The Gordon Cook Interview (2): phase transitions, scarcity, and abundance

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, will be serialized separately.

1. The parallel with the transition of the Roman Empire

Consequences of Changes in Distribution of Knowledge – from Rome to the Present

With knowledge widely distributed and independent from the large corporations and with tools that can enable large number of people to access this knowledge, you have a situation that shifts the old distribution of power in a very fundamental way. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 Think about what happened to Rome many centuries ago. In was a crisis of extensive globalizaton.

The slave-based Roman empire could no longer afford to conquer and administer the territory it needed in order to get new raw materials. What happened as a reaction was a return to localization.

The smart slave owner must have thought: if I free my slaves and transform them into serfs, then I will need no longer a thousand soldiers to discipline them, but I can accomplish this with only 100 soldiers. I will let them work for themselves, take half of what they produce and will better off than I was before. Those who did this were better suited to survive than those who did not.

But you also had an open global design community operating in early feudal Europe – this community was the Catholic Church. The itinerant monks were the guarantors of the old knowledge and as they traveled, they were also means for spreading new knowledge. The monastic orders were the ones turning forests into new agricultural lands. They invented new techniques that, unencumbered by copyright, they happily shared across all Europe.

Think about this. It is what we have now. A crisis of extensive globalization. The whole world has been globalized. We have an issue of adequate raw materials and an issue of what we have done to the biosphere. Our industrial agriculture is impoverishing the soil and wasting water. All of this means that extensive globalization is essentially dead. It can still walk and may do so for another 30 years but ultimately, an infinite growth system can just not last in a finite environment. Technological advances can play a role in playing around some limits, but technology is not a magical wand that can wish away resource depletion and social contradictions. So, what we have is that, in the face of this people are beginning to relocalize while we have a global open design community that is the internet. As the old structure slowly collapses, you have to be ready with something else because going on the streets and saying give us this or give us that when there is no one there to give it to you anymore just doesn’t work very well. What peer to peer would like to do is see that society has choices by which it can rebuild other than ones dependent on centralized force.

Localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter. The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons.

But, and this is crucial, localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter.

The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons. As John Robb says: localize what you can and virtualize everything else! For example if you want to experiment locally with organic agriculture, you can easily benefit from the innovation being done by organic farmers all over the world. If you do this then you have better access to innovation than the R&D department of any multinational. These global small group dynamics can have a global coordination effect that can out complete what the old centralized multinational can do. However, this requires the building and intermesh-working of new collaborative platforms and cooperative structures that are not all there yet, but they are definitely ‘under construction’ by many communities in the world. This is what I document in my mindmap Everything Open and Free at

http://www.mindmeister.com/28717702/everything-open-and-free see pages 6 and 7 above and also available as a “prezi” presentation via http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-everything-p2p-presentation-for-tedx-brussels/2009/11/23 .

COOK Report: And with e-science at the universities that source of corporate knowledge is beginning to tilt toward open source?

Bauwens: Exactly. I’d to compare this process in analogy with the class structure re-alignment at the end of the Roman Empire. Smart capital is starting to align itself with the new dynamics just as the smarter slave owners changed their ways when the Roman system was in crisis. You have a segment of capital that is reactionary. The RIAA for example. They only have one answer and that is to repress and sue grannies and babies. But you also have a more enlightened segment like – eBay, Google and Amazon – that try to align themselves with the new dynamics. The movement is spiral. You have an alignment of peer producers and what I will call netarchical capital that is used to enable cooperation of those building p2p networked commons.

(http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-concept-and-thesis-of-netarchical-capitalism/2010/01/27 ).

In contrast with classical Marxism, I contend that deep social change only happens when there is a coincidental alignment of both the managerial and producing classes, towards the ‘chaotic attractor’ of the new system which is visible in seed form.

Peer production is about engineering abundance and deciding how you manage abundance.

The role of capital is to manage scarcity. It’s a market logic where you are all the time allocating access to rivalrous scarce goods. The problem that you find is that you can’t make money directly out of abundance. When you have abundant goods, the only thing you can do is share them or give them away. Abundance creates wealth and value, just not always monetizable wealth.

As Glyn Moody has argued about open source: it saves a lot of money which can be used for other purposes, but in itself, the new open source economy creates less marketable value than its monopolistic predecessor. “

Part 2: Abundance engineering vs. scarcity engineering

What I See Emerging: Engineering Abundance versus Managing Scarcity

“So how can we describe the new model of production? At the core you have an open design community formed from knowledge, code, and design.

See: http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Business.

From making software we begin to move in the direction of making actual things. We have a loose community of people who contribute at various levels. There is a common knowledge core that is continuously fed by various parties. Around that you have entrepreneurial coalitions which, understanding the value of the commons, try to create marketable scarcities around the commons.

When they are successful they can strengthen the commons by sharing benefits. For example IBM now makes more money with open source than with its patents and is known for sending back a sizable chunk of money to the open source software community both because they hire people internally but also through financial support of various foundations. The commons itself is usually managed by what I call a for-benefits association. It is usually an NGO like the Wikimedia Foundation which manages the infrastructure of cooperation, without having any command and control power over the production process itself. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 The innovation you have here is the assumed scarcity of knowledge and labor. When you have an NGO you direct these carefully because you assume they are scarce. Today these NGOs merely manage infrastructure. They do not tell anyone what to do. This is what I see as a new model that is already functioning for 15 years in software but is now massively and rapidly moving into the physical world. Open hardware and distributed manufacturing projects, like Arduino follow pretty much the same model.

There are many variations of this. Apple with very good industrial design has created an ecosystem which, although carefully controlled, many people want to become a part of.

Remember how difficult it used to be to do software for a telecommunications company. It would take years of negotiation and you would get 10% of the cut and no one would do it. But the Apps Store for the I-Phone is a very different matter. Although Apple still controls the process, their genius has been in opening it up so that everyone can participate. And the next extra step forward is then Android, where anyone can create an app, and Google does not control the apps.

COOK Report: And BT is trying to do the same thing in turning its global IP network into an open services platform.

Bauwens: I think you can see that this is the new thing. It is now becoming more recognized that people collaborate in and out of any entity on a continuous basis. Trying to create closed entities that are hospitable to innovation is a non starter.

COOK Report: how about Umair Haque?

Bauwens: Umair is I think one of the prime expressions of this revolution ongoing within capital. And the P2P Foundation is centered here as well. But I would say that Umair addresses himself to the ‘social entrepreneurial’ community, while the P2P Foundation addresses itself to the peer producing communities. The one approach talks to the entrepreneurial coalitions, we talk to the commons and communities.

COOK Report: How exactly did you transition from Belgacom to P2P?

Bauwens: I wrote an essay on peer to peer in about 2001. I was describing what I was seeing (i.e. the isomorphism of that one form appearing in many different guises in different fields) and decided to take a two year sabbatical to look at it further. I moved to Thailand as a way to last longer on my savings, while figuring out what to do next. This was followed by six months of traveling and six months of intensive learning of Thai culture. Then one year of reading on the long term view of history – Rome, Byzantium, etc … Why? because when you work for a corporation for too long you have a disease which I would call a short term view of things. I had become very aware that my brain was no longer working as it should. Therefore I took a full year to go back to the long-term view. I was especially interested in phase transitions. In the end of the Roman empire and especially in the transition from feudalism into capitalism. Those are two major phase transitions and I think now that we are facing another one.

This is a MAJOR transition. Feudalism and the end of the Roman Empire involved two entirely different systems. The logic of value creation and the logic of distribution was totally different. You are talking about a fundamentally different logic which of course operated first within the old system. The paradox is that in the first phase the logic change is used by the powers that be to strengthen themselves and their own survival. But by adopting the new practices they also underminethe core logic of the old system and unwittingly prepare the way for their own overthrow by the new logic. This process can take centuries (perhaps 500 years in the case of the Rome to feudalist transition, and half that in the feudal to capitalism tradition).

This is an argument that I have with the left which will say you can see open source being co-opted by capital so this cannot possibly be the answer. I am saying that not necessarily that co-optation is good, but that this is a very positive sign. The fact that it is co-opted by capital is exactly what will make it strong. Feudalism in crisis used capital to survive another 250 years.

COOK Report: It is an admission by capital that it cannot exist without it.

Bauwens: Yes. Exactly. It is nurturing that system. Of course largely on its own terms. This is why I am saying that I am on the side of the community. Think about the old industrial system where you have capital on one side and workers on the other and you hire workers to do your stuff.

You protect your copyrights and patents and that is how you make money.

Today you have a community on one side and a platform on the other. My interest is in how a community can maintain its autonomy to the maximum degree knowing that it is partially dependent on these corporate platforms. By the end of my two year schedule I had decided that I would use the internet to maintain a pluralist platform of people researching, documenting, and promoting peer to peer dynamics in every area of social life.

I think this is affecting every aspect of thought, including spirituality and philosophy. I think this is a deep shift in ontology, in value systems, in epistemology – how we know things. It is a restructuring of our social DNA – initially within the old system. What I am seeing as the big shift is that today is we have a dominant system of capital within which things are happening. In this system the core attractor is capital. But now we have competing system of the commons which is adapting in reaction to capital. The circulation of capital is faced with the asymmetric competition of the ‘circulation of the commons’! But eventually it is the market that will be subsumed by the commons. I am not saying that the market will disappear, but I am saying that capitalism will disappear if you define it as unlimited growth in a finite world – that system cannot last.

We must find ways to make the commons compatible with free entrepreneurship, but also at the same time promote new social forms of corporate ownership, — forms that are no longer solely focused on short-term profit at the expense of the people and the planet.

It may last 30 years or fifty – who knows, but it is logically impossible for this system to continue.

You cannot have capital without growth and accumulation but in a finite universe you cannot have continuous unlimited growth. We have to find another way. The left has said we will replace a dysfunctional capitalist system by a centrally planned system. That clearly did not work substantially better than what it wanted to replace and it had its own systemic issues, beyond also being an exploitative and unfree system itself. I am arguing that today is different. That we have a system that we can see functioning and that functions better than the capitalist system that we now have.

If you want to change things, this is where you have to look. In my view, peer production is hyperproductive economically, peer governance is hyper-productive politically, and peer property is hyper-productive in terms of distribution and equity.”

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