After presenting the approaches of Yochai Benkler/Helen Nissenbauw and of Julian Fox yesterday, I’m taking the opportunity to publish excerpts of my essay for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, which was entitled Par cum pari: Notes on the horizontality of peer to peer relationships in the context of the verticality of a hierarchy of values.

Copies can be requested at michelsub2003 at yahoo.

This is a first part, the second part will see how peer production stands in relation to the four principles expressed in the social doctrine of the Church.

Excerpts:

1. Equipotentiality as a value

Equipotentiality as the metaphysical basis of peer to peer relationships, as it is even more fine-grained that the individuality and individualism that was developed through modernity. We could say that just as modernity developed all the implications of individuality, peer to peer processes develop all the implications and potentialities of relationality. Indeed, equipotentiality means the capacity of social systems to directly access the various skills of individuals, which can be aggregated selectively by the individuals themselves. Through equipotentiality, individuals allocate partial skills and effort, to common value creation, finding identity and recognition through their engagement in such common projects. It’s an object-oriented sociality, organized around transcendent objects and goals, that structure the peer to peer social system and the individuals within it. This means that everyone can potentially cooperate in a project, that no authority can pre-judge the ability to cooperate, but that the quality of cooperation is then judged by the community of peers, i.e. through Communal Validation. In other words, distributed production is matched with distributed control mechanisms, through collective choice systems that avoid the emergence of ‘representative’ collective individuals which would crystallize to take control of the social process. In equipotential projects, participants self-select themselves to the module to which they feel able to contribute.

Charles Leadbeater, in We Think summarizes the explanation of Yochai Benkler, referring to his landmark book on “The Wealth of Networks”:

“Benkler’s explanation for how open source communities coordinate themselves runs something like this. The raw material of these collaborations is creative talent. But creative talent is highly variable. People are good at different things and in different ways. It is very difficult to tell from the outside, for example by time and motions studies, who is the more effective creative worker. It is very difficult to write detailed job descriptions and contracts for creativity, specifying what new ideas need to be created when. Creativity cannot be delivered just-in-time. Open source communities resolve the difficulties of assessing creativity and quality by decentralising decision making down to individuals and small groups. They decide what to work on, depending on what needs to be done and what their skills are. There is little sense in working on a project that is already well staffed and where your contribution will add very little. It is very difficult to pull the wool over the eyes of your peers: they will soon spot if the contributions that you make do not really come up to scratch. That allows people to work on just their bit of the puzzle. Good central design rules allow the whole thing to add together. Work in open source communities gets done when creative people self-distribute themselves to different tasks, they submit their work to open peer review to maintain quality and the product has a modular design so that individual contributions can be clicked together easily.”

The ethical implications of equipotentiality are well drawn out by Jorge Ferrer:

“An integrative and embodied spirituality would effectively undermine the current model of human relations based on comparison, which easily leads to competition, rivalry, envy, jealousy, conflict, and hatred. When individuals develop in harmony with their most genuine vital potentials, human relationships characterized by mutual exchange and enrichment would naturally emerge because people would not need to project their own needs and lacks onto others. More specifically, the turning off of the comparing mind would dismantle the prevalent hierarchical mode of social interaction—paradoxically so extended in spiritual circles—in which people automatically look upon others as being either superior or inferior, as a whole or in some privileged respect. This model—which ultimately leads to inauthentic and unfulfilling relationships, not to mention hubris and spiritual narcissism—would naturally pave the way for an I-Thou mode of encounter in which people would experience others as equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal. It also would bring a renewed sense of significance and excitement to our interactions because we would be genuinely open to the fact that not only can everybody learn something important from us, but we can learn from them as well. In sum, an integral development of the person would lead to a “horizontalization of love.” We would see others not as rivals or competitors but as unique embodiments of the Mystery, in both its immanent and transcendent dimension, who could offer us something that no one else could offer and to whom we could give something that no one else could give.”

Until the advent of peer production, individual autonomy in cooperation was limited to small groups, which were unable to scale because the transactional cost of organizing commonality required hierarchical structures. However peer production is the ability to globally coordinate a multitude of cooperating individuals and small groups, and in such a way that small group dynamics, i.e. peer governance as the ability to manage such common projects, remain at the core of the process of value creation, and no longer at the periphery. There may new forms of hierarchy (of merit, engagement, and entanglement within the networks), but they cannot be equated with command and control mechanisms. This means that productive processes can now be autonomous and cooperative, which is a potentially important social advance. Until today, democracy and participation were limited to choosing representatives in the political field, while production itself remained a hierarchical and non-participatory process. We should further note that peer production is not limited to the business or economic field, but can be applied to every form of value creation. Autonomy-in-cooperation becomes scalable throughout the social field.

There is of course much to say about peer governance itself, where power becomes inter-dependent, since it is based on voluntary contributions and not on wage-dependency, and such power can only be consensual. (however, power can and does hide into the invisible architectures of the design of such social systems, requiring a literacy of cooperation from the cooperating communities, who need to become adept at value-sensitive design, so that diversity and autonomy are stimulated)

As John Heron writes about authority in peer production: “the sole role of hierarchy is in the spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continous flowering of autonomy-in-cooperation, in all spheres of human endeavour. ”

2. Passionate production as a superior modality of value creation

Pre-capitalist models, i.e. slavery and feudalism, where based on coercive cooperation, whereby the real producers of wealth had to respectively give away the totality (slaves) or a part (serfs) of their production. While the motivation of serfs would be obviously superior to that of slaves, neither group would be motivated to produce beyond subsistence without coercive pressure, and while slavery-based societies are notorious for their lack of technical innovation regarding human work, medieval feudal societies fare better, but are still characterized by very slow productivity growth, with the majority of the population not moving substantially beyond subsistence levels. Both systems are of course determined by ‘extrinsic negative’ motivation, i.e. ultimately fear, the lowest possible form of human motivation in terms of efficiency.

One could argue that the great social advance of the capitalist mode is to change the extrinsic negative motivation into a positive one, i.e. mutual self-interest. Ideally, all parties exchange equivalent value with each other. The result has been an unprecedented rise in productivity and efficiency, but with a high social and natural cost. Indeed, while coercive modes can be characterized (in game theory format) as win-lose dynamics, capitalism’s win-win is still very limited (and of course, in reality, that ideal is rarely attained): parties in a market exchange cannot and do not take into account any externalities, whether it be social or natural. This is why a for-profit enterprise can only innovative relatively, i.e. strive for relative quality, while a for-benefit community cum institution can and does strive for absolute quality.

Peer production therefore, is characterized by the filtering out of both negative and positive extrinsic motivation, leaving only intrinsic positive motivation, as the sole motivator. In other words, this system of voluntary contributions thrives on human passion and the search for creative expression, social recognition, and the need for meaning in the process of common value creation.

Peer production is therefore highly efficient, based on a quest for absolute quality, and wherever this mode becomes economically feasible because of the drop in coordination and transaction costs, will generally tend to drown out competing modes. However, in the transition period where peer production is a seed form, it will give rise to many different hybrid formats, involving cooperation with both state and private forms of production and governance.

3. The Non-reciprocal Logic of Peer Production

Historically, we have seen a succession of a tribal economy, primarily based on symmetrical reciprocal gift-giving, tributary economies based on a-symmetrical hierarchical allocation of goods according to social rank, and finally the dominance of market pricing mechanisms according to a logic of equivalent exchange.

What kind of social logic is behind peer to peer? As we will see, it is definitely not a gift economy based on reciprocity! We are using the definitions of anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, who uses a fourfold typology of possible intersubjective relationships based on his research in his book, The Structures of Social Life, which he says are a valid ‘relational grammar’, for all cultures and temporalities.

According to Fiske, this would give the following:

Dominant in the tribal gift-economy:

“In Equality Matching (EM) relationships people keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would be required to restore balance. Common manifestations are: turn-taking , one-person one-vote elections, equal share distributions.”

Dominant in the tributary economies:

“In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey, while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates. Examples are: military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other matters) ; ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of protection and enforcement of norms), monotheistic religious moralities (AR for the definition of right and wrong by commandments or will of God) .”

Dominant in capitalist economies:

“Market Pricing relationships are oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages, interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the medium, and Market Pricing relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or materialistic — any of the four models may exhibit any of these features. Market Pricing relationships are not necessarily individualistic.”

However, it is clear that the peer to peer dynamic is not covered by any of the first three definitions. As a reminder: peer to peer is based on voluntary contributions on the input side, but not to another individual, but rather to the whole collective project; and by universal availability on the output side. One can take without giving, and one can give without receiving anything back, though one has access, as have the non-givers, to the totality of the commons that has been created through this self-aggregation of effort. Clearly, we are talking here about non-reciprocal, ‘generalized’ exchange, which do not fit the previous models. We therefore turn to Fiske’s fourth model, which does give a correct definition of the intersubjective logic of peer to peer.

He calls it ‘Communal Sharing’ and it is dominant in the emerging peer to peer modes:

“Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social domain in question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to utilization of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with respect to their social selves), people who “ask not for whom the bell tolls, for it tolls for thee” (CS with respect to shared suffering and common well-being), or people who kill any member of an enemy group indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack (CS with respect to collective responsibility).”

We therefore would like to present an alternative account of social evolution, formulated by the Dutch author Wim Nusselder, which beautifully summarizes the point we are trying to make:

The primary economy is based on reciprocity, which derives from common ancestry or lineage. It is based on families, clans, tribes and exchange mostly operates through gifts which create further obligation. The division of labor is minimal and most often related to gender and age. The key question is ‘to belong or not to belong’. Social groups are based and bounded by real or symbolic lineage. Wants are defined by the community. Leadership is in the hands of the lineage leadership.

The secondary economy arises together with power monopolies which engender coercion as a means to force cooperation. We enter the domain of class societies, and production is organized by the elite in power, which holds together through the symbolic power which transforms power into allegiance. Respect for power, in the form of tribute, taxes, etc.. is normative. Distribution depends on your place in this chain of symbolic power. Wants are defined by the symbolic power with symbolic markers monopolized. The key question is: ‘to deserve power or to deserve subjection’. Social groups are bound by allegiance to power. Leadership is political and religious. Relationships, i.e. allegiance, is highly personal.

The tertiary economy arises with the entrepreneur and capitalism. It is based on ‘equivalent’, i.e. ‘fair’ exchange, which is normative. Power arises from relative productivity, relative monopoly over a needed good, and from the wage relationship which creates dependence. Social groups are loose, and wants are determined by advertising and mimetic desire. Cooperation is no longer correlated to belonging. Relationships are impersonal.

The quaternary economy, based on peer to peer processes, is based on ‘ideological leaders’ which can frame common goals and common belonging and is based on membership and contribution. Contributing to the best of one’s ability to common goals is normative and the key question becomes: to follow an existing group or to create one’s own, i.e. to convince or be convinced. Contributions to many groups can overlap. Power is dependent on the power to convince.

From all of the above we are tempted to formulate a temporary conclusion: that peer production based on the intersubjective logic of ‘communal shareholding’, i.e. characterized by non-reciprocal generalized exchange between the individual and the collective, now a seed form present in a transitional economic regime, may well be the emerging logic of social and economic organization of a new political economy and civilization yet to arise.

What we arrived at as a preliminary conclusion is that peer to peer modes are highly efficient, are based on advanced modes of motivation and cooperation, and on an ethic of non-reciprocal giving and sharing.

References:

Charles Leadbeater, draft of chapter 8 of his book, We Think, at http://wethink.wikia.com/wiki/Chapter_8_part_3

Jorge Ferrer, http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery,%201espace.doc

Derived from: Heron, John. Sacred Science. PCCS Books, 1998

Overview of the relational typology by Alan Page Fiske, at http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/relmodov.htm