Many interesting points are made in this contribution by Eric Hunting. First of all, how our logistical systems steer our lifestyles and cultures and how we need to change the first if we want to facilitate the change of the latter.

I’m also fond of the medieval comparison made here. Please do read this little gem of strategic p2p thinking.

Eric Hunting:

“We assume the infrastructure of our civilization derive from our culture and lifestyle models when, in fact, it’s the other way around. We’ve assumed a culture and lifestyle to accommodate the logistics of a particular infrastructure architecture built on Industrial Age market paradigms. Post-Industrial culture is becoming emergent because our infrastructures have been subtly changed by technology and global logistical situations, opening up some unexpected alternatives. The Industrial Age didn’t adapt to us, we adapted to it. So when we go into some self-imposed isolation to actively and deliberately pursue a new and different culture life gets hard because the infrastructure supporting that culture isn’t there. Culture and infrastructure are interdependent, just like energy and infrastructure. You can’t make and put on a new culture like a new suit of clothes and expect the world to evolve accordingly. You you have to re-engineer the things which determine what suit of clothes fits appropriately.

In medieval times monasteries may have often seemed physically isolated -since they were about ‘getting away’ from the noise of secular society- but they were all networked. They had their own independent communications systems, an infrastructure, and they could use these systems to assist and exchange between each other. This was as important to sheltering the cultivation of the tools of a new civilization as the tall sheltering stone walls and edge-of-wilderness locations. And this often bothered medieval rulers. The ruling elite of the time were all a warrior elite and they tended to think about communication in strategic terms. So they would sometimes see the church as an insurgent shadow government with large amounts of independent wealth, more allegiance to Rome than their nation-state, and with an independent and largely private means of communication, and thus a means of secret strategic organization. Why, the church even used ciphers and counter-intelligence! They could organize protests and insurgencies and quickly and systematically change public opinion on an international scale. This is also why governments today get so uptight about the Internet. It took most politicians completely by surprise when it first emerged as a public system and scared the hell out of them because suddenly there was this means of completely private global communication superior to anything they knew and understood that afforded the public a potentially independent means of spontaneous organization. Nothing scares the powers that be more than people organizing out of sight. This is where I think the real power in Internet-based P2P rests. This ability to network on a global level affording the means to act in a systematically collective and independent P2P manner -to dance to a tune broadcast on a different frequency than the conventional system’s. This affords the means to create new decentralized and independent infrastructures of resource exchange and social services all over the world at once. Progressive nepotism. This matched to independent means of production is where things get revolutionary.

Imagine if today a large enough on-line community of people said to each other; “let’s make our own bank -the World Bank Of Man or some such- sort of like a credit union rooted in distributed micro-capital and micro-loans, that does all the basic jobs banks do, but with no parasitic administration and store-front building overhead because all transactions are on-line or by ATM, no gimmicky overcomplicated financial products, all the customers are automatically share-holders, and it all is deliberately designed for a very low hassle-quotient.” Something like that would shake this world like an asteroid strike. Fantasy, perhaps. Not enough people have the slightest comprehension about how money works. They very deliberately don’t even teach the basics of routine household finance in college, let alone at the high-school level. But I think there really is potential to do things like this if one can cultivate structured networks large enough. I see that as being just as powerful as setting small examples of alternatives that people can travel to to visit, and maybe decide to stay or copy.

It’s important to show people what’s possible but also necessary to give them the means to create that possibility wherever they are now or they will associate it with being possible only in some distant special place and situation. Too many people tend to think magically. They think change happens through processes akin to sympathetic magic; perform this ritual with the right faith and attitude and things happen. Civilization IS a network and if you want to change civilization you restructure or create alternative networks. You mess with the clockwork. You get in the wires. You hack the code.”