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.

This is the third part of the interview.

1. The role of the commons

COOK Report: Then the commons is an alternative way of enabling people to use capital rather than focus on capital the primary use of which is nothing beyond accumulating more.

“This alternative system gives people with capital a large number of choices and strategies about how they will use and invest what they have.

Bauwens: Indeed. One of my research interests is what I call neo-traditionalist economics. If you look at pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society whatever critique we may have of these types of civilizations, the one thing for sure is that their goal was not one of accumulation.

Think about why the Catholic Church owned one third the land of feudal society. The Church owned the land because it was given the land by the feudal lords in search of their salvation. So while the feudal lords were getting the surplus from the farming population they were not into a game of instant accumulation but rather were into a game of being spiritually saved.

COOK Report: So the peer-to-peer commons is the use of capital for earthly salvation or better put for sustainable means?

Bauwens: Yes but I would argue that it is for primarily immaterial means. This is why I try to find a link to pre-capitalist era and study how these people saw the world because today in the capitalist world your identity is linked to having. The more you have the more you are. We have to move again to a situation where the more you are is linking to money only as a means to supporting yourself and a family and as a means to doing good works. Money is a means necessary to our sustaining whatever meaningful pursuit we see as the core of our lives.

The hoped for goal is to rearrange ones life away from constant accumulation of having “things” into an existence characterized more by knowing, being and sharing. This is a shift we have to make as a civilization, in order to survive and thrive.

Why is this world going in the wrong direction? Because of three things and these things were key to me when I created the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. One is an erroneous belief in the infinite abundance of the material world. This worldview takes no externalities into account. It is fixated on what I would call pseudo-abundance or a false sense of abundance that refuses to recognize obvious externality problems. In terms of the physical world we have pseudo-abundance but in terms of innovation and knowledge the dominant point of view is pseudo-scarcity. We need copyright and patents and to enclose innovation. We are thinking that we must overturn this and to make pseudo abundance understood in terms of how the real scarcity is in the physical world. We must recognize that knowledge and science and culture in the digital age are made to flow and to be shared so that any innovation anywhere can be instantly usable by the whole community. These are the two things that need to be changed. If we succeed in doing so, we will have a sustainable world.

Then the third leg of the stool is social justice. If we get the first two legs of the stool right, it becomes difficult to imagine the third leg as being wrong. You don’t want a fascist world where the hierarchy exists for the pleasure of centralized business. We want to change belief in physical abundance and knowledge scarcity but to do so while preserving social justice. When the market fails in the context of a predominant scarcity paradigm, then you need a new allocation mechanism.

COOK Report: If you think the market is not allocating and you depend on hierarchy then you take the course of organizing and rationing the scarcity. On the other hand the more desirable alternative is the grass roots bottom up peer-to-peer allocation?

Bauwens: Exactly but I would make one modification in describing this. Peer production works by bypassing democracy wherever there is abundance. Peer governance is not democracy. Because how the system works in free software for example is that you broadcast tasks that are taken up by contributors. There is no democratic control or discussion over access, no committees deciding where to allocate scare resources! In peer production the domain of scarcity lies in quality control.

Everyone can contribute but not everyone contributes good stuff.

COOK Report: In the commons anyone with innovative ideas can float them and, if they are really good, they get pushed toward the top and more people adopt them.

Bauwens: Exactly. But I would argue that this is where the scarcity is within the commons.

It is in the quality control after the fact. It is post-production. The production itself is self-allocated.

But the acceptance according to quality constraints is usually done by some form either democratic or hierarchical decision making.

In Linux we talk about benevolent dictatorship. There needs to be an element of hierarchy in the control of quality. It is still very significant social progress because if you disagree with the hierarchy, you can fork – that is go off on your own and no one can tell you not to do it. This is contrasted with the fact that all the big political fights in the multinationals are over whether you are allowed to do something or not. There a lot of good ideas just die because they may challenge the entrenched views of those who are higher in the chain of command. Peer production can find itself as much directed against authoritative hierarchy as decision by committee which can also be very disempowering.

I think we are doing similar things with our respective communities. Some sociologists call this object-oriented sociality. “The term ‘social networking’ makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people.”

See: http://p2pfoundation.net/Object-oriented_Sociality

What unites the people in our respective groups is the goal of the meaningful purpose we are trying to achieve. It is that object that disciplines us. Therefore, if your purpose is Wikipedia and you make a mistake, in an article no one will die as a result. The discipline can be lighter. But if you work in software and the purpose of the software is to control a nuclear power pant, it has to work. The object of the social network will determine the governance structure.

The logical problem here is that since I am not paying you to contribute to the commons, how will we discipline ourselves? The way we discipline is by social agreement around the object. We join a network because we share the goal of the network. If the goal changes, we divorce and we seek another one. Since peer to peer networks do not depend on hierarchical relationship we must find other ways to reconcile any differences that arise than we would in a hierarchy or in a market. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010

In my own work at the P2P Foundation, I’m trying to walk the talk and practice what I/we preach.

We are peer producing knowledge about peer production, and I’m not the leader but rather the chief (p)leader. Moreover, because this is our object, we are forced to be very self-reflexive about it. We study peer production and in doing so study the difficulty that we encounter ourselves in the midst of that very same process.

Let’s think about competition and cooperation. I would argue that the capitalist system is one where competition is primary. We compete as companies against each other, but within a company we have to cooperate. In the commons I would argue that the polarity will be reversed. In other words within the commons we are cooperating but that different commons and their respective entrepreneurial coalitions can compete. You have on the one hand Joomla and on the other hand Drupal. But their core is found in a common code base.

In the future I see the free software and open hardware foundation which manages the infrastructure as the kind of institutional vehicles than will determine the line up of productivity within the world. They will be the beacons and around them will flock entrepreneurs, cooperating minds, state aid and so on.”

2. Open Hardware

COOK Report: Tell me more about the transition between open software and open hardware.

Bauwens: “Essentially the free software problem is an easy one to solve because what you are creating is immediately usable. You need to bring brains together. You need access to networks and computers with which you can create executable code.

The problem with hardware is that while you can design, the hardware is additional.

Designing hardware is ‘roughly’ the same as software, although there is a more need for contextualized and embedded knowledge that is directly related to the experience with ‘things’. Nevertheless, uniting brains and then drawing together on a Cad Cam system is pretty much similar. But then you need to make and test it. That’s where the money comes in much earlier in the process.

Consequently there is a harder problem to solve. So, if you want to make circuit boards, you have to buy the materials and fabricate something and if it doesn’t work you must do it again. The sustainability issue comes in much earlier in the process than when you would work with software alone.

But the logic is similar, with open design communities on the one hand, and entrepreneurial coalitions on the other. The alignment between more is both more problematic but perhaps also more promising, since solving the cooperation between soft and hard sides is at the same times solving the problem of the reproduction of peer production. I want to see the open design communities align themselves with physical players whose values are in maximum alignment with those of the open design communities.

One of the first concerns is that if you are from a normal capitalist company and you align yourself with an open design process, you are not going to make any money out of intellectual property.

But if you have an open design commons, you will design differently there in than if you had a capitalist based design system. In the first option, design is done to ensure scarcity and the frequent acquisition of new models and rapid obsolescence. Scarcity is engineered into every detail.

It’s anti-sustainable almost by definition.

In the second option, an open design community will be thinking in modular terms and in simplicity of construction so that as much of the product as possible can be made locally.

Instead of having the big multinational the goal is rather to support small local companies but to have them interconnect globally through their common collaborative platforms and open design communities. This is pretty much what is happening with the Arduino platform of circuit boards, where more than 10 companies already making more than one million dollars every year.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino and http://p2pfoundation.net/Arduino

Let’s get back then to peer-to-peer dynamics which is any undertaking to which an individual is free to allocate his own resources. If we apply this to the physical world, it would be a process by which the individual can have access to and control over his own physical resources and freely allocate them. This would mean that that instead of having access to computers and their networks, we also need access to distributed machinery. And similarly, the ownership of those companies could have a collective element, i.e. would/could be owned by the worker/peer producers themselves, and not just by shareholders. I’m quite sympathetic to the cooperative and distributist traditions in this context, though I’m open to any solutions which can combines the openness of the immaterial and some sharing at the level of the material.

What we are building now as a global community is types of machinery with very low capital requirements and with no intellectual property protection as we strive for sustainability at the local level

Therefore what we need and what I think we are building now as a global community is types of machinery with very low capital requirements and with no intellectual property protection. Doing things this way becomes much more scalable on the local level.

COOK Report: Can you give me some examples?

Bauwens; I have a list in the p2p wiki called product hacking with between two and three hundred such examples. http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking. See the screen shot of this URL on the following page.

People are working on things like cheap 3d printing and cheap CNC milling. Apparently any industrial process can be decomposed into six different sub-process. They are working on a universal machine that can be parametricised. Think about it. The capitalist logic is making bigger and bigger machines with ever-higher capital thresholds so that you protect the monopoly of those already in the game.

A basic open source hardware paradigm is about making as low threshold machine as possible.

One example of how this can work is the alliance between 100kGarages (http://www.100kgarages.com/) and a design company that has 30,000 designs.

You go to one of the 100kGarages that are being established in the United States and they will make a design for you. You can see immediately that this is a new paradigm of production, right? Global design which you locally down load and locally make.

COOK Report: And this kind of design is for what kind of goods?

Bauwens: For the moment, most of it is prototyping or for still peripheral ‘maker’ communities, but I think this is just the necessary transition phase. The first crowdsourced car, Local Motors in Detroit, is already in production, and more similar projects are under way. http://www.local-motors.com/

Once we can make cars, the barrier to serious industrial production will be broken. So, wee are moving to from the design design phase to the prototyping design phase and have reached the ‘making’ phase for some advanced but fringe products.

The next step is a discussion of where the making will occur. Will it be only in places like China where they can mass produce these designs? One of my arguments is that the Shanzai system, which makes electronics, is already an illegal version (because the shared designs are reverse engineered proprietary ones) of the system of advocating, and it has been central to the success of the Chinese economy. Historically, new modes of production always arise on the periphery of the previously dominant system. So open production arises in the West, but may well become dominant thanks to the emergence of East Asia!”

See http://www.shanzai.com/