Here’s a preview of the program of three days that will be like no other.

Donald Trump’s announcement this June 1st that the United States will be withdrawing from the Paris Accord has caused indignation around the world. On their side of the Atlantic, the fightback was launched by a handful of mayors of big cities, gathered together in an organization called Mayors National Climate Action Agenda. Whatever the mistakes of the White House, they declared, they will work to ensure that within city limits, the fight against global warming will remain a priority. It is city halls, therefore, that will be fulfilling a treaty concluded between nations.

An inconsistent situation some may say. Or could this be a sign of a decisive change to come? Big cities, which already hold substantial demographic, cultural and economic powers, might not be condemned to remain the second order of political actors that they are today. Conversely, in a context of democratic crisis, blurred frontiers, and crumbling Nation-States, our future could well be formed of networked cities that have risen up to the challenge.

THREE DAYS LIKE NO OTHER

As crazy as it may seem, the idea that networks of cities will shape our future is at the heart of the 5th edition of OuiShare Fest Paris. Taking place at the renovated Magasins Généraux in Pantin, this year the event will go far beyond your usual talks, workshops, participative formats and immersive experiences.

Novelties on the menu:

• the Tribunal of Future Generations: can we let robots keep destroying jobs? Should we write the right to laziness in the Constitution? This decision will lay in the hands of the members of the jury, chosen by lottery for this mock trial run by the Magazine Usbek & Rica (Wed, July 5th).
• Masterclasses: in the mornings of the 6th and 7th of July experts from 13 countries will hold 4-hour masterclasses.  Participants can sign up to take a storytelling course with the American publishing consultant Ariane Conrad, learn the A to Z of sharing cities with our Dutch colleagues from ShareNL, or even learn to manage a company without bosses with our New Zealander friends from the Enspiral network. And in the background? Each day is dedicated to a particular dimension of globalized cities
• 3 festive evening events (in comparison to one!)for more opportunities to connect.

DAY 1: REGAINING COLLECTIVE POWER FROM THE BOTTOM-UP

Today, it appears ever more difficult to build consensus at the national level; political identities are fragmenting; politicians are going through a grave crisis of legitimacy. It is at this point that the city can emerge as the stage for a renewal of collective action. From this perspective, it is noteworthy that from New York to Madrid, social movements symbolic of the last few years, have occupied public spaces. Because of its size, among other factors, the city is suitable for experimentation with new forms of participative democracy, fueled by the civic tech revolution.

OuiShare Fest will also welcome two pioneers of citizen technologies: Pia Mancini, co-founder of the platforms DemocracyOS and Open Collective, as well as the Argentine political party Partido de la Red, and Jeremy Heimans, Australian activist and entrepreneur, co-founder of the online petition platform Avaaz and of Purpose, which seeks an in-depth transformation of the very idea of power in connected societies. Alastair Parvin, the creator of the WikiHouse Foundation, which applies the organization methods of the famous online encyclopedia to architecture and design, will be discussing the reinvention of cities by citizens themselves.

And, because it is important to articulate the local and the global, this first day will be concluded with an unusual football match; Pantin vs. the rest of the world!

DAY 2: RETHINKING OUR CITIES AS PLATFORMS

How do we shift from a mass of lonely individuals to an organized and lively ecosystem? Will cities be reborn as platforms for the benefit of their inhabitants? Every local government in the world dreams of replicating Silicon Valley’s success story. But aren’t there other relevant examples to look for, other paths to follow? This topic will be debated between Nicolas Colin (The Family), Jennifer Clamp (Techweek NZ) and Rui Quinta (With Company). Professor and renowned management thinker Anil Gupta (Indian Institute of Management of Ahmedabad) will deliver a talk on what corporate innovators can learn from grassroots movements.

Juan Pablo Ortega (Innotegia, the city of Medellin) and Malik Yakini (Detroit Black Community Food Security Network) will share their stories, which attest to the fact that it is often in cities which went through the worst crises that the drive to innovate is the strongest.

During a “fishbowl” discussion – a OuiShare-favorite hybrid format, somewhere between a business-as-usual conference and a participatory workshop – participants will be invited to reflect on how local authorities can efficiently regulate global collaborative platforms.

DAY 3: BUILDING GLOBAL URBAN NETWORKS

Cities with more power and autonomy should by no mean be mistaken for a temptation to retreat. There is no point arguing with the fact that there is already a chasm between globalized metropolitan and peripheral areas. But how do we prevent it from widening?

To echo Mark Watts’ (Executive Director of the C40 Cities Climate Leadership Group) opening talk, day 3 will be all about global urban networks. Founder of the Fab City Global Initiative Tomas Diez will share his vision for a future of locally productive and globally connected self-sufficient cities. Dylan Hendricks (Ten-Year Forecast) will talk about the Internet of cities and the future of borders in the post-Brexit Europe. Another must-attend session: a discussion with the creators of the Darwin Ecosystem and Ateliers La Mouche about the role of alternative spaces in urban revitalization.

And to conclude this Fest in due form, you are warmly invited to a genuine Brazilian Festival on the banks of the Canal de l’Ourcq!

Don’t miss out on this one and explore the full program

Get your ticket at http://paris.ouisharefest.com

The post OuiShare Fest Paris: Cities of the World, Unite! appeared first on P2P Foundation.

We present an English translation of the original interview in French conducted by Arthur de Grave. Cross-posted from OuiShare. Translation by Clement Defontaine. Originally published at Shareable Magazine

Michel Bauwens is one of the pioneers of the peer-to-peer movement. Theoretician, activist, and public speaker, he founded the P2P Foundation in 2005. His work, both rich and complex, is built around the concepts of networks and commons, and lays the conceptual foundations of a production system that would serve as an alternative to industrial capitalism. I had the opportunity to meet him at the French release of his latest book, Saving the World: Towards a Post-Capitalist Society with Peer-to-Peer (published by “Les Liens qui Libèrent”).

Michel, Save the World, your last book, is the translation of a series of talks with Jean Lievens published two years ago. What happened between then? Do you have the impression that the transition you talk about has accelerated?

In this regard, one should make haste slowly. It is clear that the transition to a post-capitalist, sustainable economy will not happen overnight, or even in a few years. It is a long process. Some projects which seemed to work well according to a peer-to-peer logic one or two years ago have since become purely capitalistic. This enables them to grow faster. It contrasts with other more open and truly collaborative projects that have chosen to grow more slowly.

When one has no money, one takes on “solidarity dynamics”. So yes, it can give an impression of a relative stagnation, but I do not worry too much. For this is a major crisis, ecological, social and economic, looming on the horizon. The challenge is to be ready when it breaks out, probably around 2030. FairCoop, WikiSpeed… These kinds of projects are still small and yes, too few. In the coming years, those who are still only the seeds of this transition will have to develop a stable ecosystem, in order to initiate a real movement.

In an interview with us in 2013, you stated that capitalism and peer-to-peer were still interdependent. Isn’t that the real problem? Is this a stable relationship?

No, of course not, how could it be? The value generated by the Commons is still largely captured by capital: by adopting extractive models, large platforms of the sharing economy are engaged in a form of parasitic commercial activity. In the old days, capitalism was a way of allocating resources in a situation of scarcity, but now it is an engineered scarcity system. Our system is completely mad: we pretend that natural resources are endless, and we set artificial barriers around what is abundant in nature, i.e.: creativity and human intelligence. This is a profound moral issue.

In her book Owning Our Future: The Emerging Ownership Revolution, Marjorie Kelly aptly defines the challenge that awaits us: moving from extractive capital to generative capital. The good news is that this process has already started. First of all, because it is impossible to hide the fact that civil society has now become a value creator. This is an important point, as civil society was mostly absent from the “classic” capitalist equation. In addition, we are beginning to witness a change in market structures: commercial spheres of a new kind are developing around the Commons. Enspiral [a collaborative network of social entrepreneurs], in New Zealand, is the perfect example of this type of entrepreneurial coalition.

In your opinion, how could the peer-to-peer model free itself from capitalism in practical terms?

For a start, we should choose the right strategy. I think that despite all the good intentions, projects that aspire to compete head-to-head with Google or Facebook are doomed to fail. I believe much more in targeted approaches like Loomio [an online tool for collaborative decision-making, editor’s note]. The transition will be a sum of such small victories that will connect with each other.

This also requires the creation of new legal tools. We have completely forgotten the tradition of Commons and this is really obvious in our legal tradition. We must make room for legal innovation. In this regard, a principle like the copyleft, or the opposite, the copysol [a license that prohibits any interaction with the traditional commercial market, editor’s note] are interesting but imperfect as they are too radical (in their implications). I want to find a third way, one that would provide a balance between the commercial sphere and the Commons. This is the goal of the work we began around the notion of Peer Production License, which balances out contribution to the Commons and use of these.

Will that be enough? Those in the hands of which capital is concentrated today have no interest in the emergence of a distributed and fair model…

No revolution ever happened without a fraction of the ruling elite take the side of progress! This means that a cultural shift is needed. Today, Joe Justice [founder of the Wikispeed community] struggles to raise funds, including from ethical finance funds, as Wikispeed does not file patents. The world of responsible finance can not continue to support models that create artificial scarcity.

As I was saying earlier, when one lacks resources, one works with other people. For initiatives of the Commons economy, building a network is an absolute necessity. To get an idea of what this kind of ecosystem might look like, go to Madison, Wisconsin: there, food cooperatives, cooperative credit systems between companies, time banks, etc. gathered to create the Mutual Aid Network. In Madison, the alternative economy can be seen and felt in the streets and took less than two years to happen! The same kind of ambition drove an initiative like Faircoop in Spain.

For now, the main transformative ideas that are penetrating the economy – open economy, solidarity economy and ecology – are applied independently from each other. But when these ideas converge, we will witness the birth of an open source and circular economy. This concept of Open Source Circular Economy is at the heart of the debate we are conducting within the P2P Foundation.

I have the feeling that, by focusing on economy and leaving aside the political processes, we have given in to the calls of technological solutionism criticized by Evgeny Morozov. What do you think? Should we relearn to do politics?

Yes, in some ways, but what matters is that politics ended up re-imposing itself through collective learning. The Commons Transition Platform in which I am very involved, gathers and details the political transformation plans necessary for the implementation of a post-capitalist society. This is also the idea of the approach we applied with the FLOK project in Ecuador. The devised political transition plan which included civil society at the centre of public-value creation, a market sphere integrating external factors and a State that serves as a facilitator. FLOK was a partial failure, due to a lack of political will and lack of social base on which to lean for support, however, the political vision we have outlined is making its way to Europe (some proposals have been included within the economic program of Syriza in Greece).

Occupy Wall Street and the Indignados eventually lost momentum. The Arab Spring was, for the most part, led astray. In Spain, Podemos movement attempts to maintain a balance between bottom-up and vertical power, but at the expense of permanent tensions. How can one overcome the contradiction between the institutional logic intertwined with political practices and horizontality, a concept cherished by social movements?

To transfer a concept in real-life conditions on the long term following a pure horizontal logic is very complicated, if not downright impossible. At one time or another, a collective entity has to intervene to transcend individual interests. This also forms part of the collective learning of politics that we had to do. This is also the goal of Podemos’ experience in Spain. A fully horizontal organization system causes too much energy loss; conversely, the vertical system should be confined to areas where it guarantees a greater degree of autonomy for everyone. A bit like the Domain Name System when Internet appeared.

Are the Commons a left-wing idea?

Politically, the P2P Foundation is a pluralistic organization, simply because the logic underlying the Commons spans the entire political spectrum. Solidarity also exists within right-wing parties, some ideas in the ideology of the Front National (French extreme right-wing party, translator’s note) could even be considered as more socialist than what the Parti Socialiste (French socialist party, translator’s note) offers today. But the real question is: who benefits from this solidarity? Right-wing parties only show real solidarity with their supporters! So it’s on the issue of inclusion that the real fault line between right and left comes to light.

It is on the issue of inclusion that the real fault line between right and left comes to light.

Personally, I have left-wing ideas, and I think that the transition to a Commons economy has to benefit to everyone. The real challenge is to go beyond the progressivism inherited from the world of work of the last century. In this context, it is not surprising that European socialism is going through a profound identity crisis.

It is true that none of the partisan parties really seized this idea of Commons. Was it a mistake? Can we really make this a political topic? The concept of Commons remains somewhat abstruse.

The jargon of the Commons may at first seem technical and hard to digest, which is true. But in the mid-2000s, when I created the P2P Foundation, I decided to completely give up the old political lexicon of the left. At that time, the public did not really know what was hidden behind the concept of peer-to-peer. But as social and cultural practices started evolving, as networks started being used on a daily basis, more and more people adopted this new language. The same will most likely happen with the terminology of the Commons.

All will depend on the social movements that will defend this original conceptual arsenal. However, I find you rather pessimistic: the Pirate Party, the European Greens, Podemos, or Syriza have largely embraced this concept of Commons. It is indeed at the core of a new progressive thinking.

Politicizing the Commons, is researching their roots and genealogy. If the law leaves so little room for the Commons today, it is because we forgot where they came from. Yet, this type of organization and management of resources existed long before modern industrial capitalism practices. We must reconnect with this tradition and rewrite this forgotten chapter in our economic history. Politicizing the Commons is also researching their roots and genealogy. It’s the condition to lay the foundation of a new narrative on progress. Changing the world for the better will require considerable efforts on the part of everyone, but I think that peer-to-peer is a vision of society that is worth the sacrifice.

The post Michel Bauwens: The Transition Will Not Be Smooth Sailing appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Access over ownership. After decades of excessive consumerism, this prospect sounded revolutionary. At first. Now that the sharing economy has become mainstream, more critical voices are appearing. So, what will it be? Empowerment or exploitation? A revolution or business as usual?

Before getting to the heart of the matter, I’d like to set something straight: the collaborative economy and sharing economy (or collaborative consumption) are not the same concept. The sharing economy is just one part of the collaborative economy, as is distributed production, P2P finance and the open source & knowledge movements. What these phenomena have in common is their reliance on horizontal networks and distributed power within communities, as opposed to competition between hierarchical organisations, which has dominated economic life since the second industrial revolution. For a number of reasons I will not detail here (but here is a must-read essay about this), I believe this old economic framework is rapidly becoming obsolete. A new economic paradigm is needed, and this could be the collaborative economy.

But still, there are several contradictions in the collaborative economy, which are currently becoming most obvious in the sharing economy as it goes mainstream. Let’s take a closer look at what these are. And guess what? They have something to do with inequality.

Empowerment in an era of growing inequalities

An economy where people value access over ownership? It sounds – literally – revolutionary. Karl Marx would be thrilled. Indeed, if you look at it closely, it is the exact opposite of capitalism, a system that encourages people to accumulate more wealth and goods than they could possibly use and “put it to work for them”. “Sharing” on the other hand, is a nice sounding word and the expression of pure morality, the exact opposite of homo economicus’ iconic egotism. So, after having believed for centuries that man is wolf to man – and having built entire political and economic systems upon this very assumption – it may turn out that we were wrong after all, and that humans are pure, altruistic beings. Right.

Why, then, all this growing discontent towards the so-called sharing economy? Two main groups of criticism have emerged: one on ownership structures and the other on employment. These two matters are of course related if one is to consider the context in which the sharing economy was born.

We are living in the post-2008 world, a time when we are not completely sure that capitalism will be able to once more reinvent itself.

What is the most obvious characteristic of our current economic era? Growing economic inequalities (if you doubt that, I recommend you read Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty First Century), fueled both by patrimonial inequalities (capital ownership) and income inequalities (jobs). Capital distribution is roughly at its pre-WWI levels, which means the 1% are doing pretty well. Such levels of inequality might eventually drive our civilization to collapse. Even Eric Schmidt — the chairman of a company whose private buses are being thrown rocks at by angry impoverished locals in San Francisco — thinks inequality will be number one issue for democracies in the future. And even the rich and powerful of the world that gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos — not exactly a group of dangerous leftists — are worried about the growing gap between rich and poor!

So, are we to take the sharing economy seriously? If we want to assess whether it should be seen as the first part of a new economic paradigm or as capitalism’s latest trick to survive at all costs, we have to analyze its likely effects on inequality.

Should you really free yourself from all earthly possessions?

From a collective standpoint, it might well be better to have access to a resource rather than owning it. Compared to the baby boomers generation’s obsession with hoarding, maybe younger generations indeed show less of an urge to possess things (but of course, they also cannot afford it anymore). But if someone asks you to free yourself from all earthly possessions, you should always ask: if it’s not mine, then who owns it? Remember that for Aufklärung thinkers, private property was perceived as something inherently positive: a safeguard against greater forms of oppression. Back in medieval times, serfs did not own the land they were working on. In Antiquity, slaves did not even own themselves, for that matter. Sometimes, owning is a way not to be owned!

It is quite normal that we are witnessing the beginning of a backlash towards the sharing economy: after all, it mostly consists of VC-backed startups, old-fashioned centralized ownership structures. When I was sitting on the bench at business school, I was told one thing: the purpose of any company is to maximize shareholder value. Employees and customers are but a mean to an end, and in general, a good way to maximize ROI is to get your customers to pay as much as possible (non-price competitiveness) and on the other side to pay your employees as little as possible (price competitiveness).

Simply put, under a modern capitalist mindset, shareholders are not peers (from Latin par, “equal”), but overlords. And if your business model is based on your ability to sustain a community, it is not absurd to expect a contradiction between your duty to serve your investors a high return on investment and the egalitarian spirit of P2P services. In the end, you will have to choose one or the other.

Sharing: crowdsourcing taken to the next level?

This point is the most controversial of all. Sharing economy services could accelerate the phenomenon of job destruction. For people like Evgeny Morozov, the so-called sharing economy is nothing but the logical continuation of the digital economy and crowdsourcing. Despite all those nice speeches about empowerment and entrepreneurship, people in the sharing economy are nothing but an extreme precariat (they just don’t know it yet). And they may actually have a point. Do you remember last time the economic system went haywire? It was in the early 70’s, when the oil price suddenly rose. This is what happened:

Source: Economic Policy Institute

Real wages started stagnating while productivity per capita continued to increase. To keep the system running, a new deal had to be made: people would no longer be paid according to the value they actually produced, but they would get – seemingly – unlimited access to credit. This new deal had a name: debt. In the post-2008 world, we all know this deal is now null & void. So, what do we do now? If someone tells you he knows for certain, chances are high he is lying.

One cannot help but notice one interesting fact: while allowing wages to stagnate and inequalities to skyrocket, the neo-liberal revolution has left the basic structures of welfare – all those perks associated to wage labor such as social security and healthcare – relatively untouched. These are precisely the benefits Lyft drivers or Airbnb hosts will never have: they are not employees. In a way, these services are based on crowdsourced solutions. Is the sharing economy truly about that? As Morozov puts it, does the sharing economy “undermine the workers’ rights”? Most probably. Will it destroy jobs? Of course it will! But to be honest, computers and robots will soon replace most human labor anyway. Wage labor cannot be saved, and rather than fighting long-lost battles, people should start thinking seriously about solutions such as Universal Basic Income.

After reading this, you are probably convinced that the sharing economy is nothing but capitalism’s latest and sexiest outfit that will not solve, but worsen our inequality issues. But guess what? You might be wrong.

The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk (Hegel)

It is impossible to understand the meaning of something before it is over. And at dusk, it is hard to tell dogs – man’s best friends – from wolves. Considering the economic cycle which started in the early 70’s and ended in 2008, the sharing economy may be the next monster born out of reaganian economics. But let’s not forget that dated intellectual frameworks usually fail to predict the future. We are at dusk, remember? Old ways of thinking do not shed enough light on current economic and social problems.

What happens next, no one can tell. Are Silicon Valley VCs currently being fooled into creating the embryo of a P2P economic paradigm, in which they will lose most of their influence? Or are the enthusiasts talking about empowerment being tricked into creating a new kind of serfdom?

There is absolutely no way to know. In such cases, ancient Skeptic philosophers had an interesting way of proceeding: epochè, suspension of judgment.

If you cannot predict something with a reasonable amount of certainty, stop arguing endlessly about it and start acting towards the outcome you would like to see.

What do we do next?

It would then be dishonest from an intellectual standpoint to give this long article any kind of conclusion (epochè!). Instead, I will make two – in my own humble opinion – important remarks.

First, we should avoid using the concept of a “sharing economy” as much as possible: it is tricky and raises the bar too high. It leads people to expect too much from new business models and their users. Of course it’s not really about sharing! Don’t expect any kind of moral revolution (historically, revolutions that want to change human nature end up badly). There is no such thing as pure altruism (come on, even early Christians who happily ran into the lion’s den seeking martyrdom thought their sacrifice would eventually be repaid a thousand times!). Men are both altruistic and egoistic, and that’s perfectly fine.

That being said,

If you think it’s just about winning in the collaborative economy, and that “sharing is the new buying”, you should probably think again.

Will big companies be able to face new competition from startups and win over new customers? If that is your main concern, you should probably stop talking about communities and peers. If the collaborative economy cannot help you solve our growing inequality problem, it should be of no interest to you. It’s not about protecting market share, it’s about building an economic paradigm that can make it to the 22nd century. Things will change no matter what, the only question is: how smoothly?

Cover image: Tondal’s Vision, School of Hieronymus Bosch

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