At the end of October, I wrote an article entitled “Evgeny Morozov and personal data as public domain” .
I got a lot of feedback, including from people who had never heard about these kinds of theories, trying to break with the individualistic or “personalist”  approach based on the current law about the protection of personal data, to think/rethink about its collective dimension.

Actually, there are many theories which, I think, can be divided into four groups, as I tried to show with the mindmap below (click image for full mindmap).

Click image to view full mindmap

The four groups of theories are as follows (some make a direct link between personal data and commons, while others establish an indirect link):

• Free software theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but digital commons should be developed (particularly free software) in order to regain control of them. Furthermore, we must go back to a decentralised framework of the web and encourage a service-based economy if we want the Internet to be preserved as a common good, to prevent abuses of personal data and to limit the ascendance of state supervision.
• Collectivist theories (indirect link): personal data are not directly connected with common goods, but we have to allow people to pool and share them safely or to implement collective actions in order to defend individual rights (class action lawsuits, specific unionism, etc.).
• Commoners theories (direct link): the legitimate status of personal data has to be changed to secure its collective dimension and recognize it as a common good (for example, grant a common good status to “social graph” or “network of related data”). This will make it possible to rethink the governance of personal data as a “bundle of rights”.
• Public sphere theories (direct link): the legal status of personal data has to be changed to recognize its nature as a public good. This will enable states to weigh on digital platforms, particularly by submitting them to new forms of taxation, or by creating public organizations to enhance collective control of data.

I tried to make sub-divisions for each of those four theories and to give concrete examples. If you’d like more information, you’ll find links at the end of every “branch”.

I’m not saying this typology is perfect, but it has allowed me to better apprehend the small differences between the various positions. It can be noted that some of the authors appear in different theories, which proves that they are compatible or complementary.

Personally, I tend to be part of the commoners’ family, as I have already said in this blog.

Feel free to comment if you think of more examples for this map or if you think this typology could be improved in any way.

Photo by Sarah @ pingsandneedles

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Most advocates of peer production, such as Yochai Benkler, see it as applying mostly to the immaterial economy. In my own manuscript, I examine the possibilities of expansion in some detail.

The key argument is the following. Peer to peer is a relational dynamic that arises in distributed networks, and these distributed networks are increasingly becoming a dominant organizational format in all areas of social life.

First, we have a distribution of intellect, a mass intellectuality, where many people face a dearth of meaning in their official employment.

Second is the distribution of the means of production, or “fixed capital”. A computer is very affordable to knowledge workers, and is increasingly connected to an ecology of desktop manufacturing liking the immaterial to the physical world. As this ecology develops, P2P will expand into physical production, and user-capitalization, such as the strategy used by filesharing companies or Skype, will become more common. Instead of one or several capital-intensive providers, millions of users provide marginal bits but which together make out a huge mass of productive capital to work with.

Third, the distribution of financial capital. This is the most difficult to tackle, as it is a field of immense concentration and inequality. It is therefore more a political than an economic issue. Directions to look for are a reform of the monetary system away from the current scarcity paradigm (check out Bernard Lietaer), the bottom-up proliferation of alternative currencies and open money schemes (openmoney.org). Finally also the basic income, which will restore the balance between what the social and cultural world (cooperating minds) is providing as free externalities to the corporate world. Corporations are increasingly profiting from the free labour of peer producers, and not enough is given back in return to make the process truly self-reproductive in the long term. Interesting bottom-up initiatives involving the distribution of capital are the Zopa bank and the Kiva.org peer lending scheme in Uganda.

Fourth is the distribution of property through universal common access regimes. This invention of peer property modes is well under way: the GPL and Creative Commons protect intellectual productions from private appropriation, and people like Nicholas Bentley are proposing schemes that would combine common property with income generation.

So, in my mind, though peer to peer will be a main mode in immaterial production, it is by no means confined to the immaterial sphere, and can operate wherever the design phase can be separated from the material phase (in case large capital is required), or wherever in the latter can be distributed.

Of course, this does not mean that P2P (peer production, peer governance, peer property) will be the only game in town, but that it will increasingly inform and re-form the other modes, such as reciprocity-based schemes, the market, etc …

Michel Bauwens, on the road to the Kuala Lumpur Seacem.org conference

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