The Lab was founded and is led by Gabriella Gómez-Mont, as the experimental arm / creative think tank of the Mexico City government, reporting to the Mayor. It is highly innovative in its techniques and strategies for urban development.

“The Lab is a place to reflect about all things city and to explore other social scripts and urban futures for the largest megalopolis in the western hemisphere, working across diverse areas, such as urban creativity, mobility, governance, civic tech, public space, etc. In addition, the Lab searches to create links between civil society and government, constantly shifting shape to accommodate multidisciplinary collaborations, insisting on the importance of political and public imagination in the execution of its experiments.”

During the week I worked with the Lab’s Open City team, Gabriela (Gaby) Rios Landa, Valentina Delgado, Bernardo Rivera Muñozcano and Nicole Mey. I came away super impressed by their work, commitment and creativity. The work I was asked to do was highly varied and engaged a number of my specializations:

1. To run a visioning workshop with Lab people and key stakeholders to develop a vision for an Open City for CDMX, that could help guide city development in an inclusive and participatory way.
2. To deliver a talk on “Democratizing Design” in which I discussed some current “revolutions” in design and cosmo-localization from the perspective of the P2P Foundation.
3. To run a design session to develop an anticipatory governance strategy for the application of artificial intelligence in CDMX.
4. In addition I gave presentations to the Open City team on co-governance and the city as commons, vision mapping and the anticipatory experimentation (bridge) method.

Needless to say it was a big week!

Visioning

For the visioning workshop, we started by using a technique called “vision cycles”, which is a way of mapping the history of an issue, but in such a way as to discover the previous visions that have informed development (what might be considered “used futures”) as well the current vision and its effects, and what ideas for the future are emerging. After this we did a short visualisation process that helped everyone to picture the future city in their minds eye. We then used the integrated visioning method first developed by Sohail Inayatullah, where we looked at the preferred future, the future that was disowned, and then developed an integrated future.

One of the insights from the session is that cities have many selves, and it is worth interrogating what are a city’s dominant selves and what selves have been disowned. When a self is disowned and has no avenue for expression its behaviour shows up as undermining, disruptive, agitative. If the contradictions between the dominant self of a city and its disowned self is not resolved, then conflict can ensue. The integrated visioning method provides a way of seeing that can appreciate how the integration of the dominant and disowned selves of a city can lead to more wholistic or wiser development.

Anticipatory Governance

With an issue like artificial intelligence, there is not only great uncertainty regarding the potential impact on society, there is also definitional ambiguity as AI crosses many definitional boundaries (is it machine learning, neural networks, algorithms, robots, automation, etc), and the speed of the issue seems to be accelerating. Given this, the Lab was tasked with developing a set of policies for how this polymorphous issue is managed and governed. For this they asked me to apply the Causal Layered Analysis method of Sohail Inayatullah, and then to use the Anticipatory Governance Design Framework I have developed to provide the building blocks that can form an Anticipatory Governance framework for artificial intelligence. Needless to say the workshop was rich, exploring some of the core assumptions, worldviews and attitudes guiding people’s thinking, and new myth and metaphors that provides genuinely empowering pathways.

Presentations

In addition to this I gave presentation on some of my favourite subjects.

Co-governance and the city as commons. This was more a conversation than a presentation, and to be honest they taught me much more than I was able to teach them. This conversation was one of the biggest learnings for me. First of all they were already familiar with the work of Christian Iaione and Sheila Foster (and others) on the urban commons. In particular while they appreciated the perspective on the urban commons, they questioned its translatability from the Bologna / Barcelona / Ghent context (small-medium sized cities, politically empowered population in Europe) to CDMX (24 million people, highly stratified between wealthy / empowered and poor / marginalised). They also felt that the spirit of CDMX resists monolithic prescriptions and wondered where / what opportunities exist for heterotopic futures, plural futures within the city … rather than a single / monolithic city vision. CDMX exhibits spatial diversity, a city with myriad groups, colonias, spaces, but also exhibits temporal diversity, where the pre-colombian civilization is layered and meshed into the colombian and global / neoliberal – thereby resisting the monoculture of linear time. The future cannot just be framed in modernist terms, it needs an ecology of visions.

Dovetailing with this is the concern with the somewhat trendy roll out of smart / digital city strategies that have the intention of making a city open and participatory, but which some felt have the opposite effect, they empower the people that already have power in a place like Mexico City. It became clear to me from the conversation that a truely “Open City” can only be one where core inequalities are dealt with. Poor people struggling to survive will never experience a city as “open” so long as they must toil for less than a living wage, and in which suburb by suburb segregation has been all but institutionalised along wealth lines. In this context CDMX’s historic crowdsourcing of their constitution was an important precedent, and in which Universal Basic Income was put forward (however apparently could not get through the legislative process).

In this context I also presented the core principle of implicated commons-governance, recently developed in this paper with Michel Bauwens, which I consider to have simple but radical implications for democratization of all aspects of life. (pre-print can be viewed here).

“This notion of ‘common concern’ serves to expand the scope of what is a commons and who is a commoner. In the case of planetary life support systems, the value of this as a commons is fundamentally implicit in that it does not appear valuable to a community until it is activated by virtue of a contextual shift. For an issue as fundamental as climate change, it is the personal awakening that we all share an atmosphere with seven billion other humans (and countless species) as a commons of concern. Through the accident of circumstance each of us have been ‘plied into’ this shared concern of the twenty-first century. The planet’s atmosphere has thus shifted from an implicit commons to an explicit commons. Our atmosphere has become a matter of survival for all, and suddenly people have become commoners to the extent that they see how they are entangled into this shared concern, with a concomitant responsibility for action. This implies a radical democratization of planetary governance.”

This principle of implicated commons-governance did resonate with them and we had a long discussion on how this might be applied in CDMX.

Vision Mapping and the Anticipatory Experimentation (bridge) Method. I also presented my work on vision mapping, the combination of visioning processes and online editable mapping based on open street maps and the map interface. One of the Lab teams were already using OSM for a project and there was considerable overlap in the use of participatory methods to map urban geographies and imaginaries. As well I presented on the anticipatory experimentation (bridge) method, which was very consistent with the overall approach to the Lab, as they are explicitly an experimental arm of the city government tasked with charting new pathways for CDMX’s urban futures.

Cosmo-localization

I presented on cosmo-localisation at a coworking space called wework, hosted by FabCity CDMX and Futurologi, where I got to meet Oscar Velasquez and Igna Tovar. With around 50-60 people I had chance to show off my bad spanish and my perfect spanglish. I spoke on a theme I’ve been developing with my colleagues through the P2P Foundation.

I described cosmo-localization as:

“… the process of bringing together our globally distributed knowledge and design commons with the high-to-low tech capacity for localized production. It is based on the ethical premise, drawing from cosmopolitanism, that people and communities should be universally empowered with the heritage of human ingenuity that allow them to more effectively create livelihoods and solve problems in their local environments, and that, reciprocally, local production and innovation should support the wellbeing of our planetary commons.” 

I worked on the themes of deep mutualization in the context of the anthropocene. Slides are here. Audio here.

Later that week I did a podcast with Inga Tovar where we discussed design global manufacture local / cosmo-localization, a collaboration between Centro Uni and Futurologi. This was a more relaxed conversation on the subject, conducted exclusively in spanglish (I attempted to speak in Spanish for the audience but had to revert to english again and again and get Inga to offer translations).  Audio here. 

Impressions and reflections

Overall I came away very impressed with the city of Mexico as a whole. From crowdsourcing a new constitution (perhaps the biggest experiment of this kind to-date), to becoming one of the first Latin American regions to make itself LGBT friendly, to its attempts to create a universal basic income, and of course the work of the Lab, CDMX, despite its many social problems, is an oasis of intelligence and progressive politics. I got the feeling that the city is on the cusp of a renaissance and potential transformation. That is my hope for the city’s many people, most who struggle day by day for survival.

For CDMX the promise of commons governance and Cosmo-localization is really about the ability of Mexico city’s poor to be enfranchised rather than marginalised at a number of levels. In terms of co-governance and the urban commons, it is the principle that those that have a stake in the development of CDMX need to be given the practical ability and tools for making decisions about their city. In terms of cosmo-localization it is liberating the potential for any enterprising community to be able to produce was they need for their wellbeing and livelihoods.

My own interest in working in CDMX stems from family history. My mom was born in the Colonia Roma, and she spent her first 12 years there before immigrating to the US with her mother and sisters. I grew up hearing stories with CDMX as the backdrop, not all pretty ones either. For my mom and her family, life was hard, they were very very poor, and they struggled day in and day out for survival. This has a distinct imprint on my sense of identity. Despite my relative privilege as a travelling consulting futurist, for the purposes of CDMX I know that I am the son of a mother who came from the harshest poverty, and that in another life I am one of “los de abajo”. For my mom and her family, “moving up” for them was working as maids for the wealthy in central Mexico city. It feels as if, because we suffered from inequality and the stigma of poverty, it is something that we know too well must be addressed to fulfil the promise of the city. The disowned must be integrated into the future of the city for all to flourish.

The post CDMX: Seeds of Transformation appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Karun Cowper speaks with urbanist, activist and “Audacities” initiator Sharon Ede on “cosmo-localisation” in the New Economy in Australia and beyond.

About Sharon Ede

Sharon is an urbanist and activist who works to build the sharing/collaborative movement in Australia and beyond. In 2017, she established AUDAcities, a catalyst for relocalising production of food, energy and fabrication in cities, in ways that enable more wealth to be retained and fairly distributed in the local economy: www.audacities.co

In 2012, she set up Share Adelaide, the first presence in Adelaide about the sharing and collaborative movement, and is the ‘ideator’ of ShareNSave, an initiative of the South Australian government which maps community sharing assets, and which has been made open source.

In 2010, she co-founded the Post Growth Institute to help spark a movement for ‘the end of bigger, the start of better’. Post Growth initiatives include Free Money Day, a global stunt designed to spark conversations about sharing; the EnRich List, a cheeky take on the Forbes Rich List, which instead celebrates those whose life and work contributes to enriching futures for all; and How On Earth, a book about how not for profit enterprise will become the primary business model by 2050.

For several years, she wrote a blog on helping change agents become more effective with communication and change for sustainability at Cruxcatalyst (crux = the heart, catalyst = change).

She has had a long association with Global Footprint Network, learning from GFN founder Mathis Wackernagel during an internship in the US in 2001.

During her university days, she spent five years working as a full time volunteer with Urban Ecology Australia, a nonprofit community group that promotes the development of ecological cities through education and example, which initiated Adelaide’s ‘piece of ecocity’, the international award winning Christie Walk.

Originally published in Perth Indymedia

Photo by NichoDesign

The post Sharon Ede on “Cosmo-localisation” in the New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The city of Cape Town is confronting an unprecedented water crisis. Because of a complex number of factors, including a prolonged drought, the city is facing a complete shutdown of its municipal water distribution. The city has already established a “Day Zero”, the day when all taps will cease to flow, and its inhabitants will have to walk, drive, taxi or take the train each day to one of 200 water distribution points set up around the city to pick up 25L emergency rations of water. Bottled water is flying off the shelves, and home-owners are locking up their faucets to discourage water theft. The city has levied heavy fines against those violating the strict quota of 50L of water per person per day. The Day Zero dashboard shows all the new water supply projects to supply water to the city, but as of this writing, most of them are behind schedule. The city of 4 million is in a race against time to stretch the remaining reserves of water to last until new water arrives. If the reserves run dry, Cape Town will be the first major city in the world with the dubious honor of shutting off its water supply.

The citizens of Cape Town are responding with an equally unprecedented show of creativity, demonstrating that even in a crisis, there is a silver lining. In response to the crisis, the global citizen collective Stop Reset Go, the Cape Town Science Centre,  the global Berlin-based Open Source Circular Economy Days, and Envienta are banding together to launch a global ideation hackathon to crowdsource open source solutions. The hackathon will physically take place on Feb 24 and 25 at the Cape Town Science Centre with guest speakers, panelists, workshops, displays, and spaces for DIY citizen innovators. The process will be supported by SAREBI, a South African Renewable Energy Business Incubator, who will help in judging various ideas and offering valuable Master Business Incubator classes to promising technical water innovations. Simultaneously, the hackathon will take place virtually at the Open Source Circular Economy Days community page. Local physical participants will transcribe local work onto project pages, where global participants can co-participate.

The rationale of the hackathon is to mobilize the sleeping giant of “the commons”, creating a systematic and large-scale process for a planet of innovators to help solve a local crisis. In other words, what if Cape Town were not alone in addressing its crisis, but had the solidarity of thousands of citizen innovators, engineers, organizers and technology developers from around the world? What if an open source platform were created where all contributions were available to every citizen around the world to draw upon and produce/manufacture in their own locale? The citizens of Cape Town would be able to draw upon an unprecedented resource array to solve the city’s water crisis. Enter Hack the Water Crisis.     

The hackathon follows a strategy called cosmo localization, understood through the expression “Design Global, Manufacture Local“. Leveraging the world wide web to mobilize designers to create a planetary design commons, we can create a resource accessible to local peer producers everywhere, empowered by old and new production technologies. Local South African journalist Daniel Silke writes: “…National government too, needs to move from its recent suspicion of the outside world to a new embrace. It’s not just about gaining foreign investment, it should be an embrace to harness global expertise – and Cape Town does need it urgently.” The hackathon event is part of phase 1, a global collaboration to gather ideas. In the following months, some of those ideas will be turned into prototypes and professional products then lead to a later phase 2 stage – the global distribution of the finalized designs to a network of local manufacturers and maker spaces to produce locally everywhere.

The critical question is can we establish such a planetary design commons that can help solve this crisis? Imagine a global open source alliance of cities drawing upon their citizens and resources to solve each other’s crisis. On a large scale this is what is being called “protocol cooperativism”, the development of protocols for sharing of knowledge and resources on a large-scale and systemic basis to mutualise our capacity to address the major challenges that we face.  Inspired by the terminology of MOOC (Massive Open Online Courses), we introduce the term MOOCC (Massive Open Online Commons Collaboration). Although the term may be new, MOOCC is not. The software world has leveraged MOOCC for decades to develop some of the most important open source software powering the internet, such as Linux,Ubuntu,GNU, MySQL, and Apache   Cosmo localization recognizes that we live in a brick and mortar world, and extends MOOCC methodology into production in general.

In traditional capitalism,  innovators seek financial investment capital to bring their ideas to market. Securing funds allows innovators to exchange it to obtain the resources they need to turn their idea into reality. A large portion of that investment capital is spent on human capital. For instance, labor costs make up half the R+D budget in OECD countries. MOOCC provides a way to bypass a significant portion of the traditional financial capital by going directly to the human capital. With money, it’s easy to buy the expertise we need, but without itl, we need a compelling vision of an end product that all the collaborators desire. And because, relatively speaking, so few innovators meet all the criteria of having the right skills, open source ethos and being able to work pro-bono, this requires casting the net for innovators far and wide. Appealing to the local community is not sufficient, we need to cast the net around the globe. The “massive” in MOOCC is therefore critical.

Traditional capitalism is based on competition but the emergence of the sharing economy has pointed the way to a collaborative economy. To distinguish between these two types of economy, it is convenient to introduce the terminology of the MEconomy as an economy based upon competition, and the WEconomy as one based upon collaboration. The distinction is subtle because even in the MEconomy, collaboration is still a fundamental requirement. The distinction is one more based on a shift in narratives, that drives a shift in behavior. In reality, we all live in a schitzophrenic world. When we are inside our homes, we practice the WEconomy, where social capital is high and the need for money is almost nonexistent. But as soon as we open the door and enter the larger world, we are forced into the MEconomy, and to use money to negotiate all our social transactions. Pyschologically, we feel much more comfortable when we are sharing and have a sense of community, but we forfeit that each time we leave our homes and communities. The MEconomy and WEconomy dualism does not follow the traditional dualism of capitalism vs socialism, a polarizing and false dichotomy. Human beings are both physiologically distinct individuals and yet, require social groups to live and maintain our emotional wellbeing.  Homo Sapien is an altricial species. We are born helpless and immobile – our very survival is dependent on the social support of our parents. Hence the WEconomy is not so much the opposite of MEconomy as it is a balance between taking care both of ourselves and others.

Intersecting with contemporary circular economy theory, the concept of a circular WEconomy is a further refinement of the WEconomy concept, one which recognizes and attempts to correct a politically incomplete definition of the circular economy. For in the current definition of a circular economy, there is no inclusion for democratization of production. The means of production within an idealized circular economy can still support large wealth inequality. Wealth equality is not separate from industrialization and production. It is no accident of history that exploitation of indigenous people around the globe, slavery and industrialization are all intertwined. The current global geographical and corporate polarization of wealth is part and parcel of the means of production that evolved out of the Industrial Revolution.  It is only by defining a circular WEconomy that we introduce the important dimension of wealth democratization into the ecologically necessary circular economy, and redress generational inequality propagated by mainstream economy theory which has traditionally ignored it.  

This project is an example of emerging projects which take a nontraditional approach to addressing development challenges. In addition to the open source and cosmo localization strategies, the project also takes an “urban planetary boundary approach”, to investigate the reasonable limits that should exist in a city’s ecological footprint if we are to create sustainable cities that do not overstep our planetary carrying capacity. Thus, while this project will leverage planetary solidarity to solve Cape Town’s water crisis, the city itself can be working toward making a contribution to solving our global ecological challenges.  

For those interested in supporting or participating in the hackathon, please find out more at  hackthewatercrisis.org  

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You may not know it by its admittedly awkward name, but a process known as commons-based peer production (CBPP) supports much of our online life. CBPP describes internet-enabled, peer-to-peer infrastructures that allow people to communicate, self-organize and produce together. The value of what is produced is not extracted for private profit, but fed back into a knowledge, design and software commons — resources which are managed by a community, according to the terms set by that community. Wikipedia, WordPress, the Firefox browser and the Apache HTTP web server are some of the best-known examples.

If the first wave of commons-based peer production was mainly created digitally and shared online, we now see a second wave spreading back into physical space. Commoning, as a longstanding human practice that precedes commons-based peer production, naturally began in the material world. It eventually expanded into virtual space and now returns to the physical sphere, where the digital realm becomes a partner in new forms of resource stewardship, production and distribution. In other words, the commons has come full circle, from the natural commons described by Elinor Ostrom, through commons-based peer production in digital communities, to distributed physical manufacturing.

This recent process of bringing peer production to the physical world is called Design Global, Manufacture Local (DGML). Here’s how it works: A design is created using the digital commons of knowledge, software and design, and then produced using local manufacturing and automation technologies. These can include three-dimensional printers, computer numerical control (CNC) machines or even low-tech crafts tools and appropriate technology — often in combination. The formula is: What is “light” (knowledge) is global, and what is “heavy” (physical manufacture) is local. DGML and its unique characteristics help open new, sustainable and inclusive forms of production and consumption.

Imagine a process where designs are co-created, reviewed and refined as part of a global digital commons (i.e. a universally available shared resource). Meanwhile, the actual manufacturing takes place locally, often through shared infrastructures and with local biophysical conditions in mind. The process of making something together as a community creates new ideas and innovations which can feed back into their originating design commons. This cycle describes a radically democratized way to make objects with an increased capacity for innovation and resilience.

Current examples of the DGML approach include WikiHouse, a nonprofit foundation sharing templates for modular housing; OpenBionics, creating three-dimensional printed medical prosthetics which cost a fraction (0.1 to 1 percent) of the price of standard prosthetics; L’Atelier Paysan, an open source cooperative fostering technological sovereignty for small- and medium-scale ecological agriculture; Farm Hack, a farmer-driven community network sharing open source know-how amongst do-it-yourself agricultural tech innovators; and Habibi.Works, an intercultural makerspace in northern Greece where Syrian, Iraqi and Afghan refugees develop DGML projects in a communal atmosphere.

This ecologically viable mode of production has three key patterns:

1) Nonprofit: Objects are designed for optimum usability, not to create tension between supply and demand. This eliminates planned obsolescence or induced consumerism while promoting modular, durable and practical applications.

2) Local: Physical manufacturing is done in community workshops, with bespoke production adapted to local needs. These are economies of scope, not of scale. On-demand local production bypasses the need for huge capital outlays and the subsequent necessity to “keep the machines running” night and day to satisfy the expectations of investors with over-capacity and over-production. Transportation costs — whether financial or ecological — are eradicated, while maintenance, fabrication of spare parts and waste treatment are handled locally.

3) Shared: Idle resources are identified and shared by the community. These can be immaterial and shared globally (blueprints, collaboration protocols, software, documentation, legal forms), or material and managed locally (community spaces, tools and machinery, hackathons). There are no costly patents and no intellectual property regimes to enforce false scarcity. Power is distributed and shared autonomously, creating a “sharing economy” worthy of the name.

To preserve and restore a livable planet, it’s not enough to seize the existing means of production; in fact, it may even not be necessary or recommendable. Rather, we need to reinvent the means of production; to radically  reimagine the way we produce. We must also decide together what not to produce, and when to direct our productive capacities toward ecologically restorative work and the stewardship of natural systems. This includes necessary endeavors like permaculture, landscape restoration, regenerative design and rewilding.

These empowering efforts will remain marginal to the larger economy, however, in the absence of sustainable, sufficient ways of obtaining funding to liberate time for the contributors. Equally problematic is the possibility of the capture and enclosure of the open design commons, to be converted into profit-driven, peer-to-peer hybrids that perpetuate the scarcity mindset of capital. Don’t assume that global corporations or financial institutions are not hip to this revolution; in fact, many companies seem to be more interested in controlling the right to produce through intellectual property and patents, than on taking any of the costs of the production themselves. (Silicon Valley-led “sharing” economy, anyone?)

To avoid this, productive communities must position themselves ahead of the curve by creating cooperative-based livelihood vehicles and solidarity mechanisms to sustain themselves and the invaluable work they perform. Livelihood strategies like Platform and Open Cooperativism lead the way in emancipating this movement of globally conversant yet locally grounded producers and ecosystem restorers. At the same time, locally based yet globally federated political movements — such as the recent surge of international, multi-constituent municipalist political platforms — can spur the conditions for highly participative and democratic “design global, manufacture local” programs.

We can either produce with communities and as part of nature or not. Let’s make the right choice.

• Originally published in Truthout
• Art by Jared Rodríguez

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The Commons movement is facing a challenge: to articulate the optimum rate at which a resource can be harvested or used without damaging its ability to replenish itself.

The next economy will have to balance the needs of Earth’s expanding population with the shrinking level of resources which are available to everyone. This dynamic equilibrium is called carrying capacity. It is a middle path between the ‘entropic’ faster, geometric growth rates of human population, individual consumption and economic production, and the ‘negentropic’ slower, arithmetic replenishment rates of water, food and fossil fuels.

This means that the carrying capacity rate for renewable resources will have to follow a carefully guided policy of maintenance and sustenance to ensure that resources are replenished sustainably in meeting the needs of people. The carrying capacity rates of non-renewable resources are much more challenging and will have to be treated very differently. Society will have to decide scientifically how much non-renewable resources to use in the present and how much to save for the future.

This study in 2 volumes leads to an analysis of the thermodynamic downside of free trade and the thermodynamic potential of re-localization of production and distribution.

The first volume of this research explores how scientists and thinkers have come to realise that thermodynamics teaches us that economic theory must take into consideration the constraints of our ecosystem. It also articulates why contrary to what classical economics implies, the possibility to decouple growth from resource use is a myth, and why the commons and commons-based peer production are the right paradigms for the new economy.

The second volume surveys current practices in agro-economics and the dynamics of resource replenishment. It is also a basis for undertaking a future structural analysis of the thermodynamics of re-localization. It shows with scenarios applied to food and fibre, non-renewable resources, and energy, how the commons economy help us overcome the impasse of unlimited growth.

“Those who see the world as a mechanism, a clock, do not look at the economy in the same way as those who see it as a deteriorating energy system,” said French economist René Passet.

Whilst the task of shifting our mindset from looking at a mechanism to looking at a deteriorating energy system, as well as designing new practical alternatives is enormous and might feel daunting, there is however “a light on the hill” provided by the various precursors, influencers, thinkers and practitioners who have collectively started to write the blueprint of this new paradigm.

Part Two: The commons economy in practice

“The only way to materially curb the effect of exponential growth rates on non-renewable resource is to seriously limit the rate of their extraction.”

Download here

Photo by Thomas Hawk

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Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Niaros: We have argued in this overview that we are in a conjuncture in which commons-based mutualizing is one of the keys for sustainability, fairness and global-local well-being. In this conclusion, we suggest a global infrastructure, in which cities can play a crucial role.

See the graphic below for the stacked layer that we propose, which is described as follows:

• The first layer is the cosmo-local institutional layer. Imagine global for-benefit associations which support the provisioning of infrastructures for urban and territorial commoning. These are structured as global public-commons partnerships, sustained by leagues of cities which are co-dependent and co-motivated to support these new infrastructures and overcome the fragmentation of effort that benefits the most extractive and centralized ‘netarchical’ firms. Instead, these infrastructural commons organizations co-support MuniRide, MuniBnB, and other applications necessary to commonify urban provisioning systems. These are the global “protocol cooperative” governance organizations.

• The second layer consists of the actual global depositories of the commons applications themselves, a global technical infrastructure for open sourcing provisioning systems. They consists of what is globally common, but allow contextualized local adaptations, which in turn can serve as innovations and examples for other locales. These are the actual ‘protocol cooperatives’, in their concrete manifestation as usable infrastructure.

• The third layer are the actual local (urban, territorial, bioregional) platform cooperatives, i.e. the local commons-based mechanisms that deliver access to services and exchange platforms, for the mutualized used of these provisioning systems. This is the layer where the Amsterdam FairBnb and the MuniRide application of the city of Ghent, organize the services for the local population and their visitors. It is where houses and cars are effectively shared.

• The potential fourth layer is the actual production-based open cooperatives, where distributed manufacturing of goods and services produces the actual material services that can be shared and mutualized on the platform cooperatives.

Photo by dalobeee

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To do this we must of course define the commons. We generally agree with the definition that was given by David Bollier and others and which derives from the work of Elinor Ostrom and the researchers in this tradition.

What are the Commons and P2P. Click here to enlarge.

In this context, the commons has been defined as a shared resource, which is co-owned and/or co-governed by its users and/or stakeholder communities, according to its rules and norms. It’s a combination of a ‘thing’, an activity, commoning as the maintenance and co-production of that resource, and a mode of governance. It is distinguished from private and public/state forms of managing resources.

But it’s also useful to see commoning as one of four ways of distributing the fruits of a resource, i.e. as a ‘mode of exchange’, which is different from the more obligatory state-based redistribution systems, from markets based on exchange, and from the gift economy with its socially-pressured reciprocity between specific entities. In this context, commoning is pooling/mutualizing a resource, whereby individuals exchange with the totality of an eco-system.

A number of relational grammars, especially that of Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life, are very useful in that regard, as he distinguishes Authority Ranking (distribution according to rank), Equality Matching (the gift economy, as a social obligation to return a gift), Market Pricing and Communal Shareholding.

Kojin Karatani’s book about the Structure of World History is an excellent attempt to place the evolution of these modes of exchange, in a historical context. Pooling is the primary mode for the early tribal and nomadic forms of human organization, as ‘owning’ is counter-productive for nomads; the gift economy starts operating and becomes strongest in more complex tribal arrangements, especially after sedentarisation, since the social obligation of the gift and counter-gift, creates societies and pacifies relations. With the onset of class society, ‘Authority Ranking’ or re-distribution becomes dominant, and finally, the market system becomes dominant under capitalism.

Let’s now reformulate this in a hypothesis for civilisational, i.e. class history.

Class-based societies that emerged before capitalism, have relatively strong commons, and they are essentially the natural resource commons, which are the ones studied by the Ostrom school. They co-exist with the more organic culturally inherited commons (folk knowledge etc..). Though pre-capitalist class societies are very exploitative, they do not systematically separate people from their means of livelihood Thus, under for example European feudalism, peasants had access to common land.

With the emergence and evolution of capitalism and the market system, first as an emergent subsystem in the cities, we see the second form of commons becoming important, i.e. the social commons. In western history we see the emergence of the guild systems in the cities of the Middle Ages, which are solidarity systems for craft workers and merchants, in which ‘welfare’ systems are mutualized, and self governed. When market-based capitalism becomes dominant, the lives of the workers become very precarious, since they are now divorced from the means of livelihood. This creates the necessity for the generalization of this new form of commons,distinct from natural resources. In this context, we can consider worker coops, along with mutuals etc… as a form of commons. Cooperatives can then be considered as a legal form to manage social commons.

With the welfare state, most of these commons were state-ified, i.e. managed by the state, and no longer by the commoners themselves.There is an argument to be made that social security systems are commons that are governed by the state as representing the citizens in a democratic polity. Today, with the crisis of the welfare state, we see the re-development of new grassroots solidarity systems, which we could call ‘commonfare’, and the neoliberalisation and bureaucratisation of the welfare systems may well call for a re-commonification of welfare systems, based on public-commons partnerships.

Since the emergence of the Internet, and especially since the invention of web (the launch of the web browser in October 1993), we see the birth, emergence and very rapid evolution of a third type of commons: the knowledge commons. Distributed computer networks allow for the generalisation of peer to peer dynamics, i.e. open contributory systems where peers are free to join in the common creation of shared knowledge resources, such as open knowledge, free software and shared designs. Knowledge commons are bound to the phase of cognitive capitalism, a phase of capitalism in which knowledge becomes a primary factor of production and competitive advantage, and at the same time represent an alternative to ‘knowledge as private property’, in which knowledge workers and citizens take collective ownership of this factor of production.

To the degree that cognitive or network-based capitalism undermines salary-based work and generalized precarious work, especially for knowledge workers, these knowledge commons and distributed networks become a vital tool for social autonomy and collective organisation. But access to knowledge does not create the possibility for the creation of autonomous and more secure livelihoods, and thus, knowledge commons are generally in a situation of co-dependence with capital, in which a new layer of capital, netarchical capital, directly uses and extracts value from the commons and human cooperation.

But we should not forget that knowledge is a representation of material reality, and thus, the emergence of knowledge commons is bound to have an important effect on the modes of production and distribution.

I would then emit the hypothesis that this is the phase we have reached, i.e. the ‘phygital’ phase in which the we see the increased intertwining of ‘digital’ (i.e. knowledge) and the physical.

The first location of this inter-twining are the urban commons. I have had the opportunity to spend four months in the Belgian city of Ghent, where we identified nearly 500 urban commons in every area of human provisioning (food. Shelter, transportation)^[1].

Our great discovery was that these urban commons function in essentially the same way as the digital commons communities that operate in the context of ‘commons-based peer production’.

This means that they combine the following elements:

1) an open productive community with

2) a for-benefit infrastructure organisation that maintains the infrastructure of the commons and

3) generative (in the best case) livelihood organisations which mediate between the market/state and the commons in order to insure the social reproduction of the commoners (i.e. their livelihoods).

In our vision, these urban commons, which according to at least two studies ^[2] are going through an exponential phase of growth (a ten-fold growth in the last ten years), are the premise for a further deepening of the commons, preparing a new phase of deeper re-materialization.

We can indeed distinguish four types of commons according to two axes: material/immaterial, and co-produced/inherited.

Ostrom commons are mostly inherited material commons (natural resources); inherited immaterial commons, such as culture and language, are usually considered under the angle of the common heritage of humankind; knowledge commons are immaterial commons that are co-produced and finally, there is a largely missing category of material commons that are produced. We are talking here of what is traditionally called ‘capital’, but in the new context of an accumulation of the commons, rather than a accumulation of capital for the sake of capital.

Let’s see the logic of this.

In pre-capitalist class formations, where the land is a primary productive factor, natural resource commons are an essential resource of the livelihood of the commons, and it is entirely natural that the commons take the form of the common governance of natural resources tied to the land.

In capitalist formations, where the workers are divorced from access to land and the means of production, it is natural that the commons become ‘social’; they are the solidarity systems that workers need to survive, and they are the attempts to organize production on a different basis during the rule of capital, i.e. they can also take the form of cooperatives for production and consumption.

In an era of cognitive capitalism, knowledge becomes a primary resource and factor of production and wealth creation, and knowledge commons are a logical outcome. But the precarious workers that are in exodus from the salaried condition, cannot ‘eat’ knowledge. Therefore, the commons also take on the form of urban infrastructure and provisioning systems, but must ultimately also take the form of true physical and material productive commons. The commons are therefore potentially the form of a mode of production and industry appropriate to the current conjuncture. During a time of market and state failure regarding the necessary ecological transition, and heightened social inequality, commoning infrastructure becomes a necessity for guaranteeing access to resources and services, to limit unequal access, but also as a very potent means to lower the material footprint of human production.

Therefore, current urban and productive commons are also the seed forms of the new system which solves the problems of the current system, which combines a pseudo-abundance in material production which endangers the planet, and an artificial scarcity in knowledge exchange, which hinders the spread of solutions.

The knowledge commons of cognitive capitalism are but a transition to the productive commons of the post-capitalist era.

In this new form of material commons, which are heavily informed and molded by digital knowledge commons (hence ‘phygital’), the means of production themselves can become a pooled resource. We foresee a combination of shared global knowledge resources (for example, exemplified by shared designs, and following the rule: all that is light is global and shared), and local cooperatively owned and managed micro-factories (following the rule: all that is heavy is local).

This cosmo-local (DGML: design global, manufacture local) mode of production and distribution, has the following characteristics:

• Protocol cooperativism: the underlying immaterial and algorithmic protocols are shared and open source, using copyfair principles (free sharing of knowledge, but commercialization conditioned by reciprocity)
• Open cooperativism: the commons-based coops are distinguished from ‘collective capitalism’ by their commitment to creating and expanding common goods for the whole of society; in Platform coops it is the platforms themselves that are the commons, needed to enable and manage the exchanges that may be needed, while protecting it from capture by extractive netarchical platfors
• Open and contributive accounting: fair distribution mechanisms that recognize all contributions
• Open and shared supply chains for mutual coordination
• Non-dominium forms of ownership (the means of production are held in common for the benefit of all participants in the eco-system.

In our opinion, the current wave of urban commons, is a prefiguration of the coming wave of scaled up material commons for the production and distribution of value in post-capitalist systems.

All artworks by Mario Klingemann.

^[1] See: http://wiki.commons.gent for a directory of these commons, classified by provisioning system, in Dutch.
^[2] The first study pertains to the Netherlands, and is a booklet with the text of a lecture by Tine De Moor, entitled ‘Homo Cooperans, delivered at her inauguration as Professor of Institutions for Collective Action in Historical Perspective, August 30, 2013:

The second study concerns the Flanders: Burgercollectieven in kaart gebracht. Van Fleur Noy & Dirk Holemans. Oikos,2016: http://www.coopkracht.org/images/phocadownload/burgercollectieven%20in%20kaart%20gebracht%20-%20fleur%20noy%20%20dirk%20holemans.pdf

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Summary

Chris Giotitsas and Jose Ramos: “The basic features of DG-ML are based on the conjunction of open source / open design production logics at the global scale, which are coupled with local-network production at a regional scale. Traditionally corporate enterprises have solely owned the intellectual property (IP) they employ in the production of goods. They source the materials for the goods through national or global supply chains. They manufacture those goods using economies of scale in a set number of manufacturing centres, whereupon those finished goods are delivered nationally or globally. DG-ML is an inversion of this production logic. First of all, the IP is open, whether open source or creative commons or copyfair,3 so it can be used by anyone. Secondly, manufacturing and production can be done independently of the IP, by any community or enterprise around the world that wants to. The democratization of increasingly powerful precision manufacturing technologies, such as 3D printers, laser cutters, CNC routers and automated systems / robots potentiate this. This does not follow the logic of economies of scale (yet), rather it is focused on producing value for a critical reference group (CRG), a community who require such goods. Thirdly, distribution is localized to the CRG, or affiliates of the CRG.

DG-ML is not just the advent of new technologies that can be simply strapped on to the neoliberal globalization machine. DG-ML in fact represents the instantiation and operationalization of a new economic system that draws from an emerging worldview. Drawing from relationships and experiences with people involved in DG-ML, we believe it represents a substantive cultural shift in the orientation of material producers/consumers. It rejects the way in which industrialization has decontextualized inputs and outputs and associated externalities. It is thus allied to the vision for building circular economies, the idea being that the production materials used in a DG-ML process are sourced as locally as possible, with waste outputs utilized as inputs elsewhere, eliminating unnecessary supply chain associated costs and impacts. It is also connected to calls for a post-growth economic model, sustaining livelihoods based on measures of wellbeing rather than corporate / economic growth.10 It is interwoven with the open source movement, a vision for a digital commons where the legacy of human creativity is shareable. It draws from a planetary imaginary where local development work is responsive to the planetary challenges we face.11 It is in fact part of a movement to create an alternative globalization,12 and an expression of an emergent worldview: global ecological integrity versus overshoot, peer worker solidarity versus national competition, value pluralism versus the monoculture of GDP.”

Excerpts

From the conclusion: “These two cases provide a window into an emerging economic model that we are just beginning to understand. The cases demonstrate the peer production of shared value and common resources. However, unlike the open software movement, the mode of co-production within these cases are highly localized, members are collaboratively prototyping, designing and experimenting with machinery. These cases can be considered to be prefigurative, they are potential indicators of things to come. The logic of peer production has hit an important threshold, it is now instantiated through physical / material production. Yet the cases also demonstrate growing pains. For Farm Hack questions still remain concerning their financial viability and the challenges of sustaining the producing communities. Is a weak for-benefit organisation enough to facilitate the healthy growth of their network of peer producers? For L’Atelier Paysans, there are less problems with financing the operation, but more questions about how an entrepreneurial coalition is activated. Looking ahead, what might we take away from these case studies that may allow us to see the faint future outlines of an alternative political economy? The emergence of the network form and the logic of commoning embodied in DG-ML practices as demonstrated in these case studies, provide us with some of the seeds from which to begin to imagine an alternative future for political economy. DG-ML challenges the logic of zero sum competition, which is at the heart of our nationally based (and globally connected) capitalist systems. In the current system we are used to national governments supporting national industries to compete globally, win market share and take the lead in technology and innovation. The DG-ML model is part of the birth of a globally cooperative system, the design innovations from one community in one part of the world can be used and adapted for a community in a wholly different part of the world. Instead of systems of competitive advantage and capturing of market share, technological adaptation is community-based and meant to sustain the livelihoods of critical reference groups. While there is theoretical scope for larger industrial scale DG-ML which is able to produce for regional markets (cities of 4-20 million people for example), the examples in this report show a commitment to the adaptation of design and technology for local critical reference groups, rather than competitive marketing strategies.

This then can also help us to reconsider the role of the state with respect to industry and material production. If DG-ML helps regions to rupture from the zero-sum logic of competition, states may develop policies in which support is given to both scales of the DG-ML coproduction system – global and local. At the scale of the global, national policy can orient knowledge production to be open in a way that potentiates industry in material production society-wide and indeed worldwide. At the scale of the local state policy can support communities and local regions in bootstrapping enterprises and productive communities that can instantiate the potential and value of DG-ML processes, through participatory action research processes. This has been referred to as a partner state model.24Finally, because DG-ML is growing from within the dominant capitalist economy, it is important that the value of a global design commons is not simply captured by capitalist industry as a way to lower its operational costs, without having to reciprocate by entering into the coproduction of the commons. It’s important, therefore, to begin to consider how to create virtuous cycles in the value exchanges between different actors in the global DG-ML meta-system. Some ideas in this vein have may be the development of copyfair licences (commons-based reciprocity license),25 useful for trans-nationalizing a generative circulation of value across commons based initiatives – a form of Dzopen cooperativismdz,26 and through which the capitalist / corporate sector would need to concretely reciprocate into if it wants to draw upon it in the first place. This would conceivably require new global institutions that would be able to provide legal and administrative power in supporting, enacting and protecting an open cooperativist regime of knowledge and value exchange. The potential for DG-ML is to liberate the human heritage of knowledge and design, so that communities and people anywhere have the full array of technologies and capabilities to address their living economic and ecological challenges. If we want to accelerate the human capability to enact sustainable development strategies across the world, the right to global designs and concrete support for building local livelihoods are fundamental pillars. The case studied presented here provide hope grounded in practice. Building on these courageous pioneering efforts will be the next challenge.”

Visualization

Comparison of Traditional vs DGML-based peer production

(CRG refers to: critical reference group)

• Images courtesy of L’Atelier Paysan.
• Download the full report here: A New Model of Production for a New Economy.

The post A New Model of Production for a New Economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jose Ramos: I had the great pleasure last month of speaking in a symposium hosted by the Anthropocene Transition Project, a project run by Ken McLeod from the University of Technology Sydney’s School of Business. The symposium was entitled “After Growth, Reimagining Economies for the Anthropocene”, held 17 July 2017. Coming to learn about the project, I am truly impressed by its scope and dimensions, and I believe it represents the kinds of conversations and work that we need to have in order to address the challenges that we face. Many thanks to Ken and others for the opportunity. Here’s a link to the talk. Below is a transcript of the talk. In the live talk I had to cut out certain bits to fit it into the symposium time allocation, so the script has elements not in the live talk.

Cosmo-localization for the Anthropocene Transition 

The Anthropocene signifies humans as a species with planetary impacts. Importantly it also signifies us as a species of emerging planetary awareness. In this talk I will discuss this first dimension – human instrumental power – and this second dimension – reflective human awareness – together with the idea for cosmo-localization. We are seemingly in a pitched race between two aspects of ourselves. human instrumental power and reflective human awareness. The first aspect of our self is inventive and creative and impactful. Technology liberates energy, and energy flows back into human systems increasing their power.

Our species is playing out an unconscious expiation of the wild, a deep seeded need to create order and stability from the rhythmic and uncertain dynamics of our prehistoric existence… technologies primal power, which liberated us from the uncertainty of our prehistorical lives of ecological interdependence, competitiveness and precarity.

When this dominion of God’s chosen species had only regional impacts we could continue to play out this logic of endless displacement. But now we have reached the full circle of the contradiction. When the impacts are globally distributed and future negating, there are no “other” places to displace these onto. We humans have reached the limit of the capacity to play out this unconscious model of civilization as god’s chosen.

As William Irwin Thompson argued:

If we make such things as Agent Orange or plutonium, they are simply not going to go away, for there is no way in which to put them. If we force animals into concentration camps in feed lots, we will become sick from the antibiotics with which we inject them; if we force nature into mono-crop agribusiness, we will become sprayed by our own pesticides; if we move into genetic engineering, we’ll have genetic pollution; if we develop genetic engineering into evolutionary engineering, we will have evolutionary pollution. Industrial civilization never seems to learn, from DDT or thalidomide, plutonium or dioxin; catastrophe is not an accidental by-product of an otherwise good system of progress and control; catastrophe is an ecology’s response to being treated in an industrial manner…. Precisely because pollution cannot go away, we must generate only those kinds of pollution we can live with. Precisely because enemies won’t go away, for the fundamentalists’ process of inciting hate only creates enemies without end, we have no choice but to love our enemies. The enantiomorphic polity of the future must have capitalists and socialists, Israelis and Palestinians, Bahais and Shiites, evengelicals and Episcopalians. (Thompson, 1985, pp140-141)

In 2001 A Space Odyssey there is a scene in which the protohuman throws a bone into the air, and as it spins it becomes a space station floating through space. This is the first act in the drama of technology’s triumph. The next acts play out in the histories of technology and conquest that we all know so well – from the wheel to railroads to computers. Towards the end of the film, this same human-created technology plays out the end of this drama, the artificially intelligent system that runs the spaceship – Hal 9000, decides it doesn’t need us anymore.

How I interpret this …. Is it about the human disownment of the deeper logic of our relationship to technology (human instrumental power) and the world. When emancipatory instrumental power becomes homicidal, ecocidal, humanicidal, it is because an aspect of ourself has been disowned.

This is where we are now – and films like 2001 A Space Odyssey and many other films simply play out what our collective unconscious already knows and wants to affirm – that the human instrumental relationship with the world is in deep contradiction to our own existence. This emerging awareness is that second aspect of the self.

This self observes, reflects… it understands that we’ve reached a place of planetary impact, which requires a new level of understanding, identity, coordination and action. Within this new understanding of a planetary commons, new models of personal behavior, social rules and governance are required. This second aspect of ourselves looks critically at the first aspect. It can see both the shadow of our technological self, but as well the way in which human culture is the ultimate technology / the ultimate infrastructure, through the shaping of mindsets, worldviews and the deep assumptions and metaphors by which we live our lives.

The first aspect is very well developed, we have created a global industrial innovation machine. To paraphrase the German sociologist Ulrich Beck, the global industrial innovation complex not only produces technological novelty but it produces risk on unimaginable scales which gets financially rewarded, as engineers, tech gurus and innovation consultants, IPOs etc. etc.

The second aspect is still underdeveloped. The field of complex adaptive systems is only about 40-50 years old. It is not a baby or even a toddler. But it is young. Modernity disowned preindustrial folk eco-science, only to bring it back in when we began to experience silent springs. It is a process of reflection through destruction. The adolescent learns to become responsible by first crashing dad’s car. And the reflective loop from the Anthropocene is even more dramatic, we learn how our planet works by first almost destroying it.

In the film the Aluna, the Kogi tribe of Colombia first decided to come out of isolation in 1990 to give a warning to the modern world. Their message is not heeded and 20 years later they decide they need to teach modernity just how the world works – their much older version of ecological science. In the film they refer to themselves as the older brother, and to modern society as the younger brother. I think that is a very good description, as first we are all brothers and sisters, but even then the younger brother has gone a bit crazy. The younger brother is very powerful but blinded by his own power, and has become dangerous to all. He thinks more of his instrumental power (aka green capitalism) is the solution to the problems of his instrumental power. Older brother and sister have some very important lessons.

So we need a conversation between these different selves, the older brother and sister and the younger brother and sister

Technology surely cannot be disowned because that would be disowning what it means to be human. We are technologial beings by virtue of our neocortext, and its expression through complex social organization. But technology needs to be at the service of deep ecological planetary awareness and impacts, understanding the shadow of our species as a technological being that disowns. So an integration between these dimensions of ourselves for our species … this is the way that I consider future strategies and possibilities.

Over the past few years I’ve been putting forward the idea of Cosmo-localization. The basic idea here is that we increasingly have the potential for localizing production by drawing on a global design commons. There are decentralized open resources for designs that can be used for a wide variety of things, medicines, furniture, assistive devices, farm tools, machinery etc. A new generation of manufacturing technologies has emerged on the back of the computer revolution. The democratization of these technologies, for example the development of raspberry pie and Arduino microcontroller systems, makes this distributed local production approach viable.

There are about 20+ or so emerging case examples. It exists in pockets and seeds, and holds potential, but that potential is not guaranteed and has many development pathways, some of which are undesirable. For example cosmo localization means the capacity for people to 3D print weapons. There is nothing desirable about this in my opinion. If we attach a libertarian philosophy to it we simply exacerbate the problems we already have. It’s instrumentalism all over again.

Ideas such as the Anthropocene and Planetization, which talk about human species planetary impacts and awareness, the crisis of the growth machine, and the need to build and protect our planetary commons, these are the essential social and conceptual contexts within which Cosmo-localization strategies need to be developed. Cosmo-localization without the social context is simply again the younger brother disowning the wisdom and guidance of the older siblings.

So what I’d like to do for the remainder of this talk is to provide some links between Cosmo localization as a technological and economic strategy, and Cosmo localization as a an expression of planetary awareness and planetary responsibility taking in an Anthropocene Transition.

Indeed this is what I initially meant by the “Cosmo” in Cosmo-localization. It was partly from the Kantian inspired discourse on cosmopolitanism, which asserts that each of us has equal moral standing, even as nations treat people differently. We share in a global community of fate, as David Held would argue, and that the zero-sum game of nation-state politics is completely inadequate for dealing with our shared planetary challenges. We are not just creatures of locality but indeed cosmic beings, the air we breathe is from the oceans and the great forests of the world, the water we drink has circulated millions of times through every ecosystem that exists. We are brother and sisters and kindred with all life.

So with this in mind I want to put forward some of the basic ways in which I see Cosmo-localization as part of an Anthropocene Transition, as it is this latter social and conceptual context, the second self, that is so fundamental to the very notion of Cosmo-localization.

Michel Bauwens’ argument from years ago was that we treat physical resources as if they were infinite and then we lock up intellectual resources as if they were finite. But the reality is quite the contrary – we live in a world where physical resources are limited, but immaterial resource are digitally reproducible and therefore abundant. Therefore what should be traveling around the world are ideas and designs that form part of our shared knowledge commons, which any community around the world can use to produce the things they need. Moving electrons around the world has a smaller ecological footprint than moving coal, iron, plastic and other materials. At a local level the challenge is to develop economic systems that can draw from local supply chains.

But how are we going to get anywhere close to the material sufficiency – we are all wedded to economies of scale and the extractive neoliberal model? This is where the idea of stigmergy helps. Stigmergy is the process by which distributed actors coordinate and build collective structures overtime, without a central control system. It is how ants and bees build their colonies. It is how wikipedia was built.

Imagine a water crisis in a city, for example capetown SA. The city is facing such a severe water crisis that within a year the whole city may be out of water. A stigmergic cosmo-localization strategy would mean that globally distributed networks would be active in solving the water crisis. In one part of the world, let’s say barcelona, a fab lab prototypes a water filtration system – the system itself is based on a freely available CAD design that can be 3D printed. The Capetown teams draw upon this and begin to experiment with it with their lived challenges. To make the system work they needed to make modifications, and they document this and make the next version of the design open. Now other locales around the world take this new design and apply it to their own challenges. This is mobilizing stigmergic problem solving planet-wide.

This is not a fiction, actually their is a network based in capetown SA called STOP RESET GO who contacted me and who want to run a cosmo-localization hackathon process to do just this. Imagine doing this with any problem that people faced locally. From farmers doing regenerative agriculture. To machinists developing furniture products from locally sourced materials. To builders creating housing.

Another concrete connections between Cosmo-localism and the planetary view of responsibility taking is the relationship to the post-growth model. Céline Piques and Xavier Rizos over the past year have been working with Michel Bauwens on developing the data modeling and conceptual understanding for how we create post growth economic scenarios through a Cosmo-localism strategy. They argue that even with intensive recycling, the current growth trajectory of material use across a whole number of types of materials will lead to eventual depletion, not to mention unacceptable ecological impacts. In one of their models for a particular resource, I think iron, they write: “The exponential nature of growth makes recycling ineffective when the growth rate is above 2%. It is only when the rate of growth is lower than 1.5% that recycling makes a significant difference.”

Their modeling of growth dynamics compounded year by year led them to only one scenario that can avoid eventual depletion with large ecological impacts – degrowth. It is through degrowth together with smart circular economy strategies where, material type by material type, material depletion with large ecological impact can be avoided. Degrowth means there is a reduction in the quantity of the said material on a year by year basis – but not a reduction of value – value continues to be created and circulated.

This is where cosmo-localization may provide some solutions, because everywhere there is a need to simultaneously reduce material impacts while generating livelihoods. The post growth scenario so far has not been politically palatable because our political economy is still based on assumptions that the state must drive growth to generate full employment (Keynesianism / social democracy), or corporate expansion (neoliberalism). Going post growth looks like the abyss to policymakers and politicians – it is a formula for getting kicked out of office. But what if, through cosmo-localization, the stigmergic global design commons potentiated local innovation, problem solving and entrepreneurship, which generated livelihoods and jobs while simultaneously reducing material use and impacts?

So as part of an Anthropocene Transition, perhaps we can imagine a transnational effort to potentiate and build the global design commons – the collective intelligence and heritage of humankind that can be instantiated in any locality. Build livelihoods while reducing material impacts.

To do such a thing will not be easy, as our current economies are designed to co-op such efforts, and our variegated capitalist oligarchs by definition engage in what is called “wealth defense”, which means using a variety of means of rigging policies to favour incumbency.

So to finish here is some vision and proposals for how such a process might unfold.

Scenario 1 – Economic Transition

Imagine it is 2035 and the world economy has been transformed. The world went through traumatic shock after the second Global Financial Crisis of 2020, erasing trillions from people’s bank accounts and devastating economies. For decades wages have stagnated under neoliberal policies. After the first GFC this accelerated, but after the second it became a crisis with massive levels of unemployment. Rising from the ashes of this were new cooperative systems of economic organization. As the cooperative and platform cooperative movements matured, they became more profitable for member-workers, and a strong competitor to the corporate-capitalist incumbents. With the crisis, people flock to the cooperative form. Alternative currencies had developed, increasingly high tech, leveraging block chain and other technologies. The global knowledge and design commons had matured even more. Through open cooperativism strategies a resurgent transnational sector called ‘The Global Coop’ emerges. It helps to transnationalize value exchange. Coop currencies trade across the globe, creating a planetary sub-economy that flourishes amid the economic mess left over by neo-liberalisms GFC wreck. Institutions that support Commons Based Reciprocity Licenses (CopyFair) provide ways to maintain the strength of design and knowledge commons that underpin The Global Coop. The Global Coop, by virtue of capturing and circulating value, is able to increasingly build and maintain the open global design commons that increasingly potentiates distributed localized production. 

Scenario 2 – Politics Transition 

Imagine it is 2045, and world political systems have undergone fundamental transformations. From 2020 automation and robotics decimated whole industries and sectors, leaving large swaths of the population unemployed. Political oligarchy continued to drive policies that failed to redistribute wealth and create the social commons. The political movements that began in the 21st century, the World Social Forum, Occupy, the Arab Spring, Podemos, the Sunflower Movement, evolved into powerful forces for change – wisdom polities. A new generation of citizens forge a new political culture, visionary and forward thinking, highly connected, relational, experimental and active. Using new P2P practices and technologies, and founded on a new political culture of patient engagment, citizen movements are able to create new political contracts. The foundational outline for the political contracts include: a new system of taxation that draws from a commons analysis, the development of a partner state model where the state supports citizen initiated commoning, cooperative enterprises and development strategies, which includes cosmo-localization projects, and different types of progressive support systems that provide basic levels of security for all.  

Scenario 3 – Culture Transition  

Imagine it is 2055, and a new type of culture flourishes which values local knowledge, ecologies, resources and where most of what we produce is designed for non-obsolesce, reuse or upcycling. From 2020 major resource shocks began, with the price of oil affecting transport, and other minerals. The resource crisis deepened year by year as the world population soared and demands for resources steadily rose. As the population rose so did human impacts on ecosystems, in a steady march of degradation. Facing ecological crisis, even the most trenchant conservatives began to question their assumptions underlying societal models. The maker movement and sustainable design movement had begun to forge a new culture of ecological care in the application of technology. Products are only be made if they could be reused, or if they could be upcycled. This new culture drives policies for “true costing”. High resource costs are dealt with through circular and cosmo-localized systems of production, supported by the open design commons. The new human story is about restoration and restorative practices, how we build the health of our societies and the Earth through a deep understanding of our ecological world and self. 

In conclusion there is a way through this mess! But it is neither by disowning technology, nor by believing that technology is the answer. It is by bringing together the younger brother and younger sister into a larger conversation with their older siblings, to reflect and consider and renew what it means to be human.

References

Thompson, W.I. (1985). Pacific Shift. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.

Originally published in Linked.in

Lead image by Berlyn Brixner / Los Alamos National Laboratory – http://www.lanl.gov/orgs/pa/photos/images/PA-98-0520.jpeg, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4179325

The post Jose Ramos on Cosmo-Localization for the Anthropocene Transition appeared first on P2P Foundation.

1/THE UNDERLYING DYNAMICS OF CAPITALISM: The presidential victory and ongoing support for Donald Trump in the USA reflects the crisis of neoliberal globalization and the underlying dynamics of capitalism.

These dynamics include not only the environmental externalities, such as peak resources and climate change, but also the social externalities, essentially the impoverishment of the western working and middle classes and how, for example, this affects attitudes towards migration. Note also that peak resource calculations are not in contradiction with the current oil glut, but paradoxically part of it (see Bio-Physical Triggers of Political Violence).

2/EMPIRE vs NATION-STATE: The following struggle therefore emerges. Pro-neoliberal forces seek to maintain the benefits of Empire at the cost of both the internal population and the more nationally bound industries. Trump-backing forces accept that they can no longer dominate Empire, and are ready to endanger it to save the USA as a nation-state. Wall Street and the fossil fuel industry align with Trump in a desperate attempt to maintain profits by slashing social and environmental costs. Other right-wing populist forces have broadly similar designs for their own national realities. Hence the support for Trump from the more nationally-oriented business leaders and the energy sector fearing climate change costs and regulations. The idea is to retreat back to the nation-state, only accept trade that poses no threat to national capital, and repatriate trillions of dollars stashed abroad through the “imperial” multinationals. This explains the neoliberal elite opposition to Trump.

3/THE CLASS COMPROMISE: The class compromise of neoliberalism has been gradually rendered unworkable. This compromise included acceptance of the cultural aspects and desires expressed by the 1968 uprising (and thus, of cultural, gender and other minority rights), and a relative alliance with the postmodern, post labor left that supported it (while actively de-industrializing to the detriment of western industrial labor). ‘Neoliberal economics preferences’ allied to ‘liberalized cultural preferences’, if you like. Indeed, it is important to understand that just as the labor left institutions became coopted in the New Deal/ Welfare state model, so also did much of the pro-rights left represented by identity politics (see the Boltanski/Chiapello book for for an inquiry into this). The Trump forces in contrast vow alignment with the white working class and those sharing certain laborist or productivist values, at the cost of Otherization. It is mobilizing, and creating a convergent enemy: the amalgam of neoliberal business elite and the cultural elite.

Hence the alignment between pro-neoliberal politics and the cultural left. This was represented by the Clinton-Obama coalitions in the US, while social democrats elsewhere also shifted from industrial labor to more privileged “creative” workers, managing the neoliberal retrenchment of welfare provisions and effectively orphaning industrial workers, leaving them ripe for manipulation by right-wing populism.

4/CULTURE AND OTHERIZATION: The focus on cultural rights leaves the cultural left understandably opposed to the Otherization and overt racism/genderism of the Trump coalition. They largely feel obliged to offer some degree of support to the neoliberal regime which granted cultural rights and reforms. Given the undermining of the neoliberal compromise, however, this seems a mistake. Instead, it will be necessary to realign with the needs and interests of industrial labor, and to build grand coalitions that no longer sacrifice blue collar workers’ interests on the altar of neoliberal globalization. As we will see below, we believe the Commons is that new glue.

5/PROTECTIONIST RE-NATIONALIZATION: The Sanders forces thus more realistically represent those sectors of the left focused on re-creating synergy between progressive labor and the cultural left, intent on building a new coalition. Hence the use of moderate language by Sanders in an effort to maintain bonds with those parts of labor that voted for Trump. However, this means maintaining a broad orientation towards restoring New Deal principles and support for Keynesian politics and, crucially, the same orientation towards re-industrialization and the restoration of the nation-state. Both right- and left populism, despite their great and significant differences, share the nostalgia for a strong nation-state, but lack any vision of going ‘beyond’ it. This orientation also continues to posit contradictions between the workers in different nation-states. The proposed protectionist re-nationalizations and re-industrializations do not sufficiently address global issues and the need for transnational cooperation in tackling them. A return to nation-state protectionism does not adequately address the needs for transnational solidarities between commoners the world over.

6/COALITIONS OF CONTRADICTIONS: Both coalitions, therefore, have their contradictions. For example, Trump needs the support of both labor and their unions, but also of the no-tax Republicans. This means he must cut the budget while simultaneously needing trillions for infrastructural investment. He needs to retreat from Empire, but also needs to pacify the defense establishment. He needs Big Oil, but at the cost of environmental disruption. He wants to increase profitability at the cost of social and environmental disruption, and at the risk of eventually alienating his labor base to appease his industrial supporters. The radical right may talk ‘labor’, but their main base remains the angry declining middle classes who are eager to slash their costs of production.

7/THE DECOMPOSITION OF “NORMAL”: The Obama and Sanders coalitions have their own contradictions. They remain stuck between a rock and a hard place, between a disintegrating neoliberal globalization and a nation-state reality that’s just impossible to restore.

8/COSMO-LOCALIZATION AND THE WORKFORCE: Thus, the emerging P2P/Commons approach has a crucial role to play in making the Sanders coalition more realistic, by offering new strategies for re-industrialization which are not based on going back to the old models, but on going forward towards a cosmo-local model of production, ‘where everything light is global, and everything heavy is local’. Advocating for this subsidiarity of material production, combining deep global cooperation with deep mutualization of infrastructures is the only recipe for global re-industrialization on a ecological footing, with the re-creation of massive employment opportunities and livelihoods. This model offers solutions not only for the US and European workers, but for populations worldwide. This requires that commoners make their own turn towards focusing more broadly, not only on knowledge workers but on all workers and the rest of the population, through offering perspectives for sustainable livelihoods, centered around the cities and their bioregional contexts. Trans-national institutions that can supplement the likely failings of both corporate neo-globalization AND neo-statist restorations will also be need to be created, based on the current emergence of global productive communities, global ethical entrepreneurial coalitions and the commonification of public services in support of it.

9/THE PARTNER STATE APPROACH: The big issue for the Commons movement and emergence is the immaturity of a lot of these potential solutions, which are far from being embraced by sufficient critical masses. Thus, the Commons is as dependent on aligning with the progressive nation-state restorers, as the other way around. Such huge transitions are impossible to carry out well without the support of state institutions (what we call the Partner State approach). Hence, one of the strategic priorities is a dialogue between the labor left (a la Sanders and Corbyn), the cultural rights movements, and the emerging commons movement along with regenerative business orientations and sustainability coalitions. Indeed, the only interesting coalition with potential elite forces are those that fully support ecological transitions and ‘fair deals’ with the larger population on the fruits of labor and the Commons. However, there are numerous grassroots generative and ‘entre-donneurial’ forces that could be aligned with the Commons as its livelihood branch.

10/THE PREFIGURATIVE COMMONS ECONOMY: In the meantime, as Arthur Brock and others have suggested, we must accelerate construction of the prefigurative commons economy, with its respect for the sharing of knowledge (free movements), just distribution of the social surplus (solidarity economy), and ecologically viable production for human need (political ecology). This is the micro-coalition of the Commons, which undergirds our participation in the larger social and political mobilizations now unfolding.

Lead image by Alisdare Hickson. Additional image by ResistFromDay1.

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