One of the other interesting presentations during the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop was Tere Vaden’s intriguing presentation entitled a “Critique of Cybercommunism”. This title is misleading as Tere Vaden actually points out that people in favour of free and commons oriented approaches shouldn’t be satisfied with using tools owned by centralized corporations.

Tere makes an important difference between four stages of freedom: 1) closed approaches; 2) Single-Free approaches based on sharing on proprietary platforms; 2) Doubly-Free approaches involving the production of a real commons; 3) and finally Triple-Free approaches where the infrastructure is owned as well.

In his own words:

“triple-free peer production (whether in free software, media, education…) includes the ownership of the means of production down to the level of electricity, the physical infra etc. I’m thinking of Gandhi in South-Africa: when he with his colleagues wanted to start a newspaper highlighting the racial/economic/legal issues, they could not get it printed (economy + censorship), so they bought a printing press and moved with it to the country where they grew their own food & wrote & published. I’m thinking that something like this might in the long run be necessary if we want to escape the dependency & falling back of peer production to waged labour.”

Here is the full graph: