We invite you set up a local event in your city, develop and use open circularity solutions and connect to people world wide. Here is how and why:

WHY

‘Planet earth is doomed’. Is it?

Humanity faces enormous challenges: Climate change is marching, resource shortages accelerate, species extinction is faster than ever, and the current rise of fascism in some parts of the world presents us a first impression how people react when they get scared by things changing to the worse for them.

But,

You can’t solve a problem with the same thinking that created it.

-Albert Einstein

We need to recreate our economy – our methods of collaboration and production – to build a future worth living in.

Open Source is a transparent, distributed, collaborative methodology made possible by the internet. Though still in its infancy outside of software, we firmly believe that Open Source offers the most rapid and transformative pathway to create a truly ecological ‘circular’ economy that can meet humanities needs while staying within planetary boundaries and enabling all life forms on earth. And this is what we are working for!

But changing habits isn’t easy. The current methods of production and collaboration are effective and deeply embedded in our everyday life and thinking. Open Source – collaboration methodologies based on transparency – on the other hand is still an unsolved riddle in many areas. Let’s solve it! Let’s experiment and make progress. Let’s use and build upon existing open circularity solutions and create more of them. First pioneers have created projects and business that show us the potential of openness and the ecosystem thinking that goes with it. We all can start with Openness and Circularity right now.

So once again we invite you to join us for a global event. Switch on your brains and creativity, activate your optimism, zest for life and local community so that together, we can imagine and build a positive future. Here is a Guide for Participation:

Create A Local Event – FAQ

OSCEdays connects people on the subject of Open Source Circular Economy. In the past 3 years more than 100 cities participated with local events contributing to the progress. In 2018 & 2019 we continue the journey focussing for the first time on using/implementing the resources that were created by the community in the past. It is a big moment :-). Join us, set up your local event, and let’s make progress together. Here is how:

Date & Size

There is no required minimum size for a local event. A room with a smaller group of people working for a few hours or hundreds of people working several days, everything is possible.

You can set up your event whenever you like. Every year so far we announced a global date. This date is not mandatory. And there is no date set for 2019 yet.

Program

What are good activities for an event?

Open Source and Circular Economy are pretty new questions. So some local organizers struggled in the past to find content for an event. But with the work of the past years there are now first good resources to use and build upon at your local event. We invite you to implement open solutions and develop them further. There are also other options for content like talks, workshops and challenges. But let’s start with the solutions:

1) Play With ‘Open Solutions’

The OSCEdays forum contains many valuable things. Really well documented and ready to use resources are marked with “Solution”. Here is a list with a collection of them. For most it is self explanatory how to use them for interactive hands on sessions in an event. Some have extra remarks to support this. So browse the list and find possible activities and content.

Examples from the list:

• Open Source Business Models For Circular Economy. A design-thinking tool and workshop format on open source (business) ecosystems and the practical design of products & services for them. >
  
• Precious Plastic: Well documented machines you can build yourself to recycle plastic locally, build new products with it and set up a business around. >>
  
• ‘Make It Circular’: An open poster on circular making you can translate, print, hang up and run prototyping sessions with. >>

• Circular Wedding (Or Celebration): Learn from Seigos wedding tutorial and create a zero waste event circular style! You can have a circular wedding or adapt the methodology to any other event or celebration. >>
  
• PRe-Use & Re-Use Sessions: Find existing circular modularity in your environment and build infrastructures or products with them. >>
  
• Circular City Hacking: A list of urban interventions/city hacks to transform your city – and to experiment and campaign for the open source circular city. Run a hackathon or implementation session with them. >>

(more here)

Think about combining things! Build an urban garden with reused infrastructure and structures based on a unified grid for example

Call For Open Circularity Solutions!

Do you have great, open and well documented circularity solutions people could use locally, run events around and implement them in their city? For example a hardware that can be built during an event? Let us know Here!

Facilitation Of Open Solutions 

For most if not all of these resources you’ll need someone to facilitate a public session about them. Do it yourself: Pick a resource and implement it. This is already an event. But if you want to run a larger event with several sessions try to find people in your community interested in doing the same with other solutions. Sessions can be well prepared upfront or you can come together and have a deep look at the resource only at the event.

You can do this also university like: Build a group that wants to set up an event and then each of you picks one activity (solution) to prepare and run.

You can also reach out to the creators of the solution. Maybe they have some time.

2) Challenges, Talks, Workshops Of Your Local Actors

In almost every city there are people working on sustainability solutions. This might be companies or startups or other types of organizations like NGOs. They probably don’t use or build a lot of Open Source resources yet. Invite them to your event. There are a couple of things they can do:

TALKS

Most of them are probably ready to do a presentation. Talks are good, inspiring stories are important. But try to make your speakers not just deliver advertisement talks, but share really meaningful, enabling information and details (how is it working). You can ask your speakers about Openness, Open Source and transparency in the Q&A. Some might have heard about it already and have some ideas or opinions. You don’t have to convince them about Openness. All ideas are welcome.

WORKSHOPS

But maybe you can get them to do more than a talk. They can bring their product, open it – invite people to screw it open, ask questions about technical details, improve it together and so on. Find someone who can teach how to grow mushrooms, how to solder, how to avoid waste in your house etc. Some inspiration how to share solutions in other formats than talks can be found here.

‘CHALLENGES’

Challenges have been the core of the OSCEdays in the past. In a challenge a person, project or company presents and prepares a question or problem and invites people to help solving it. This often needs facilitation. Try to make sure there is good documentation of the problems and solutions afterwards. To get inspiration for challenges have a look here (formats) and here & here(content)

Ok. With this you should have some ideas what will or might happen at your event.

Some Helpful Resources

Pointers and resources for organizing and communicating your event.

• Funding: There are plenty of options how to fund an OSCEdays event: Sell tickets, try to find sponsors, apply for grants. Practical tips and resources that might help you to fund your event are collected and shared here.
  
• OSCEdays Graphic Design Files: We share all OSCEdays graphic designs under open licenses and in editable formats. You can use them and adapt them as you like. Many did in the past and created really beautiful remixes and additions to the available graphics. Have a look into our public graphic design folder.
  
• Video: In the °OSCE TV° category on our forum you can find tutorials how you can document and connect your event with video streamings.

Sign Up! How To Register Your Event

To get your event officially on the map we like you to register it by creating a topic about on our forum. With this you become visible on the global level and a start is made to connect your local activities to the global community.

The forum might look complicated at first but it isn’t. And we have an easy to follow step by step guide for registering your event. Continue here!

In that topic you will also find some suggestions how to make your local community use the forum to share information and collaborate with other cities. Start here!

Reprinted from oscedays. Find the original post here!

IMAGE CREDITS: 18L Module, by Nikusha Chkhaidze, CC-BY-SA; Bee, by Jon Sullivan, Public Domain; Mushrooms, by Dax & ZeroWasteLabs.Com; Open Structures Part, by Lukas Wegwerth, CC-BY-SA; Cargo, by The City Is Open Source, CC-BY-SA; Beer, by The City Is Open Source, CC-BY-SA; Make It Circular, by OSCEdays, CC-BY-SA; Biohof_arche_5012, by: Arche Zürich, CC-BY-SA; Extruder, by Precious Plastic, CC-BY-SA

The post OSCEdays Call For Local Organizers appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Description:

“The computerization of the economy—and everyday life—has transformed the division of labor between humans and machines, shifting many people into work that is hidden, poorly compensated, or accepted as part of being a “user” of digital technology. Through our clicks and swipes, logins and profiles, emails and posts, we are, more or less willingly, participating in digital activities that yield economic value to others but little or no return to us. Hamid Ekbia and Bonnie Nardi call this kind of participation—the extraction of economic value from low-cost or free labor in computer-mediated networks—“heteromation.” In this book, they explore the social and technological processes through which economic value is extracted from digitally mediated work, the nature of the value created, and what

Arguing that heteromation is a new logic of capital accumulation, Ekbia and Nardi consider different kinds of heteromated labor: communicative labor, seen in user-generated content on social media; cognitive labor, including microwork and self-service; creative labor, from gaming environments to literary productions; emotional labor, often hidden within paid jobs; and organizing labor, made up of collaborative groups such as citizen scientists. Ekbia and Nardi then offer a utopian vision: heteromation refigured to bring end users more fully into the prosperity of capitalism.”

Available at MIT Press

Header Photo by Janrito Karamazov

The post Heteromation as the New Division of Labor Between Machines and Humans appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Written by Hank Sohota. Originally posted on Good Audience on 28th January 2019.

A viable, sustainable and scalable P2P sociopolitical economy, which embraces digital and data sovereignty for all agents, is about to emerge. One in which, as a consequence, money and intermediaries — social, political and economic — will no longer play the central, and therefore controlling, role they play today.

Let us start where Bitcoin started

Whatever socially and politically legitimised ‘flavour’ of money operates within a given community, nation or civilisation, it fundamentally shapes the economic, social, and political potential — and therefore possibilities — within those domains.

The Problem with Money

Money — by its very nature a social construct, as it fundamentally relies on people’s confidence in it — has three defining core functions. These are:

1. a store of value (i.e. sufficiently stable in value — and particularly, in people’s confidence in it — over time), which enables it to be …
2. a medium of exchange (i.e. also sufficiently saleable across scales and space), all of which enables it to be …
3. a unit of account

However, in order for money to work at scale, standardisation is also required which, in reality, inevitably means centralisation. Unfortunately, this intrinsically undermines the hardness of money (i.e. it’s ‘uninflatability’*), and the level of confidence people can have in its core functions, because decision-making shifts into the hands of the few. One cannot have sound money without reliable and consistent long-term hardness, as well as confidence-maintaining monetary policy. Regrettably, the few — or in the bygone case of a monarchy, an individual — have a long history of abusing their fiduciary responsibilities on both counts.

So, in order to solve the ‘hardness of money’ and the ‘level of confidence’ problems, we need to solve the centralisation problem, which — applied more broadly — asks:

How do we coordinate, cooperate and collaborate across space and time, at scale, without the need for intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners?

Arguably, this articulates, for some, the holy grail of anarchy (which should not be assumed to be synonymous with lawlessness, chaos or disorder).

Limitations of Bitcoin and Ethereum

Bitcoin is an attempt at solving the ‘centralisation of hard money’ problem which in the bigger picture is a good place to start. However, it does this by using a distributed ledger of hashchain blocks (giving it immutability), hard coding hardness (giving it uninflatability), and constructing a single network-wide timeline through a decentralised but not fully distributed Proof of Work (PoW) consensus mechanism (giving it ‘uncensorability’*). This provides a form of ‘trustlessness’ by trusting the network rather than any individual entity or actor. Due to its significant practical and philosophical limitations, this approach provides only a partial and impractical solution because it is not distributed enough, not fast enough, not cost effective enough, and not scalable enough. Furthermore, it could push climate change too far in the wrong direction to be worth it, due to its electrical power consumption needs. Unless of course, conversely, it turns out to be a boon for renewable forms of generating electricity by increasing the financial incentives for it, perhaps even leading to green energy infrastructure which otherwise would not be funded. Nonetheless, these shortcomings will still apply even if all the near-to-medium term solutions work out as proposed. Even so, the four key features of Bitcoin*, in its current form, namely, immutability, uninflatability, uncensorability and unconfiscatability, are an historic achievement.

Ethereum, although not necessarily trying to solve the same problem — and not necessarily doing a good job of it — is fundamentally based on the same underlying ledger technology as Bitcoin and so suffers from the same or similar limitations, even before we include its ‘centralisation of power’ issues, its shortcomings as a cryptocurrency relative to Bitcoin, the complications and disadvantages of smart contracts, and its attempt to move to a Proof of Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism*. What Ethereum has done is enable the launching of several thousand Altcoins, none of which seem to make much sense, and nor do their fundamentals give one confidence that they will ever achieve their stated goals. Given that this has taken place in a new asset class and an unregulated market, no one should be surprised by the emergence of a FOMO-FUD wild west, or the role played in it by market makers.

Mutual Self-sovereignty — the foundational core construct of a fair and just sociopolitical economy

In my view, economics should have a strong focus on thrivability in human social systems — viable, sustainable and inclusive thrivability, at scale.

Although I over-simplify, I believe that at the heart of thrivability lies a dialectic in human social systems, that of group solidarity vs. individual sovereignty (cf. the political philosophy divide of left vs. right). Both aspects of this dialectic provide tremendous benefits for the group and the individual, namely, social cohesion leading to better survival odds, but this comes at a price, namely, acquiescence, conformity and homogeneity.

However, I would suggest that solidarity and sovereignty are two sides of the same coin – they mutually and dynamically ‘co-form’ and ‘in-form’ each other, and so co-evolve symbiotically. They constitute a ‘dialectical singularity’ which is brought into ‘harmony’ through mutual self-sovereignty (cf. Yin-Yang; i.e. black and white dynamically interacting with each other at the same time, without either diminishing in identity or the two combining to become a ‘middle’ grey). In this dynamic, both social cohesion and individual sovereignty are both ‘strong and fluid’, at the same time — a concept often referenced in Daoist philosophy using the metaphor of water. I believe it is this perpetual dynamic which leads to the anti-fragility of a human social system. I further believe, it leads to the perpetual emergence of one’s sense of self and one’s sense of identity.

The mutual self-sovereignty challenge

Even solving the centralisation problem — of hard money or more broadly — would not be enough. We need to go further and address ‘the mutual self-sovereignty’ challenge, which can be thought of as:

Not only do I need a viable option of not having to participate in any particular socially mediated ‘game’ played by a particular set of rules, I also need to be able to, easily and permissionlessly, change the rules of the game (i.e. create a forked version — preferably not a sh*tty/scammy one) and invite others to play, or — just as easily and permissionlessly — be able to invent an entirely new game.

Furthermore, and equally importantly, in all such games the rules (i.e voluntary and mutually enabling constraints) must be enforceable and policed in an emergent and self-organising manner by the participants — governance of the people, by the people, for the people — and the rules must respect relativity (i.e. multiple relativistic timelines) — global consensus should not be necessary. Otherwise, we inexorably end up back at the centralisation problem.

All of which means that Bitcoin and Ethereum — specifically their underpinning blockchain technology — are not going to take us where we need to go, in order to address our most pressing global and local challenges. This is because they are not sufficiently workable and do not go far enough although they will have been critical and essential catalysts. Even those who were initially inspired by the distributed ledger technology (DLT) of Bitcoin, as a means of addressing the challenges of enabling a radically new peer-to-peer (P2P) sociopolitical economy — which motivated some in the Bitcoin and Ethereum communities — are now having to recognise, and to concede, these limitations. Hence, the sense of malaise and disillusionment among the Ethereum and Ethereum-esque developers who are not in it for the money.

Holochain and the Post-monetary Economy

Holochain, on the other hand, will take us where we need to get to. It is the first technology, in human history, which genuinely addresses the mutual self-sovereignty challenge, completely and at any scale — in fact, it is inversely scalable, its efficiency and efficacy improve as network size increases — and as an integral component of the MetaCurrency and Ceptr projects, it also pre-dates both Ethereum and Bitcoin.

Holochain provides a bio-mimicry inspired, software-based, enabling social technology — a pattern, if you will — from which can emerge anarchy — life without mass intermediation as a necessity. Thus empowering us to move to a post-monetary epoch with, for example, a multitude of asset-backed mutual credit (crypto)currencies — which on Holochain are natively inter-operable — using a much broader definition of currency (i.e. a formal symbol system for shaping, enabling, and measuring flows — e.g. of value, promises or reputation). A much more enlightened interpretation of Hayekian thinking, I would suggest, than the neo-liberalism version.

A value flow, of any kind, must first be acknowledged and recognised before it can be managed for the better — making visible only GDP-related flows has been a disaster for humanity and the planet, if not potentially catastrophic. Then, and only then, can we begin the work of reinforcing or amplifying interrelated positive flows and mitigating — hopefully eliminating — interrelated negative flows, in an emergent and self-organising way. Thus we can form the basis on which more meaningful, and more humane, wealth and prosperity can be created for the many, perhaps even, for all.

Mass Disintermediation

Despite its long history, for most people, the economic and sociopolitical revolution Holochain will induce will seem like it happened overnight. This is because it is an open source software solution taking place in a digitalised world. It can be deployed at speed, at scale, and at zero marginal cost, using the full range of computational device types from a Raspberry Pi, to a smartphone, to a tablet, or a laptop — even a server — using software development languages and tools which produce secure, compact and fast web and native apps.

The first hApp (Holochain dApp) to be built — using Rust and WASM — is Holo, an hApp for hosting hApps which includes the first ever mutual credit cryptocurrency called Holo Fuel, to reimburse Holo hosts — who with Holo, host hApps using the spare computation and storage capacity on their own devices. This enables hApps to be accessed using a standard browser — such as Holochain favoured Mozilla’s Firefox — through the web, without any change in the user experience. However, even this hosting can be avoided, since any device running Holochain is natively both a user and a host. Holo’s purpose then is to provide a bridge between the current server-based web and the potential longer term server-less — because it is peer-to-peer — Holochain alternative. Ultimately, it should be possible to integrate mesh networkingtoo, which would mean a genuinely and fully distributed internet and web.

Furthermore, Holochain’s data integrity model supports mutual self-sovereignty by having an agent-centric orientation, using sourcechains (think, agent owned hashchains), digital signatures, and validatingdistributed hash tables (think, BitTorrent and GitHub), rather than a data-centric orientation. Thus fully returning value realisation and ownership, as well as privacy and confidentiality, to those actually creating the value locallyrather than intermediaries, representatives, executives or organisation-owners, seeking to extract and monetise it.

The Ultimate Question

Once workable, practical and ubiquitous, mutual self-sovereignty — as a movement — will redefine every dimension of our lives — social, political, economic, artistic and cultural. Most profoundly, it will completely change the nature of the stories we tell ourselves and each other in order to navigate our lives, both intra and inter generationally. In doing so, along with the societal implications of advanced, model-free, deep reinforcement learning AI — not to mention Ceptr and Ceptr-based AI — we will ultimately re-conceive and therefore redefine what we believe it truly means to be human — in the 21st century.

Disclosure: I am financially and philosophically invested in Ceptr/Holochain/Holo. I have never invested in Bitcoin, any alt-coin or crypto asset.

Photo by Freddie Collins on Unsplash

Thanks for reading.

You can share this article using these links: 
Facebook | Twitter | Reddit | LinkedIn | Telegram |Email.

Further reading:

Ceptr/Holochain/Holo Whitepapers

Antonopoulos, M. (2016). The Internet of Money: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos: Volume 1. Merkle Bloom.

Antonopoulos, M. (2017). The Internet of Money Volume Two: A collection of talks by Andreas M. Antonopoulos. Merkle Bloom.

Ammous, S. (2018). The Bitcoin Standard: The Decentralized Alternative to Central Banking. John Wiley & Sons.

* Special thanks to Tone Vays and Murad Mahmudov for so freely sharing their intellectual musings with the public.

The post Beyond Bitcoin and Ethereum — a fairer and more just post-monetary sociopolitical economy appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Southern European countries were among the hardest hit by the 2008 economic crisis. In response to the economic pressure, declining public services and drastic unemployment situation generated by the crisis and the corresponding public policies, the Southern regions of the continent became terrains of experiments in self-organisation and gave birth to new forms of the civic economy. In this contribution, Tiago Mota Saraiva analyses the consequences of austerity policies on Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain, focusing on how people tried to create networks of solidarity and resistance.

n his brilliant book about the history of Latin America – “Las Venas Abiertas de América Latina”, (The Open Veins of South America) originally published in 1971 – Eduardo Galeano (1940-2015) starts by writing that the international division of work consists of defining that some countries specialise in winning and others in losing. Galeano describes a history of the region that is made by its own People, a history that does not depend on the greatness and the richness of the Country. A system where development deepened inequalities and popular sovereignty had to be bonded because There Is No Alternative. “It’s a problem of mindsets”, would declare the canny eurocrat after reading Galeano’s introduction. But the system is not far from what is now happening in Europe. This article is about the PIGS, the continental countries of Southern Europe.

The PIGS

This racist acronym has never been claimed by any author. Some sources refer to its use during the end of the 70’s, but it definitely started to be used more often after the 2008 financial crisis as PIIGS (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) to refer to the five countries that were considered weak economies and possible threats to the eurozone. After 2013, with the Irish exit of eurozone bailout program, PIGS became four again as they were before. While each of these countries had different political and historical contexts and scales, over the last five years they have shared the similar financial impacts of EU austerity measures.

The PIGS countries. Image (cc) Eutropian

The People

From 2001 (the European economic and monetary union fully started on 1st January 2002) until the 2013 crisis peak, Southern Europe’s employment situation changed drastically according to Eurostat. In Portugal (unemployment increased from 3,8% in 2001 to 16,2% in 2013), Italy (9,6% to 12,1%), Ireland (3,7% to 13,0%), Greece (10,5% to 27,5%) and Spain (10,5% to 26,1%) unemployment rates increased dramatically. In the same period, unemployment increased in other European countries, more or less following the EU average, besides Germany and Finland where unemployment decreased, respectively, from 7,8% to 5,2% and 10,3% to 8,2%. These rates assumed an impressive impact on youth unemployment. The April 2014 Eurostat report unveils that one month prior to the official census in unemployment in Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain the figures were, respectively, 35,4%, 42,7%, 56,8% and 53,9%.

Poverty in Europe. Image (cc) Eutropian

Despite the brain drain (for example in Portugal the emigration numbers were higher than in the 60’s peak, when the country was living under a fascist regime and fighting several wars in its former colonies), this data shows the massive number of people with no jobs and more free time. If we add to this those people living from precarious labour, with low salaries or low pensions, we may find a number of people that are in need of support to barely survive. Always according to the Eurostat it is in Southern Europe that we find the countries with the largest part of the population in risk of poverty with Greece (36,0% in 2014) and Spain (29,2%) at the top of the ranking.

The Politics

In opposition to what is happening in almost all other parts of Europe, the nationalist and far right parties in Southern European countries are not fighting in order to win elections or lead the opposition towards EU policies. The Greek Golden Dawn, probably the most exuberant party, is far from winning national elections. On the other hand – in Italy, Greece and Spain – there are social movements and local activists gathered in so-called anti-systemic parties/political movements, all with different characteristics, but presenting themselves as the face for the change. Although Syriza – the only one of those parties that, until now, has won national elections – is being severely criticised for its acceptance of the very strong EU austerity policies against which it once was established, in Spain, civic movements won local elections in large cities with a diverse set of new public and city policies that are being implemented.
In Portugal, the massive demonstrations during the Troika’s official period of intervention, did not translate itself into a significant change in the architecture of national parties. However, despite the primacy of the coalition of right wing parties at the 2015 national elections, it did not achieve the majority of MPs to form the government. Instead of a right wing government, the Socialist Party was invested with the parliamentary support of the Left Block, the Communist Party and the Greens, under the agreement of progressively reversing the cuts on wages, pensions and the Social State. For the first time since 1974, when the long fascist dictatorship of Portugal was defeated, the Socialist Party is now leading the country, only backed by the left wing parties in the Parliament.

The State

Even though with different characteristics and at different levels, all these four countries have been witnessing the dismantling of the State. Privatisations of fundamental public sectors and the decrease of the public presence in economy have never been as evident as nowadays.
In Greece and Portugal the situation was extreme. The Troika’s program forced governments to quickly sell the most powerful and profitable public companies at low prices. On the other hand, the Welfare State has proven to became an Assistentialist State only programmed to act in desperate situations and not working on people’s emancipation from poverty. With the increase of sovereign debt, states have increasingly lost their independence in a process that inevitably damaged the democratic system. The “oxi” vote at the Greek referendum and the following reaction of the EU leadership, forcing on the Greek government an even more severe agreement, constitute a historical event we should never forget when analysing the growth of anti-EU feelings and the rising popularity of sovereignty movements among the working classes and poorest urban areas.

Esta es una plaza, self-organised garden in Madrid. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Self-organisation

Despite the high proportion of people unemployed and retired, people in Southern European countries do not have more time left to participate in common or community issues. Precarious and low-wage jobs, the insecurity of personal futures, longer daily commuting, or the family assistance of children and older people are some of the new issues that overload working days. These may be some of the reasons why people tend to participate more in initiatives that start from a will of reaction or resistance to a specific problem – either locally based or humanitarian – than from a global and theoretical ambition of structural and global societal change.
Whilst, on the one hand, PIGS are living under the described extreme economical pressure where people generally think the future will be worse then the present and focus their energies on everyday issues that require immediate responses, on the other hand, locally based self-organised initiatives are flourishing as a consequence of specific and local problems as illustrated by many examples:

Coop57 is a financial services co-op that started in Catalonia, emerging from workers’ fight to keep their jobs at Editorial Bruguera, during the 1980s. Over the last decade, the action of the cooperative spread all over Spain. Its main declared goal is to help the social transformation of economy and society, assuming that money and the Coop57 cannot do it on their own, but that they can play a role in helping people, organisations, collectives and groups that promote policies for investment and quality jobs in food and energy sovereignty, inclusion and spaces for culture and socialisation.

Sewing workshop in Largo Residencias, Lisbon. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Carrozzerie | n.o.t is a theatre space in Testaccio, a former working class neighbourhood in Rome – now in the process of gentrification. The space was renovated in 2013 and it hosts dance, theatre and performative projects of younger generations of artists. It defines itself as a space for slow time, courageous and far-sighted projects. Carrozzerie | n.o.t works in the same artistic areas as Largo Residências, in the Intendente neighbourhood of Lisbon. Until 2012, Intendente was seen as one of the most dangerous areas in the city centre and an area to be renewed on a large-scale urban operation. Largo Residências started in 2011, renting a building on the square, and assuming the goal to fight against the gentrification of the area. The cooperative that organises all of Largo’s activities is now running in the building a floor of artistic residences, a hostel, a café open in to the square and a massive cultural program developed with and for the inhabitants of the area. Portugal is a good example of the unbalanced states of civic initiatives, whose development depends on the political approaches of local governments. Whilst in Lisbon, these initiatives have been flourishing over the last few years, in Oporto they have been under attack by the former authoritarian and conservative mayor Rui Rio. Lisbon’s local government created a program (BIP/ZIP) that, each year, finances around 30 different projects in priority intervention neighbourhoods/areas (Largo Residências was also supported by this programme) At the same time, projects like “es.col.a,” held in a squatted school with a very important social and cultural program at Fontinha (one of the poorest areas of Oporto) have never had any political or financial support from the municipality: es.col.a was evicted and consequently eliminated by the municipality’s decision.

Navarinou park, a self-organised garden in Athens. Photo (cc) Eutropian

The consequences of austerity were the most severe in the Greek context,. where state structures were partially destroyed. Nowadays, local and national governments tend to be involved with citizen initiatives even though with almost no resources, since the funds are all being directed towards structural or emergency goals. Almost everywhere in Greece, the exodus of refugees to Central Europe appears to be one of the most important challenges of the present and near future. Mostly addressing people who aim at crossing the country, EU policies has turned Greece into Europe’s buffer country before nationalist walls. Even though the walking routes are not passing through Athens, when I visited them last July, both the Elionas and Piraeus camps – the first one organised by the government, the second set up informally by a local citizen initiative (now, apparently dismantled) – accommodated thousands of people, waiting. In these camps, local or national governments are not receiving any direct support from EU funds for refugees.

Parco delle Energie, self-organised sports facility in Rome. Photo (cc) Eutropian

Probably more than other PIGS countries, Italy has already had, since the 1980-90s, a very strong and politicised structure of self-organised movements and local citizen initiatives. During the last decades, those initiatives worked as a kind of a blow-off to political institutional collapse. However, the lack of strong national networks and, probably, the missing ambition to upscale local initiatives has prevented the initial energies from unfolding.

Despite the deception of the June 2016 national elections, Spain, where the networks of citizen initiatives and protests created strong networks, now face their second stage: disputing power. Local movements that emerged from the 15M movement succeeded in winning elections in the most important cities in Spain – Madrid, Barcelona or Valencia. Even though Podemos. in coalition with other political forces, did not achieve the expected share of votes at the last elections, city governments are already networking, organising new forms of decision-making and empowering citizenship initiatives. However, it is still too soon to measure the results of these new cooperations. A country or a society in crisis is not a “time of opportunities“ as we often hear when stock markets are translated into real life. From what I could see and live, during the last years in these four countries, crises are thrilling times of resistance, but also desperate moments of destruction. The decisive question for these initiatives is how to move from the idea of resistance, within this society frame, towards construction. This will be the only way to step forward from precariousness to resilience.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What are some of the projects being studied?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anything else you’d like to add?

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

Elena:

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

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

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

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

Virtuous rent: a rudder that can transform our economy.

Peter Barnes: The London Underground abounds with warnings to “mind the gap,” referring to the space between station platforms and train doors. In our larger society similar warnings could be issued for the gaps between rich and poor and between humans and nature. These gaps must not only be minded, they must also be narrowed. The persistent question is how to do this, and I con­tend that a form of rent may be the best possible tool. But before we get to that, we must first become familiar with rent.

The term was first used by classical economists, including Adam Smith, to describe money paid to landowners. It was one of three income streams in the early years of capitalism, the others being wages paid to labor and interest paid to capital.

In Smith’s view, landlords benefited from land’s unique ability to enrich its owners “independent of any plan or project of their own.” This ability arises from the fact that the supply of good land is limited, while the demand for it steadily rises. The effect of landowners’ collection of rent, he concluded, isn’t to increase society’s wealth but to take money away from labor and capital. In other words, land rent is an extractor of wealth rather than a contributor to it.

A century later, a widely-read American economist named Henry George (his magnum opus, Progress and Poverty, sold over two million copies) enlarged Smith’s insight substantially. At a time when Karl Marx was blaming capital­ists for expropriating surplus value from workers, George blamed landlords for expropriating rent from everyone. Such ­rent­ extraction operated like “an immense wedge being forced, not underneath society, but through society. Those who are above the point of separation are elevated, but those who are below are crushed down.” George’s proposed remedy was a steep tax on land that would recapture for society most of landowners’ parasitic gains.

More recently, the concept of rent was expanded to include mono­poly pro­fits, the extra income a company reaps by quashing com­pe­tition and raising prices. Smith had written about this form of wealth extraction too, though he didn’t call it rent. “The interest of any particular branch of trade or manufac­tures is always to widen the market and to narrow the competition…To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition must always be against it, and can only serve to enable the dealers, by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow-citizens.”

It’s important to recognize that the tax Smith spoke of isn’t the kind we pay to government; rather, it’s the kind we pay, much less visibly, to businesses with power. That’s because prices in capitalism are driven by four factors: supply, demand, market power and politi­cal power. The first two, which are omnipresent in economics texts, deter­mine what might be called fair market value; the last two, which are prevalent in the real world, determine rent. Actual prices charged are the sum of fair market value and rent. Another way to say this is that rent is the extra money people pay above what they’d pay in truly com­pe­titive markets.

More recently, the term has been further extended to include income from privileges granted by government—import quotas, mining rights, subsidies, tax loop­holes and so on. Many econo­mists use the term “rent-seeking” to describe the multiple ways special interests use govern­ment to enrich them­selves at the expense of others. If you’re wondering why Washington, D.C. and its envi­rons have grown so prosperous in recent decades, it’s not because govern­ment itself has become gargantuan, it’s because rent-seeking has.

In short, traditional rent is income received not because of anything a person or business produces, but because of rights or power a person or business possesses. It con­sists of takings from the larger whole rather than additions to it. It redis­tributes wealth within an econ­omy but doesn’t add any. As British economist John Kay put it in the Financial Times, “When the appropriation of the wealth of others is illegal, it’s called theft or fraud. When it’s legal, it’s called rent.”

Because rent isn’t listed separately on any price tag or corpor­ate in­come statement, we don’t know exactly how much of it there is, but it’s likely there’s quite a lot. Consider, for example, health care in America, about one-sixth of our economy. There are many reasons the U.S. spends 80 percent more per capita on health care than does Canada, while achieving no better results, but one of the biggest is that Canada has wrung huge amounts of rent out of its health care system and we haven’t. Every Canadian is covered by non-profit rather than profit-maximizing health insurance, and pharmaceuti­cal prices are tightly controlled. By contrast, in the U.S., drug companies overcharge because of patents, Medicare is barred from bargaining for lower drug prices, and private insurers add many costs and inefficiencies.

Or consider our financial sector. Commercial banks, the kind that take depo­sits and make loans, receive an immensely valuable gift from the federal gov­ernment: the right to create money. They’re allowed to do this through what’s called fractional reserve bank­ing, which lets them lend, with interest, about ten times more than they have on deposit. This gift alone is worth billions.

Then there are commercial banks’ cousins, investment banks, which are in the business of trading securities. They can’t mint money the way commercial banks do, but they have tricks of their own. For one, they charge hefty fees for taking private companies public, thus seizing part of the liquidity pre­mium public trading creates. For another, they make lofty sums by creat­ing, and then manipulating, hyper-complex financial “products” that are, in effect, bets on bets. This pumps up the casino economy and extracts capital that could otherwise benefit the real economy.

We could wander through other major industries—energy, tele­com­muni­ca­tions, broadcasting, agriculture—and find similar ex­tractions of rent. What percentage of our economy, then, consists of rent? This is a question you’d think economists would explore, but few do. To my knowledge, the only prominent economist who has even raised it is Joseph Stiglitz, a Nobel laureate at Columbia University, and he hasn’t answered it quantitatively.

The amount of rent in the U.S. economy, Stiglitz says, is “hard to quantify (but) clearly enormous.” Moreover, “to a significant degree,” it “redistributes money from those at the bottom to those at the top.” Further, it not only adds no value to the economy, it “distorts resource allocation and makes the econ­omy weaker.” 

So far I’ve described rent as a negative force in our economy. Now I want to introduce the concept of virtuous rent, a form of rent that would have distinctly positive effects.

A perfect example of virtuous rent is the money paid to Alaskans by the Alaska Permanent Fund. Since 1980, the Permanent Fund has distributed equal yearly divi­­dends to every person who resides in Alaska for one year or more. The divi­dends—which have ranged from $1,000 to $3,269 per person —come from a giant mutual fund whose beneficiaries are all the people of Alas­­ka, present and future. The fund is capitalized by earnings from Alaska’s oil, a commonly owned resource. Given the steady flow of cash to its entire pop­u­la­tion, it’s not surprising that Alaska has the highest median income and one of the lowest pover­ty rates of any state in the nation.

Broadly speaking, virtuous rent would be any flow of money that starts by raising the cost of harmful or extractive activity and ends by increasing the incomes of all members of society. Another way to think of it is as rent that we, as collective co-owners, charge for private use of our common assets. Think, for example, of charging polluters for using our common atmosphere and then sharing the proceeds equally.

There are two key differences between traditional and virtuous rent. The first has to do with how the rent is collected, the second with how it’s distributed.

Traditional rent is collected by businesses whose market and/or political power enables them to charge higher-than-competitive prices. It leads to higher prices that serve no economic, social or ecological function. Virtuous rent, by con­trast, would be collected by not-for-profit trusts that represent all mem­bers of a polity equally. It would be generated by charging private busi­nesses for using common assets that most of the time they use for free. Such rent would also lead to higher prices, but for good reasons: to make business­es pay costs they currently shift to society, nature and future genera­tions, and to offset traditional rent.

The second difference is distributional. Traditional rent flows upward to the small minority that owns most of the stock of rent-extracting businesses. Virtuous rent would flow to everyone equally.

When collection and distribution are merged, the effects of traditional rent are doubly negative: it diminishes the efficiency of our economy and the in­comes of all those who pay it but don’t get any. The effects of virtuous rent, by con­trast, are doubly positive: it increases the health and fairness of our economy and the security of our middle class.

At this moment, of course, traditional rent totals trillions of dollars a year, while virtuous rent (out­side of Alaska) is more of a concept than a reality. But virtuous rent can and should grow. To understand how this could hap­pen, it’s necessary to ex­plore two other concepts: common wealth and exter­nalities.

Common wealth has several components. One consists of gifts of nature we inherit together: our atmosphere and oceans, water­sheds and wetlands, forests and fertile plains, and so on. In almost all cases, we overuse these gifts because there’s no cost attached to using them.

Another component is wealth created by our ancestors: sciences and techno­lo­gies, legal and political systems, our financial infra­structure, and much more. These confer enormous benefits on all of us, but a small minority reaps far more financial gain from them than do most of us.

Yet another chunk of common wealth is what might be called “wealth of the whole”—the value added by the scale and syner­gies of our economy itself. The notion of “wealth of the whole” dates back to Adam Smith’s insight two-and-a-half centuries ago that labor specialization and the exchange of goods —pervasive features of a whole system—are what make nations rich. Beyond that, it’s obvious that no business can prosper by itself: all busi­nesses need cus­­tomers, suppliers, distributors, highways, money and a web of comple­men­tary products (cars need fuel, software needs hardware, and so forth). So the economy as a whole is not only greater than the sum of its parts, it’s an asset without which the parts would have almost no value at all.

The sum of wealth created by nature, our ancestors and our econ­omy as a whole is what I here call common wealth. Several things can be said about our common wealth. First, it’s the goose that lays almost all the eggs of private wealth. Second, it’s extremely large but also (like the dark matter of the universe) mostly invisible. Third, because it’s not cre­ated by any indivi­dual or business, it belongs to all of us jointly. And fourth, because no one has a greater claim to it than anyone else, it belongs to all of us equally, or as close to equally as we can arrange.

The big, rarely asked question about our current economy is who gets the benefits of common wealth? No one disputes that private wealth creators are entitled to the wealth they create, but who is entitled to the wealth we share is an entirely different question. My contention is that the rich are rich not so much because they create wealth, but because they capture a much larger share of common wealth than they’re entitled to. Another way to say this is that the rich are as rich as they are—and the rest of us are poorer than we should be—because extracted rent far exceeds virtuous rent. If that’s the truth of the matter, the solution is to diminish the first kind of rent and increase the second kind. 

Externalities are a better-known concept than common wealth. They’re the costs businesses impose on others—workers, communities, nature and fu­ture generations—but don’t pay themselves. The classic example is pollution.

Almost all economists accept the need to “internalize externalities,” by which they mean making businesses pay the full costs of their activities. What they don’t often discuss are the cash flows that would arise if we actually did this. If businesses pay more money, how much more, and to whom should the checks be made out?

These aren’t trivial questions. In fact, they’re among the most momentous questions we must address in the twenty-first century. The sums involved can, and indeed should, be very large—after all, to diminish harms to nature and society, we must internalize as many unpaid costs as possible. But how should we collect the money, and whose money is it?

One way to collect the money was proposed nearly a century ago by British economist Arthur Pigou, a colleague of Keynes’ at Cam­bridge. When the price of a piece of nature is too low, Pigou said, government should impose a tax on using it. Such a tax would reduce our usage while raising revenue for government.

In theory Pigou’s idea makes sense; the trouble with it lies in imple­mentation. No western government wants to get into the business of price-setting; that’s a job best left to markets. And even if politicians tried to adjust prices with taxes, there’s little chance they’d get them “right” from nature’s perspective. Far more likely would be tax rates driven by the very corporations that domi­nate government and overuse nature now.

An alternative is to bring some non-governmental entities into play; after all, the reason we have externalities in the first place is that no one represents stakeholders harmed by shifted costs. But if those stakeholders were repre­sent­ed by legally accountable agents, that problem could be fixed. The void into which externalities now flow would be filled by trustees of common wealth. And those trustees would charge rent.

As for whose money it is, it follows from the above that payments for most externalities—and in particular, for costs imposed on living creatures present and future—should flow to all of us together as beneficiaries of common wealth. They certainly shouldn’t flow to the companies that impose the exter­nalities; that would defeat the purpose of internalizing them. But neither should they flow to government, as Pigou suggested.

In my mind, there’s nothing wrong with government taxing our individual shares of common wealth rent, just as it taxes other personal income, but government shouldn’t get first dibs on it. The proper first claimants are we, the people. One could even argue, as economist Dallas Burtraw has, that government capture of this income may be an unconstitutional taking of pri­vate property.

This brings us back to virtuous rent. There are several points that can be made about this sort of rent.

First, paying virtuous rent to ourselves has a very different effect than paying extractive rent to Wall Street, Microsoft or Saudi princes. In addition to dis­couraging overuse of nature, it returns the money we pay in higher prices to where it does our families and economy the most good: our own pockets. From there we can spend it on food, housing or anything else we choose. Such spending not only helps us; it also helps businesses and their employees. It’s like a bottom-up stimulus machine in which the people rather than the government do the spending. This is no trivial virtue at a time when fiscal and monetary policy have both lost their potency.

VIRTUOUS RENT

Second, virtuous rent isn’t a set of government policies that can be changed when political winds shift. Rather, it’s a set of pipes within the market that, once in place, will circulate money indefinitely, thereby sustaining a large middle class and a healthier planet even as politicians and their policies come and go.

And third, though virtuous rent requires government action to get started, it has the political virtue of avoiding the bigger/smaller government tug-of-war that paralyzes Washington today. It thus can appeal to voters and politicians in the center, left and right.

A trim tab is a tiny flap on a ship or airplane’s rudder. The designer Buck­minster Fuller often noted that moving a trim tab slightly turns a ship or a plane dramatically. If we think of our economy as a moving vessel, the same metaphor can be applied to rent. Depending on how much of it is collected and whether it flows to a few or to many, rent can steer an economy toward extreme inequality or a large middle class. It can also guide an economy toward excessive use of nature or a safe level of use. In other words, in addi­tion to being a wedge (as Henry George put it), rent can also be a rudder. An economy’s outcomes depend on how we turn the rudder.

Think about the board game Monopoly. The object is to squeeze so much rent out of other players that you wind up with all their money. You do this by acquiring monopolies and building hotels on them. However, there’s another feature of the game that offsets this extracting of rent: all players get a cash payment when they pass Go. This can be thought of as virtuous rent.

As Monopoly is designed, the rent extracted through monopoly power greatly exceeds the virtuous rent players receive when pass­ing Go. The result is that the game always ends the same way: one player gets all the money. But sup­pose we tip the scale the other way. Suppose we decrease the extracted rent and increase the virtuous kind. For example, we could pay players five times as much for passing Go and reduce hotel rents by half. What then happens?

Instead of flowing upward and concentrating in the hands of a single winner, rent flows more evenly. Instead of the game ending when one winner takes all, the game continues with many players remaining.

The point I wish to make is that different rent flows can steer a game—and more importantly, an economy—toward different outcomes. Among the out­comes that can be affected by differing rent flows are the levels of wealth co­n­centration, pollution and real investment as opposed to specu­lation.

Rent, in other words, is a powerful tool. And it’s also something we can fiddle with. Do we want less extracted rent? More virtuous rent? If so, it’s up to us to build the pipes and turn the valves.

Photo by Paul Housberg

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Originally published on The Conversation

Trina Hamilton, Winifred Curran: There are many indexes that aim to rank how green cities are. But what does it actually mean for a city to be green or sustainable?

We’ve written about what we call the “parks, cafes and a riverwalk” model of sustainability, which focuses on providing new green spaces, mainly for high-income people. This vision of shiny residential towers and waterfront parks has become a widely-shared conception of what green cities should look like. But it can drive up real estate prices and displace low- and middle-income residents.

As scholars who study gentrification and social justice, we prefer a model that recognizes all three aspects of sustainability: environment, economy and equity. The equity piece is often missing from development projects promoted as green or sustainable. We are interested in models of urban greening that produce real environmental improvements and also benefit long-term working-class residents in neighborhoods that are historically underserved.

Over a decade of research in an industrial section of New York City, we have seen an alternative vision take shape. This model, which we call “just green enough,” aims to clean up the environment while also retaining and creating living-wage blue-collar jobs. By doing so, it enables residents who have endured decades of contamination to stay in place and enjoy the benefits of a greener neighborhood.

‘Parks, cafes and a riverwalk’ can lead to gentrification

Gentrification has become a catch-all term used to describe neighborhood change, and is often misunderstood as the only path to neighborhood improvement. In fact, its defining feature is displacement. Typically, people who move into these changing neighborhoods are whiter, wealthier and more educated than residents who are displaced.

A recent spate of new research has focused on the displacement effects of environmental cleanup and green space initiatives. This phenomenon has variously been called environmental, eco- or green gentrification.

Land for new development and resources to fund extensive cleanup of toxic sites are scarce in many cities. This creates pressure to rezone industrial land for condo towers or lucrative commercial space, in exchange for developer-funded cleanup. And in neighborhoods where gentrification has already begun, a new park or farmers market can exacerbate the problem by making the area even more attractive to potential gentrifiers and pricing out long-term residents. In some cases, developers even create temporary community gardens or farmers markets or promise more green space than they eventually deliver, in order to market a neighborhood to buyers looking for green amenities.

Environmental gentrification naturalizes the disappearance of manufacturing and the working class. It makes deindustrialization seem both inevitable and desirable, often by quite literally replacing industry with more natural-looking landscapes. When these neighborhoods are finally cleaned up, after years of activism by longtime residents, those advocates often are unable to stay and enjoy the benefits of their efforts.

The River Walk in San Antonio, Texas, is a popular shopping and dining area catering to tourists. Ken Lund, CC BY-SA

Tools for greening differently

Greening and environmental cleanup do not automatically or necessarily lead to gentrification. There are tools that can make cities both greener and more inclusive, if the political will exists.

The work of the Newtown Creek Alliance in Brooklyn and Queens provides examples. The alliance is a community-led organization working to improve environmental conditions and revitalize industry in and along Newtown Creek, which separates these two boroughs. It focuses explicitly on social justice and environmental goals, as defined by the people who have been most negatively affected by contamination in the area.

The industrial zone surrounding Newtown Creek is a far cry from the toxic stew that The New York Times described in 1881 as “the worst smelling district in the world.” But it is also far from clean. For 220 years it has been a dumping ground for oil refineries, chemical plants, sugar refineries, fiber mills, copper smelting works, steel fabricators, tanneries, paint and varnish manufacturers, and lumber, coal and brick yards.

In the late 1970s, an investigation found that 17 million gallons of oil had leaked under the neighborhood and into the creek from a nearby oil storage terminal. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency placed Newtown Creek on the Superfund list of heavily polluted toxic waste sites in 2010.

The Newtown Creek Alliance and other groups are working to make sure that the Superfund cleanup and other remediation efforts are as comprehensive as possible. At the same time, they are creating new green spaces within an area zoned for manufacturing, rather than pushing to rezone it.

As this approach shows, green cities don’t have to be postindustrial. Some 20,000 people work in the North Brooklyn industrial area that borders Newtown Creek. And a number of industrial businesses in the area have helped make environmental improvements.

Just green enough

The “just green enough” strategy uncouples environmental cleanup from high-end residential and commercial development. Our new anthology, “Just Green Enough: Urban Development and Environmental Gentrification,” provides many other examples of the need to plan for gentrification effects before displacement happens. It also describes efforts to create environmental improvements that explicitly consider equity concerns.

For example, UPROSE, Brooklyn’s oldest Latino community-based organization, is combining racial justice activism with climate resilience planning in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. The group advocates for investment and training for existing small businesses that often are Latino-owned. Its goal is not only to expand well-paid manufacturing jobs, but to include these businesses in rethinking what a sustainable economy looks like. Rather than rezoning the waterfront for high-end commercial and residential use, UPROSE is working for an inclusive vision of the neighborhood, built on the experience and expertise of its largely working-class immigrant residents.

This approach illustrates a broader pattern identified by Macalester College geographer Dan Trudeau in his chapter for our book. His research on residential developments throughout the United States shows that socially and environmentally just neighborhoods have to be planned as such from the beginning, including affordable housing and green amenities for all residents. Trudeau highlights the need to find “patient capital” – investment that does not expect a quick profit – and shows that local governments need to take responsibility for setting out a vision and strategy for housing equity and inclusion.

In our view, it is time to expand the notion of what a green city looks like and who it is for. For cities to be truly sustainable, all residents should have access to affordable housing, living-wage jobs, clean air and water, and green space. Urban residents should not have to accept a false choice between contamination and environmental gentrification.

Header photo: Small tankers unload along New York’s Newtown Creek in 2008. Jim Henderson

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Martin Kirk: When Donald Trump says “Make America Great Again,” he’s alluding, at least in part, to the promise of economic growth. Just as when Bill Clinton said, “it’s the economy, stupid,” he was really saying that “it’s about economic growth, stupid.” This is the Golden Promise of politics: more economic growth. Golden, because it is effortlessly translated in voters’ minds to mean more jobs, more money in the economy, and therefore more income in everyone’s pockets. Because economic growth is, obviously, a thing greatly to be desired.

Equally obvious is the knowledge that no economic growth is a bad thing. When economies and companies don’t grow, they stagnate and falter. Which means fewer jobs, lower wages, less money to invest, more business shut downs, and bankruptcies. In short, more misery for all.

It’s all so obvious, right? It’s one of the precious few things we can all agree on in this fractious age.

But there are some new strains of thought that take a more nuanced and sophisticated view of growth. That say, yes, all other things being equal, economic growth is a positive thing. But all other things are not equal. There’s no such thing as a free lunch, and, for all its positives, economic growth has a dark side; its ecological impact. The impacts of our ever-growing economy have become so stark and so widespread that they are by any sane measure portents to catastrophe. Whether it’s the fact that Antarctic ice is now melting three times faster than we thought, or the unfolding “biological annihilation” that has already wiped out 50% of all animals and up to 75% of all insects, or the fact that, in spite of all this, we are pumping out CO2 at record levels, it takes willful ignorance or a blinding ideology to deny the severity of the crisis.

This creates a terrible paradox: Economic growth keeps economies stable today, but threatens not just future growth but medium-term social and civilizational cohesion, and ultimately the very capacity of this biosphere to sustain life. A paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last year suggested that “the window for effective action is very short, probably two or three decades at most.” And that even this dire prediction is considered “conservative” by the authors, “given the increasing trajectories of the drivers of extinction.” In terms of practical politics, that means acting immediately, preferably yesterday.

Most politicians deal with this paradox by ignoring it. It’s by far the easiest option; one afforded every incentive and reward by this political economy and the beliefs that underpin it. This belief system has been dominant for a long time now. We are, as a society, deeply comfortable with it, which means many of its core assumptions are considered unassailable–too obvious to question. The most profound being this idea that growth is always good. Questioning this amounts to political suicide for any politician.

Or, at least, it used to. We are starting to see some movement in interesting corners of the global political landscape that suggest that some leaders are showing the sort of political courage needed to shift established norms. It may well be starting to become something of a bonafide political movement. It’s young and small, still, but so were all movements at one time.

A little thought experiment shows how growth can be a problem: Insert the word “a” before it. “A growth.” That feels very different from just “growth,” right? Growth is a big part of what we all understand happens in a healthy life. Children grow, knowledge grows, love grows. But “a growth” is what happens when life gets corrupted. “A growth” is when the growth is unchecked, and thus a symptom not of health but disease; when it takes on the character of an invader, attacking its host. The word for growth that gets out of control in this way, such that it becomes “a growth,” is, of course, cancer.

But wait, I hear you cry, technological progress will save us! We can just grow meat in test tubes rather than needing so much land and clean air space for cows and their methane-laden farts, or we can all switch to renewable energy, or recycle more and better, and then we can get back to the promise of infinite growth. Unfortunately, the evidence is clear that this is simply not possible. Yes, we can make dents in our impact with such measures, and we should with all possible speed, but the way the global economy is currently programmed means such things are important–but also entirely insufficient.

So, once we discard the vain hope of being able to grow the economy infinitely and indefinitely, what are we looking at? This is where the innovation and bravery come in.

A new alliance was formed in 2017, called the Wellbeing Economy Alliance. What they are shooting for is one–or many different–economic model(s) that have, “the fundamental goal of achieving sustainable well-being with dignity and fairness for humans and the rest of Nature.” Which means they cannot just reach for socialism or any other historical model–socialism, like capitalism, relies on growth, as does communism. They have recognized that we can’t rely on past thinking; we must genuinely put our best brains forward and innovate.

We’re not talking about a bunch of random, dreamy utopians here, but real politicians who have won real elections and are exercising real power. So far, the roster of governments signing up to the Alliance includes Scotland, Costa Rica, Slovenia, and New Zealand. Other governments that are actively looking at the issue include Italy, and there are political parties emerging, like the Alternative Party in Denmark, which is also embracing the innovation challenge. These are not what are often referred to as Tier 1 countries in the international order, but neither are they so small they are irrelevant.

Scotland, for example, provides a direct line into both the U.K. and (at least for the time being) the EU. Costa Rica has long been a pioneer of innovative economic and social thinking, with impressive results: It is routinely in the top three countries in the world when measured for the well-being and happiness of their people. New Zealand is, perhaps, the most newly bold. Its prime minster has not only called growth-at-all-costs capitalism “a “blatant failure” but also has said her government would no longer accept GDP as the sole, supreme measure of progress. “The measures for us have to change,” she said in October last year. “We need to make sure we are looking at people’s ability to actually have a meaningful life, an enjoyable life, where their work is enough to survive and support their families.”

And this is where social and economic forces start to align in very interesting and potentially powerful ways. And open the door for seeing electoral strategies in an agenda based on innovations to take us beyond traditional growth-at-all-costs economics.

Consider a few facts: More than 50% of millennials say they would take a pay cut to find work that matches their values, while 90% want to use their skills for good. And these trends are on the up. Deloitte’s 7th Annual Millennial Survey of 12,000 young people, for example–both millennials and gen Z–reports record low opinions of businesses. Fewer than half now believe that businesses behave ethically, and this directly affects how loyal they feel to their employers; 43% of millennials and a whopping 61% of gen-Zers expect to stay in a job no more than two years. And all this against a backdrop of general public opinion that is also looking increasingly unkindly on the economic paradigm we have.

These are conditions that can be worked with. They show that there is a large and growing instinct out there that thinks that we need fundamental change to the way we do economics. Not tweaking around the edges, but fundamental change at the very roots of the global economy. There is no neat or reliable evidence to suggest that challenging infinite growth is at the top of peoples’ minds, or likely to be a particularly easy sell. But there is significant doubt in growth-at-all-costs capitalism, and that is an opportunity for innovation. Combine that with the new thinking coming out of places like the Wellbeing Alliance, and you can start to sense the causes and conditions may well be aligning in favor of the emergence of wholly new, post-growth economies. It cannot come soon enough.

Martin Kirk is cofounder and director of strategy for The Rules, a global collective of writers, thinkers, and activists dedicated to challenging the root causes of global poverty and inequality. His work focuses on bringing insights from the cognitive and complexity sciences to bear on issues of public understanding of complex global challenges.

Cross-posted from Fast Company

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Nithin Coca, Shareable: So what does the concept civic economy mean to you?

Eguchi Shintaro, co-author of “Civic Economy in Japan”: It is based on the real meaning of “economy.” If you look at the etymology of the Greek word, it represents a community that actually is sustainable and generates and regenerates what it has from its resources.

In the concept of civic economy, civilization or people is the focus of economy. This is the focus of my research. Civic economy is originally a concept in introduced in Europe, but there has been this idea in Japan for centuries too to heighten and advance civilization through the economy, and as a byproduct this can also be a sharing economy.

Civic economy is basically where individuals share what they have — skills, knowledge, services — to develop the economy of a certain area. The original meaning is basically a community of cooperation… a community that is sustainable, that generates its own resources.

Can you tell me about the history of sharing or civic economy in Japan? What is the underpinning of sharing in Japanese society?

In Edo era, there were ideas and functions that were held by small organizations that were early version of banks. This is where people in communities pitch in and pool money to invest, and have that money held in cases. For example, [if] someone had a fire and lost everything, they might loan that money for them to rebuilt their lives. Or sometimes, they would give that money. This is a system of mutual help, beginning of cooperativism in Japan. Because it is related to civil economy, I am recently getting more interested in cooperativism.

Then, the sense of commons was stronger than sharing. For instance in a village, there might be a well that a community uses together, or cooperative housing, or families taking care of each other’s children. Within that small community, it was complete. From our perspective, it is sharing, but at that time, the sense of personal ownership was not so strong. It was much stronger to have a sense of commons.

What happened to these systems?

After the Meiji Restoration, Japan went through modernization. This meant the sense of capitalism and individualism has gotten stronger, so there is a sense of having individual resources. That’s why individuals and family unit has gotten much stronger. The idea of capitalism meant companies promoted the sales of appliances, and meant household owned things, and that’s when the idea of personal ownership was introduced.

What about the growing attention on rural economies in Japan. Can sharing help revitalize those economies?

During Japan’s bubble economy era, the economy boomed, and major cities became bigger and bigger, and basically have extracted from rural areas, which have declined in population and their economies declined too.

Today, the population is still declining in rural areas, and that’s why there are very few businesses willing to move to rural areas, and in rural areas they don’t see any venture capital. Young people are leaving these areas to look for jobs in big cities, and then they make money and send some money back. Gradually, rural area is becoming more elderly, and there is more aging population.

There is a danger of small towns or small cities maybe disappearing entirely. As far as local governments go, they need to stabilize their economy. And so, within the community, they have few resources, which are getting fewer and fewer. In rural areas … local governments haven’t put many efforts in building more entrepreneurs in their areas, so the sharing economy is one way for rural governments to create and generate funds for their own communities.

What is behind the more recent resurgence in interest in sharing or civic economy in Japan?

The Great Kobe Earthquake, and other disasters in Japan were important milestones. When there is a huge natural or social disaster, people learned that it was impossible to sustain or survive all on their own. That’s when the idea of mutual help was reintroduced and got stronger. Along with that, the Japanese economy stagnated, so this is when the idea of cooperation re-emerged.

The Great East Japan Earthquake is also an important point when the idea of mutual help got stronger. In other countries, there is a strong interest in cooperativism, and in Japan, there is a need to review and look at cooperativism again. Of course the basis of that is because it is very democratic. It’s not from the point of view of the study of the economy, it is also from how you can democratically operate,so it’s important to study it.

Can you tell me about civic economy projects that are representative of the potential for sharing to revitalize the economy?

One example is a Toyo-oka, Kinosaki Onsen in Hyogo Prefecture. It is a hot springs (onsen) town. It’s a very famous town because there is a novel written by a famous Japanese author, about 100 years ago. They rely on tourism.

In the past few years, there is a movement to create some projects to keep culture and people in the city. The project is launched by the local government, with one project, Books in Onsen started by onsen inn owners who had a union already. It’s like an Artists in Residence program, they invite artists to stay in this area and create something. In exchange for free residence, artists are supposed to open their studios, when they are rehearsing or creating, to residents, so they can come and watch what they do. Or they have to provide workshops for children. Kids can also use these facilities to create their own pieces of art. … For local residents, they see in the books and stories names of places that are very familiar to them, so in that way, it’s promoting literature, creation, and it supports tourism, because of the fans who want to come and get these books. They have already sold 100,000 copies. And many Japanese media have picked up these stories too.

Another example is Hagiso, in the eastern part of Tokyo, an area which has a lot of old buildings. It’s a building which used to be an apartment and which is 60 years old that was renovated to have a cafe, gallery, and shop.

In this neighborhood, Hagiso is in the middle and functions as a front desk, and you might have lodging in an old Japanese farmhouse, where you can stay. For bath, they will give a ticket to another facility which is a hot spring bath. If they want to eat dinner, they will get a list of restaurants in the neighborhood for them to pick. They can rent a bike. Since this is an old neighborhood, we have facilities where they have cultural experiences like a tea ceremony. So this is a system that was created in the neighborhood, and economy itself it pulls and is shared by institutions in the neighborhood. Small businesses getting together to mutually generate business and help create and sustain the local economy.

What do you see as the future for sharing?

There have been a lot of efforts to increase start-up companies, or educate entrepreneurs in local areas, starting in the late 2000s. Amidst that, there are sharing businesses build on sharing economy concepts, particularly using IT. This is chance, to see how IT technology can be used to help society. But of course, that does not mean that IT literacy is increasing among older age bracket. There is a need for us to increase the IT use among this age bracket.

There is little understanding of sharing among local governments. Cities need to develop this vision. Citizens, private sector, and governments all have to come together, and work in the same direction, with the same goals. We don’t have that yet — they are divided, and working separately. The people have not really felt or understood the Sharing City vision.

One of the biggest things right now is to help these groups understand each other and face the same direction — need to create something that people and the local government that can make their own city attractive, and build civic pride together.

 Cross-posted from Shareable

Photo by thomwisdom

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The School for Civic Action in collaboration with Commons Rising are inviting commons initiatives and commoners to come together to initiate a UK wide Commons Assembly. This is an open platform to meet others, exchange knowledge and to see if there is an appetite for an ongoing UK Commons Assembly.

The Commons discourse is informed by an idea, which has been around for hundreds of years. In a contemporary context of much inequality, the Commons discourse introduces models of sharing. The Commons are about the assets that belong to everyone, forming resources that should benefit all, rather than being enclosed to just a few.

The aim of the day is to put on an exhibition showing the wealth of Commons projects happening in the UK. There will be discussions as well as workshops to inform the public about the commons. It is also an opportunity to vision how the commons might work beyond the individual projects and to set up practical outcomes going forwards.

You will see commons initiatives from each of the following areas Health, Food production, Food distribution, Housing, Economy/Money, Energy, Culture, Waste, Commons Law and Charters, Digital Commons, Governance of the Commons, Land use/ownership, Transport and Technology.

The ambition of this event is to continue beyond this event in formats decided by the participants and contributors on the day.

Register through Eventbrite

@publicworksuk Facebook

Programme PDF:

Uk Commons Assembly_tate Exchange Programme by P2P Foundation on Scribd

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