In Four Futures Peter Frase poses, as a thought experiment, an “anti-Star Trek”: a world that shares the same technologies as Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s post-scarcity communist society, but in which those technologies of abundance are enclosed with “intellectual property” barriers so that capitalists can continue to live off the rents of artificial scarcity.

“…[I]magine that unlike Star Trek, we don’t all have access to our own replicators. And that in order to get access to a replicator, you would have to buy one from a company that licenses the right to use it. You can’t get someone to give you a replicator or make one with their replicator, because that would violate their license and get them in legal trouble.

What’s more, every time you make something with the replicator, you also need to pay a licensing fee to whoever owns the rights to that particular thing. Captain Jean-Luc Picard customarily walks to the replicator and requests “tea, Earl Grey, hot.” But his anti-Star Trek counterpart would have to pay the company that has copyrighted the replicator pattern for hot Earl Grey tea.”

In such a world, earning the money to pay for the things will be a problem, since there is no need for labor to actually make anything. What remaining work there is will be a small pool of intensely competed-for jobs designing stuff, some amount of guard labor enforcing “intellectual property” against piracy and protecting the accumulated property of the rich, and an odd assortment of work in household service or hand-crafting luxury goods for those in the propertied classes who value the status symbolism entailed in such things.

This is the world of The Diamond Age. In Stephenson’s medium-term future, Star Trek’s matter-energy replicators are a reality (well, the food replication is considerably well below Star Trek standards). A world of plentiful sustenance for all, without money, is technologically feasible. But there the similarity ends.

The story is set at some indefinite point in the mid-21st century—presumably somewhere around the 2060s or so, given that a quite old lady reminisces about being a thrasher in the ’90s.

The world in this future is governed by the international order that emerged from a period of chaos—the Interregnum—following the collapse of most major nation-states that occurred when encrypted currencies starved them of tax revenue. The basic unit of organization is the phyle—a deterritorialized, networked opt-in community with associated support platforms, which is based on some shared point of affinity like ethnicity, ideology or religion.

The first phyle to emerge from the Interregnum was the First Distributed Republic, apparently an entirely pragmatic, non-ideological platform whose chief purpose—like the lodges in Poul Anderson’s Northwestern Federation (Orion Shall Rise)—was to keep the lights on and the trash picked up. By the time of the story, there are many scores of phyles. The largest and richest are the neo-Victorians (recruited largely from the Anglosphere) and the Nipponese, both governed by an intensively work-oriented and capitalistic ethos and making money through nanotech and other forms of engineering and design. The others—Mormons, Israelis, Parsis, Boers, Ashanti, Hindustani, Sendero Luminoso, etc., etc.—range widely in size. CryptNet is a phyle governed by a pirate ideology, and classified somewhere between subversive and terrorist by the mainstream phyles and their international order.

Depending on their size and wealth, the various phyles maintain territorial enclaves ranging in size from city-states to clusters of a few buildings in cities around the world, with the largest and most widely proliferated belonging to the neo-Victorians and Nipponese for obvious reasons.

Given the existence of technologies of abundance, the profitability of neo-Victorian and Nipponese industry obviously depends on patents and copyrights. And the post-scarcity potential of matter-energy replicators—“matter compilers”—is limited by the Feed. Feeds are long-distance pipelines of various volumes transferring feed stocks of assorted atoms to supply mater compilers. A Feed, in turn, is supplied by a Source—a facility which uses nanotech membranes and other nano-filtering mechanisms to sort out the various elements from seawater and air and store them in separate holding tanks. The major Sources are located in, and operated by, enclaves of the most technically advanced phyles.

The combination of “intellectual property” and the dependence of matter compilers on the Feed severely hobbles the potential for abundance. Some basic minimum of essential life support—fabricated staple foods, clothing, blankets—is available for free from public matter compilers. Everything else has a price, often steep. The “thetes”—a large underclass of people, perhaps a majority of the Earth’s population, unaffiliated with any phyle—stay alive through a combination of casual labor for members of the rich phyles and access to free stuff from the MCs. A considerable burden of high-interest debt, enforced in the last resort by workhouses for defaulters, is apparently the norm among this population.

This system of artificial scarcity is maintained through an international regime called the Common Economic Protocol (CEP). The CEP is enforced by the joint military forces of Protocol Enforcement. Constable Moore, himself Scottish, is a retired Brigadier who served with the Second Brigade of the Third Division of the First Protocol Enforcement Expeditionary Force—largely recruited from the American, British, Ulster Protestant and Uitlander lumpenproletariat, and other thetes of the Anglosphere. Mention is also made of a Nipponese division. The primary purpose of Protocol Enforcement is to enforce “intellectual property” law and secure the Feeds against attack from disgruntled local populations in the territories they pass through.

Although David De Ugarte‘s adoption of the term “phyle” for neo-Venetian platforms like the Las Indias Group was obviously an homage to The Diamond Age, the capitalist phyles in the story are nothing like De Ugarte’s vision of networked platforms incubating cooperative enterprises for commons-based peer production. The neo-Victorians, the only phyle whose internal workings are described in much detail, adhere to a social regime based—as their name suggests—on intense social hierarchy and strict sexual mores. The majority of their members are salaried laborers in the engineering firms like Machine-Phase Systems Limited and Imperial Tectonics Limited that produce most of the phyle’s income. The phyle itself is a giant corporation governed by “Equity Lords” with ownership stakes of various sizes (earl-level, duke-level, and so forth).

The main geographic setting of the story is the southern coast of China—the coastal city-states and the neo-Victorian clave of New Atlantis—along with the regional successor states of the Chinese interior. The relationship Stephenson depicts between the capitalist phyles, Protocol Enforcement and the various Chinese states is reminiscent—deliberately so, obviously—of the era of the Open Door and gunboat diplomacy, with the Rape of Nanking thrown in for good measure.

At the time of the story, the disemployment of hundreds of millions of peasants in the Chinese interior by newly developed synthetic rice from the MCs has resulted in a radical uprising—the Fists of Righteous Harmony—obviously based on the Boxer Rebellion. Peasant armies are marching southward, preparing to invade the coastal city-states and phyles, and burning Feeds along the way. Protocol Enforcement is fighting a losing war against them and gradually retreating southward.

Meanwhile, a coalition of CryptNet, other dissident phyles, and local mini-states allied with the Fists is at work developing a genuine post-scarcity alternative to the Feed, which will destroy the material foundation of the CEP’s global order. This rival technology—the Seed—will use self-assembling nanotech to compile food, tools and goods of all kinds from ambient matter on-site, independently of Feed lines.

The various subplots of the novel involve, directly or indirectly, the complex intrigues between New Atlantis and Protocol Enforcement, which are trying to thwart completion of the Seed, and the coalition struggling to complete it. Central to the latter coalition is the Celestial Kingdom, a city-state in the Greater Shanghai area governed by a caste of Mandarins with a Confucian ideology. Their leadership sees the Seed, a producer-centered technology amenable to village economy, as a way to restore the dignity of the peasantry and create an independent society with an organic social order independent of the CEP’s international order.

The attitude of the capitalist phyles and Protocol Enforcement towards the Seed is, understandably, one of revulsion. John Hackworth, an artifex (senior engineer) in one of the New Atlantan nanotech firms, describes it from his point of view:

“CryptNet’s true desire is the Seed—a technology that, in their diabolical scheme, will one day supplant the Feed, upon which our society and many others are founded. Protocol, to us, has brought prosperity and Peace—to CryptNet, however, it is a contemptible system of oppression. They believe that information has an almost mystical power of free flow and self-replication, as water seeks its own level or sparks fly upward…. It is their view that one day, instead of Feeds terminating in matter compilers, we will have Seeds that, sown on the earth, will sprout up into houses, hamburgers, spaceships, and books—that the Seed will develop inevitably from the Feed, and that upoin it will be founded a more highly evolved society….

Of course, it can’t be allowed—the Feed is not a system of control and oppression, as CryptNet would maintain. It is the only way order can be maintained in modern society—if everyone possessed a Seed, anyone could produce weapons whose destrucive power rivalled that of… nuclear weapons. This is why Protocol Enforcement takes such a dim view of CryptNet’s activities.”

The real reason for his horror—of course—is that the Seed would “dissolve the foundations of New Atlantis and Nippon and all of the societies that had grown up around the concept of a centralized, hierarchical Feed.” More specifically it would, by enabling people to meet all their needs for free and without limit or permission, destroy the wealth of those who lived by claiming ownership over the right to use ideas.

The Mandarins of the Celestial Kingdom, on the other hand, envisioned a high-tech neo-Confucian order in a China “freed from the yoke of the foreign Feed,” in “the coming Age of the Seed.”

“Peasants tended their fields and paddies, and even in times of drought and flood, the earth brought forth a rich harvest: food, of course, but many unfamiliar plants too, fruits that could be made into medicines, bamboo a thousand times stronger than natural varieties, trees that produced synthetic rubber and pellets of clean safe fuel. In an orderly procession the suntanned farmers brought their proceeds to great markets in clean cities free of cholera and strife, where all of the young people were respectful and dutiful scholars and all of the elders were honored and cared for.”

The book ends, as the victorious Fists surge through the coastal claves, with the destruction of the near-complete design for the Seed. The clear implication is that, absent any alternative to the Feed, the Fists’ uprising will collapse and the hegemony of the CEP will reassert itself over China. At the same time there is also a hint—but perhaps this is just my wishful thinking—that the setback to development of the Seed is only a temporary postponement.

Photo by torbakhopper

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This is a collection of writings by Marcus Brancaglione. Brancaglione is President of ReCivitas (Institute for the Revitalization of Citizenship); Bruna Augusto, who edited the collection, is CEO. Among the activities of ReCivitas listed on its website are “structuring intellectual property licenses,” “creating new products for social investment,” and “governance platforms architecture”; as best I can gather from Google Translate’s unsatisfactory Portuguese-to-English rendering, ReCivitas is partly a sort of phyle or platform in roughly the same ballpark as Las Indias, and partly engaged in the same sort of commons-based municipalism as activists in Barcelona.

Brancaglione co-managed a crowd-funded Unconditional Basic Income pilot project in . The project paid 30 reals a month to around a hundred members of the community for five years.

He argues that Basic Income is not primarily a redistribution of income, but more importantly “it is an instrument that restitutes natural rights and the fundamental freedom protection against the exploitation of alienated labor,” and “above all, an instrument of liberation from governmental dependency and political servitude and thus, of political-economic empowerment, especially for the more unprivileged and marginalized individuals.”

Although it’s always been the case that poverty is a political rather than a merely socioeconomic issue, that fact has become more apparent than ever today. Poverty is “not merely a state of relative lack of economic conditions, but it is indeed, much deeper and more comprehensive than that, it is the deprivation of fundamental freedom of all sorts: political, economic and cultural.”

Brancaglione rejects the neoliberal framing of poverty as an individual rather than a structural issue, along with its lionization of a “freedom of choice” relegated to consumer decisions within the structural parameters left by monopoly capital and the state.

He comes from a left free-market tradition that sees capitalism as a set of coercive structural features enabled by the state for the sake of rentier classes. Capitalism and state socialism are both variants of the same system of domination by the few over the many — both of which he distinguishes from the “free market.”

He distinguishes — perhaps reflecting some Georgist influence — between legitimate wealth and private properties, and nature which is a property common to all. Some forms of property like land and natural resources are rightfully common to all, and cannot legitimately be privately appropriated; others, like the fruits of individual labor, are rightfully private property and should not be violated by force. Genuine liberty cannot exist if the equal right of authority over common assets is violated. A free market — defined by voluntary relationships negotiated by parties equal in power — cannot exist when the revenues from common properties, which should be distributed as a social dividend to enable individual independence, are privately appropriated and the propertyless are forced into economic dependency on employment by the appropriators of social property.

Brancaglione sees the provision of basic income as a duty of goverments — “the duty of those who have control over the territory and its inhabitants and the commonwealth.” But when they default on this duty, and available resources for state funding have been privately appropriated, “nobody can prevent people to assume, voluntarily and mutually, the responsibility to supply the basic income.” He obviously doesn’t mean this voluntary assumption to be understood as a mere charitable contribution out of the incomes of the poor — rather, he strongly implies, one of the things government has no right to “prevent” is the expropriation of privately enclosed natural commons by society at large to fund a basic income when the state will not undertake that duty on its own. The people have a “natural right to common properties alienated as possessions of [nation-states] and private corporations.”

The Georgist influence comes through in his distinction between “goverments” and “states” and his treatment of states and landlords as different versions of the same phenomenon. The latter is illustrated (along with panarchistic tendencies) in the following passage:

The libertarian republics of the future are going to be societies without states or, more precisely, societies free from the national and private corporate monopolies over common and private natural properties. The governments of the future will coexist peacefully in the same territory as competitive and cooperative management societies, acting in a negotiated manner not only in the same space, but at the same time.

Brancaglione proposes a very anarchist-sounding agenda of federated local communities bypassing the state to create a counter-economy and appropriate illegitimately enclosed resources to fund a basic income.

Roughly speaking, my proposal is the constitution of small communities, completely horizontal, open and connected so as to form a network of social security without borders and which are directly financed by funds created by association of citizens, not being restricted to a venue, but by social investors from all over the world. Investors who can invest directly in the real economy of these communities, villas, cities with an enormous human capital and potential of development, instead of investing on bankrupt governments and rotten banks. Present poor and unprivileged communities… which, in the long run, could not only pay their own basic income, but also become investors or providers of basic income in other places in the world. People and societies which, in the face of the old and unsustainable violent and monopolizing possession systems would finally be able to conquer back what effectively is theirs; recover the control of their land and territories and consequently, their political sovereignty as a people with overall direct self-determination rights.

This idea of radicalized and horizontally federated communities supplanting the state and corporation is reminiscent of Bookchin’s libertarian municipalism and Harvey’s rebel cities.

The Quatinga Velho experiment reaffirmed a common theme among Basic Income advocates: that, far from disincentivizing effort and initiative, the economic security of a Basic Income actually increases them. “…[T]he opportunities, especially when one has the means to take advantage of them, increase the free initiative and the entrepreneurial ability, whereas the deprivations tend not only to reduce, but also to paralyze them.”

This is a writer who combines a lot of congenial threads of left-libertarian thought in new and interesting ways. Definitely worth checking out.

Photo by scottsantens

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At the end of last year, we began the fusion of Enkidu and Las Indias. Not only was it the logical conclusion of the logic of integration, but also a reorganization of the whole group that prepared us for a new stage, both in terms of the market—with new products, channels, and ideas we’ve been working on since 2015—and our social impact and utility for our surroundings.

At the beginning of July, we sealed the first part with the signing of the merger between the two cooperatives. It was the first “paw.” But we have two more: the Art, a tool that we have never been able to develop the way it deserved, and the Club, which, since November, has been holding activities almost every Thursday. So not surprisingly, the guide to reorienting both “paws” has been fed by the public discussion among the members of the club in La Matriz. The result of all this reflection is that we believe that we have finally found a form and growing activities that are called to make the most of each of the pieces we’ve built during these years. And we’ve given ourselves an objective: it’s all going to be ready before October first, the eve of the 14 anniversary of Las Indias.

Our toolbox

The Group has always been a “toolbox” for us, more than an end in itself, because we have always distinguished clearly between the community, in all its degrees and forms of relationship, and objects—cooperative, association, whatever—which let the people of that community build what they want. That doesn’t mean that they can have things any way they want. A clear and orderly toolbox, where it’s intuitively clear which tool to go to for each new idea or problem, and which also puts them within arm’s reach, ultimately leads to building more and better.

In the group, there are three tools: Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas (Society of the Electronic Indies), which is the economic base and the market-facing platform of the Indiano communards, with its own system of integration; El Arte de las Cosas (the Art of Things), which is the structure to spread cooperativism through community production of everyday goods and objects; and las Indias Club, which is the group’s space for deliberation, reflection, and learning. We Indianos commit to involve ourselves both in Art and in the Club and contribute as much as we know how and are able; but not all members of the Art will participate in the reflections of the Club, nor will all the members of the Club want to make beer or whatever is proposed at a given time in the Art.

The Cooperative Group in detail

1. The Sociedad de las Indias Electrónicas («Society of the Electronic Indies») is the worker cooperative through which the Indiano communards enter the market. As head of the group, it is responsibility for sustaining and driving the other two pieces. Because, like the medieval monastaries, it’s not just about having founded a community way of life, which is sustainable, thanks to the market, and which allows the communards to enjoy their passion for learning and growing; it’s also about making everything we’ve learned available to our surroundings because, if we do it well, new ways of living and working will expand around us—a new culture and a different economic practices “within the shell of the old society,” which will be what really creates social change.
2. El Arte de las Cosas («The Art of Things») has became a worker cooperative with an open social base, dedicated to the promotion of cooperativism through the community production of everyday goods and objects. That is, it’s about expanding the community experience and cooperative production, making, offering integration as a “collaborating partner” to whoever wants, for example, to make beer, as we are already doing, soap, books, electronic gadgets, drip irrigation systems, etc.; We are already organizing anyone interested in the community production of beer for personal consumption and enjoyment, in the same way we would organize market-oriented cooperative production. That is, the Art is becoming our main tool to empower our surroundings with practices and productive technologies applied to everyday life, so people can enjoy and make the most of the reduction of optimal scales of production and experiment and learn the modes of production among peers.
3. las Indias Club is already the group’s space for deliberation, reflection, and learning. From November to July, it went through a “constituent” stage. In the new stage, it has to to keep creating spaces of deliberation outside of the ambient noise, proposing new topics—from robotification to poetry, or the new forms of expression in the blogosphere—like we did from February to June, in more than a dozen meetings. And we practice new, more regular formats, like the next European gathering around the news that E?ropano publishes on a daily basis from a transnational perspective, which is so valuable these days.

Surely, this is the moment to change the format of the “Someros.” Somero is first and foremost the annual conference of the Club, and the Club is already mature enough to move on to a new kind of meeting: to go from listening to outsiders’ experiences, to listening to its own members. The format needs to go from the kind typical of every event intended to get the public’s attention to the kind used in the “Meetings of Economic Democracy” that we organized years ago (which doesn’t mean we might not organize other event with a form similar to the one used so far in Somero, with another name). Now, the members of the Club need to do the talking. They are the ones that need to do presentations, take part in gatherings, discuss new ideas, make proposals, and offer reflections to others. It’s about taking the leap from the “call to action” that the two first “Someros” were, to the social constitution of the Club as an association with mood and momentum of its own, dedicated to feeding the rest of our community, in the broadest sense, with ideas and deliberation.

In the same self-managed logic, we should, over the remainder of year, organize the GNU social Camp in an open call specific to the members of the club and people involved in the development of GNU social across Europe.

Forms of integration

Every tool has its own forms of integration, which, together, allow for a whole range of commitments. The Society of Las Indias has its own itinerary of integration, which is well-known for all its alternatives and possible results; in the Art of Things, the normal way will be enter as a collaborating partner to be part of concrete projects oriented towards personal consumption (beer, for example) or the market (creating a book, developing a product for the direct economy), but it could well be that over time, it could have full-time worker-members; and in the Club, one could be a full member—those dedicated to maintaining and financing the structure, or collaborator—the members who participate in deliberation and activities.

What about the future?

Among friends and members of the Club, there already exist initiatives that indicate that in the Indiano community, which is made up of all members of the three structures, all kinds of
ventures will emerge. We hope that many of them will be integrated naturally into the cooperative group.

So, if we do things well, we could be on the path to having, with an expanded group that can hold many more people than today, the first node to materialize the big idea that arose from this community to win over theoreticians and activists from across the world, from Michel Bauwens to Kevin Carson: the phyle. That’s what orients us, and we must not lose it, but also not forget that, as the Communard Manifesto said:

We have to confront a gigantic problem created by over-scaling, from smallness, with smallness, and step by step.

Las Indias: an organizational diagram

 

Organizations	las Indias Club	El Arte de las Cosas	Sociedad de las Indias
Legal status	Association	Cooperative of production	Worker Cooperative
Activity	Debates, conferences, events, p2p learning, workshops, open discussions.	Communitarian production of everyday goods (beer, books, soap, gadgets, etc.).	Consultancy (Innovation, Networks, Commercial Intelligence, Regional Development) and software development.
Membership and money	Open membership. Everyone can participate and become a supporting member. Activities are mainly sponsored by Sociedad de las Indias but international events use to have some external sponsoring.	Open membership. In every activity participants must pay their equal share of the production costs and if the production goes to the market they get an equal share of the revenues.	Selective membership after a learning itinerary. Work organized according to hacker ethics. Incomes, savings and the biggest part of consumption are shared. Everyone can take from the common fund according to her/his needs determined by her or himself.
Social Organization	Democratic Association	Cooperative	Egalitarian Community
Members (October 2016)	110	20	6

 

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)

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People around the world are increasingly identifying as global citizens, according to a new BBC poll that shines a light on changing attitudes about immigration, inequality, and different economic realities.

Among all 18 countries where public opinion research firm, GlobeScan conducted the survey, 51 percent of people see themselves more as global citizens than national citizens. It is the first time since tracking began in 2001 that a global majority identifies this way, and is up from a low point of about 42 percent in 2002.

The trend is particularly strong in developing countries, the poll found, “including Nigeria (73%, up 13 points), China (71%, up 14 points), Peru (70%, up 27 points), and India (67%, up 13 points).”

Overall, 56 percent of people in emerging economies saw themselves as global citizens rather than national citizens.

“The poll’s finding that growing majorities of people in emerging economies identify as global citizens will challenge many people’s (and organizations’) ideas of what the future might look like,” said GlobeScan chairman Doug Miller.

In more industrialized nations, the numbers skew a bit lower. The BBC‘s Naomi Grimley writes:

In Germany, for example, only 30% of respondents see themselves as global citizens.

According to Lionel Bellier from GlobeScan, this is the lowest proportion seen in Germany since the poll began 15 years ago.

“It has to be seen in the context of a very charged environment, politically and emotionally, following Angela Merkel’s policy to open the doors to a million refugees last year.”

The poll suggests a degree of soul-searching in Germany about how open its doors should be in the future.

Not all wealthy nations were opposed to newcomers. In Spain, 84 percent of respondents said they supported taking in Syrian refugees, while 77 percent of Canadians said the same. A small majority of Americans—55 percent—were also in favor of accepting those fleeing the ongoing civil war.

As Grimley points out, the concept of “global citizenship” can be hard to define, which makes it difficult to determine answers about identity.

“For some, it might be about the projection of economic clout across the world,” she writes. “To others, it might mean an altruistic impulse to tackle the world’s problems in a spirit of togetherness—whether that is climate change or inequality in the developing world.”

GlobeScan interviewed 20,000 people in 18 countries between December 2015 and April 2016.

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Sharing is more than a trend: it can be a business model, a city model or a lifestyle. To distinguish these three dimensions and their manifestations, it’s important to understand the culture born of the crisis and its limits.

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

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

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

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

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

David de Ugarte in the first person

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Links

• Las Indias in English (an interesting life)
• Grupo Coop de las Indias
• On Twitter
• On LinkedIn

David de Ugarte in Guerrilla Translation

• The Future Now
• Phyles and the New Communalism

The post Person of the Day: David de Ugarte appeared first on P2P Foundation.

In short, we need a alliance of the commons to project civil and political power and influence at every level of society; we need phyles to strengthen our economic autonomy from the profit-maximizing dominant system; and we need Chambre of the Commons to achieve territorial policy; legal and infrastructural conditions for the alternative, human and nature-friendly political economy to thrive. Neither alone is sufficient, but together they could be a powerful triad for the necessary phase transition.

Michel Bauwens:

Image by Seier Seier

The recent success of a global mobilization (500+ participants and collectives in 23 countries and over 50 cities) to collaborative map P2P-driven, commons-oriented, collaboration/sharing-based initiatives in hispanic countries, has shown a grassroots hunger for more mutual coordination to enhance the capacity to initiate social change. I would like to add the hypothesis that what is in the making is not just a new social imaginery, but also a potential new political subject. To build and obtain more civic infrastructures to enable and empower autonomous social production, I believe we must move to mutualize our forces and create a new set of political, social and economic institutions which can have ‘transitional’ effects, i.e. prepare the ground for a phase-transition to a political economy and civilization in which socially and environmentally friendly free association between autonomous producers and citizens become the norm.

I believe the time is there to start constructing the following three institutional coalitions:

* The civic/political institution: The Alliance of the Commons

An alliance of the commons is an alliance, meeting place and network of p2p-commons oriented networks, associations, places; who do not have economic rationales. These alliances can be topical, local, transnational, etc … An example is the initiative Paris Communs Urbains which is attempting to create a common platform for urban commons intiatives in the Paris region; another Parisian/French example is the freecultural network Libre Savoirs, which is developing a set of policy proposals around digital rights. (both examples were communicated to me by Lionel Maurel).

An alliance of the commons is a meeting place and platform to formulate policy proposals that enhance civic infrastructures for the commons.

* The economic institution: the P2P/Commons Globa-local « Phyle »

A phyle (as originally proposed by lasindias.net) is a coalition of commons-oriented, community-supportive ethical enterprises which trade and exchange in the market to create livelyhoods for commoners and peer producers engaged in social production. The use of a peer production licence keeps the created exchange value within the sphere of the commons and strengthens the existence of a more autonomous counter-economy which refuses the destructive logic of profit-maximisation and instead works to increase benefits for their own, but also the emerging global commons. Phyles created integrated economies around the commons, that render them more autonomous and insure the social reproduction of its members. Hyperproductive global phyles that generate well-being for their members will gradually create a counterpower to the hitherto dominant MNO’s.

* The political-economy institution: The Chamber of the Commons

In analogy with the well-known chambers of commerce which work on the infrastructure for for-profit enterprise, the Commons chamber exclusively coordinates for the needs of the emergent coalitions of commons-friendly ethical enterprises (the phyles), but with a territorial focus. Their aim is to uncover the convergent needs of the new commons enterprises and to interface with territorial powers to express and obtain their infrastructural, policy and legal needs.

In short, we need a alliance of the commons to project civil and political power and influence at every level of society; we need phyles to strengthen our economic autonomy from the profit-maximizing dominant system; and we need Chambre of the Commons to achieve territorial policy; legal and infrastructural conditions for the alternative, human and nature-friendly political economy to thrive. Neither alone is sufficient, but together they could be a powerful triad for the necessary phase transition.

The post Proposed Next Steps for the emerging P2P and Commons networks appeared first on P2P Foundation.