I’m really surprised by your different interpretation of Fiske, and I must say that I missed the sequential interpretation that you mention (but then, I’ve read only the first 100 pages of his massive book)

I have no doubt that communal sharing was important for the tribal form, within the family unit. Bear in mind that CS is a form of ‘general reciprocity’ which does not require an individual or precise counterpart. But everything I read so far, from Mauss ‘the gift’ and other accounts, show that as a society, goods where exchange on the basis of symmetry, not direct as in market trade, but definitely creating obligations of some form of return. For example, a potlach festival created a competition in giving, not an indifference to that process.

So for me, as a society, i.e. a grouping of tribals, to exist, they were in my mind necessarily organized around the gift exchange.

To know if this is true we would have to answer the question: if a clan/tribe gave something away, did they expect a return or not. From what I’ve read, the answer is an unequivocal yes.

Now we move to peer to peer. In free software and open knowledge, amongst the volunteers who participate, can anyone have a direct expectation from the other invididuals or collective? The answer is this time a unequivocal no. You contribute to the whole, you get a lot of indirect benefits (use of the whole, accrued reputational, knowledge, and relational capital), but no expectation of tit for tat returns. So it is without doubt, for me at least, not a gift economy of mutual obligations, but a clear form of CS.

This being said, I expect no identical overlap between both of your framework

– for example: tribal society combines CS and EM with minimal markets and hierarchical allocation

– slave-based, feudal, tributary societies combine hierarchical allocation, with CS in the local agricultural communities, and a gifting competition of the nobles towards the spiritual bodies

– market capitalism is based on the market pricing mechanisms, but could not exist without a strong state, and significant redistributory mechanisms to keep the social peace

I expect the coming P2P society to be dominated, for its social, intellectual and cultural innovation, by CS dynamics, but surrounded, onion-like, by peer-informed market forms, revived forms of reciprocity, and new forms of hierarchical allocation that are compatible with its overall logic

What the network society is concerned, I do not believe myself this is a valid concept, because we have hierarchical, decentralized and distributed networks, and only the latter allow for a deployment of the CS dynamic, in the field of abundant immaterial reproduction. Bear in mind that for scarcity-driven goods, this dynamic cannot fully operate, and will use market forms (as advocated by Kevin), and others yet to be invented.

So, my view is that today we have a dominant market society, with networks forms of the 3 varieties, and emerging distributed p2p networks. Because of the dominance of the market form, all other formats are necessarily ‘market-informed’, though the already existing p2p networks have the strongest transcendendal potential vis a vis the market.

Michel

i’m delighted to see that you’ve treated my timn work well. yes, i had spotted your postings about it. that’s partly why i decided to include your name on my latest send-around: the cyboc paper.

your email raises a lot of theoretical points, more than i can handle right now. maybe later, because this is all very interesting, and we are seeking in rather similar directions.

but i do have one comment that i can offer quickly enough. it’s about fiske’s framework. there is some overlap with timn, but not exactly. i briefly explain this in a 2006 study you may not have seen yet that focuses on the tribal (t) form, but also contains material on the other timn forms (see url below).

my take on fiske is different from your own. you equate the tribal form with equality-matching, but i equate it to his communal-sharing form. you think his communal-sharing form matches p2p nicely. in my view, none of his forms match the network form the way i’d like. here’s what i say there:

“One psychologist (Fiske, 1993) posits that all social relationships reduce to four forms of interaction: communal sharing, authority ranking, equality matching, and market pricing. People develop their capacities for social interaction in that order, from infancy through early childhood. The sharing, ranking, and pricing forms correspond to the tribal, hierarchical, and market forms, respectively. The equality-matching form, which is mainly about equal-status peer-group behavior, does not correspond to any single form; it has some attributes that fit under network form, but other attributes (e.g., reciprocity, feuding, revenge) fit better under the tribal form.”

the url for this (including for .pdf download) is: http://www.rand.org/pubs/working_papers/WR433/ (Social Forms, 2006)

a deeper issue here is whether the tribal and the network forms are all that different. i think they are. and i’d like them to be so. i write several pages about this. but as i note, if it turns out that the new network form is an upgraded version of the old tribal form, then the timn framework should be converted into a three-form framework, and what will come next later in spiral fashion is an upgraded version of the hierarchical form. hmm

Michel et al. — Fair enough. Interesting too. Some comments in reply:

At first sight, I thought your criticisms meant we had generally neglected p2p networks. But that can’t be. We make a big deal out of the rise of network forms of organization, including “p2p” (though I have previously preferred the term “all-channel”).

Then I saw you refer to “peer production” (a la Benkler?), as found among open-source undertakings for software development and file-sharing. Well, that we do not attend to. I view it mostly as an innovation in a part of the economy — one that engages a proposition for my TIMN effort, and I’d rather take it up when I get around to doing the rise-of-markets chapter for that study.

[See below for a reminder of what TIMN is about. The proposition is that the rise of a new form (and its realm) has effects that modify the existing forms/realms. Thus, state hierarchies get modified by market principles to generate liberal democracies. Today, capitalist markets are being modified by network principles to generate new modes of social production. But I digress.]

However, I finally spotted that you were mainly referring to “peer-governed civil-society networks” that include newer kinds of entities than just NGOs and NPOs. Hmmm. Well, the paper does repeatedly emphasize NGOs and NPOs, partly for shorthand reasons, and it wouldn’t have taken much extra space to add epistemic communities, virtual associations, and other new network entities to the picture, not to mention individuals, as we have done in other writings. Moreover, on review, I see I left out a phrase I’ve used in the past to help cover such possibilities, by referring to the emergence from civil society “of a new network-based realm whose name and nature are not yet known.” I’m certainly not supposing that all of civil society will fold into this new realm. Maybe Danielle and I can edit for all this before long.

I try to keep an eye out for innovative entities and networks that transcend existing NGO/NPO-related categories. But I’ve not spotted a lot yet, even less when it comes to durable new entities that would be of interest to policymakers and could participate in governance programs. It will be interesting to see what happens to the “Obama network” in this regard.

Amid all this, you found our second section in the Postscript “disappointing, as a third nonprofit sector already existed.” Well, yes, it has kind of existed for a little over a decade or so. But that isn’t long. Researchers didn’t make much of it as a social or third sector until the 1980s-90s (see our citations). Policymakers still aren’t sure about it, from what I’ve seen. Our point is that its significance will be for sure when policy dialogue shifts — when it moves beyond the standard public-private, government-or-market categorizing, and engages a language that means going in distinctly new directions.

Later, you claim we have a “top-down bias.” But in fact, there is lots of room — and need — for bottom-up as well as side-to-side structures and processes in our vision. This is most evident in the section on sensory apparatuses, as in our references to sousveillance and collective intelligence. However, your comment is aimed at the section on networked governance. There we observe that hierarchy will persist; it is essential to some degree for states. But, even in the quote you use as an example of top-down bias, what we look forward to seeing are more networked partnerships between state and other actors. I figured it would be implicit that such networks would not have to be top-down hierarchical.

Perhaps you have a deeper critique in mind, akin to Kevin Carson’s interesting comments aspiring for p2p networks and p2p governance to displace hierarchies (not to mention markets too) as a main form of social organization. That networks are gaining ground relative to hierarchies and markets has been a key theme in my work for many years, esp. in writings with John Arquilla. We have even helped argue that networks can outfight hierarchies in some circumstances. But it is quite another matter to suppose that, over the long run, hierarchies (or markets) are goners, and networks their entirely preferable successors.

My theoretical stance stems from trying to figure out the TIMN framework and what it means for social evolution. As you may recall, it concerns how societies have developed four major forms of organization — tribes, hierarchical institutions, markets, and networks — and combined them (and their resulting realms) in a prefered progression that takes centuries to evolve: from monoform T, to biform T+I, to triform T+I+M, and next to quadraform T+I+M+N societies. As I see it, one of the underlying principles for success is balance: Each form, as it arises, is essential. For societies to achieve higher levels of systemic complexity, no form (or the realm it creates) should be allowed to dominate any other; some kind of balance and equilibrium should be built among these inherently contradictory forms and their realms. If correct, I regard that as science, not bias.

I hope to get back to working on this framework soon. Our cyberocracy paper relates to it, but I never meant for it to be a major endeavor.

One advantage of posting and sharing via SSRN is that the paper is not firmly published. After we see what other comments roll in, we could revise and repost.

I commend you on the material here on your blog. I’ve spent more time than before in browsing it, and I’m impressed. I’m also pleased that you’ve helped circulate our paper.

These are my personal, independent views (and Danielle’s may differ).

Onward.

Please see my comments and reaction to Ronfeldt’s and Varda’s piece here:

http://irevolution.wordpress.com/2009/01/17/the-prospects-for-cyberocracy

As you will note from my comments, perhaps what is missing from the 2008 postcript section of “The Prospects for Cyberocracy” are important insights from contemporary writers such as Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler, Antony Loewenstein, etc.

QUOTE: “Thus, optimism about the information revolution should be
tempered by an anticipation of its potential dark side.”

IMO the “dark side” will only be dark, for the most part, from the
perspective of existing institutions like the corporation and state.
Rhizome organization certainly makes asymmetric warfare a lot more
devastating against large organizations like the state and the large
corporation–but devil take them. Rhizome organization won’t be very
effective in the target-poor environment of the successor society.
It’s hard to imagine how a society made up of the kinds of small,
self-sufficient, and loosely networked “resilient communities”
described by Robb could be significantly threatened by the kinds of
disruptive methods used by today’s networked resistance movements like
Al Qaeda. Such a decentralized economic and political model would
lack the characteristics that bring existing corporate and state
institutions onto the radar screen of networked resistance
movements–most importantly, the ability to exercise external power.
And they would lack any nodes sufficiently large to present valuable
targets.

What’s more, with these networks of resilient communities themselves
possessing the advantages of redundant networks and lacking any
central nodes whose destruction can cripple them, and having the
advantage also of clear motivation in defending their home ground,
it’s likely that any attempt at asymmetric warfare against such
networks would turn into a war of attrition that would exhaust and
destroy the attackers. Asymmetric warfare only works, by definition,
as long as the asymmetry persists.

In an America of ten thousand resilient local economies, with largely
localized industry centered on small industrial shops taking advantage
of the decentralizing potential of electrical machinery, a vigorous
household and informal economy using even smaller machinery (including
desktop machine tools), and the proliferation of low-overhead
microenterprises using spare capacity of ordinary household capital
equipment, what will be worth attacking? An Al Qaeda, with its
limited resources, must economize force by concentrating it against
single spectacular targets like the WTC; it lacks the resources to
destroy an entire networked society one tiny node at a time.

IMO the very existence of the hierarchical organizations has generated
the contradictions that will bring them down, and the disappearance of
hierarchy will bring those contradictions to an end.

QUOTE: “The first cyberocracies may appear as overlays on established
bureaucratic forms of organization and behavior, just as the new
post-industrial aspects of society overlay the still necessary
industrial and agricultural aspects. Yet such an overlay may well
begin to alter the structure and functioning of a system as a whole.
Just as we now speak of the information society as an aspect of
post-industrial society, we may someday speak of cyberocracy as an
aspect of the post-bureaucratic state.”

Exactly. People like Bill Gates tend to treat networked organization
as something that can be harnessed within the bounds of existing
corporate organizations, when in fact it will likely destroy them.
Gates, Tom Peters, and the like write a lot about “flattening
hierarchies,” “outsourcing everything,” “dissolving corporate walls,”
etc., but their vision always in fact assumes the persistence of
corporate walls, in the sense of entities that retain control over
finance and marketing and “intellectual property.” But IMO
“intellectual property,” in an age of encryption and bittorrent, will
not survive the asymmetric warfare waged by the open-source movement.
Eventually those engaged in actual production, from Nike’s sweatshop
workers to code writers, will perceive the corporate headquarters as
nothing but nodes to be bypassed.

And as states hit the wall of the fiscal crisis and input crises like
Peak Oil, they will find that their ability to perform their main
function (subsidizing the operating costs of large, centralized
corporate enterprise and externalizing it on taxpayers, and protecting
large corporations from market competition) will eliminate the main
necessary support to the corporate economy. As governments exhaust
their fiscal resources in an attempt to provide subsidized inputs as
fast as corporations gobble them up, they will retrench and devolve
real government functions to localities, with legislators and heads of
state increasingly relegated to symbolic figures to whom the
localities pay nominal allegiance.

In the end, I don’t think there will be any cybercrats after the
transition, because their organizational base is unsustainable.