Marxism?

The specific approach of the P2P Foundation is that we believe both are possible and likely. Just as proto-feudal and proto-capitalist forms initially strenghtened the survival of the respective Roman and feudal systems, so we believe that P2P forms will initially be used by forces in the present system, solving some of its problems and therefore in a paradoxical way, strenghten it. I believe that a next Kondratieff wave, largely organized as a form of green capitalism, will have to substantially use P2P innovations in order to be successful. While this is happening, peer forms will have the opportunity to move from emergent stage, to parity stage, with commons-based peer production increasingly center stage and also with increasingly self-confident communities that have forms of political expression and animate powerful social movements, that use compromises with the dominant system to their own benefit. This sets the stage for a further phase transition, in which peer producers, finding the limits and self-destructive behaviour of the capital system unacceptable, will radically transform the present system. I must admit though, that my belief in a reconfiguration of capitalism, may be misplaced, as there is no sign that the dominant players of the previous dominant wave, i.e. the dominant players of neoliberal finance, are willing to lose power. So this change may require its own ‘revolution’, and it may not occur in time to avoid the decomposition of the present system. If it fails to occur, then we face much more serious dislocation and decomposition, and the phase transition will have to occur in chaotic circumstances, in the context of economic and social decline. It’s not something to wish for. To distinguish the two scenarios, I speak of the high road to peer to peer, and the low road. It seems to me that the Roman transition was an example of decomposition, while the feudal to capitalist transition was a more straightforward transition to a system of higher complexity and productivity. Both were of course very costly in human terms. In other words, we may already have reached the end phase of the capital system, with no possibility for midway transformation.

4.* Some of the most celebrated peer-to-peer strategies involve communities dealing with social topics rooted in their urban territory. Is this influencing current urbanism studies? And how can we define the so-called “peer-to-peer urbanism”?

There are many strands of peer to peer urbanism, but I believe three main ones, and they are interconnected and should possibly from one synthetic movement in the future. The first is the urban connectivity movement, which aims to assist the autonomy of individuals and social groups through the use of digital technologies, let’s call it the digital cities trend. The second one is the trend towards sustainability and urban resilience, which we could call the eco-cities movement. The second can tremendously benefit from the new neighborhood sharing initiatives that are being born, and the fact that social media and lower transaction cost are enabling all kinds of product service systems that lower the footprint of human activity by substantially re-socializing infrastructures. Finally, the P2P Foundation itself is closest to a participatory planning movement, called bio-urbanist architecture, which combines participation with the rediscovery of biophilic patterns for human living, as exemplified by the work of Christopher Alexander and followers of this pattern language like Nikos Salingaros. It’s aim is to reclaim our cities to recreate them from the bottom-up through community engagement, instead of through centralized planning or pure neoliberal market mechanisms. What distinguishes bio-urbanism is that it claims that there is concrete scientific knowledge, i.e. the biophilic patterns, which can inform a responsible choice.

5.* In common sense “peer-to-peer” is used to define music and video files exchange networks. These very working exchange systems, evolving since a decade, have introduced many people to the culture of “digital abundance.” Do you think that they can constitute the common ground to explain peer-to-peer strategies? And do you think that efforts like the Pirate Party can play an important role in this educational effort?

Yes, essentially, I believe that the new p2p paradigm is the expression of the new life conditions of the knowledge workers, which represent about 40% of the working population in the West, and their new ways of digital socialization. It is the rediscovery of free cooperation through the digital commons, which set the stage for a rethinking of human life and social organization in general. It’s start from a powerful realization based on real practice: “if we can do it here, why not in the rest of our life”. This new form of social awareness first grows as real practice, creates its own infrastructures, but when it comes under attack, it gains political awareness, and the Pirate Party is the first political expression of this. But so are free software, free culture and open access movements, though these were less explicitly political in the ‘parliamentary’ sense. So, the Pirate Party is an important milestone in this regard. Green parties, which are sociologically very close though of a previous generation of knowledge workers, are also quite close to the value system and generally support the same demands.

The danger comes from some expressions of the so-called ‘p2p right’, which use the trend towards p2p organization as a further way to undercut public services and further privatize our societies by destroying all that is common. This is very clearly the approach of the British Tories who use the ‘Big Society’ as a battering ram to further destroy the remnants of the welfare state. I personally believe that strong public services are a guarantee for healthy peer production.

Knowledge workers cannot transform society on their own, that’s why ultimately we need an alliance between the constructive ‘Nowtopian’ forces creating new forms of life, the social protest movements that are re-energized by of the decline of the neoliberal system; the social forces protecting our biosphere, but also, certainly in the South, the movements representing the majority rural population (and their links to traditional physical commons). We need a grand alliance of the commons. It is some way off, but the premises are being constructed. However, knowledge workers and especially the new generations of digitally socialized youth, will be at the forefront of the coming struggles, since their future is at stake. Neoliberalism is destroying their future, and they are more and more aware of it. As the crisis intensifies, peer to peer based social forces will increasingly become anti-systemic.

6.* Mutual education is another big opportunity in peer-to-peer social relationships. Beyond the informality of processes, involving curricula and personal reputation, it seems very important to know acknowledged persons who can point you to the right resources or provide them themselves more than compulsively searching or creating online resources. How do you think this processes can be structured and simultaneously be open?

So far, the focus has been on informational processes that combine crowd judgment with algorhythms, in the context of largely corporate platforms with their own agendas. But I believe that the future lies in individuals and affinity communities taking up the responsibility of filterning and co-learning by themselves, by injecting qualitative expertise and value judgements in the process. For example, that’s what we do, of course imperfectly, at the P2P Foundation, i.e. we built a contextopedia, we do not just trust whatever social media are throwing at us, but we repurpose and transform it for our own needs. And we combine these informational processes, with all kinds of extra face to face organisation, by organizing conferences, physical meetups, funding mechanisms, and the like. In addition, mere networks cannot provide sustainability, so one must construct real solidarity mechanisms and built real social movements.

7.* The kind of space that is created in these kind of networks is an active and multifaceted “collaborative space.” Usually it’s a space dispersed online but often locally very rooted. In your opinion, how these two different aspects can be effectively exploited to produce the maximum outcome in physical reality? And is the perception of this new hybrid space already (unconsciously) familiar to us, or we are still to get used to it?

I think a vanguard is certainly already used to it, as many open software and hardware projects prove. And as both projects and tools become more ubiquitous, it becomes a larger social reality.

My ingredients would be, hinted already in your own formulation of the question:

1) adequate leadership from the project visionaries

2) adequate online platform (a lot needs to be done on open design where open collaborative tools are still in their infancy, but progress is constant)

3) rootedness in real communities which also have f2f connections

4) a conjoint model for both collective project sustainability (the more easy part since rotating members are adequate to keep a project alive) and more importantly, individual sustainability. This means that for a project to go from emergent to stable, it has to square the issue of economic survival.

Starting and evolving projects initial stages is easy, but they can only survive longterm through some accomodation with present economic realities. Doing this in a way that strengthens rather than weakens the autonomy of peer producers, is the real challenge.

8.* You often mention David De Ugarte’s “phyles,” which is about communities creating and collectively participating in businesses. Why do you think that this concept is essential for peer-to-peer culture?

There are several ways to look at this. The first is as a missing link between the relocalization of production and global open design communities, because though I believe this transformation will happen, it is unlikely that all forms of trade and material globalization will disappear. So phyles are a missing link and offer sustainability and a ‘global presence’ for the p2p communities which are in essence value affinity communities centered around common objects of cooperation. The other issue is that of surplus value, in a traditional capitalist format, surplus value is appropriated away from either workers or peer producing communities, even as they may practice profit or benefit sharing processes.

A phyle guarantees that the surplus value stays within the communities that create the value. If a community is not strong enough to create its own phyle, I suggest a preferential attachment to commercial entities that are closest in ethical terms to the value system of peer to peer. Following Daniel Pinchbeck of Evolver, I’m suggesting practicing corporate alchemy, i.e. just as profit-maximisation companies are seeking to benefit from p2p value creation, so can p2p communities create entities that are beneficial to them and benefit from their relations with commercial entities. Having a phyle structured around the knowledge, design, or software commons is a guarantee for the self-reproduction of the commons and the commoners.

9.* You once defined the essence of peer-to-peer networks as being “permissionless networks.” Can you elaborate more on that?

In modernity, knowledge was opened up away from the privatising of knowledge in guild and religious communities, but was at the same time institutionalized in an expert-based credentialist system, and under the control of state and capital. This means participation is always conditional on some prior agreement from an authority, based on expertise, political power, or access to capital. The new p2p-oriented social systems allow (generally), everyone to participate (provided you have technological, social and cognitive access capabilities), without such prior permission, and the selection for quality becomes post-hoc, i.e. after the production of alternatives. Forking strengthens this capability. The exact form of this post-hoc selection, for quality is usually determined by the nature of the object (medicine and science require a lot more expert judgment than say journalism or the wikipedia). Peer systems also are a way to evacuate conflict from where it is unnecessary, i.e. the field of immaterial abundance related to marginal reproduction costs, to where it is still necessary, i.e. allocation of scarce resources via hierarchy, democracy or market pricing. But is is a great social advance that people who disagree with you, no longer can block the production of alternatives.

10.* You once said: “Technology has to be imagined before it can be invented.” There’s any kind of yet-to-be-invented technology, or improvement of existing ones, that would boost peer relationships, or we just need to creatively use (or program) the technology we already have?

Here I’m finally going to sound conservative … I think that the meaning of our age is to translate the realms of matter, life and mind to its informational structure, in a kind of matter-energy-information metaphysics. This is now well underway through digitalisation, AI-Bio-Nanotech, and social media. All these things are essentially ‘already there’. So the real issue is, under what context will they evolve and become mainstream social realities. Will it be in the context of a decomposing global capitalist system, some new kind of feudalism, or rather, a humanized and civilized peer to peer society centered around civil society and commoning, and where public and private forms still exist, but as serving civil society.

We need to strenghten the distributed aspects of our infrastructures, in order to guarantee permission-less peer production. The Wikileaks affair has taughts us how fragile the current infrastructures still are to central or decentral control by the state and corporations.

In the New Years message to our sympathizers, I proposed the following strategy:

Excerpt:

“We need to

* use the existing infrastructures for immaterial exchange for personal and social autonomy

We started by creating an infrastructure that allowed for peer to peer communication. Out of this striving came the internet and its end to end principle, web 2.0 and its possibilities for participation, and social media allowing for intense relational interaction, and tools such as wikis which allow for the collaborative construction of knowledge.

The creation of this infrastructure was a combination of efforts of civil society forces, governments and public funding, and private R&D and commercial deployments. It’s an imperfect world full of governmental control, corporate platforms, but also many capabilities for p2p interaction that did not exist before.

My assessment is that this struggle can experience setbacks but can no longer be undone. They have become civilisational achievements that are just as necessary for p2p-commoners than for the powers that be, even if they can impose a ‘dissent tax’

* change those infrastructures itself away from centralized and corporate control

But precisely because phase 1 is an imperfect one and partially if not largely in control of forces which have their own agenda of (political) control and (commercial) exploitation, as lately exemplified so well in the corporate decisions around Wikileaks, we are increasingly realizing the need to control these very infrastructures and insure that they can continue to allow and even expand the possibilities for p2p communication and value creation.

Hence the movements for free software, open standards, independent p2p infrastructures. There are many efforts underway in this area, some successful, some fledlging, some of which will go nowhere and be defeated.

Success on this front also depends on what the ‘enemy’ is doing. To the degree they want to go too far in controlling the platforms, to that degree they will mobilize the counterforces building the counter-infrastructures, and convince more and more users to use them.

* use the existing infrastructrures, and the new p2p-transformed ones, to change the very infrastructure of production of material goods, making it more sustainable in the process

As we get habituated to p2p communication and value creation, and move from open software to open knowledge to open design, p2p communities get involved in redesigning the means of production and making, i.e. open design necessarily needs to a reconfiguration of production processes towards ‘distributrion’. Open design communities moreover have no perverse incentives for planned obsolence or for hindering the sharing of innovation, so the new infrastructures have a bias towards sustainability, but also to relocalized production and a rationalisation of wasteful and unsustainable material globalization.

* change the property structures of the infrastructure and means of production in the process

As the new modalities of open design and distributed manufacturing are deployed, peers discover and experience the many constraints imposed by the old order of production, such as modes of property, the lact of benefit or revenue sharing, compound-interest based capital which is not easily available for them etc … They start building their own platforms, governance foundations, etc …This creates a need to extend p2p practices and modalities to the rest of the economy, with efforts towards forms of peer funding, open money, a revival of cooperatives and mutualism, and many other. Commoners also discover their affinities with other counter-economies such as the solidarity economy, fair trade, and other forms of commons-friendly enterprise and start developing practical and political alliances

* raising of political awareness and expression as a means of overcoming opposition

As all the above processes are undertaken, digital commoners learn about and experience the political and economic forces that are arraigned against them, and become more politically aware, discovering the need for their own modalities of political action and expression. They may also discover affinities with the enemies of their enemies, other social movements, commons-friendly enterpreneurs, etc

* transform the infrastructures so that the abundance of immaterial sharing can co-exist with the sustainability of the planet, and the demands for equity and social justice

Immaterial cooperation rests on a physical infrastructure which is currently part and parcel of an unsustainable mode of production. Commoners learn the importance of recognizing the natural scarcities of the physical world and how knowledge sharing and open design are themselves vital factors to redesign the unsustainable infrastructure, and to transform it into resilient modalities that insure the perenity of the new social practices. Digital commoners ally with those forces that combine an interest in the abundant sharing of immaterial resources, in the context of preserving natural resources, and according to the principles of social equity.”