With Michel Bauwens working on the commons transition plan in Ghent and multiple initiatives in the Netherlands we will have a lot to discuss this coming year.  Our network it steadily growing and I am very happy to be part of it. I am Walter Dresscher and will be the coördinator of the Dutch language blog. I work on the relation between peer to peer practices and the potential improvement of city life and public space that is enabled by P2P practices. I will initiate multiple projects this year that I will be sharing on the blog.

So next to our already very successful Greek an French blog we re-add the native tongue of the two main figures of our community: Jean and Michel.

I hope to find all Dutch speaking commoners on our blog to discuss how we can help orchestrate the transition to a post-capitalist society.

The post Dutch P2P Foundation Blog relaunched today appeared first on P2P Foundation.

He died on Tuesday, September 6, 2016, and his funeral was held in Ostend, Belgium, on Friday the 16th. Jean had been having health problems for about a year, but was unaware of a more serious condition until his last 10 days.

I’d like to offer some of my memories of our work together as well as reflections about continuing his legacy. I write this in both a personal capacity and as a co-member of the P2P Foundation network.

The Memories

I got to know Jean the second year of our studies at the Free University of Brussels (V.UB.), probably in 1978. Jean was first a student in the business school Solvay, while I was doing Political Sciences. We met in the student movement Aktief Linkse Studenten (Active Left Students), were members of the Flemish Socialist Party’s youth wing, and both believed in Trotsky’s analysis of the permanent revolution. I would leave just a few years after my time as a student, as I could not square living through the Thatcher/Reagan counter-revolution with the ever-optimistic predictions of the political tendency we belonged to. Jean would leave much later (in his mid-thirties I believe), after having been a full-time organizer and editor-in-chief of the radical magazine Vonk. What was striking about Jean was his generosity to his friends and his reliability as a co-worker and comrade. Jean also had some personal issues to deal with. He came out as gay, and for this he was not accepted by his parents. It would take decades before acceptance came, but he went on to become friends with his father and accompanied him in his final years.

When Jean quit the radical movement he belonged to and gave his life’s energy to for many years, he was also at a loss. Without savings due to very low wages, and with no prospect of a sufficient pension, he had to re-arrange his life. He was lucky to find a cheap apartment in Brussels which he bought and transformed into a jewel of wonderful, if eccentric, taste, and started working as a copywriter for corporate magazines. Given this context, the writing was always excellent and informative about societal trends. We briefly met again in the mid-nineties, after having lost touch for many years. This career worked well for Jean until 2008, when the crisis of capitalism led to a dwindling of his client base, due to cutbacks in corporations. This is when Jean decided to get a job in the city of Brussels, in the department that manages the housing stock. Although he liked the social mission and respected his colleagues, Jean thoroughly disliked the bureaucratic procedures, and it made him feel depressed for several years.

It was then that we met once again, and I could share my enthusiasm about my own work for the emerging peer-to-peer and commons movement. Like Jean, I had composed with the dominant society for many years, and struggled with the anti-social and anti-ecological nature of contemporary capitalism. After experiencing personal burnout and deep crises in 1996, I decided to reconnect with the engagement for social change of my youth. While investigating which approach was appropriate for our times, I decided that P2P dynamics would give social movements the leverage for self-organisation and change. It took Jean nearly 3 years to go through the literature and understand my analysis, but when he emerged from his own study, it gave him a new positive outlook on life. He combined his full-time job with enthusiastic participation in the P2P project in the evenings. He exhibited tremendous energy.

It is thanks to him, as co-author, that I could produce the Flemish book, De Wereld Redden, and its French translation and counterpart, Sauver Le Monde, both of which made a definite impact. Since about 2005, I would be a regular guest during my lecture tours, in his amazing apartment at the Stalingradlaan in Brussels. We talked and thought into the wee hours of the night, and Jean became a much-sought after lecturer in Flanders, while also writing various Dutch-language articles for the more thoughtful magazines such as De Wereld Morgen.

It is difficult to express what a good friend he was, how supportive, and how spoiled he made me feel. Jean was purchasing many of the books I wanted to read, was a master chef of wholesome food. My family also had the opportunity to stay on occasion in his home. My wife became a great admirer of Jean; she considered him like a saint. Jean in return came to visit us in Thailand and had plans to come back in February 2017.

Jean began having health issues about a year before his passing, first expressed as a knee problem, but later as digestive issues that prefigured the disease that would fell him. Despite this, he was still giving plenty of lectures and made many plans. One was to found P2P Foundation Belgium as a separate legal entity; another was to co-author an English conversation book with me (the rough version is finished, awaiting further work to complete it). He was wondering how he could once again make his activist life a primary focus, but had not yet found a satisfactory solution. He also had a warm and active family life with his parents, sisters, nieces, and especially his godson, Sam Kestens.

Jean is leaving a big hole in our hearts, as our fond memories can’t compensate for the warm support he gave us, but we are very committed to honouring his engagements and legacy. Frank Theys and I are finalizing a funding round for a documentary that will be dedicated to his memory. At the recent Prix Ars Electronica awards ceremony, Stacco Troncoso dedicated to Jean the Golden Nica award that we received as the P2P Foundation collective. We will finish the English-language book we started with him, and I am seriously considering naming a new commons-oriented policy institute after him.

Jean left us far too early and far too fast, but his legacy and his gifts will live on in our hearts and our own practice for many years to come.

Michel Bauwens, for the P2P Foundation

The post In Memoriam: Jean Lievens 1957-2016 appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Sam Kinsley translated also Bernard Stiegler’s Preface and Dirk Holeman’s Postface to Michel Bauwens and Jean Lievens’ book Sauver le Monde: Vers une société post-capitaliste avec le peer-to-peer [To Save the World: towards a post-capitalist society with peer-to-peer].

Introduction

“We do not live in a changing age, but rather a change of age”
Professor Jan Rotmans
(Professor of the Theory and Management of Transition,
Erasmus University Rotterdam)

It would be pointless to try to convince the reader of a book entitled To Save the World that life on Earth, as we understand it today, is in peril. Following a recently published study in the journal Nature Climate Change, more that half of terrestrial plants and the habitats of around a third of animals will disappear because of climate change if greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase at the current rate. Scientists at the renowned Global Footprint Network (an international laboratory of ideas that measures ecological sustainability using ‘ecological footprints’) have calculated that, at present, we will need a planet and a half to maintain the current global economy. Furthermore, the growth rate required to maintain this system until 2053 would require the global economy to quadruple. In this case, we would need six planets. One does not need to be genius to understand that endless growth on a finite planet is a scientific nonsense and we are heading for a crash. Faced with this bleak perspective for the future, there are different ways to react: simple denial, to resign ourselves to it, or to attempt to do something about it.

To change the world, we can draw inspiration from the past, but we need a new way of addressing the challenges of the future. Michel Bauwens brings us such a vision. Not the visions, but a vision. The title of this book thus reflects a certain arrogance inconsistent with his character. Indeed, very intelligent people are often very modest, because they are very conscious of their own limitations. But who is Michel Bauwens? Beneath the title “The most stimulating Belgian thinker is an unknown philosopher” in the newspaper De Morgen (on the 23rd March 2012) presents him as follows:

“Do you know Michel Bauwens? Perhaps not. This 54-year-old cyberphilosopher is not well known. Bauwens is the first Belgian to figure in a list of the 100 most influential people in the world. He finds himself in the illustrious company of people such as Mahatma Ghandi (9), Martin Luther King (24), The Dalai Lama (28), Thomas Malthus (55) and John Kenneth Galbraith (70). Bauwens occupies 82nd place, a few rungs above Eleanor Roosevelt (87).”

The list referred to in De Morgen, “The (En)Rich List”, is a table of 100 people established by the Post Growth Institute, an international group of scientists that lobby for a sustainable society in which prosperity can be created without a need for economic doctrine [besoin de croissance économique]. The list of the “most enriching people” is a foil [clin d’œil – literally “a wink”, could be translated to ‘a nod’] to the 100 “richest people” in the world, published annually by the American financial magazine Forbes.

Cyberphilosopher, futurologist, economist, researcher, conference convener, entrepreneur… These are some of the epithets given to Michel Bauwens by journalists. Wikipedia designates him as a “peer-to-peer theorist”, and he describes himself in this book as a commentator and thinker attempting to forge a coherent link between the theories, hypotheses and explications of peer-to-peer, and to do so in the most ethical way possible.

So what is ‘peer-to-peer’ (abbreviated to P2P)? This is a term not well known or understood outside of the world of IT enthusiasts and geeks, nevertheless the collaborative economy, forged through networks of peers, has rapidly gained in popularity throughout our countries. A year before the publication of that short article in De Morgen, the Dutch-language Belgian newspaper De Tijd (on the 23rd April 2013) published a detailed interview with Michel, across a double-page spread. Little by little, he has gained notoriety even in his country of birth. As is often the case, local recognition comes on the back of an international breakthrough, and not vice versa. It is well-known that: “No one is a prophet in their own country” [«Nul n’est prophète en son pays» – this is an idiom that some suggest traces back to the apostles Luke and Matthew].

About this book

This book is the outcome of twelve Skype interviews, of around an hour each, between January and February 2014. If I had arranged twelve more hours, if someone else had interviewed Michel, this would have been a different book. In any case, our aim is to share with you some ideas at the heart of peer-to-peer, production between peers, in the hope of inspiring you to further your understanding through other lectures, books and studies. As this book contains a number of important new and uncommon terms (for example, you may have already struggled with the term ‘peer-to-peer’ in the subtitle of this book), we have created a glossary that is situated at the end of the book.

Personally, I think that politicians, whether on the right or the left, have a tendency to see the future [l’avenir] through the rear-view mirror. Just as Marxism is an ideological construct of the 19th century, liberalism and nationalism find their origins in the 18th century. From a historical perspective these ideologies each have respective values but they no longer offer a response to the enormous difficulties that confront us today. This is also expressed in the way that politicians are unable to offer solutions. Not only because the political class tends to defend the status quo and their vested interests but also because many of the problems can only be solved at a global scale and thus local authorities are powerless. This certainly does not mean that nothing is possible at a local level, quite the contrary. On those occasions when everything is paralysed at national and international levels, only local level action allows real progress. This is reflected in particular by increased urbanisation (since the beginning of the 21st century more than a half of the global population has lived in towns and cities), or what Eric Corijn calls the emergence of “urbanity” as new form of post-national society, but also by the development of peer-to-peer mechanisms through which a number of people take their fate into their own hands by launching new projects from within the very institutional framework with which they have often clashed. In the face of the pessimism of the political world, there is optimism within the science of peer-to-peer. This is why solutions will come first from civil society.

We live in an era of enormous possibilities, but also of contradictions and gigantic obstacles to the full realisation of those possibilities. Machines have releaved us of a large part of manual labour (and increasingly of intellectual labour), but the automisation of production processes has not translated into the redistribution or the reduction of working time. Financial markets, often governed by mathematical algorithms upon which no one has a grip, have a greater impact than governments upon our lives. Our parliaments vote for laws that render collaboration and sharing illegal. Our economic model is founded upon the absurd idea of material abundance and immaterial rarity. We behave as if the world was limitless and exploit it to the utmost, to the point of jeopardizing the survival of the human species. Furthermore, we use copyright and patents to build artificial barriers around human knowledge to complicate sharing and collaboration as much as possible. Yet, from the society of the industrial revolution emerged new models and ways of working, heralding a new society. Thus, today, in the words of the Dutch Scientist Jan Rotmans: “We do not live in an era of change but in a change of era”.

The emerging model of peer-to-peer, inspired by the open source movement, seeks to circumvent the false logic of material scarcity and the artificial scarcity of the immaterial. In the apparent tangle of new phenomena such as the collaborative economy, peer-to-peer networks, open source, crowd-sourcing, FabLabs, micro-factories, the “maker” movement, urban agriculture and so on, Michel Bauwens sees a model that leads us to a post-capitalist society, in which the market finally submits to the logic of the commons (the common good). This book is a first attempt to articulate ideas concerning peer-to-peer formulated by Michel Bauwens. It is not simply the result of the reflections of a single person but rather the collective inteilligence of a growing minority of active pioneers who are developing and revealing thousands of projects and experiences amongst peers. Hopefully they will be an inspiration for all who are active in this area and work to build a new world, starting with what affects us directly.

Jean Lievens
9th July 2013

The post Jean Lievens’ Introduction to Michel Bauwens’ “Sauver Le Monde” (original title: De wereld redden) appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Today though, Jean has an important question…

Jean Lievens

There are two good reasons to change a light bulb. The first one is that it is broken; the second, that it is obsolete. If it is broken, we will be in the dark and it will be much harder to replace it. But we are not there (yet). The main problem with our bulb ? or rather bulbs, because we are using far more than we really need ? is that they are designed to fail, they can never be repaired and contain toxic materials poisoning the environment when thrown away.

So there are many reasons why we need to replace our bulb. How many peers does it take to change it? A lot. Why? Too many people are still squabbling if the bulb needs to be replaced in the first place. Therefore, those who know the light bulb needs to be changed, otherwise it might explode with devastating effects, need to take their fate into their own hands. Let’s call them the Transformers.

First, the Transformers need to design the best possible light bulb. If a team of about 80 engineers in a dozen countries can design a sustainable, eco-friendly car like Wikispeed, a similar number of peers can certainly design a sustainable, eco-friendly, low energy consuming light bulb.

« Too many people are still squabbling if the bulb needs to be replaced in the first place »

Because they have no incentive to make a throwaway bulb in order to sell as many as possible to maximise profits, they will design the best possible light bulb: open, sustainable and reparable by everyone as it uses an open design. It will even be adaptable to changing needs and moods as it will probably function with a programmable arduino.

Once they have designed this wonderful light bulb, the Transformers need to produce it. They do not need a huge factory to produce throwaway bulbs on a mass scale; a local micro factory or fablab will do just fine. If they find 2500 people donating $ 20 each through a crowdfunding campaign, they will get the necessary funds to finance their fablab. Up till now, about 2580 people are needed to change the light bulb; maybe less if the donators are rich or more generous.

But wait a minute… Even if the Transformers build the machinery for their fablab themselves, following in the footsteps of Marcin Jacubowski, they still need to rely on others to buy some machine parts. They need raw materials and energy, although a coop, raising about $ 1,25 million, can produce green electricity locally. So the Transformers need another 2500 people paying $ 500 each, bringing the total number of peers needed to 5080.

« Not only the Transformers know how to design and produce better light bulbs, they also can make better software, cars, satellites and even coffee »

Unfortunately, despite all their efforts the Transformers have only found a partial solution to their problem. There is a lot they can do locally, but what if the sun does not shine or the wind does not blow? A smart grid financed by the state and linking them to other local coops would be handy. But the question of raw materials and machine parts still need to be solved, although they might find a solution in recycling old stuff. Still more peers are needed…

Not only the Transformers know how to design and produce better light bulbs, they also can make better software, cars, satellites and even coffee. And they are much happier than their peers in big factories who are alienated from their work. Luckily there are more and more Transformers everywhere around the world. Their experiments are mushrooming and the number of peers involved is growing every day.

According to Jeremy Rifkin in his new book The Zero Marginal Cost Society, there are already millions of “prosumers” generating their own green electricity at near zero marginal cost. It is estimated that around 100.000 hobbyists are manufacturing their own goods using 3D printing. But we have not reached the tipping point yet. Following the second law of dialectics, a lot more peers are needed to transform quantity into quality and change the light bulb once and for all.

PS: Come to think of it, there is a light bulb burning since 1901 in Livermore, California. Unfortunately for 113 years nobody wants to produce it…

Originally published in Open Thoughts’ special 2014 issue, asking the question “How many peers does it take to change a light bulb?”

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