This piece is a reaction to the thesis of Ulises Mejias on the limits of Networked Participation, which I have also summarized here. I recommend that you read either one as background to this intervention.

It becomes increasingly clear to me that there two major positions about the potential for participation and that P2P Theory represents a clear third voice.

The first position is that of the participatory enthousiasts with a technology-determinist bent. These people see the objective evolution of participatory media as resulting in a new and better society marked with increased participation.

The second position is that of Ulises Mejias and other similar critics, which points out how that participation is already taking place within a context of economic power which subverts and manipulates that desire for participation.

The advantage of the first position is that you strongly feel that objective trends and history is with you, but the disadvantage of such technological determinism is that you indeed ignore the dominant social and economic forces that bent technology to their advantage.

The advantage of the second position is the advantage of any realism, is that you also feel that reality is on your site, but the disadvantage is that it may easily fall into cynicism, and that it objectively disheartens energies for change. This is not an idle criticism, as I rememb er vividly reading an article in an environmental magazine, showing that hypercritical education about the dangers to the environment was actually disempowering students, while bringing them out to take care of a natural environment, created a bond that turned them into activists for life. (I do not remember the source, sorry).

There is a third position however, which I think is that of Gandhi or Martin Luther King. It is to see what is wrong with present reality, and to work consistently towards a better alternative. Such a position might be strengthened by a recognition of positive objective evolutions, and I’m pretty sure both these leaders recognized that there were shifts in society strengthening their struggles, and they could use these forces to ultimately prevail. At the same time, the limits pointed out by the second position, gave them crucial information about obstacles that needed to be faced.

I would like to think that this is the positioning taken by the P2P Foundation and P2P Theory. It is to recognize that there are indeed objective trends that create a huge opportunity for change; and it uses the information of the critics to define more precisely what needs to be done. See for example my earlier contribution on defining the ‘technical characteristics for human emancipation’, which is based on a wish to identify more close what levers can be used to go beyond certain obstacles inherent in the invisible architectures of power.

We have to avoid both the traps of all forms of determinism, i.e. it will all happen outside of us, we can just ride the wave, and the trap of cynism (‘don’t you see how all these trends are just a plot of the powers that be’).

This being said, to return to the original presentation by Ulises Mejias, I tend to believe that he is also making mistakes in his analysis.

For example, he claims that participatory media networks are a sign that the social is totally subsumed to the (capitalist) economy. He even says that exchanges between the nodes are market driven. This fails to see the double truth that such networks are both used for market purposes, but also for purposes that go beyond the market functioning. As Adam Arvidsson argues, there is a lot more non-market and non-monetary value being created, than the part that is captured by the market forces. We would insist that peer production is both immanent (used by the market) and transcendent (having characteristics that go beyond the market).

He also claims that the actions on networks are exclusively marked by self-interest. Here again, we would posit that self-interest and collective interest can be congruent, and that it is precisely this that happens in peer production, and why it emerges so strongly. This on top of recognizing that altruist behaviour is also present.

There are a number of similar claims that I would dispute and that all are based on this general idea of a almost total subsumption of the networks to the market.

Here is a proposed different positioning:

1) Distributed networks, when fully implemented to give freedom of action and engagement to individuals, represent a unprecedented opportunity to creates new types of social relationships that bo beyond market limitations

2) But this is only a potential, and depending on perceived interests and the state of consciousness of the user, this potential will be used in differential ways

3) We need strategies of change that work both on the objective characteristics of networks, and on the subjective/intersubjective states of consciousness, in order to make advances

4) The network is indeed by itself insufficient, and can be used for neutral human relationships. Such neutral relationships are by themselves not regressive (as they are an advance on obligatory community), and they can be used to create and sustain different forms of exchanges, such as the gift (which Mejias mentions) and non-reciprocal peer production (which he seems totally to ignore in his presentation).

5) All of this is basically, up to us. That doesn’t mean we will succeed, that doesn’t mean progress will happen, but it does mean that those who want to participate in such an endeavour, have a historical opportunity do to so.