I look forward to that with great interest.

@Dante-Gabryell Monson: “It seems to me that the comparison between the collectivist Maghribis and current distributed p2p networks does not totally match.”

Modern p2p relations are more varied and complex than Maghribi society, but the latter might represent a pattern that a p2p subculture could devolve into. There may already be examples.

PR

My first feeling is that distributed p2p networks are not collectivist, but can include certain advantages seen in collectivism while actually being “cooperative individualists”, based on “equipotentiality”

http://p2pfoundation.net/Equipotentiality

Some quotes from the following p2p blog post :

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/jaron-laniers-rant-against-online-collectivism-and-its-relational-alternative/2006/05/31

“this turn to the collective that the emergence of peer to peer represent does not in any way present a loss of individuality, even of individualism. Rather it ‘transcends and includes’ individualism and collectivism in a new unity, which I would like to call ‘cooperative individualism’. The cooperativity is not necessarily intentional (i.e. the result of conscious altruism), but constitutive of our being, and the best applications of P2P, are based on this idea.”

…

“The individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the service of the construction of a common resource. Implicit is not just a concern for the narrow group, not just intersubjective relations, but the whole social field surrounding it.

An important aspect is the issue of value, both the value in the sense of what is exchanged on a market, and the value in the sense of ethical meaningfulness, i.e. what we value. Peer to peer produces for use value, not exchange value. The wider community therefore derives ‘use value’ from this common form of production. Participants themselves derive value in two different ways: first, the uptake or not of the ‘production’ is a sign of the relative value of the product in its wider field of related offerings. Participants will partake in the general recognition/valuation of the project in the wider society. Second, within, a similar form of recognition will operate according to the contribution of participants. The process is often measured or aided by social accounting tools specifically designed to that effect, and individual recognition of effort is always a key element of open source projects. Peer to peer is therefore also a process of social recognition and valuation, that replaces or complements money as a token of social recognition.”

…