Vasilis Kostakis is a Greek Msc student at the economic and business faculty of the University of Amsterdam. He is working on a thesis “Laser Theory and Peer-to-Peer: Redefinition of the Society in the Information Age”, which he started to explain here.

As I understand it, the metaphor of the laser, as thousands concentrated points of light, seeks to determine under which conditions distributed efforts can be effective as a strategy for social change, and thus also, where it is not effective.

Vasilis started a blog to document the progress of his project. In the blog, he also started an interview process and asked me a number of questions, which helped me draw out some of my more recent insights.

One questions concerns the new type of leadership in peer-based communities which I identify as being both a priori invitational and a posteriori arbitrage, but staying clear of the production process itself; I deal with what I believe is the somewhat misleading concept of benevolent dictatorship; the other question concerns how the formulation of a peer to peer theory of social change, is related to earlier egalitarian traditions, such as Maxism and anarchism, and I try to show how it indeed differs.

The first 3 questions of the interview process are here.