Joon Sang Baek interviewed me via email, through 3 questions. Here are my short answers.

* Joon: You once said that technologies, especially ICT, can provide communication and S/W infrastructures of P2P and indeed today various collaborative social tools proliferate in our daily life that connects distributed knowledge and enables co-design and co-production. In your opinion, how will ICTs evolve to facilitate transformation of our society towards P2P?

Peer to peer for me is the free aggregation of individuals around common interests and common value creation, and I believe this kind of technology is becoming universal, But there is an important hitch: when people create value together, they are usually able to form strong bonds and create their own infrastructures, think free software, Wikipedia, the shared design of arduino and many other examples of commons-based peer production, where user communities have their own infrastructure of cooperation, usually managed by a new type of for-benefit association such as the FLOSS Foundations. However, for simple sharing, we only create weak bonds, and it seems that empirically speaking, so far, we are using third party proprietary platforms for that. Obviously, these shareholders/owners have their own agenda, are selling our data, want to control and typeset our behaviours etc… This is an important polarity that will remain in place for the foreseeable future, and is a terrain of conflict between user communities, platform owners, and all those who want to access and control our attention streams.

* The current economic crisis in Europe and devaluation of Euro currency make us reflect on the problems of our centralized monetary system. You have discussed money and P2P on your website and proposed new alternatives which in my perception are based on a local-driven, self-sufficient economic model. The question is, what do you think is the most promising model among many alternatives that could replace the current system?

My own belief is that the current form of material globalization is not sustainable, and that the classic growth patterns that we are still seeing, such as in emerging BRIC or East Asian countries, are problematic, it is they can go on for a while, but not indefinitely under current conditions. Today we are facing a serious problem of the capture of the state by predatory interests, and the spread of what John Robb calls hollow state dynamics. European austerity politics are part of that dynamic in which the social product is increasingly going to an elite, and leads to a tendential impoverishment of working people. They are different ways to react to this. The classic way is through social struggle and building strong social movements, as was pioneered by western working classes, and we now see a budding movement of Chinese workers.

This is now problematic because the power of nation states is being hollowed out, and in the thrall of the global financial market players. So this now defensive strategy, while unavoidable, has to be supplemented by a constructive approach to insulating local communities from global storms. So I see a global movement afoot, documented in our P2P Foundation wiki through 12,000 plus entries, of people rebuilding local economic infrastructures through various means, i.e. a revival of local, including urban, agriculture; distributed manufacturing developments, but also, and this is what your question refers to, open money systems. Historically, in the thirties for example, towns and regions with such monetary alternatives did much better than those relying on central money which is now subjected to pressures from global finance, and has lost much of its independence. Such open monies can be local, as in the Damanhur community in northern Italy, or can be affinity-based an operate through virtual networks. Both are happening, growing substantially, but also largely invisible to the media because the efforts are either local or specialized. I believe that at some point, say in 10-15 years, when some problems of interoperability and software mgt infrastructures will be solved, they will be more prominent. But national and even supra-regional monies will also continue to exist.

* How do P2P influence the quality of relation among people?

My own experiences are positive. If you and I are to work together on a project of common interest, and we are not paying each other, so we are inter-dependent, then governance and cultural norms can only be based on mutual consent, which I believe is very good. Also, online cooperation recreates proximity, both physically for local communities, and virtually for affinity groups, people who are seen by each other, and whose reputation are interdependent, tend to want to behave in better ways. Of course, this does not apply to anonymous boards for example, and most complains of the pre-internet generation focuses on these wild west areas of online discourse. It’s important that online communities have leadership, facilitation, and cultural norms, that reinforce an egalitarian ethos of respectful communication, but this is happening in many places. It’s also important to not see the virtual and physical realms as different and separate … We only have one bodymind, and we tend to meet the people we interact with in real-life, that strengthens the human bonds as well as trust mechanisms.