Elena Martínez Vicente is a product designer, specialized in designing better processes and more understandable products for humans. She was a designer with the P2PValue project and has extensive experience collaborating with commons, communities and P2P projects, including an ongoing collaboration with the P2P Foundation on our publications and the Commons Transition Primer.

Silvia and Elena are team members in  P2P Models, a research project examining the infrastructure, governance and economy of decentralized, democratic organizations, with a particular focus on value allocation and distribution.

We asked them to tell us about their experiences working in the commons, in academia,  and in the broader world.

Elena, Silvia, tell us a bit about your backgrounds, interests and how you came to be involved in the P2P Models project.

Elena: Since 2006, I have worked as an Interaction Designer in the private sector, also working for NGOs and cooperation projects in general, whenever I had a chance. From my days as a student, and intermittently, I have been in and out of activist groups, feminist and commons communities. It is not until 2016 that I could finally dedicate my entire time at work to “designing for the good ones”. Since then, I have been trying to translate difficult concepts for the common(s) people through infographics, post, illustrations and simple designs. I also try to bring some sanity to free software, since often in large projects, very good intentions are left on the wayside because it is “a pain in the ass” to use them as these projects do not give the right importance to design and user experience.

Silvia: Really, I was never in touch with these themes before, in fact, I think I always avoided using technology in general (I’m now more concerned about how important and powerful this kind of knowledge is). I was always very confused about what to study. I have a lot of diverse interests: dancing, carpentry, philosophy…and although now I find it positive, at that time I felt pressure to “find my speciality”. What I knew, was I liked to write and I was interested in social issues and this led me to Anthropology. Partly because of diverse life experiences, years later I started a master’s degree in Gender Studies and Development Cooperation in Madrid, which offered an internship in Colombia. This experience reinforced my liking for research. When I was back in Madrid, a friend told me about this job opportunity and I did not hesitate to try it.

Can you describe what P2P Models is about? Who else is on the team, and what stage is the project in right now?

Silvia: I am still understanding what this project is about…hahaha. I’m lucky enough to have some master classes with Samer, our principal investigator, to know more about the tech part. I have a much clearer image about the social side of the project. We want to better understand how the governance and the distribution of value work happens in the CBPP (Commons Based Peer Production Communities), in order to know how blockchain could be useful for them. Fortunately, we have a sociologist-computer scientist in our team, David Rozas, who can be the link between the social and the tech part. We are 7 people in total, with different backgrounds and education but with activism in common. Also, we have a lot of collaborators and advisors who help us. We are at the beginning of the project, still taking off, maybe in the most challenging stage or where we should take more important decisions.

Elena: P2PModels is a research project full of difficult tech concepts so it is a beautiful challenge for me. Basically, we can summarize it in a question: Could we advance to a Commons Transition with blockchain?

The project has three main branches to build decentralized, democratic and distributed organizations. We intend to collaborate with international communities to learn from them and to think about technologies that could help to improve the lives of the people who work in these communities.

The people involved are Samer Hassan, principal investigator, David Rozas and Silvia in the sociological part right now, Sem and Antonio as tech advisors and Geno, our word-translator for humans. And, we are hiring tech unicorns and project managers too.

What are some of the projects being studied?

Elena: Right now, we are centered in designing better processes within the team, building the basis as a group and rethinking our team culture. A very important (and invisible) task. In terms of productive work, we almost have the pilot communities, for the ethnographic research. Secondly we are working on the brand, the new website and the communication strategy. We are just a few people doing a lot of stuff!

Silvia: That is one of the important decisions we should take and we are still thinking about it. We have drawn up the criteria to choose which projects could be interesting to study, and it seems like in the next months we can start some provisional social research but as I said, this is also under construction! We are full of verve, and we want to take on a lot of case studies but we have to be aware of our capabilities, in terms of time etcetera.

Blockchain-enabled projects are meant to be about decentralizing power, but treat this in a technical way. How do you see this project addressing other issues about decentralizing power, taking into account gender, race, class…?

Silvia: Thank you for asking this question. We strongly believe that the decentralization of power is possible beyond the technical part. Because of that we are giving the same value to both the tech and social sides of the project. Personally­, I’m really focussed on bringing a gender perspective to the project, of course an intersectional one. We are going to put all our efforts into this in order to carry out gender-mainstreaming in the project, starting first within our team and our own culture. We believe strongly that “the personal technical is political”.

Elena: Decentralizing power is the foundation, in your own dynamics and in your relationships as a working group. And it is true, I can see a lot of white men people talking and talking about decentralizing power in both blockchain and the commons. What they do not ask about is their own race, class or gender privileges of being there, maybe they have some women people behind doing the invisible work? Are their personal relationships unequal? Great speeches, theories and papers are useless without considering this.

Communities involved in contributory accounting have different concepts of value and value tracking. Can we avoid the mindset that says that the only value worth tracking is exchange value?

Elena: We have to try it!! It is a partial way, inherited from capitalism and therefore a patriarchal way to see value. People contribute in different ways to the group. What about emotional value? I always work better with people who take care of me and who I love. I do not know if this type of value can be tracked, but we all know that it is there, we cannot ignore it and try to measure and track all the facts.

Silvia: Yes, I think we can. Feminist economy has been doing this, challenging the heterodox economy, for many years. It is a matter of having the will and developing a broader outlook. It is not easy, I have never worked before in tech and I am still struggling with how to apply my knowledge in this field. I assume it is going to be a very creative process.

What about invisible or affective work? Can these be tracked and measured?

Elena: Affective and invisible work is the base of all groups and society. I am not interested in measuring them, but maybe we could try to train in empathy, listening and learning a little more. In Spain, for example, assemblies, work meetings… are often held at 8 p.m. This is absolutely incompatible with the caring done outside of work, and nobody seems to mind. This makes people that have to care disappear from decision making and groups. In my opinion, it is a capitalist heritage that we need to rethink.

Silvia: I don’t know if it is a matter of measuring. The feminists working in development cooperation, for example, have done a really good job with time, using surveys or calculating the contributions of domestic and affective work to the GDP. On the other hand, I think a very important first step is to consolidate the idea of invisible and affective work as the base of life, and understanding how without it, there is nothing else. This kind of work must not be in the periphery, waiting to be measured or recognized; we have to put it in the center, as Amaia Pérez Orozco explains so well.

Although commons based peer production is an emancipating way of pooling our productive capacities, these communities are often dominated by male, white, economically privileged individuals. What is the role of “peer to peer” in confronting these disparities?  

Silvia: We cannot be so innocent in thinking that in “peer to peer” production there are no power relationships. These commons based initiatives have a lot of potential, challenging capitalism and exploring new ways to build economy, but of course they have to implement a lot of mechanisms to avoid reproducing patriarchy, racism, and other structures of domination. It is still necessary to make the struggle against knowledge- or power-inequality a priority in these communities.

Elena: P2P communities have made important advances in decentralizing power but, like Silvia said, we cannot think that everything is already done, because in most cases, we’re all white, first world people. We have to make an effort to introduce measures that help us to re-think and re-design real peer to peer values. I am not an expert, but I can still see, typically, a white, upper-class man doing free software or exchanging p2p value.

Silvia, how does your background in feminism and anthropology fit into the project? How do these affect Commons and P2P practices, in academia and “in the real world”?

Silvia: Well, the entire group has expressed from the beginning how important the social branch of the project was for them. They have helped me to overcome this “imposter syndrome” I had (I know the theory, however, I am still in the empowerment process…). Well, I think a new person on a team always enriches it. Because of my background, maybe I can give some different perspectives to achieve this non-techno-determinism view that the project wants to maintain. This maybe goes more for the academic part. On the other hand, I think my inexperience in tech makes me a good translator and mediator with the “real world”.

Elena, you have done design work on a number of P2P-related projects. Are there specific challenges you try to address in communicating this field? How can ideas like P2P and the Commons be represented visually, and especially to non-academics?

Elena: I am always thinking that we should be capable of talking about commons with the mainstream, and one way to make this possible is with design and communication.

Academic people have the ability to make a simple concept complicated. In this way, we need journalists and designers who translate these complicated minds, papers and concepts to the people. People can easily understand the value of urban gardens in their neighborhood, or the way energy cooperatives are an advantage for the environment and your pocket, but books or essays about p2p communities are very complicated and full of difficult concepts. In that sense, the Commons Transition Primer we did last year is an excellent advance. In the last few years, feminism has done this with excellent results, so, we should try, shouldn’t we?

We talk about a Commons Transition. Do the two of you see this taking place? If so, how?

Silvia: Well, to be fair, I would not say that this would be a transition, but a return to the past. Women have being doing Commons and alternative initiatives for centuries, the novelty now is the inclusion of some technologies like blockchain. I do not dare to make predictions… Deep down, what I would like is that this happens in a coherent way with the bases of the Commons, that is with equity, solidarity and an awareness of interdependence.

Elena: Step by step, I can see little advances in people’s mentalities, or in local politics. For example, recently the Madrid council has received a UN Public Service prize for a collaborative free software platform called Decide Madrid. It is an excellent sign and means that our work and efforts working in the commons are important and can provoke social change.

Anything else you’d like to add?

Silvia: I would like to give special thanks to my colleague Elena. From the beginning I’ve felt her sorority, and it is really a pleasure to share my workspace with such an experienced person and woman. It is great to have her support and knowledge in this uncertain and masculinized sector.

Elena:

 Elena Martínez Vicente studied Fine Arts in the Universidad Complutense of Madrid, where she spent her final two years enjoying a grant in Venice, Italy.

Silvia Díaz Molina studied Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. After two years living in Vienna (Austria), participating in different volunteer work and activism, she joined the Gender Studies and Development Cooperation Master’s Degree at the Instituto Complutense de Estudios Internacionales, because of which she had the opportunity to do an internship in Cartagena de Indias (Colombia), where she wrote her thesis about “Afro-descendant women from the Colombian Caribbean, sexual violence and the construction of memories about the armed conflict”. In April 2018, she became part of the P2PModels project as a researcher, developing the social side of the project.

Lead image by Gaelx, Flickr CC BY-SA 2.0; text image by Janita Top, Unsplash

The post Elena Martinez and Silvia Díaz of P2P Models on Blockchain, Feminism and Affective P2P appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Credit: netlancer2006, on Flickr, under a CC BY license.

That’s why I was excited to run across a fascinating paper by Neera M. Singh, an academic who studies forestry at the University of Toronto.  Her paper, “The Affective Labor of Growing Forests and the Becoming of Environmental Subjects” focuses on “rethinking environmentality” in the Odisha region of India.  (Unfortunately, the article, published in Geoforum (vol. 47, pp. 189-198, in 2013) is behind a paywall.)

How do people become “environmental subjects” – that is, people who are willing to apply their subjective human talents, imagination and commitments and become stewards of some element of nature?

Singh wanted to investigate why villagers were willing to regenerate degraded state-owned forests through community-based forest conservation efforts.  She found that “affective labor” is critical in managing a forest.  The term comes from Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, who use it to describe the role that reciprocity, empathy and affect play in shaping human behavior and action. Indeed, other people’s affect influences what kind of “self” we construct for ourselves.

This whole topic is important because standard economics has its own crudely reductionist idea of who human beings are.  We are “rational, self-interested” economic actors, of course, and most public policy is based on this (erroneous, limited) notion.  Most economists frankly have no interest in exploring how people come to formulate their “self-interest.”  They simply take those interests as given.

But what if participating in commons produced a very different sort of human perception and subjectivity, and indeed, produced human beings as self-aware subjects/agents?  What if this process could be shown to be essential in integrating human culture with a specific ecological landscape?

Singh’s piece tries to better understand how people’s sense of self and subjectivity are intertwined with their biophysical environment, and “the forms of human cooperation that emerge in response to changes in this environment.”  The lesson that I draw from Singh’s paper is that our acts of commoning changes how we perceive ourselves, our relationships to others, and our connection to the environment.  In Singh’s words:  “Affective labor transforms local subjectivities.”

I admire Singh for tackling the ontological issues head-on.  So much pivots on them.  She notes that the philosopher Spinoza saw the human body as something that learns by doing.  Through action, human identity and knowledge are “constantly open and renewed.”

As a result, human beings are not fixed and “closed-in” (as economics sees them), but constantly unfolding and “opened-out.”  Human beings are best understood “not in terms of eternal and immutable essence but in terms of relations and affect,” writes Singh. They are formed through “active engagement with other human and non-human bodies.”

Thus a core ontological insight about commoning:  subjectivity emerges from doing – just as a commons itself can emerge only through commoning. It is an unfolding of affective labor.

So instead of presuming that individuals are “coherent, enduring and individualized” as the modern worldview (including economics) holds, we must regard humans as a hybrid mix of individual propensities and the environment.  Or as Singh puts it, “the boundaries between the ‘self’ and the environment are porous….human subjectivity is shaped by a human being’s engagement with its total environment, not just its social environment.”

That’s why we must engage with subjectivity and the commons:  When we engage with nature – and with each other through commons – we are changing our subjectivity in the process.  And this subjectivity is a life-force of its own.

Singh illustrates this process by studying villagers in Odisha, India, who did not participate in a classic “market solution” by which the state would pay peple to act as conservators of state-owned forests. Instead, villagers were allowed to provide their own self-managed community-based conservation.  They could apply their own “affective labor.”

While Singh doesn’t use the language of the commons, she is clearly describing commoning:  People patrol the forest as part of their everyday activities.  They pick berries, pull out weeds and check for any signs of pilferage or violations of rules of the commons.  They develop “affective ties with the growing plants, trees, birds and animals,” and in so doing, “forests are transformed from nature out there and become a part of the self that is nurtured through care.”

The forest becomes a place of social life and collective memory.  People take pride in their relationships to “their forest.”  They write songs about the “cool, lovely shade of trees” and describe it in terms one might use to talk about one’s family.  A whole range of “intimate environmental care practices” help maintain and “grow” the forest.

Villagers developed an identity as “forest people” and “forest care-givers” – quite a reversal of the standard market/state logic that regards a forest as a raw product to be sold, an object of bureaucratic control or empty wilderness.  A commons brings into being a different ontology!

Singh writes:

One village leader simply described the collective action to protect forests as “Samaste samaste ko bandhi ke achanti,” that is, ‘each and every ‘one’ holds the other together.”  I think he was also referring to the affective capacities of all bodies, human and nonhuman, to come together and get entangled in relations of affect and accountability.  Through forest protection, villagers have built and strengthened communities, with the forest being a part of the affective community.”

The state was not especially happy about these outcomes, Singh writes.  Why?  Because commons initiatives are “not simply a struggle over resources but also a struggle over meanings.”  The state wishes to insist upon the authority to define any forest resource as a market resource, and not acknowledge the meanings and subjectivities of villagers.

One villager who has fought with a local mining company to protect the forest was asked what he hoped to “gain” from his resistance:  “After some thought [Singh reports], he haltingly replied, ‘We live by the forest.  The forest provides us with many things – tubers, herbs, fruits like Mahua and Char, and also dead wood and branches, which I can sell in the future.”  When asked if he will cut the trees to sell, he retorted, ‘No. Never.’  He went on to say, ‘The cool breeze coming from the forest feels nice.  It feels good to have protected this forest.’  The connections between joy, empowerment and the production of new subjectivities could not have been more clearly expressed.”

Singh acknowledges the difficulties that often occur within forest commons, such as conflicts over resources and the exclusion of marginalized groups.  But she notes:

“…it is remarkable that millions of people in thousands of villages in Odisha who are involved in forest protection think of themselves as forest conservators, and their actions and discourses are informed by this subject position.  My point is that we need to understand and engage with the processes through which new subjectivities are formed, and new ways of relating to nature emerge, and appreciate their potential to challenge dominant visions about nature conservation.”

Singh’s wonderful article reminds us that at bottom the commons is about developing and protecting some very different subjectivities than those currently allowed by neoliberalism.

For more on this topic, check out Tim Jensen in the Journal of Aesthetics and Protest “On the Emotional Terrain of Neoliberalism.”  Jensen writes:

“Just as with the exploitative extraction and reshaping of our natural environment, our collective emotional and affective environment is being shaped—violently, systematically—to serve the interests of capital. Derrick Jensen rightly notes, “It would be a mistake to think this culture clearcuts only forests. It clearcuts our psyche as well. It would be a mistake to think it dams only rivers. We ourselves are dammed (and damned) by it as well. It would be a mistake to think it creates dead zones only in the ocean. It creates dead zones in our hearts and minds. It would be a mistake to think it fragments only our habitat. We, too, are fragmented, split off, shredded, rent, torn.” When these territories of desire and imagination are stolen, ravaged, and toxified it becomes that much easier for the theft and destruction of natural landscapes to go uncontested, unnoticed.

“Premise:  Affect and emotion are foundational.”

• Originally published at Bollier.org

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