[p2p-research] Why Post-Capitalism is Rubbish

[Christian Siefkes]

Ryan,

Ryan Lanham wrote:
> I mean you or your work no disrespect, but literally thousands of highly
> trained development economists and related professionals (World Bank,
> UN, IMF, etc.) and in NGOs, universities, etc. work on this every day
> and have done so for years.  Their collective wisdom is perhaps best

And how many of them, do you think, are seriously and unprejudiced
considering non-market-based solutions as alternatives to the market and/or
state-based solutions? 100%? 50%? 10%? The figure would be closer to 0%, I
suppose. And if you've already accepted thinking inside the box, then of
course you'll never come up with outside-the-box solutions.

I don't think it's a surprise that all the non-market-based production
models that we already have -- free software, Wikipedia, wireless community
networks, hacker spaces, Couchsurfing, you name it... -- were NOT developed
by highly paid economists and related professionals, but by people who
didn't simply swallow the collective wisdom of the day of how software was
created or an encyclopedia was written.

Do you think Galileo would have made and expressed his discoveries if he had
been paid by the Catholic church?

> It doesn't mean
> advances don't happen.  It means that they happen in collaboration, in
> part, with experts.  Experts are in the academy, in fields of practice,
> and in individual research.  Advancing on one's own is not likely to be
> productive in this Age in my opinion.  Profound insights must build on
> current dialogue and acceptance.  And we must and should be highly
> skeptical of new ideas until they are well-refined, field-tested and
> considered by many experts who work in the field.  That is, to my mind,
> the very idea of peer-review--the original P2P.

That's very true, and fortunately such communities, who haven't just
internalized the standard wisdom of the day, exist. They are, for example,
the German (through now also English) keimform.de Blog, where my own work
originated, Oekonux, The Commoner magazine and indeed parts of the commons
research community, parts of this mailing list, the openmanufacturing list,
and so on. It's a small community, but it exists, and it is growing.

You should be happy that it exists and encourage it, rather than trying to
convince it that it should just give up...

Best regards
	Christian

-- 
|-------- Dr. Christian Siefkes --------- christian at siefkes.net ---------
|   Homepage: http://www.siefkes.net/   |   Blog: http://www.keimform.de/
|   Better Bayesian Analysis:           |   Peer Production Everywhere:
|   http://bart-project.com/            |   http://peerconomy.org/wiki/
|------------------------------------------ OpenPGP Key ID: 0x346452D8 --
Anyone who believes that the laws of physics are mere social conventions
is invited to try transgressing those conventions from the windows of my
apartment. (I live on the twenty-first floor.)
        --  Alan D. Sokal, A Physicist Experiments With Cultural Studies

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