[p2p-research] Obama and the high road to the peer to peer society

[Michel Bauwens]

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/obama-and-the-high-road-to-the-peer-to-peer-society/2008/11/22


 This then is the first 'high road' scenario in a nutshell: that the
enlightened part of the current establishment, concerned with its systemic
survival, ushers in a global compact for sustainability, in the form of
green capitalism, and that this allows peer to peer dynamics, or in other
words 'participation', to move from an emergent seed form into a co-evolving
characteristic of the new green capitalist global compact.

*Is there any relationship between the election of Obama, and the prospect
for a more 'peer to peer' oriented society?*

I believe there is, and I would like to outline a possible scenario.

I want to start with acknowledging the deep crisis in which humanity finds
itself. On the one hand, the meltdown of the financial system will have very
serious effects on the real economy, which will play out in the coming
years. Because many 'fundamentals' are already so skewed, I believe this
will be a rather long systemic crisis for the existing world system,
although it can pave the way for a new long wave of growth later on.

What of course complicated the matter is the underlying crisis affecting the
biosphere, in the form of global warming.

All in all, we are facing a crisis of the extensive growth of world
capitalism, in the current format which is highly destructive for the
biosphere, and with a deep impossibility for the rest of the aspiring
nations, such as China and India, to reach Western levels.

*How does Obama as agent of change play into this?*

I think there are three main factors that will determine how radical the
impact of Obama will be:

- His personal characteristics: Obama is not a radical, but a center-right
politician, with a lot of conservative instincts, not a particularly
impressive record, and his early choices of neoliberal Clintonite appointees
do not augur a particularly radical agenda. Of course, compared to the
lunacy of the alternative, the election is still very significative. It is
also not entirely clear how much of such appointments are tactical maneuvers
to make himself acceptable.

- The second factor will be the objective social, economic and political
situation however. If the crisis is as serious as we expect it to be, then
it would be increasingly unwise to govern from the center and preserve a
status quo. Indeed, being in the center in a radical situation, is like
taking responsibility for all things that go wrong. Such a situation may
indicate that, independently of any personal predilections, an Obama
administration would be forced into the direction of more radical reform.

- And here's where the third factor comes in: political and social pressure
for change. Though political and social movements are weak institutionally,
his election has unleashed a deep wave of hope, and networked sociality may
yet provide an avenue for the rapid reorganization of pressures for social
change.

So I believe that the situation is more open than we may at first sight
expect.

In any case, I do believe that with Obama, we have an intelligent,
multiculturally formed personality at the head of the American state; a man
who is politically astute, able to handle and understand complex problems;
and who has shown he can mobilize vast enthusiasm and self-organized
political initiatives in his favour.

I think that we can consider him, despite any limitations, to be part of the
enlightened sector of the establishment, a person that understands the
systemic risks and problems that the world and America is facing.

It is now time to present two scenarios, i.e. to contrast a 'high road'
transition to a low road transition.

*The high road transition and the low road transition to peer to peer.*

*I do believe that Obama can be the agent of change towards a new phase of
'green' capitalism, a substantial effort to gear the economy towards an
effort to solve global warming through the development of alternative energy
and other solutions.*

I also believe that such a transition, if it wants to be successful, cannot
but integrate a substantial dosis of participation.

As a reminder, *the argument for the link between sustainability and
participation* is made by Daniel Christian Wahl and Seaton Baxter, in the
magazine Design
Issues<http://p2pfoundation.net/Design_for_sustainability_is_inherently_participatory>
:

'"*Sustainability is rapidly becoming an issue of critical importance for
designers and society as a whole. A complexity of dynamically interrelated
ecological, social, cultural economic and psychological (awareness) problems
interact and converge in the current crisis of our unsustainable
civilization. *

*However, in a constantly changing environment, sustainability is not some
ultimate endpoint but is better conceived as a continuous process of
learning and adaptation. Designing for sustainability not only requires the
re-design of our habits, lifestyles and practices, but also, the way we
think about design. Sustainability is a process of co-evolution and
co-design that involves diverse communities in making flexible and adaptable
design decisions at local, regional and global scales. The transition
towards sustainability is about co-creating a human civilization that
flourishes within the ecological limits of the planetary life support
system. *

*Since sustainability requires widespread participation, communities
everywhere need to begin to shape local, regional and global visions of
sustainability and to offer strategies to engage humanity collectively in
cooperative processes that will turn visions (designs) into reality.
However, rather, than believing that we can design universally applicable
blueprints to bring about sustainability by prediction and control-based
top-down engineering, it may be more useful and appropriate to think of the
outcome(s) as an emergent property of the complex dynamic system in which we
all participate, co-create and adapt to interdependent bio-physical and
psycho-social processes*."

Such a social dynamic is partly independent of politics and Obama, but if
indeed a powerful Administration recenters itself around a policy of
sustainability, we can clearly expect such processes to be strengthened,
especially if other countries choose a similar path.

This then is the first 'high road' scenario in a nutshell: that the
enlightened part of the current establishment, concerned with its systemic
survival, ushers in a global compact for sustainability, in the form of
green capitalism, and that this allows peer to peer dynamics, or in other
words 'participation', to move from an emergent seed form into a co-evolving
characteristic of the green capitalist compact.

Since our own belief however is that an infinite growth system, a
characteristic capitalism would retain even in a green format, then such a
high road transition to co-existence would ultimately still need for be
transformed ultimately to a new type of society where peer to peer dynamics
are the very core of social evolution.

*The low road scenario*

But what happens if such expectations are too rosy?

Then, we have to expect the 'Roman Empire 'long descent into hell'
scenario', a long descent into disorganization of the global system, with
the prospects of the peer to peer and sustainability transition moving
towards the local field, in the form of Resilient Communities, as described
by John Robb. I won't go into that one for now, so see
here<http://p2pfoundation.net/Resilient_Communities>for more details.


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