Reporting from Amsterdam

This is the second P2P seminar tour after the first one in April this year which took me to Louvain and Cambridge. This time, it’s mostly Amsterdam, with sidetrips to Copenhagen and Antwerp. My first impression is that the maturity of the western countries, in terms of P2P uptake, has dramatically increased in just 6 months. The reception to P2P theory, as a guide to the new practices and for building a new world, has been extraordinary welcoming this time.

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The first seminar, for an Executive Master in Information Management, led by the extraordinary Rik Maes and his colleague Toon Abcouwere, was attented by mostly police officers. I learned from them, how pervasive the use of P2P is, starting from civic movements that want to correct possible judicial mistakes, to pionieering experiments by research teams to mobilize collective intelligence.

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The second seminar was for a very interesting, bottom-up peer to peer movement, from Beroepszeer to Beroepseer. This Dutch movement is finally reacting to the dehumanizing of work under neoliberal models, which are eliminating quality human time from work, and driving many professionals to despair.

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 The third one was for an organization called Digitale Pioneers, which supports start-ups with gifts (not loans or investments), and which dedicated its last round to the theme P2P. The 12 presentations I could witness were a testimony to the thriving underground of create web work in the Netherlands. Really enthusing.

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The weather has been perfect, and Amsterdam is, despite its heavy flow of tourists, still probably one of the most convivial cities on the planet. Guided by my friend and P2P Foundation co-organizer James Burke, we met a lot of interesting people, such as Gil Agnew of New Innergy. Apart from his work on urban and social renewal, most recently in Barcelona, Gil has a thoughtful blog, I recommend reading as samples, his thoughts on Jeremy Rifkin, and on the book “The Alphabet nd the Goddess� by Leonard Shlain, see here.

First quote on the move towards a participatory consciousness:

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“Owen Barfield. British barrister and philosopher, said we’ve had two great stages of consciousness in human history, and of course it’s always generalizations, but … it rang true for me. First stage of human consciousness, hunter-gatherer … consciousness. We had intimate participation with the natural order. We were a part of it. But we had no sense of self. We revered the generativity of nature.

Second stage of history, we reduced nature from a generative force, including our own nature, to a … productive force. And that’s the great break in consciousness, from generativity … to productivity. And in the process, we learned, from Neolithic agriculture until today, the end of the pyrotechnical era, the nuclear era, we learned how to detach ourselves from nature, control it from a distance, and in the process we developed a sense of “I� and “it.� The self emerged in history. We became … the captains of our fate. But in the process, we lost intimacy. We lost the sense of participation. We lost the early bonds of generativity.

What’s the third stage of consciousness? A transformation to a species understanding, which is … a self-aware choice. By volition, not by fear as the early Paleolithic tribes, but a self-aware choice by volition, for a generation to reclaim a sense of participation with the community of life. We maintain our individuality, we don’t go back to the pre-modern moment. We maintain our sense of self because that provides us with the opportunity, the challenge, the responsibility, to make decisions. And the decision we make is to reclaim our relationship to the generativeness of the creation. Self. Community. Future generations. Our children’s world.”

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