David de Ugarte – P2P Foundation

Experiential Egalitarism

David de Ugarte — Mon, 07 Mar 2016 07:08:03 +0000

As there are two models of productive communities –one that sees itself as a “society of friends” and one that defines itself as a “collectivist germ”-, there are basically two models of community growth. In the “society of friends” model, the procedure is “experiential”: the community’s growth starts from and relies on those who share experiences and projects. In the collectivist model, growth is “universal” –that is, a relatively objective procedure is established, and all those who follow it have the “right” to join as a peer.

In practical terms, however, a problem arises: seldom any of the two models allows for the integration of participants as true peers in the situation. Some members are treated more as “peers” than others. The founding groups, the pioneers in almost any community, hold a different status: equal rights, more responsibility, and more prominence towards the outside world. This is not the result of a hidden power structure. When an intergenerational community proclaims itself to be egalitarian, it is usually sincere. But the truth is that those who go through a long foundational process, as is the case of a productive community, accept more responsibilities afterwards, tend to value more the associated risks and show greater concern with the global development than those who enter an “already-made” community and think that its stability is not an achievement but a starting point about which one doesn’t have to worry. In essence, we are talking about the same problem found in cooperatives or family businesses when they talk about “generational change.”

Any solutions?

What makes a community egalitarian is equality in responsibilities: all members are equally responsible for everything, starting with the smallest thing regardless of whether they have direct participation or not. That is a legitimate solution to deal with the invisible line separating “founding” members from “newcomers” in a community.

But, as in any other aspect of life, solutions are never found in “being”, much less in the imposition of a “collective being.” It is not about the creation of rules to manipulate people’s wishes let alone requiring from them a change in how they are.

In a community, inequality between members on account of their participation or not in the community’s foundation stems from the inequality of experiences. Thus this should be our starting point. The aim is that all members become founders –that is, allowing for everyone to have a foundational experience so that he can see the community from that experience. Of course, neither we can think that “all work is done and we can go home” nor we can expect the conclusions of each particular experience to be the same for all, something that is impossible. Learning will be different for each member, but it will be different under a basic equality in responsibility: having to “do it all”, erring on his own, having to “look at everything all the time,” and learning by himself how fragile is every construction. Ultimately it is a process of discovery: that all human constructs are kept alive only while they are in motion.

This is the reason why Mayra and Manuel created Enkidu two years ago and why we are so proud that the Christmas Project arose out of the Club de las Indias. They are two similar ways to build experiential equality in two different types of community, which is, at the end, the true meaning of “making community”.

Translation by Olaf Domínguez from the original post in Spanish.

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Why all peers are not equal in Egalitarian Productive Communities

Michel Bauwens — Sat, 27 Feb 2016 10:25:45 +0000

Excerpted from David de Ugarte who distinguishes two types of such communities:

“As there are two models of productive communities – one that sees itself as a “society of friends” and one that defines itself as a “collectivist germ” -, there are basically two models of community growth. In the “society of friends” model, the procedure is “experiential”: the community’s growth starts from and relies on those who share experiences and projects. In the collectivist model, growth is “universal” –that is, a relatively objective procedure is established, and all those who follow it have the “right” to join as a pair.”

He then goes on two explains why inequalities in influence persist:

“In practical terms, however, a problem arises: seldom any of the two models allows for the integration of participants as true pairs in the situation. Some members are treated more as “pairs” than others. The founding groups, the pioneers in almost any community, hold a different status: equal rights, more responsibility, and more prominence towards the outside world. This is not the result of a hidden power structure. When an intergenerational community proclaims itself to be egalitarian, it is usually sincere. But the truth is that those who go through a long foundational process, as is the case of a productive community, accept more responsibilities afterwards, tend to value more the associated risks and show greater concern with the global development than those who enter an “already-made” community and think that its stability is not an achievement but a starting point about which one doesn’t have to worry. In essence, we are talking about the same problem found in cooperatives or family businesses when they talk about “generational change.”

What makes a community egalitarian is equality in responsibilities: all members are equally responsible for everything, starting with the smallest thing regardless of whether they have direct participation or not. That is a legitimate solution to deal with the invisible line separating “founding” members from “newcomers” in a community.

But, as in any other aspect of life, solutions are never found in “being”, much less in the imposition of a “collective being.” It is not about the creation of rules to manipulate people’s wishes let alone requiring from them a change in how they are.

In a community, inequality between members on account of their participation or not in the community’s foundation stems from the inequality of experiences. Thus this should be our starting point. The aim is that all members become founders –that is, allowing for everyone to have a foundational experience so that he can see the community from that experience. Of course, neither we can think that “all work is done and we can go home” nor we can expect the conclusions of each particular experience to be the same for all, something that is impossible. Learning will be different for each member, but it will be different under a basic equality in responsibility: having to “do it all”, erring on his own, having to “look at everything all the time,” and learning by himself how fragile is every construction. Ultimately it is a process of discovery: that all human constructs are kept alive only while they are in motion.”

Photo by Kamaljith

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The ethics and politics of abundance

David de Ugarte — Mon, 07 Sep 2015 10:57:31 +0000

While there is no “politics of abundance,” no theory of the State, there does exist the possibility of living in accordance with an ethic of abundance, an ethic that contributes to emancipation from scarcity and uncertainty.

Until recently, the words “progress” and “progressive” reflected a relationship with concretely making abundance. “Progress” was that which advanced us on the path towards a society of abundance, and “progressive” that which drove that development. If “progress” was associated with a set of policies, “progressivism” was an ethic, a way of being that presaged a new culture and human experience. Progress was what opened factories or what led a country to leave the the regime feudal behind and modernize. Progressive was defending universal suffrage, women’s equality, or universal schooling. The whole Left and a part of the Right—classical liberals and industrialists—were considered progressive. The opposite of progressive was “reactionary,” the word that defined those who longed for the world before the French Revolution: Carlists [royalists], clerics. Soon, in practice, it became an insult.

But if it was pretty clear in the 19th century what “progress” meant, shamefully, those who made the most use of the term in the twentieth century were doing so from a strategy that was concrete… and wrong. For them, there was a shortcut towards abundance: state capitalism. In practice, from the ’30s to the ’80s, because of the influence of the Communist Parties, everything that gives more powers to the State or puts more and more parts of social life under its control and guardianship is considered “progressive.” This equates progressive with statist, and nationalism and “struggles for national liberation” are legitimized independent of whether or not they serve development. Only in the ’70s, when the Left starts to incorporate feminist demands, does “progressive” start to gain nuances that are favorable to personal freedoms and sovereignty over one’s own body, which will be expanded in the ’80s to include early environmentalism. With the collapse of the totalitarian States in the Soviet orbit, and with them, the Communist Parties that were affiliated with them, “progress” and “progressive” were blurred definitively. It went to describe more of a “who,” a social group defined aesthetically, than a “what.” With the new century, the destruction of meanings reached the point of including in the term the partisans of degrowth, the radical opposite of abundance.

How progress got away from progressivism

An example of how “progressivism” distanced itself from progress at the turn of the century is the debate on intellectual property. Since the ’30s, an essential part of the positions of the pro-Soviet Communist Parties in Western Europe was representing themselves as a “front of the forces of work and culture.” In practice, the inclusion of intellectuals meant defending all manner of State rents for artistic creation: subsidized culture, but also a reinforced copyright system. The argument for this was purely conventional: State monopolies for creation and invention would favor innovation and therefore “progress,” since the consequent development of productivity would bring us closer, step by step, to abundance. But the emergence of distributed networks will demonstrate the opposite. This will be obvious even for academics, when, beginning in 2000, Boldrin and Levine’s theoretical models first and Heidi Williams’ empirical evidence about the effects of patents later make it clear that in the world we live in, intellectual property only serves to create shortages artificially.

Generally, everything about centralization or monopoly means rents. And by now, we know that abundance is fed by distributed networks and the dissipation of rents. The famous “progressive policies,” today, would be practically the opposite of the traditional ones from the “progressives” of Left and Right: rather than feeding rents, reinforcing monopolies and building larger business scales and reinforced national identities, which is to say, rather than create scarcity artificially, they would be about removing obstacles to abundance. Progressivism today would take devolucion seriously, work for a distributed electrical system, confront State rents and the regulations custom-made for big businesses… and of course, pursue freedom of movement for everyone throughout the world.

Because the truth is that, as in days gone by, possible “progressive measures” exist, but not a “politics of abundance,” a certain way of understanding the State and society’s relationship to it, that make it possible to turn it into an tool of development, thanks to a well-defined ideology. In reality, only concrete measures exist, derived relatively easily from economic analysis, that would seek to avoid having its regulatory power became a brake on social transformation.

Abundance as an ethic of knowledge and emancipation

That’s why, more than developing a political theory, accepting the logic and the objective of abundance asks us look deeper into its consequences from the ethical point of view.

The starting point should be establishing that if abundance can appear as an attainable objective in History, it is through the development and extension of knowledge. Every ethic of abundance, and by extension every emancipating ethic, must revolve around it.

Such an ethic cannot be predatory or individualist, because is not Nature or others we are trying to free ourselves from, because we’re part of a common metabolism, but from scarcity. It is scarcity that introduces uncertainty in our life and forces us to know, and to know, as Dewey said, “effectively.” That’s why knowledge is both the result and the main tool of the human experience and that’s why an ethic of knowledge is also a life ethic, a way of being that express the desire and the enjoyment of living.

But knowledge—and especially social knowledge—is a community act, a distillation that exists in the framework of an experience and contexts that are not, in themselves, universal. An ethic of abundance is a community ethic, oriented to shaping the real community and understanding it not as a constriction of the individual, but as the essential condition of their own development. Because, as the cyberpunks said, “life is a package deal,” a unique thing, a necessarily transformative activity.

And that means two things: the most obvious is that there is no such thing as “living time” differentiated from and opposed to “working time.” Work, transformative activity, is knowledge in action and the action of creating knowledge—theory and practice that are aware of each other. An ethic of abundance is a work ethic motivated by knowledge. The view of work as subjugation, as slavery, is the result of alienation, a separation of ourselves into arbitrary parts, which should not be tolerated, but overcome by providing meaning through making and changing the conditions we live in.

Secondly, it implies that, given that both work and knowledge are community deeds, the essential freedom of the individual is not a impossible “individuality” affirmed at the cost of, or to the exclusion of others, but the freedom to leave any community that does not satisfy us, to create new ones, or to participate in as many as may want to accept us; and also, the freedom to access and use knowledge without obstacles or tolls. Beyond any political or economic arguments, restrictions on the access to and use of knowledge are detestable because they deny the very heart of individual freedom. Said with even more clarity: intellectual property is immoral in itself.

And while from this, not only can ethical legitimacy be derived, but the desirability of the greatest community diversity—as long as communities are not coercive and permit members to leave with the greatest ease—it also leads to an understanding of why an ethic of abundance does not look to the State as the main subject of the collective. If knowledge is a community act, and it is, it does not make sense to ask any external entity to do the things we want or provide us with what we need, because we would be depriving ourselves of the experience of making them, which, from the point of view of knowledge, is often as important as the things themselves. Freedom is the possibility of making them ourselves and if it makes sense to demand anything, it would be the withdrawal of obstacles of any kind that prevent us from communally building the tools of change.

Work, which is what we call effective knowledge in action, is the only transcendent possibility for the human race and for the individual. In the human race, it is the thread that unites History and Nature, making abundance possible. As individuals, the only way that we have of transcend our main limitation, death, is to develop that which unites us with Nature through the rest of the species: knowledge. Knowledge that is created or transmitted is, therefore, the true “soul of the human race,” and the only legacy that we can leave as individuals.

That is why the centrality of possession, “having” things individually and exclusively, can only be seen and felt as another form of alienation, of separation from what’s truly important in life.

Consumption, in such an ethic, is not in itself “bad,” “immoral,” or “unfair,” but simply necessary, if it is significant, if contributes genuine enjoyment to each. Or, it may be unnecessary, incomprehensible, and alienated, if it is not carried out for enjoyment, but as part of social climbing, or as status symbols or markers of belonging. So, yes, by the same logic, it would be immoral to limit the consumption of others, ignoring their tastes and preferences, in the name of certain values. An ethic of abundance sees consumerist behavior as an erroneous substitution, a mistaken response to the loss of meaning in work or one’s community development. It does not, however, see it as something morally bad in itself and rather would respond with classic minimalist “why do you want to have more needs?” A life oriented to the construction of abundance, an interesting life, cannot be based on deprivation or the desire to deprive others. That is a life in poverty, and a life in poverty ends up being a poor life.

And in the same way, a good environment is not an opulent life, but the communal “good life” that, as Juan Urrutia says, “has more to do with the self-realization of the members that make it up that with their material wealth.”

Conclusions

Such an ethic is not a chimera or a luxury reserved for a few. While a “politics of abundance,” a theory of the state, doesn’t exist, there does exist the possibility of living in accordance with an ethic of abundance. The ethics of abundance is an ethic of emancipation, because it seeks serve us by emancipating us from scarcity and uncertainty. It is therefore an ethic of knowledge which values the communal, an ethic which reduces transcendence to contribution, and which is expressed in a “good life” that blurs the difference between time for enjoyment and working time into a significant total time, which is creative and pleasant.

Translation by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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The “why” of everything in just over 1000 words

David de Ugarte — Wed, 22 Jul 2015 19:00:15 +0000

A post dedicated to setting down in black and white the great conceptual frameworks within which we understand the world.

The nature of the human race

Since the origin of our species, we humans have grouped ourselves to satisfy the needs of our own existence, which is to say, to produce everything that makes our survival possible. By joining into community to produce, humans make it the essence of their social organization to transform nature. However, in the course of time, a new result appears, which surpasses the initial objective of the mere production of tools and food:knowledge.

Applying knowledge allows humans to make their work produce more and more results. Acquired knowledge, by collectively transforming Nature, which is to say, by working, will materialize in new tools and ways of producing: what we calltechnology. Because production is a social, collective act, technological development will also drive changes in the organization of labor that, at certain times, will call into question the relationships ofpower between the different groups in each social organization.

Scientific truth and social stories

This inherent conflict makes it necessary to understand and justify alternatives. That is,knowledge of social matters appears as a result of the change promoted by knowledge and the evolution of ways of transforming of Nature through technology. But while the empirical knowledge about Nature that is materialized in science and technology of each age objectively expresses the transformative power of the species as a whole, knowledge of social matters will be always mediated, because in the discussion of social matters, each interest group, each power group, will understand as true those values and stories that effective at transforming or conserving the relations that align with their own interests and uncertainties.

In the same way, every community tends to define itself and explain the world, within the general conditions it lives in, according to a story that is effective for its objectives. That’s why what serves to describe the origins of the great tendencies, motivating stories, and ideas about historical change do not necessarily explain the behavior of the path of a real community in history. The Hutterites of the sixteenth century can be told as a product of the gigantic scenario of politics and class conflicts in the Europe of that time, but their descendants, current Hutterite communities, cannot be explained except as the result of the endogenous dynamic of a series of real communities of their descendants, reaffirming themselves until they are frozen into a set of beliefs and traditions that have been tremendously effective in their setting for almost five hundred years.

The base

We real communities and individuals tend to define ourselves by ideas that are really just a set of answers to questions which we have only partly chosen to ask and which we constructed using the elements we had at our disposal. We have limits on knowledge of our times, on our historical context, and on the place we occupy in society. But also we have autonomy within the limits of the general development of knowledge and of social relationships existing in every age.

A ethic of autonomy, an ethic that can try to be emancipating for individuals and communities, must begin with knowledge. As we saw, knowledge is the result and the central tool of the human experience, our main weapon against uncertainty, and the point of connection between our species and Nature, between technology and society, and between historical change and social relationships. It’s not developed in a sort of big, open general chat, but within given contexts, under certain rules, and starting from a particular identity among those who take part in the conversation. All knowledge is, to some extent, community knowledge. That’s why the projection of an ethic of knowledge is not “political,” a theory of the State, but a theory of human communities that uses them to explain the societies in which they exist. To see the social world not only as an inter-communitarian terrain with many social “truths” in play, and also many kinds of truth, means accepting conflict as inevitable, but also understanding that, most of the time, the framework of that conflict can be agreed on.

Abundance as a goal for communities and species

Not being “political” in a strict sense does not mean, however, that being founded on an ethic of knowledge necessarily condemns us to a story without a goal.

While transforming Nature is the original definition of the species, which is motivated by the need to overcome uncertainty and scarcity, the development of knowledge—which turns species time into historical time—is the only creator of meaning in the great macro-story of the human experience. Obviously, this tale is not linear, always ascendant, or predetermined to reach any specific place. Knowledge is a product of the transformation of nature and in good measure is dependent on it. That’s why eras, societies, or communities where that transformation stops end up “forgetting” knowledge and technologies that were previously known and losing skills and structures, until they revert to subsistence economies; societies that, like several tribes still existing today, find a fragile “stationary state” in isolation, or communities like the Amish or the Hutterites, which simply “choose” not to grow. These are not more authentic or “human,” but just the opposite, the most dehumanizing and alienating, because they deny and abort what is central to the human experience on the basis of a social system in which passion for knowledge and diversity suffer what can only be iron control.

Thought founded on an ethic of knowledge has to be projected not only onto the knowledge of a community, but also onto a Socioeconomics oriented towards abundance. Abundance means that knowledge has been developed to where it allows the species to transform and produce to make freedom possible for each of its members. What constrains everyone’s freedom in every social order, what makes such constraint necessary, is the need to organize according to the best technology possible to overcome scarcity. A society of scarce surpluses is a stratified society, supported by the power of the groups that manage it. Abundance as a historical stage would therefore mean the end of uncertainty as a primary engine of knowledge, and the end of conflicts that result from a social structure determined by scarcity.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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OuishareFest 2015: Interview with Juan Urrutia

David de Ugarte — Tue, 02 Jun 2015 15:00:42 +0000

Thursday, May 31, 2015. In the Circus of the Cabaret Sauvage, David de Ugarte interviewed Juan Urrutia during the OuiShareFest 2015. A rare and rich document explaining the foundations of a 20 years effort to create an Economics of Abundance.

¿What did happen in the nineties? How a distinguished professor of Economics, well known academic writer, got involved in communitarianism and started trying to build a New Economic Theory of the transition towards a society of abundance.

Las Indias and I were bound to come together around the issue of communitarianism. Yes I was a professor of Economics (completely orthodox) but I could not forget

May 68 in Europe and USA

Frankfurtian ideas (Marcuse)

Specific kind of psychology centered on Fritz Pearls¨Gestalt Therapy

And some young people around (members of las Indias today), a bunch of hackers indeed, showed me that something called ICT (Information and Communication Technology) could give rise to a new way of economic thinking called at the time «New Economy».

This New Economy developes around two important ideas:

abundance is possible

networking is crucial

The Great Recession forgot about the dotcom firms and it is only now that they (the hackers) and I (the old professor) can face the intellectual challenge of building up a new basic model of the workings of the economy build upon, not the I, but the «WE».

But it has to be done unless we are ready to accept to be lost in transition.

Identitarian communities and abundance

But in the course of your research you found this «we» is not every possible «we», but a very particular «we» called «identitarian community», product of the modelization of networking. So, in order to be clear, everybody has an intuitive concept of «networking» but… what really networking is from the point of view of formal economic analysis and how does it produce identitarian communities?

We call networking the formation of networks of persons through a process that can be modelled as an evolutionary game among them. The game is played among all pairs of persons formed at random and connected in the network at a given moment, a network that as time goes on increases the number of connections.

The interaction generates «memes» (social habits) that change as the network becomes more and more dense (or closed knit). In the limit this evolutionary game generates an equilibrium called evolutionary stable stategy in which the “memes” attained cannot be changed by mutants.

The corresponding society is what we call an identitarian community.

Both in practice and in economic modeling the distinctive culture of identitarian communities is fraternity, and old philosophical subject from Epicurus to the French revolution and so on. How does fraternity change the game, how does social results become subverted by the kind of fraternity an identitarian community produces?

Fraternity is in its foundations the pleasure of being together as it was already defined by the epicurean concept of «friendship», which in turn sustains mutual trust and credible commitments. And in such a society scarcity is overcome, abundance is possible.

Based on changes of costs

Transaction costs disappear because of mutual trust

There are increasing returns from the demand side. For example the «net effect» also called the «Mathew effect» produces these increasing returns becase “those who have will get more”

The economies of scope increase their importance

But also based on “rent dissipation”. Monopolies have disapeared because nobody gains anything threatening to leave the identitarian community because this threat is not credible since the equilibrium is mutant’s proof: perfect competition has been reached.

Revolution

«Rent Dissipation» is the main concept of your 2003’s book «Capitalism to come», the book in which you defined by first time the possibility of a sharing economy. But little time before you also published a brochure I would like to refer to now. It became very relevant those days because newspapers, specially conservative newspapers, said you cooked in that book the theory for the mobs against the government that followed the march eleventh alqaedas’s attacks. To me the relevant thing of the economic models you worked there is to show how «revolution» happens inside an identitarian community and how it is related to network architecture.

Yes, the identitarian community is always threatened by revolution which is possible or not depending on:

The threshold of rebellion: the number of other members of the network who would support the change, something I need to know for eventually changing my behavior myself.

The epistemic condition, i.e. who knows what.

The density of the network.

And this creates a paradox:

Classify communities in conservative (high) or progressive (small) according to its threshold of rebellion.

Resulting that in the conservative societies the revolution is easier the less dense is the structure.

An example could be the UK a collection of conservative and isolated overlapping communities in which nobody has sufficient knowledge about the threshold of rebllion of others.

Consumption and producction

So, you modeled how networks and communitarianism defined the horizon of abundance, then in detailed mechanisms of how it tend to happen as rent dissipation, and then you researched social network dynamics explaining revolution in networked behavior. Finally your work in las Indias focused in the creation of «new basic economic model» upon all those pieces…

For our desired new basic model there are two fundamental pieces: consumption and production.

On consumption. I know no theory of consumption based on WE and not on I. I only know first approximations like Marx’s Communist paradise, or Marcuse’s 68 ideas in California or, indeed the way of life in the Esalem Institute in Big Sur.So, we in las Indias work hard in formalizing the notion of the “good life”.

On production. We already know, in the context of abundance, of the Mathew effect and related economies of scales and economies of scope. But we have to take into account

Strategies: two well known strategies became impossible:

to take a possition.

to establish an standard

Rules of management. Two are selfdefeating:

conservation of clients.

education of workers. In fact distinctions between workers and clients disappear.

Commons

In the Economics’s and Philosophical tradition, abundance is the opposite to the mere existence of merchandises. Is it possible even to imagine a path towards abundance based exclusively in market dynamics? Markets interchange merchandises and money, so… And on the other hand, markets offer universal solution that probably no other tool different of them could offer…

After Information and Communication Technologies in the New Economy the percentage of non tangible goods has increased heavily. And most intangibles are commons ( communal goods) characterized by non-rivalry and more or less exhaustibility.

Therefore, in our effort To rebuild the Economy, commons are a very important piece, although we cannot forget markets.

There are however no obvious and universal solution to the problem of common goods. All solutions are ad-hoc and local. Some are good solutions and some are bad.

Today’s examples of local bad solutions on commons:

Intellectual property laws are examples of local solutions which are already known as bad solutions

knoledge in general and how to finance it

Ranking of scientist or universities according to sociometrics distort incentives.

Politics

Well, then if you accept commons as a key piece of the path towards abundance, you will agree this way cannot be only an economic or cultural path, it has to be necessary a political path too which has to produce a change in political institutions and relationships

Yes, our basic model cannot be isolated from politics. The Sharing Economy generalization has to be diverse because of the local nature of identitarian communities making the whole. The political form we in las Indias cherish is confederation which preserves diversity. In a confederation there is no ultimate authority. But it is better to accept it than to try to bould one artificially. Remember the Central Bank Syndrome:

the only agent which cannot be forced to honor its promises.

Unless its promises are based in the common language and correspond to idiosincratic memes.

If we accept diversity

optimality might not be reached

but survival is maximized (as in Biology) under limited rationality and suboptimizing

Stochasticity is therefor implanted and his stochasticity lead to an unique equilibrium.

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Practical anti-capitalism

David de Ugarte — Wed, 12 Nov 2014 12:49:14 +0000

What crowdfunding businesses like Kickstarter have accomplished is to allow hundreds, thousands, of small businesses to be born, obtaining financing with nothing more to offer than an idea and without having to cede portions of property in exchange.

Capitalism is not the market. Capitalism is taking for it granted that those who provide the capital (one among the many factors of production that converge in a productive project) are automatic and exclusively the owners of the business.

A little more than five years ago, we dedicated ourselves on this blog to studying how Kiva in the world of cooperation, Kickstarter in the world of entrepreneurs, and microcredit systems in traditional SMEs put the traditional idea of commercial banking in check.

We began to understand that the bottom of the financial crisis was, in reality, a crisis of scale that financial capital hasn’t been able to adapt to. Or rather, instead of adapting to the new optimal scales imposed by technology, it preferred to try to modify the optimal scale, backed by political power, so as to avoid changing its models and structures–and pick up some extra rents along the way.

We were on the right track. But we put the framework in the wrong place. Crowdsourcing systems only pressure banking indirectly. What’s really transformative about what Kickstarter and crowdsourcing sites have done is allow hundreds, thousands, of small businesses to be born, obtaining financing with no more guarantee than an idea, and without having to cede portions of ownership in exchange.

They have created a market supported by “early adopters’” desire for innovation and consumers who “want to send a message,” the ones who use their money as a way to vote for what they believe in. And that market, having been discovered by pioneers of the direct economy, has become the demonstration that, with the new optimal scales, there are more and more industrial environments where it is not as important for monetary capital to automatically be synonymous with ownership. And that, in practice, seems to me more anti-capitalist than all the anti-capitalist theory I’ve heard and read in my life.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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Person of the Day: David de Ugarte

Stacco Troncoso — Thu, 22 May 2014 11:01:51 +0000

This bio is an English translation of David’s full bio at lasindias.com

David de Ugarte. Economist, technologist and entrepreneur committed to new models of economic democracy. Founder and theorist of the Spanish cyberpunk group (1989-2007), founder of Piensa en red SA (1999-2002) and later of the Cooperative Society of las Indias Electrónicas (2002) and of the Cooperative Group of las Indias, in which he’s in charge of new project development.

An author of fiction offered in unusual formats, he has written two novels serialized via mobile telephones: “Lía: MAD phreaker” (e-moción 2003-2004) and “Días de frontera” (e-moción 2002-2006). He has also authored essays including “11M: Networks to win a war” (2004) and the “Network Trilogy”, comprising the essays “The Power of Networks”, “Phyles: From Nations to Networks”, and “The Coming Futures”. The trilogy has been translated into half a dozen languages, with tens of thousands of printed copies sold and hundreds of thousands downloaded.

His latest work, created with Natalia Fernández and María Rodríguez, is entitled “The P2P Mode of Production” and incorporates an analysis of the impact of networks on the technosocial bases of the crisis, as well as open perspectives on new forms of distributed industrial production based on fabbing, free software and collaborative development platforms. His next book, in the works, focuses on the history of the game of Go.

All of these books, published under Public Domain, are available both as paper editions and as free downloads in html and epub format on the Library of las Indias. This library builds on the first collection of contemporary essays published under Public Domain, the “29th Floor Collection”, which he managed from its creation in 2007 until its closing in 2010. This project proved that publishing under public domain can generate sufficient incentive for publishers and authors alike.

David de Ugarte in the first person

I was born in 1970, and in 1979 I learned to program on an Atari cartridge console, so I guess that makes me one of the first digital natives. Ever since then, my life has been inextricably linked with the evolution of personal computers and the new possibilities and freedoms they allow people to enjoy. In 1982 I totally immersed myself in the techy world with my Spectrum, which I still have to this day. That 48kb hunk of junk plunged me into Madrid’s first hacker scene: magazines, documentation notes for z80 and 8008 assemblers and microprocessors, etc. In 1987 I made the leap to my first PC – an Amstrad – and in 1989, in the revolutionary atmosphere of Berlin, I connected to the Internet for the first time. Since 1994 all my work, projects and businesses have been Internet-based.
My academic training is as an economist. In fact, I’ve written works on the Microeconomy of the Art Market, the role of Lord Keynes in the Birth of the Speculative Market in Paintings, and even a general interest booklet on Microeconomics for my students when I was a professor of Organizational Economics at the Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.

Professionally, I came into my own directing projects such as the Plan Integral de la Creación (1997-8) [Comprehensive Creation Plan (1997-8)]. This project launched the first on- and off-line debates among more than 8000 Spanish artists, concerning the future of culture. I also took over the strategic direction of Arsys (1999-2000), which was the largest web hosting company in Europe. My first small business was “Piensa en Red” (2000), the first Spanish company to develop software for PDAs. It also spawned subsidiaries which continue to this day, like “Piensa Solutions”, and marked milestones like having developed the world’s first moblog, installed the first wifi network in Spain and the first i-mode services outside Japan.

Today, I’m a partner in the Cooperative Society of las Indias Electrónicas, a group of cooperatives founded in 2002, in participation with Juan Urrutia and Natalia Fernández, my main companions in intellectual adventures in those years in which we attempted to materialize the possibilities of the analysis of social networks.

Las Indias and its library, managed by María, are my place in the world, my way of life and my state of mind. It’s the place I’ve always wanted to be, where you can always do something different, where my peers and I can hatch plans for new innovations and endeavors. Thanks to this, las Indias might ring a bell for having been the first to attempt the self-replication of a 3D printer (2008), for having created Ciberia and feevy (a project that sprang from comments on las Indias’ blog) in 2005, for having published (via e-moción) the first novels for mobile phones in Europe (2003), or for being the first business in the world to have a blog (2002). And it was also in this blog that we serialized, chapter by chapter and in real time, what would later become my first book in a paper edition, “11M: Networks to win a war ” – which was also, as far as I know, the first book to make the leap from blog to paper.

From November 2007 until the Spring of 2010 I also managed the 29th Floor Collection, an initiative between Ediciones del Cobre, the Society of las Indias Electrónicas and BBVA, in which we published 10 essays. These were works with innovative approaches and authors working in our linguistic milieu, quite often years ahead of any Anglo-Saxon references, treating the new concepts we employed in our cultural field to begin articulating an understanding of the network society.

All the books in this collection were published, with the express consent of the authors and publishers, under the same conditions of intellectual property protection as in the traditional Public Domain. Three books were published in this collection: “The Power of Networks”, “From Nations to Networks” and “Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Century of Networks”. These last two were merged in later editions as “Phyles: From Nations to Networks”.

In October 2010, after this publishing adventure, I went on to publish my new books in the Collection of the Library de las Indias. So, with Natalia Fernández, I published “The Key is Public”. Like everything else in the collection, it’s in the public domain and you can read it on the web or download for your e-book in epub format. The bulk and the evolution of my work since 2010 can be summed up in the “Network Trilogy” (forthcoming in English), which includes “The Power of Networks”, “Phyles: From Nations to Networks” and “The Coming Futures”.

My latest essay, translated and published in various languages, was written in 2012 with Natalia Fernández and María Rodríguez. Entitled “The P2P Mode of Production”, it represents a leap forward, propelled by the crisis and the free industrial technologies, in the ideas we integrated this last decade. It might possibly be released in a paper edition during 2014.

David de Ugarte in Guerrilla Translation

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