“The role of humans as the most important factor of production is bound to diminish in the same way that the role of horses … was first diminished and then eliminated.” Nobel Prize–winning economist Wassily Leontief, 1983

Very broadly, a paradigm is about the way you perceive, interpret and live your life. In one where there are so many of us but money is scarce and you need money to survive, doesn’t money (and status) motivate and reward people to do things?

Since this signals you to be a money-chasing machine — to constantly (and blindly) battle anyone/anything that gets in your way — have the world wars really ended? Or have they evolved into Business-as-usual where common sense goes out the window as your livelihood depends on not understanding anything beyond your self-preservation?

Based on artificial Scarcity, has the incumbent paradigm experientially “groomed” you to be ‘a clock thinker’ in your respective survival silo/bubble (and to be systemically blind)?

So, although a transition is underway, do you see how we are being self-organized to shove each other from the world’s dumbest idea into the world’s most dangerous idea?

This is similar to the late 1960’s, when private sector firms in the US were starting to feel the initial pressures of global competition. Like many today, people had desperately wanted quick fixes.

That’s when Milton Friedman published a very confusing New York Times article in 1970, titled ‘The social responsibility of business is to increase its profits.’ After he retired from GE, Jack Welch even admitted the concept of shareholder value focusing on consistent quarterly results was “the dumbest idea of the world.”

However, that idea has infiltrated and shaped all our lives as we are like fish in the water.

In between physical and digital Scarcity

Until 2004, the Internet was decentralized, and a startup could go public with a business plan written on a single sheet of paper (single sided). But that year, Google IPOed and Facebook was launched.

Surveillance capitalism has since flipped us from customers being served to products being sold. Based on more of the same thinking and doing, doesn’t surveillance capitalism really mean ‘post capitalism’ and in a ‘post-monetary’ world, isn’t the future of money the data we generate?

Google and Apple have embraced open source. In 2014, TechRepublic recognized Facebook as the world’s biggest open source actor and Tesla also made available all its patents for other manufacturers to copy. Microsoft recently open sourced 60,000 patents while Amazon has opened its ‘Machine Learning University’ to all developers.

On 21 June 2018, Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, spoke about how “Data is the new oil” and called for “a new world order.” Was he signaling technocrats to self-organize, to build and to champion the new ‘smart’ infrastructure and to eventually replace money with our data (and all our assets)?

Self-organizing to perpetuate the Age of Nonsense

As you join the race for recognition, convenience, speed and bargains, here’s Tom Goodwin on how we self-organized to create the initial digital Business-as-usual model:

“Uber, the world’s largest taxi company, owns no vehicles. Facebook, the world’s most popular media owner, creates no content. Alibaba, the most valuable retailer, has no inventory. And Airbnb, the world’s largest accommodation provider, owns no real estate.”

In 2018, he opined how three years had flipped the above scenario:

“The world’s largest taxi firm, Uber, is buying cars. The world’s most popular media company, Facebook, now commissions content. The world’s most valuable retailer is now Amazon, and has more than 350 stores. And the world’s largest hospitality provider, Airbnb, increasingly owns real estate.”

Because instead of Big Business paying most of us a decent salary to buy the goods and services we produce, this digital trend revolves around us creating the value and buying their services and products while all the key benefits (wealth) end up in the pockets of the Big Business and their owners.

Automation, robotics and artificial intelligence (AI) have (gradually, initially) been replacing humans.

Meanwhile, the gig/freelance economy has emerged as the 21st century’s global factory on demand — marketed as your having freedom, autonomy, and self-determination but where ‘employees’ have no benefits.

According to a 2016Spera report:

• In the next five years, half of the United Kingdom’s working population may be self-employed.
• Independent workers comprise the fastest growing group in the European Union labor market: A 45% rise from 2012 to 2013.
• India’s 15 million independent workforce is the world’s second largest, filling about 40% of the world’s freelance jobs, and their ranks continue to grow.

The so-called sharing economy has many renting out their spare capacities — whether that’s themselves, their homes, cars or whatever else they have. We even volunteer our time, ideas and intellect for free on social media platforms, oblivious to how algorithms are learning about us from what we share to create value for the digital oligarchs.

Of the two trend-setting countries? Zero-hours contracts prevail in many parts of the UK economy as it grapples with Brexit while the US is regressing into a third world country. Check this out.

With better, faster, cheaper as their mantra, what profit-maximizing businesses will want to keep shelling out money to humans they no longer need to employ?

As the cost of living shots up and money scarcity addicts you to surviving only for yourself (and your loved ones), we are now being lured to DIY (with our time, efforts and money) a very different reality from what we know today. This latest transition may even standardize what it means to be a sustainable human.

Because as we continue to think and live ‘I win, you lose,’ wouldn’t our individual data all be aggregated and turned into Big Data — the future of money — for absolute control?

Why? Because the Business-as-usual function of extracting our value based on ‘I win, you lose’ to maximize profits has not changed one iota. Based on artificial Scarcity, wouldn’t the new digital tools simply accelerate the extraction of the rest of our value from cradle to grave?

Do these social movements have the answer?

To explore, get your copy of Social movements powering the future of money, the first of two or three books to try to explain why we need a paradigm shift from artificial Scarcity to True Abundance.

Our future depends on you!!

About twenty or so years ago, Prince perhaps said it best: “Don’t be fooled by the Internet.”

The post New century, new tools but what future are you creating? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Check out this video to ponder whether this is the paradigm we are in.

This extract from Social movements powering the future of money attempts to explain how the Age of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense (paradigm) has us blindly perpetuating the root cause of all our (biggest) challenges …

INTRODUCTION

“ … our society is filled with hatred and violence. Everything is like a bomb ready to explode, and we are all a part of that bomb; we are all co-responsible. We are all the policemen and the victim.”Thich Nhat Hanh

What is the biggest challenge the world faces?

Is it humans, money, technologies, capitalism, climate change, wars, terror, diseases, mass starvation, wealth inequality or social unrest? Or is each of that a ‘silo’ tool or outcome of the system we depend on, with symptoms running the gamut of fear, distrust, anger, hatred, envy, biases, etc.?

All these are systemic challenges: They have their root in how the system we depend on impacts our behavior, individually and collectively, to perpetuate a destructive ‘bullying’ way of thinking and extracting, especially by the most power-hungry:

To survive, you must compete and fake it till you make it because wanting to win at all costs is what’s prized.

This core root cause hides in plain sight and you even call it Business-as-usual.

However, with its logic deeply embedded into our culture, you may not see how in a world where we all need money to survive, Business-as-usual very narrowly focuses you on how money is for your self-preservation — at your individual level — preoccupying you with surviving/competing in a silo. As money buys you stuff, pays your bills or you may receive some as a reward for being a super money-chasing machine, are you even cognizant of the system of how money influences your behavior?

Essentially, the systemic role of money and its creation. Can that be how our means of survival has increasingly been vested with corporations (aka ‘artificial persons’) that exist solely to maximize shareholder value/profit? Is that how the corporatocracy has been able to take over our lives?

John Kenneth Galbraith, the late Harvard economics professor, provides this systemic insight:

Twenty-three years after the Bretton Woods Conference (officially known as the United Nations Monetary and Financial Conference), he published The New Industrial State to share how capitalism had shifted from a market society to a hierarchical“industrial system” owned by a cartel of corporations he called the “technostructure.”

More than half a century ago, Galbraith had observed that instead of being markets-driven ground-up, the economy was organizations-driven, top-down. Dominated by large industrial firms controlling around two-thirds of output in key sectors of the economy then, he saw how a global elite was usurping markets, fixing prices and controlling demand for long-term production planning.

Galbraith had further disdained the scientific pretensions and formal apparatus of modern economics, believing all that math and numbers-crunching missed the point. He was also known to have quipped:

“Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s just the opposite.”

In 1973, the year after taking up Mao Zedong government’s invitation to visit China in his capacity as the president of the American Economic Association, Galbraith published A China Passage to share:

“There can be no serious doubt that China is devising a highly effective economic system,” “Greater Shanghai … has a better medical service than New York …”

and considered it not implausible that Chinese industrial and agricultural output was expanding annually at a rate of 10 to 11 percent … “rivaling that of Japan.”

Rather than being Johnny-come-lately, China could have been creating the framework for a new global system based on Business-as-usual for a very long time: The Belt and Road Initiative and the Social Credit system being two of its latest endeavors. The world’s factory also harbors intentions to become the world’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) powerhouse.

Meanwhile, using money to laser focus you on self-preservation, the “technostructure” has gradually institutionalized money into our lives, drumming up artificial Scarcity to reinforce distrust and exploitative ‘I win, you lose’ behaviors — with value creation orbiting around money.

Have you observed or even experienced such Hegelian dialectic theatrics?

A problem is created using fear, panic and hysteria. Two polar opposites (good cop vs bad cop) surface, one opposing the other to create division (divide and conquer) so you (the masses) will clamor for a predetermined solution.

Over time, is that how the global elites have been able to turn money into a public utility for a global payment system — governed exclusively by Big Business — powered by us surviving for ourselves?

In this dangerous world, only they are our saviors because they NEVER see Business-as-usual as the key fundamental root cause — it is always us, the people.

“Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Oscar Wilde

Money serves these key functions

• Transfer of value (buy and sell goods and services and pay debts/taxes),
• Store of value (accumulate to transact goods and services later) and
• The most critical, psychologically as a numeric unit of account (common measure for goods and services to be exchanged) so whoever has the most money and power can very easily control and manipulate you — e.g. rewarding (giving money) or punishing (taking away).

Meantime, whatever has the most meaning (e.g. love, trust, care, friendship, authenticity, innate gifts) cannot be measured. So, although we are all vastly different, money has enabled our value (e.g. time, ideas, skills, energy, passion, resources, rights, etc.) to be captured, standardized and monetized. Even weaponized, as we compete for attention, grades, jobs, promotions, market share, funding, etc.

Most of all, by transforming human value into exchange value, money allows business entities (middlemen) to systemically facilitate transactions and to take a cut. Legally obliged to pursue the bottom line, these rapacious ‘artificial persons’ have no higher god than growth. Once they take over our means of survival, we are held hostage — money lets them increase prices at their whims and fancy, including outsourcing their risks to jack up their bottom lines, and to do whatever else they want with us.

If so, doesn’t the systemic role of money make us their sources of profit and transactions, our toxic way of life? Hasn’t money turned us into (human) resources to power the system we depend on?

Byextracting our value and funneling that to the “technostructure,” our collective value and worth is rendered invisible but individuals with the winner-takes-all mentality are encouraged and rewarded.

The operating system of artificial Scarcity does not value humans

“If you’re in a system where you must make profit in order to survive, you’re compelled to ignore negative externalities, effects on others.” Noam Chomsky

Money is mandatory for urban survival. As escalating cost of living fixates you on self-preservation, too many will perceive that value only comes with a big price tag. Expectations honed by societal norms also reinforce that belief. Then as you use money to self-organize and to self-allocate yourself and your priorities, money scarcity will hammer this simple numbers logic into your psyche.

Once that becomes an unconscious lifelong habit of ‘I win, you lose’ (divide and conquer), you will be territorial over whatever it is you perceive you own. Psychologically ingrained, (the lack of) money focuses you on seeing things as you are rather than as they are. In the here and now. Systemically conditioned to take things personally, your sense of self-worth (ego) then becomes an unwitting custodian of Business-as-usual as your empathy, the long term and the system fade out of sight.

So, much like the frog in a pot of slowly boiling water, you may not even realize the human layer is disappearing — money lets you complete transactions quickly without needing to understand anyone. Already, no human is required to transact on online platforms. With billions increasingly engrossed with self-preservation, unintended and negative consequences can and will arise. As trust collapses, fear will then push you to blindly accept utter nonsense as norm.

To have you continue doing whatever it is you believe you must do to survive, unaware this is how the system influences you to systemically create booms-and-busts.

For example: As we scramble to survive for ourselves, we invariably create a mountain of debt for all. Globally, a staggering 97 percent of all the money is debt. As we chase after shelter, food, healthcare, education, energy, security, etc., so many of us powering the system willy-nilly also drive up the cost of living to mega insane heights, unaware:

“The financial system does not, in fact, consist of ‘national monetary flows.’ Nor is it made up of a mass of tiny, anonymous, microscopic firms — the ideal of ‘perfect competition’ and the economic analogue to the individual citizen. The overwhelming majority of private credit creation is done by a tightly-knit corporate oligarchy. … At a global level twenty to thirty banks matter.”Adam Tooze, Crashed: How a Decade of Financial Crises Changed the World

Our post-war world economy was originally structured to prevent speculators from trying to attack fixed currencies. To keep money within the countries they were acquired, only long-term investments could move overseas. Oliver Bullough shares in the Guardian that this was to “keep governments from using trade as a weapon with which to bully neighbours, and create a stable system that would help secure peace and prosperity.”

However, Moneyland is also “a place where, if you are rich enough, whoever you are, wherever your money comes from, the laws do not apply to you.” Bullough calls that “the dirty secret at the heart of the City’s rebirth, the beginning of the process that eventually led to today’s stratospheric inequality.”

But back in September 1970, as US businesses grappled with the initial impact of globalization, Milton Friedman’s article clumsily rallied their key drivers to make profit their social responsibility.

Then on 15 August 1971, US President Richard Nixon ripped apart the Bretton Woods agreement, officially ending liberal economic order. As currencies became legal tender (fiat), Business-as-usual ushered in a new phase of globalization tethered to neoliberal policies. The movement of capital unleashed, the rich and powerful (including institutional investors) speculated — using money to make money — the world, their global casino.

‘Hot money’ (e.g. ‘eurodollar’ and ‘eurobond’) legally moving across borders has torpedoed us back to square one, exposing us to escalating episodes of debilitating instability:

“With the creation of the Euromarket, bankers in both countries [United States and Britain] ambled on a solution to the problem of how to reconstruct the London-New York financial axis that had been prominent in the 1920s.”Eric Helleiner, Treasure islands

Was our biggest shove into artificial Scarcity(and inequality) when our world economy legally became a global casino — covertly helmed by the failed Bretton Woods institutions?

* * * * * * * * *

The Social movements powering the future of moneyebook is now available on Amazon. Depending on demand, a paperback can be in the works.

If you are ready for a paradigm shift out of ‘I win, you lose’ Nonsense, please please watch out for and sign our petition when it’s out. Once it reaches 10,000 signatories, I hope to have observed/figured out the initial guidelines to try to catalyse the shift to True Abundance where strangers anywhere can potentially empower and build trust with one another for everyone’s benefit.

To try to buck the Business-as-usual trend where Big Business retains all the key benefits, net proceeds from that very emergent initiative will be shared with the best crowd actualizers, very broadly as follows:

· 1/3 for core team

· 1/3 for best crowd actualizers and

· 1/3 for next True Abundance project.

But we have a huge chasm to cross first — to unlearn ‘I win, you lose’ so we can relearn ‘You win, we win’ by doing.

The post Self-organized to perpetuate Nonsense? appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Jordan Greenhall: There have been a lot of conversations about Bitcoin over the years. Is it a currency or an equity or a commodity? Is it a store of value? Is it a “settlement mechanism”? Is it not money at all, but merely an example of a decentralized application on the Blockchain? The short answer is: none of the above.

Bitcoin is a self-organizing collective intelligence. As such, what it becomes is entirely a function of what it can do — that is, it is a function of the capacity of its collective intelligence to overcome the challenges that it encounters in its environment.

In some sense, we’ve seen this sort of thing many times. Every “movement” or “scenius” (to use Brian Eno’s ingenious term for “collective genius”) is a form of self-organizing collective intelligence. The Punk Rock movement, skateboarding, Ruby on Rails. What makes Bitcoin important is that it represents a new mutation in self-organizing collective intelligence.

In order to explain what I mean by this, I’m first going to have to spend a few minutes laying out what I mean by self-organizing collective intelligence.

The Development of Self Organizing Collective Intelligences (SOCI)

The basic dynamics of a SOCI is as follows. It begins as some sort of attractor — some aesthetic sensibility or yearning — that is able to grab the attention and energy of some group of people. Generally one that is very vague and abstract. Some idea or notion that only makes sense to a relatively small group.

But, and this is the key move, when those people apply their attention and energy to the SOCI, this makes it more real, easier for more people to grasp and to find interesting and valuable. Therefore, more attractive to more people and their attention and energy.

Thus begins the generative loop: as the SOCI becomes more real and attracts more people it begins to encounter challenges. Maybe Impressionism is being rejected by the status quo and it needs to find some way to display itself. Maybe hand-coded HTML is too burdensome and clumsy and this SOCI needs to get easier to use.

If the SOCI has enough capacity within its collective intelligence to resolve the challenge, it “levels up” and expands its ability to attract more attention and energy. If not, then it becomes somewhat bounded (at least for the present) and begins to find the limit of “what it is”.

Different SOCI will resolve challenges through different mechanisms. Some will form relatively centralized nodes (ICANN, Rolling Stone Magazine) that will accelerate problem solving in certain areas — but at the cost of losing some of the generativity and flexibility of decentralization. Others will mutate and proliferate exploring their niche like a slime mold (Protestantism and electronic music might be a good examples here).

As the SOCI develops, the choices that it makes — the solutions that it crafts — become part of its core architecture. “Frozen accidents” in its development, these begin to shape and define its future paths, slowly accreting structure and topography as the SOCI moves from its vague, open and highly creative infancy through adolescence and finally into its mature, effective, but much less creative adulthood.

In the end, the development of a SOCI is defined by the challenges it faces, its capacity to surmount those challenges, and the consequences of its solutions on its own further development.

Bitcoin as a Self Organizing Collective Intelligences (SOCI)

Bitcoin is a SOCI. And its future will be determined precisely by the dynamic tension between the problems it faces and its capacity to solve those problems.

Over the years, Bitcoin has worked its way through a complicated childhood. It was able to attract the attention and energy of a core of developers who built software that made it possible for less technical folks to participate and apply their energy. It has been able to create online exchanges and marketplaces and then survive the collapse and redesign and collapse and redesign of these pieces of its architecture.

As it did this, it expanded its “reality” and attracted the attention and energy of more “professional” entrepreneurs and venture capitalists — whose work significantly expanded Bitcoin’s capacity (and birthed an offshoot in the form of the “blockchain” SOCI).

Over the past year and a half it has struggled mightily with its most recent challenge: governance. For most of its developmental history, Bitcoin has been defined by two different governance mechanisms. The vast majority of the work has been highly decentralized — activities like wallet construction and exchange building that is entirely done “at the edge” and with little to no governance outside of simple architectural boundaries. The remainder of the work has been handled through an ad hoc oligarchy of the “Core Developers” who have been broadly able to maintain a highly technocratic coherence.

This loose governance mechanism broke down as the collective intelligence couldn’t achieve coherence on purely technical grounds: two paths emerged that each presented valid, compelling and incompatible attraction to different sensemaking elements of the collective intelligence. The result was the exploration of what might be a fundamental feature of this kind of SOCI’s governance — a “hard fork” where doctrinal and values differences are physically formalized into two separate code bases.

So now we wait. Will the “hard fork” be the next level up for the Bitcoin SOCI and lead to an expansion of its ability to attract more intelligence? Or is this the hill that Bitcoin can’t climb and the beginning of its senescence?

Bitcoin as a new form of self-organizing collective intelligence

Lets step back and consider what the Bitcoin SOCI has already done.

Beginning with essentially no backing and no resources Bitcoin has been able to organically attract attention and energy to grow into something that includes dozens of exchanges in something like 40 different countries and a computational infrastructure that processes an astounding 14 Million PetaFLOPS.

And it has done this while innovating directly against one of the most fundamental components of our current social fabric: money. The beaches are littered with the bodies of well funded efforts to step into this space and, indeed, even a major victory like PayPal required the improbably combined genius of Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Luke Nosek, Reid Hoffman and the rest of the much gloried PayPal Mafia simply to carve out a “nice” niche in online payments.

And the Bitcoin SOCI has done this in merely seven short years.

This is no ordinary SOCI. The deep importance of Bitcoin is that it represents the first example of an entirely new SOCI organism in our landscape. One that clearly represents a new kind of power and capability. In fact, one that might relate to our legacy forms of collective intelligence in the same way that Homo Sapiens related to Homo Neanderthalensis.

What is the essence of this new form of collective intelligence that represents so much potential? My guess is that this can really only be answered with the benefit of hindsight. But I’ll venture a guess:

1) It is intrinsically global. More to the point, it is geographically unconstrained, and, therefore able to take advantage of any attention and energy anywhere in the world.

2) It is intrinsically virtual. In other words, it is able to connect with resources anywhere with minimal lag and at minimal cost.

These two features combine to mean that in principle this new form of SOCI can attract and utilize the total collective intelligence of the human species almost instantly. While in practice this level of concentrated collective intelligence isn’t likely to happen the potential of tapping into and connecting precisely the girl in Phuket and the team in Slovenia when where and how they are needed is flat out revolutionary.

And, most importantly,

3) It solves motivation, reward and collective action problems through an architecture that is responsive to nuanced and changing value landscapes without being bottlenecked by concentrated (and, therefore, intelligence reducing) decision-makers.

This is a dense and important point that needs to be unpacked.

Consider digital SOCI like, say, WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram. While these collective intelligences are both global and virtual, their ability to connect with, motivate and apply the attention and energy of their communities is either very narrow (you can contribute to the Instagram SOCI by uploading photos, liking and commenting them, but little more) or bottlenecked by a relatively small team of people who have exclusive power to adapt the architecture (like when the Facebook team added the ability to upload videos).

Bitcoin-like SOCI use the technical capabilities of the blockchain, crypto-tokens and smart-contracts to provide a motivational architecture that can be highly adaptive to the real needs of the SOCI without bottlenecking through some concentrated control structure. As these techniques mature, they provide this new class of SOCI with an “executive function” that has little to no agency risk and can scale without creating a bottleneck on the SOCI.

To get a better sense of what I mean here, consider Bitcoin as an extremely early prototype of how this kind of motivational architecture can work. By linking “run hashing software” with “be the source of coin creation”, Bitcoin created an invitation to value contribution at an architectural level. Anyone who could understand and act on the invitation could participate without any human agents getting in the way to bottleneck the process.

And by carefully wiring up difficulty and scarcity, Bitcoins became at least potentially appreciating assets — motivating anyone who could appreciate and act on this invitation to figure out how they could best give their value to the Bitcoin SOCI in exchange for increasingly valuable coins.

While rough and coarse-grained, this approach worked. It was flat out brilliant in incentivizing the construction and rollout of mining infrastructure, and as mentioned has delivered on a tremendous amount of creative activity.

Of course, the Bitcoin approach has known issues. High volatility, a dependence on risk seeking speculation, too much concentration in the hands of early adopters, coarse-grained focus on mining, etc. Arguably, these design elements limit the effectiveness of the SOCI to attract and deploy collective intelligence and, therefore, its overall potential.

With regard to the Bitcoin SOCI in particular, the future is uncertain. Will it overcome its governance challenges and emerge on the other side with still more collective intelligence? I honestly have no idea, I suspect it will, but these moments are always deeply uncertain.

If it does, however, it will come out the other end much stronger than it has been so far. Governance is a major challenge. If Bitcoin survives this current crisis, my bet is that the collective intelligence will focus its efforts on governance much like it has on past crises like the Mt. Gox collapse — and the result will be a much, much more capable SOCI.

The Future of Self Organizing Collective Intelligences

Regardless of the specific result of the Bitcoin experiment, we are clearly in the middle of a new era. As I discussed in The Future of Organization, a lot of smart people are currently hard at work understanding, generalizing and optimizing the deep code of these new forms of collective intelligence.

The limitations of Bitcoin’s approach to motivation and collective action are well understood and new technical layers like Ethereum’s smart contracts and Backfeed’s distributed governance system magnify the potential intelligence of this kind of SOCI at least as much as the neocortex magnified the intelligence of the mammalian brain.

I really wish the reality and importance of this new frontier were more broadly understood. My sense is that over just the next five years this new form of SOCI will go through its gestation, birthing and childhood development stages. The result will be a form of collective intelligence that is so much more capable than anything in the current environment that it will sweep away even the most powerful contemporary collective intelligences (in particular both corporations and nation states) in establishing itself as the new dominant form of collective intelligence on the Earth.

And whoever gets there first will “win” in a fashion that is rarely seen in history.

The post Lets get this straight, Bitcoin is an experiment in self-organizing collective intelligence appeared first on P2P Foundation.

The following are a series of assertions around our present geo-political circumstances and hypotheses about our most effective actions.

• There is a global institutional order, largely initiated as the aftermath of WWII and growing organically through to the fall of the Eastern Bloc, at which point it substantially accelerated. This order includes both active and passive interconnections that span economic, technological, social, cultural, political and military dimensions. By “institutional order” is meant the organizational and conceptual mechanisms by which human activities are focused and directed. This includes governmental organizations (the US Military, the EU ministry of agriculture, medicare), meta governmental organizations (the UN, the WTO, the IMF), NGOs, corporations, etc.
• This global institutional order was largely formulated based on the technical and conceptual state of the art existing after WWII. Although it has consistently been complexified and updated (“patched”) in the intervening 60 years, it is still fundamentally organized around hows, whats and whys that originate in that era.
• The foundation on which this order was built and by which it made sense has been undergoing profound transformation — particularly in the past two decades. Largely, this is the result of the unprecedented *success* of the present order: advances in information technology, increases in population, depletion of global natural resources, etc.
• Whenever an institutional order is faced with this kind of transformation of its fundament, it can choose two paths:

1. Deconstruct and reorganize functions around emerging capabilities
2. Attempt to conserve the existing order

The former choice involves significant pain. Disrupting existing means (and even ends) is contra human psychological tendencies. Moreover, it is not guaranteed to be successful — many things can happen when long-bound energies are released in an institutional reconstruction. As a consequence, it requires tremendous foresight and political will.

The latter choice ultimately involves the death of the society. An attempt to conserve an order that has become obsolete requires an intensification of “delusional” mechanisms that distance society from reality and eventually deplete its ability to operate. Thus society moves from productive to conservative to moribund. Depending on the political will and political power of the institutions driving the transition from productive to conservative, this death can be very quick and destructive (see French Revolution) or can potentially be delayed for a very long time (“zombieification”). Indeed, the period just following the transition from productive to conservative (open to closed) can be experienced as highly positive (a “golden age”). However, once a society moves to full closure — like any entropic environment — its fate is (largely, although never absolutely) sealed.

• The decision to deconstruct and reorganize can rarely (never?) be made by existing institutions (the past), it must, instead, be made by “institutions from the future” — which can provide solutions and vision that is simply outside of the means of existing institutions.
• It is possible to interpolate the shape of future institutional orders based on the present circumstances.
• Uniquely in history, our future institutional order must be self-assembling, self-organizing and meta-stable. There can be no central organizing structure that is adequate to their construction — instead they must be architected to “unfold” dynamically yet effectively.
• Nonetheless, we can assert several rules that are quite likely to be part of their basic operations:

– Data aware: in principle all possible transactions are stored and searchable

– Transparent: in principle all transactions can be viewed by all participants

– Distributed: in principle no levels of hierarchy

– Anti-fragile: designed to maximize and benefit from “black swan” events rather than minimize and suffer from them

– Auto-liberating: intrinsically difficult to capture and all efforts to capture are rendered ruinous

– Transient. Beyond the basic resilient holon and stored data, every function or organization is built with the time or conditions that warrant its death built into the design/plan.

The new system must run concurrently with the old in order to avoid inducing general collapse. To achieve this end:

1. It displaces due to choice and not force. Bit by bit and not all at once.
2. It can leverage mature services of the old system to gain capabilities rapidly and supplement deficits.
3. It must be able to defend itself against predation by the old system.
4. It replaces old system functions when able.
5. Connection to the new system is a function of desire/membership and a willingness to live by a set of rules, both at the individual level and at the level of the resilient community. Membership is not based on geography or accident of birth, it is earned through behavior.

Photo by giloudim

The post A Prolegomena to any Future Politics appeared first on P2P Foundation.

Extracted from: http://seikatsuclub.coop/about/introduction_e.html

History

“Seikatsu Club”, is a voluntary association started in Tokyo in 1965 at the initiative of women who wanted to reform their lives and local communities as well as society.  In 1968 Seikatsu Club was incorporated as Seikatsu Club  Consumers’ Co-operatives which guaranteed democratic operation and management in order to promote the movement, continue business, and realize its goal. Since then, Seikatsu Club  has expanded its activities under a motto of “autonomous control of our lives” including production-distribution-consumption-disposal, the environment, social services, and politics. Presently 29 Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Co-ops (affiliates to Seikatsu Club Union) in over 19 prefectures conduct independent and unique activities.

Extracted from: International Newsletter on Sustainable Local Development. Newsletter #40 – July 1st, 2007

Today

As of June 2007, the Seikatsu Club is a union of 30 local co-operatives with a total membership of over 290,000 members, 99.9% being women. This is explained by the fact that Japanese society is in some regards very traditional. Therefore, social pressure strongly incites married women with children to quit the labour market, such as was the case in North America and in Western Europe a generation or two ago. This explains why the domestic consumption sphere is mostly a woman’s realm.

New social initiatives

Over the years, the members have launched workers’ collectives. There are now over 700 collectives, with nearly 20,000 members. Since there is no law in Japan for workers’ co-operatives, the members had to use the non-profit organisation (NPO) status. However, they function as if they were a coop (working ownership). The range of activities is very broad: preparing meals for elderly people, homecare, kindergartens, handicrafts, recycling, etc.

Having understood that merely making demands to local authorities was not enough, some members decided to get directly involved in politics by presenting candidates for local assemblies in the Tokyo Metropolitan region. The name they chose «Seikatsusha Network», means People who live in the sense of «inhabitants». Today, there are over 140 elected members in local assemblies, all women, who work to push these concerns.
At the local level: a Community Cooperative Council

The Seikatsu Club considers that to make a global change to society, a «cooperative» society, a society that works together has to be put in place. The plan is to create local Community Cooperative Councils, especially in Tokyo, composed of all organisations in a given territory: cooperatives, local producers, citizens’ movements, unions, workers collectives, associations, educational institutions, etc. The objective is that the community takes charge of itself. The principles are quite similar to sustainable local development or community economic development as known in Canada.
At the global level: a transformative vision of the public arena

Having realized that economic and social issues are linked, that all has become «glocal»; that the global and the local are so interlinked that we must act at all levels, from the local to the global. To have an impact on issues such as GMOs, the WTO rules, poverty and war, we are forced to imagine a «global community» similar to how we conceive local or national communities. Their vision is affirmed in the following manner (excerpt from a PowerPoint presentation):

We believe it is now the time for co-operatives to play a big role, both in their various communities and as the world’s largest NPO, in building the new glocal public sphere.

Extracted from: http://seikatsuclub.coop/about/economy_e.html

A Consumer Who Produces

The Seikatsu Club movement, “a consumer who produces”, promotes the following objectives in co-operation with consumers and producers who act as equal partners through collective purchase movement and business:

• To reveal absurdity and mechanisms of society from the viewpoint of ordinary citizens
• To share with producers the risk of time, space, and cost of improving agricultural methods and production process necessary for production
• To not deprive others of food (including overseas)
• To realize a truly necessary “alternative production-distribution-consumption-disposal” social system.

Independent Control and Auditing System

• Member themselves directly inspect the process from purchasing of materials to producing.
• In our Independent Control and Auditing System, based upon the Seikatsu Club principles of safety, health and the environment, members of the Independent Control Committee, consisting of both members and producers, form sub-committees for agriculture, fishery, livestock raising, processed foods, daily commodities, packaging materials, etc. and set independent standards.  The producers are supposed to disclose information as to whether their products meet the Committee’s production standards. “Mass independent control” gives the committee members an opportunity to actually check whether independent standards are truly realized through study session and on-spot inspection.  This is a unique auditing system and only Seikatsu Club can achieve such a high level of information disclosure. About 500 independent audits by about 4,000 members were conducted up to 2006. Once a producer achieves the independent standards objectives, a higher level of standards is set.

Extracted from: http://seikatsuclub.coop/about/rengo_about_e.html

There are about 500 consumers’ cooperatives in Japan. From Hokkaido in the north to Hyogo in the south, the Seikatsu Club Consumers’ Co-operative Union, (hereafter SCCCU) which consists of an association of 32 consumer co-operatives active in 21 administrative divisions (prefectures) of Japan, has altogether about 340,000 members, most of whom are women. In addition, there are six associated companies, including a milk factory.

The SCCU carries out the development, purchasing, distribution, and inspection of consumer materials (food, general daily goods, clothes, publications), and publishes PR and ordering information for pre-order collective purchase. In addition, the entire union works on problems such as GMOs and the environmental hormones issue by setting up committees and establishing projects which are run by SC members and SCCU staff.

The SCCCU member unit is based on the independent branches, all of which have independent management and activities. Seikatsu Club funding is from the members, who make monthly contributions of 1000 yen per person. These investments are the foundation of our healthy financial management.

Extracted from: http://seikatsuclub.coop/about/introduction_e.html

Problems we are facing

We are now almost drowning in the ocean of a consumer society which prevails all over the world. Although we believed it possible to achieve a fruitful life, as a matter of fact, we face problems such as the decline of food self-efficiency ratio, insecure food safety, the destruction of the environment, the widening gap of rich and poor, and poverty. Each problem is too huge to be tackled by an individual so we have to unite with our neighbour and neighbour’s neighbour.

 Seikatsu Club Principles: 10 principles on safety, health and the environment

1.    Pursuit of safety for consumer materials
2.    Raising self-sufficiency in food
3.    Reduction of harmful substances
4.    Sustainable use of natural resources
5.    Reduction of waste and promotion of reuse
6.    Reduction of energy use
7.    Reduction of risk
8.    Information disclosure
9.    Independent control and auditing
10.  Mass participation

Photo by Magdalena Roeseler Photo by polybazze

The post Project Of The Day: the Seikatsu Clubs appeared first on P2P Foundation.

I found both experiences intense. It was great getting to really know the others. Yet no one is perfect and inside a compound people’s flaws are magnified.

But as we transition to a peer to peer economy, there will be no single referee. So aptitude in getting along with others becomes essential.

Beneficio is one experiment in peer to peer living. It has survived for many years and may be worth investigating as an example of self-organization.

Extracted from http://www.ic.org/directory/beneficio/

Community Description:

Extracted from https://decentralize.hackpad.com/Beneficio-IhEduLvEypp

Extracted from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beneficio

Photo by Public Places

Photo by Tyler Allen Lewis

The post Project Of The Day: Beneficio appeared first on P2P Foundation.