[p2p-research] P2P Ideology

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Matt Cooperrider wrote:
> I'm forking this out from the discussion "Is the P2PFoundation a Shill for
> Proprietary  Software?"  The question of whether P2P is an ideology needs
> discussing.
> 
> -----
> 
> Athina wrote:
> 
>> It seems this raises again the issue of ideology I think in p2p which so
>> far has been a bit conveniently thrown under the carpet, especially in
>> relation to the commercialization and promotion of the open source and
> open
>> products in general.
>>
>>
> 
> Kevin wrote:
> 
> I don't think it's been thrown under the carpet at all.  Upon close
> inspection, the notion of a general ideology in p2p itself is a nonsensical
> concept.  P2P is a phenomenon / process.  Participants may have diverse
> ideologies (e.g. profit-only vs freedom-only), but as long as they agree on
> the basic principles of production, that doesn't impact the process.
> Ideological differences can and do impact organizations participating in p2p
> production, and that has come up regularly (e.g. Wikipedia).
> 
> -------
> 
> I don't have much of an argument, but I wanted to invite others to discuss
> (particularly to invite Athina to rebut, and Kevin to expand on his close
> inspection).
> 
> I agree with Kevin that there is no "general ideology in p2p itself", but
> the notion of "p2p itself" brackets the historical context.  Employing p2p's
> "basic principles of production" in 2009 has potentially huge political and
> social implications.  Those of us who work to advance "p2p alternatives" do
> so because p2p processes (maybe not in every case, but when considered
> together) privilege certain outcomes that we prefer.  Our preferences need
> to be examined.
> 
> Best,
> Matt

I read Michel's last reply in that thread, and had a few comments to it:
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-October/005219.html

An especially insightful part is where Michel wrote: "My political and 
philosophical options are to outcooperate and transcend private property, 
not abolish it."

I can see where he is coming from on all the points he made, and I think 
that part quoted is especially a great sentiment.
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyagraha
A life of non-violence is much more than turning the other cheek, it is 
constructive creation of alternative visions, it is promoting alternative 
ideology, it is principled not-cooperation (even at cost).

Still, we all make our choices as to where to invest our limited time and 
resources.

I agree it is hard for a small business to deal with the ongoing transitions 
in our society (like to free digital goods, but with food and energy still 
costing ration units, aka dollars), and I wrestle with that myself as does 
my wife. (I've posted some thinking about that on the Open Manufacturing 
list a couple months back.)
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/5d511326e6bc1d70/33cfa204454500db?hl=en#33cfa204454500db
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/browse_thread/thread/ee76fc1f315b8fda/ae3c0a47b6328c81?hl=en#ae3c0a47b6328c81

Even though making any product is a risk as far as people liking it or 
paying money somehow connected to it, there is a good chance I could make 
some proprietary money-making products right now (games and design tools). 
But my feeling about the transition to free digital goods stands in the way.

It's harder to make free products that might make money some other way, like 
consulting, though, say, my wife is trying, and has just finished a several 
person month effort in that direction: :-)
   "Rakontu: Helping people take good care of their stories."
   http://www.rakontu.org/
"Rakontu is a free and open source web application that small groups of 
people can use together to share and work with stories. It's for people in 
neighborhoods, families, interest groups, support groups, work groups: any 
group of people with stories to share. Rakontu members build shared "story 
museums" that they can draw upon to achieve common goals."

I agree that market position (like Google) can allow one to do questionable 
things with free software, and there are deep privacy issues there. (Even 
for my wife, she chose Google AppEngine to build on, so there are privacy 
issues in that Google sense even in her effort.)

Plus, there are other issues about just exactly who gets to design the 
"free" software and what their priorities really are:
   ""Free" is Killing Us--Blame The VCs"
  http://www.businessinsider.com/2008/4/-free-is-killing-us-blame-the-vcs

That's a market failure mode IMHO, that those with a lot of money (like 
Google) shape innovation to ensure they remain in a dominant position. IBM 
and Microsoft have done the same with proprietary stuff (IBM killed off 
Control Data Corporation by needless changing of standards for disk drive 
plugs, and Microsoft killed off other software and OSs by making sure they 
were not compatible.) Thus for example, some technical differences between, 
say, Google Wave and the ideas in the Pointrel Social Semantic Desktop that 
relate to privacy and browser limitations and the openness of the codebase 
in practice.
   https://wave.google.com/
   http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
Google Wave is still a cool thing, of course, but contrasted with, say, what 
Squeak Smalltalk could have been as an open personal platform for 
communications, Google Wave is a really shallow idea and Squeak was beyond 
it a decade ago with virtual worlds and so on, in a framework where *anyone* 
could change the source locally (Google Wave is in practice server based 
with unmodifiable code, even if you can in theory fork it and run your own 
servers).
   http://www.squeak.org/

Still, I feel there is some logical orthogonality (difference) between peers 
communicating using proprietary technologies and peers using them to make 
open content and free software (right now). Including for reasons Michel 
outlined, I use a Mac these days after five years of Debian GNU/Linux). 
However, I still program in Java and Python and other free tools, use free 
libraries, use free tools like FireFox and Thunderbird even as I use a Mac. 
I could switch back to GNU/Linux without too much trouble if I wanted (and 
hope eventually there will be a great release for the Mac Pro). I stay away 
from something like dot net. So, while the chips and the OS on my computer 
may be paid for (even as Mac OS X had a fee core from Mach and BSD), pretty 
much all the rest of what I use is free. The fact is, almost all of us are 
paying for proprietary chips, even Richard Stallman, so the line is fuzzier 
than even he might want to admit, even if he has a principled position. Open 
Manufacturing is in part about improving on that situation, but is mostly 
(not entirely) just a dream at this point. Apple also offered a 
well-engineered quiet multi-core box, something that would have been much 
harder and costlier to build on my own to the same standards; like Michel, I 
made a compromise there on time and uncertainty.

With that said, one only has to look at the Linus Torvalds and the 
proprietary Bitkeeper and eventually free Git issue to see how fast things 
can get out of hand and ugly:
   "RMS Weighs in on BitKeeper Debacle "
   http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/04/25/1936225

These compromises are so often questionable, regrettable, and do set a bad 
example.

It's hard to figure out how to keep yourself safe and fed when you are 
engaged in removing a scaffolding around an abundant society when most 
people confuse the scaffolding for the post-scarcity building and live in 
the scaffolding instead.

That "scaffolding" metaphor is one I talk about more here:
   http://www.pdfernhout.net/reading-between-the-lines.html
"""
What am I up to with that [Princeton University] education myself? Besides 
being a part-time stay-at-home Dad, I'm busy these days in my "free" time 
(along with many in the world, such as these people: http://www.reprap.org/ 
:-) attempting to help take down the intellectual scaffolding of global 
capitalism one myth at a time in a controlled safe manner where no one gets 
hurt, same as these people do when demolishing physical structures past 
their usefulness:
     http://www.controlled-demolition.com/
     "And behind each successful project stands the CDI team - a talented 
group of professionals with decades of experience dedicated to absolute 
perfection on each new project."
   See, there are people whose whole careers are devoted to the safe 
demolition of historic structures. And this essay is not intended in any way 
to defend anyone who intentionally destroys structures in a way intended to 
hurt people. ...
   At some point, after you are done building a new building (or a new 
post-scarcity society) the scaffolding comes down. :-) But unlike the easier 
time CDI has with demolishing vacant structures, it's much harder if people 
(including PU alumni) still mistake that competitive capitalist scaffolding 
for the post-scarcity building full of abundance the scaffolding surrounds 
(and likely always did. :-) And I'm definitely hoping for that intellectual 
scaffolding's removal in a controlled way, not a big crash like these where 
often people get hurt: :-(
     "Images of catastrophically collapsed scaffolds"
     http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=scaffolding+collapse
Here is my young child's contribution to this essay. And I have also taken 
perhaps too much time from our relationship to write this, sorry, so that is 
another contribution. So if this essay helps anything, thank in part my kid, 
who helps make me a better person every day. From:
    "Fighting Fire Trucks" by Larry Shapiro
    http://www.amazon.com/Fighting-Fire-Trucks-Enthusiast-Color/dp/0760305951
    "Chapter 5. Special Units. Workers didn't need to be told what the 
creaking noises meant as they ascended the construction elevator outside the 
26-story building in Times Square. They quickly shouted over their radios 
that the scaffold was about to come down, alerting pedestrians and 
co-workers alike to get clear. Moments later with a loud crushing sound, 14 
floors of steel dropped the equivalent of one story to rest on the bottom 10 
floors. One of the two elevator tracks came raining down on a neighboring 
building and the street below. The incident would turn out to require a fire 
department presence for several days. The Mobile Command Post was ordered to 
the scene as a base for chiefs and other supervisory personnel. "
   That metaphor of dedicated brave people helping the current 
partially-collapsed economic "scarcity" scaffolding come down in a 
controlled fashion to reveal a beautiful and joyful "post-scarcity" society 
for everybody is what I'd suggest a prospective Princeton student meditate 
on. :-) And then she or he can ask the hard questions about whether 
Princeton (and perhaps then grad school) is a good investment of time to 
help realize that future. It's also a scaffolding built using dollars as war 
time "ration units", so more dollars and more financial obesity aren't going 
to fix the problem in the end (Princeton's main selling point in the public 
imagination). ...
   But how can we ensure the collapse of money as scaffolding for society 
happens in a more orderly and safer way than a catastrophe? Even just the 
catastrophe of avoidable suffering through ignorance and poverty for some 
extra years for many people on the planet? As someone suggested on 
slashdot.org a while back, the year the food replicator is invented by 
capitalism, everyone will starve from economic forces. :-(
   That's the sort of problem that will challenge prospective Princeton 
students down the road in their careers. And not just in some distant 
future, but in the next ten to twenty years, perhaps even before someone 
starting PU next year can get tenure -- or maybe a third post-doc. :-( And 
such a prospective Princeton student has to ask themselves, is Princeton 
University (the current flagship of global capitalism) the right place to 
find or make answers to those sort of problems? I frankly do not know, 
having been out of the physical university community for so long -- but 
based on the current issue of PAW alone, I suspect the answer is still, "Not 
yet". :-(
"""

Talking about dealing with scaffolding of artificial scarcity vs. 
envisioning and building a society with genuine global abundance for all 
might be a way to think about this issue.

Related:
http://www.capitalismhitsthefan.com/
http://www.moneyasdebt.net/
http://www.google.com/#hl=en&source=hp&q=basic+incom
http://www.beyondajoblessrecovery.org/2009/10/03/why-limited-demand-means-joblessness/

--Paul Fernhout
http://www.pdfernhout.net/