[p2p-research] A joint statement on P2P and post-scarcity thinking

[Paul D. Fernhout]

Franz Nahrada wrote:
 > We know we don´t speak for everybody, since we are a pluralistic community
 > and we seek commonalities  between divergent views, but that does not mean
 > that we don’t have a concern about the efficiency of what we are doing.

Let me say at the outset, on a practical basis, I agree with much of the 
spirit of the rest of what you wrote, and I feel it is Franz and Michel's 
prerogative as initiators and leaders of their respective groups 
(globalvillages and P2P foundation) to say this.

With that, said, some clarifications may be in order, as below, from another 
one of the post-scarcity abundance advocates like me. :-) Nathan made his 
own comments as well.

 > In
 > this context, we feel the need to distinguish the P2P theory view from
 > post scarcity assumptions that have received such a prominent place on the
 > P2P research mailing list.

Fair enough. Yes, I've been taking on some of the gloomy thinking about Peak 
(Whale) Oil here and elsewhere. :-)

 > To make a strong statement: P2P (and also GlobalVillages) is not about
 > post – scarcity, but about restoring the right balance between scarcity
 > and abundance – which is an alltogether different thing.

I'm not sure what is meant by "restoring the balance" here?

Is this a suggestion "artificial scarcity" has a role to play in a good 
society? Maybe it does, to the degree hierarchies have an artificially 
scarce number of slots at the top, yet hierarchies are often a valuable part 
of life (see Manuel de Landa).
   http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/meshwork.htm
"But even if we managed to promote not only heterogeneity, but diversity 
articulated into a meshwork, that still would not be a perfect solution. 
After all, meshworks grow by drift and they may drift to places where we do 
not want to go. The goal-directedness of hierarchies is the kind of property 
that we may desire to keep at least for certain institutions. Hence, 
demonizing centralization and glorifying decentralization as the solution to 
all our problems would be wrong. An open and experimental attitude towards 
the question of different hybrids and mixtures is what the complexity of 
reality itself seems to call for. ..."

 > It does not believe that technology by itself provides any complete social
 > solution, but it is always embedded in and driven by particular social and
 > political logics

I agree the two are interrelated; something related I posted to the Open 
Manufacturing list
"Getting to 100 social-technical points" 
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/a7abadb8867dae79?hl=en
"""
One can think of it this simplified way. Imagine abundance for all takes a
society earning 100 "social-technical" points. :-) These points come from
the multiplication of the "social" points times the "technical" points.
So, 50 * 2 = 100.
Or, 2 * 50 = 100.
or, 10 * 10 = 100.
Social points might be things like learning to share better, or learning to
get along with each other better in resolving conflicts with less damage, or
in general, even eventually a global mindshift:
    "Global Mindshift: The Wombat"
    http://www.globalcommunity.org/flash/wombat.shtml
Technical points are like the ones we are usually talking about here, how to
make things efficiently and effectively. Let us consider three scenarios for 
these points, with the numbers as above.
"""

And then there is the Langdon Winner point that artifacts have politics, 
just like politics produces artifacts. :-) Once we build a certain 
infrastructure, it usually makes certain actions easiery while making other 
actions harder.

 > For example, automation is very much driven by capitalist competition to
 > be more productive than other market players.

This is a half-truth (even if a lot of truth in practice over the last few 
hundred years).

If we look at dogs or potatoes, there we see examples of self-replicating 
technologies that have been selectively bred for various characteristics 
over thousands of years (so, from way before capitalism). Breeding dogs 
better at hunting for humans, or breeding bigger and tastier potatoes, was 
something worth doing in its own sake to save human labor. So, this impulse 
has been around for a long time.

http://archaeology.about.com/od/domestications/qt/dogs.htm
"Dog history has been studied recently using mitochondrial DNA, which 
suggests that wolves and dogs split into different species around 100,000 
years ago; but whether humans had anything to do with that, no one really 
knows. Recent mtDNA analysis (Boyko et al.), suggests that the origin and 
location of dog domestication, long thought to be in east Asia, is in some 
doubt. ... A burial site in Germany called Bonn-Oberkassel has joint human 
and dog interments dated to 14,000 years ago. The earliest domesticated dog 
found in China is at the early Neolithic (7000-5800 BC) Jiahu site in Henan 
Province. European Mesolithic sites like Skateholm (5250-3700 BC) in Sweden 
have dog burials, proving the value of the furry beasts to hunter-gatherer 
settlements. Danger Cave in Utah is the earliest case of dog burial in the 
Americas, at about 11,000 years ago. "

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potato
"Wild potato species occur from the United States to Uruguay and Peru.[2] 
Genetic testing of the wide variety of cultivars and wild species suggest 
that the potato has a single origin in the area of southern Peru,[3] from a 
species in the Solanum brevicaule complex. Although Peru is essentially the 
birthplace of the potato, today over 99% of all cultivated potatoes 
worldwide are descendants of a subspecies indigenous to south-central 
Chile.[4] Based on historical records, local agriculturalists, and DNA 
analyses, the most widely cultivated variety worldwide, Solanum tuberosum 
ssp. tuberosum, is believed to be indigenous to the Chiloé Archipelago where 
it was cultivated as long as 10,000 years ago.[5][6]"

 > It is absolutely not sure
 > that autonomous communities would choose to totally abolish manual work.

Sure, to the extent it is fun, why would they? But it it is not fun, then it 
can be rethought.
   "The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black
   http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html

Subject to how generally there are aspects of work that can be positive in 
promoting community and character:
  "Buddhist Economics"
  http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/buddhist_economics/english.html

Lots of people like to garden, raise dogs, tend flocks of goats, and so on, 
because it can be fun and interesting and can help others.

Hunter/Gatherers had a lot of fun too, as long as the work is occasional and 
interesting:
   http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

Consider the Cuba of today. Is Cuba not going to automate something that is 
very tedious because it is "socialist"? If Cuba had more resources, I'd 
expect it to automate things that were unpleasant *faster* than in the USA 
where obviously exploiting workers is more acceptable. Granted, one might 
argue aspects of any hierarchical society, including Cuba, may be 
dysfunctional in practice, but as far as ideology goes, you'd expect 
socialist and communist countries to automate as quickly as possible, as 
long as they are not trapped in some notion of "make work" because they 
believe in a need of a link between work and a right to consume (as in the 
USA). (And some might, for political reasons.)

My version of the famous slogan: "From each according to his or her 
abilities and interests; to each according to his or her needs and 
reasonable wants".

 > It is totally legitimate that communities or countries would choose
 > industrious development paths preserving and augmenting direct human
 > involvement in material production.

Sure. See also "The Skills of Xanadu" for a notion of enjoyable manual labor:
   http://p2pfoundation.net/Skills_of_Xanadu

Or Charles Fourier:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fourier

Or here:
   "The Case for Working With Your Hands "
   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/24/magazine/24labor-t.html
(Note, despite the title, the point there is you are working with *both* 
your mind and your hands, not as a mindless robot doing repetitive labor).

Or here:
   "Blue Collar Independent Scholar"
http://unconventionalideas.wordpress.com/2009/09/09/blue-collar-independent-scholar/

Or, as above, Bob Black.

 > For example, an agricultural community may want to preserve its
 > traditional ways of life – and that is a freedom we want everybody to have.

But, with the above said on the joys and benefits of manual labor, a lot of 
agricultural labor exploits women historically, so they might have a lot to 
say about that.  :-) Although often they feel they have no voice. :-( Or 
change is too risky (going to a city and getting exploited or worse there).

Contrast:
  "The Autonomous Grape-Vine Pruner"
http://roboticnation.blogspot.com/2009/04/autonomous-grape-vine-pru...
"A robot with a sophisticated vision system and sophisticated arms is able 
to prune grape vines on a twig-by-twig basis."
with:
   "Cucumber Pickers of Belarus"
   http://englishrussia.com/?p=2033
where ten people are laying in the equipment a tractor pulls (at personal 
risk and stress).

There are reasons farming is one of the most dangerous occupations. Those 
people don't look too happy. It is ironic both the robot video and the 
cucumber picker video end with a bunch of men standing around admiring the 
technology. :-) But in the first one, the robots do the work; in the other, 
mainly women do the work it seems.

Mentioned here by me:
  http://globalvillages.ning.com/profiles/blogs/pictures-of-life-in-a-russian

This is, in general, a large issue with very complex politics, how 
communities want to change, who gets to make these decisions, and so on. And 
it trades off the joy many get from preserving patterns important to them 
against other joys in life. It's a hard problem.

 > Maybe we can say that our contacts with local activist communities have
 > made us aware that the identification with post-scarcity thinking is
 > politically problematic – in particular the image of the „magical
 > technical fix“.

I think both Michel and Franz are correct in identifying aspects of 
"post-scarcity" that are not aligned with social-justice etc, especially of 
the Kurzweil-ian/libertarian flavor that tends to get the most media attention.

But there are other thoughts on this, like James Hughes' "democratic 
transhumanism":
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_transhumanism

Then there is as well as my own different take on it, like my recent post 
about "No Time for the Singularity":
http://listcultures.org/pipermail/p2presearch_listcultures.org/2009-September/004618.html

So, it is more complex than thinking all people talking about post-scarcity 
themes have a unified perspective. I myself tend to not identify with a lot 
of transhumanist themes, even if there is some overlap, but as someone whose 
done graduate work in Ecology&Evolution, historically, I know nature abhors 
a vaccuum, and space is a big vacuum. :-)

But this is a common thing to happen, that within the community one is in, 
it is easy to see the diversity, but within another group you hear about you 
just see one thing. On FastForward Radio, in one episode, Joseph Jackson 
talks about "The Fundamental Attribution" error in relation to that:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fundamental_attribution_error

However, that does not mean Michel and Franz are not correct in some sense 
in building a strategy based on common perceptions of a post-scarcity 
movement. I'm just pointing this issue out.

 > We do not want to stop the dialogue, but we would like to make clear that
 > no consensus can be assumed on that - and as a movement we do not want to
 > be identified with it.

Well, fair enough. Again, I don't want to be identified as a "trashumanist" 
for similar reasons, many go way too far IMHO, especially of the 
Kurzweil-ian libertarian direction, even though there is some overlap. James 
Hughes in the link above makes an interesting 3D graph with different issues 
on different axis. Though even that does not capture all the diversity of 
various possibilities (one might, say, be a transhumanist but still 
anti-abortion/pro-life and against foetal stem cell use for that reason).

 > It is not a central message, it is merely the hope
 > of some, of people that we do respect but also who carry a much stronger
 > burden of proof.
 > People who make extraordinary claims are bound more than
 > others to show practical implementations.
 > All the material we have in the P2P wiki are actually existing projects
 > and it is out of the observation of these existing social practises that
 > we draw our conclusions.

There is a central problem here. It is the same in AI research. People are 
all Googling stuff now like "why there is not AI",
   http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=why+there+is+not+AI
without realizing Google is, by 1950s standards, one of the most amazing AIs 
one could have imagined. :-) Essentially, anything computers can do now is 
deemed "not AI". Chess playing use to be considered AI. Now computers can 
beat chess grandmasters, but now chess is no longer considered AI. Speech 
recognition was once AI, now almost any mobile phone has voice dialing, so 
speech recognition is not AI anymore. Pattern recognition was once AI, now 
you can buy a $1000 or so device to stick on an assembly line somewhere to 
be trained to spot bad parts visually, but that's not AI anymore. Those 
things are now just "technology" we expect to work the way we want it to. 
Granted, "strong AI" eludes us, perhaps fortunately, but see, we hand even 
then to make up a new term to exclude everything that works. :-)
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strong_AI
Soon having a conversation won't be considered "strong AI", as many speech 
systems can do that in restricted problem domains.

So, the same thing applies to post-scarcity technology, to a lesser degree. 
People for decades like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay, Stewart Brand, and others 
had hopes that better communication tools (the internet and personal 
computers) and better energy technology (wind and solar) and better design 
(simulation) would make the world a better place, including socially. Now 
that we have those technologies, it is easy to think, well, those are not 
"post-scarcity" technologies of abundance. It is now nanotech 3D printing 
that is post-scarcity, not computer-designed windmills or Nanosolar PV 
panels or computer controlled reverse osmosis water filters or whatever. 
Those existing things are now just "technology". Printing solar panels 
cheaper than coal? That's just the way it is...
   "Printing Solar Panels"
   http://broadcast.oreilly.com/2009/01/printing-solar-panels.html

So, windmills, solar panels, water filters, and so on are not considered 
"proof" of abundance theory. :-)

They are just proof of the status-quo now. :-)

 > STRATEGY
 > P2P is operating in a world which is characterised by 2 main factors,
 > mostly wrongly perceived:
 > - Scarcity of natural resources, which is increasingly accelerated by a
 > dysfunctional mode of production and is putting us into ever more serious
 > planetary management problems.

Except aluminum used to cost more than platinum and gold. But now we throw 
aluminum away. Explain that? Example:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#History
"Before the Hall-Héroult process was developed, aluminium was exceedingly 
difficult to extract from its various ores. This made pure aluminium more 
valuable than gold. Bars of aluminium were exhibited alongside the French 
crown jewels at the Exposition Universelle of 1855, and Napoleon III was 
said to have reserved a set of aluminium dinner plates for his most honoured 
guests."

See also:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simon-Ehrlich_wager

One explaination:
   http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.02/ffsimon_pr.html
"""
   Julian Simon: The facts are fundamental.
   Garrett Hardin: The facts are not fundamental. The theory is fundamental. 
- from a 1982 debate with the UC Santa Barbara biologist The 
doomslayer-doomsayer debate, Simon thinks, is an opposition between fact and 
bad theory, a case of empirical reality versus abstract principles that 
purport to define the way things work but don't.
   "It's the difference," he says, "between a speculative analysis of what 
must happen versus my empirical analysis of what has happened over the long 
sweep of history."
   The paradox is that those abstract principles and speculative analyses 
seem so very logical and believable, whereas the facts themselves, the story 
of what has happened, appear wholly illogical and impossible to explain. 
After all, people are fruitful and they multiply but the stores of raw 
materials in the earth's crust certainly don't, so how can it be possible 
that, as the world's population doubles, the price of raw materials is cut 
in half?
   It makes no sense. Yet it has happened. So there must be an explanation.
   And there is: resources, for the most part, don't grow on trees. People 
produce them, they create them, whether it be food, factories, machines, new 
technologies, or stockpiles of mined, refined, and purified raw materials.
   "Resources come out of people's minds more than out of the ground or 
air," says Simon. "Minds matter economically as much as or more than hands 
or mouths. Human beings create more than they use, on average. It had to be 
so, or we would be an extinct species."
   The defect of the Malthusian models, superficially plausible but 
invariably wrong, is that they leave the human mind out of the equation. 
"These models simply do not comprehend key elements of people - the 
imaginative and creative."
   As for the future, "This is my long-run forecast in brief," says Simon. 
"The material conditions of life will continue to get better for most 
people, in most countries, most of the time, indefinitely. Within a century 
or two, all nations and most of humanity will be at or above today's Western 
living standards.
"""

So, you are IMHO making a fundamentally flawed assumption with no empirical 
evidence. That's not to say making predictions is not useful. But they 
should be predictions based on the obvious observable facts. Exponential 
growth is an observable fact. Printed solar panels as well as green leaves 
are observable facts. Space travel and Bioshere II are observable facts. 
Artificial islands in the sea are observable facts. And so on...

For example, let's look at some facts. Macau has a population density of 
about 19000 people per square kilometer, the highest in the world. (The USA 
has 31 people per square kilometer, Belgium has 341).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density

But even in that worst case in the entire planet,
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macau
that is 19 people per 1000 square meters, or about one person per 50 square 
meters.

An area of 50 square meters is about enough space to grow enough about a 
third the food for one person of a good diet.
"Development and research program for a soil-based bioregenerative 
agriculture system to feed a four person crew at a Mars base"
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science?_ob=ArticleURL&_udi=B6V3S-47RB619-F&_user=10&_rdoc=1&_fmt=&_orig=search&_sort=d&_docanchor=&view=c&_searchStrId=1009920187&_rerunOrigin=google&_acct=C000050221&_version=1&_urlVersion=0&_userid=10&md5=c844006fd6011f15746cb7d353fe7e36

So, there is some pressure there, but not as much as one might suppose.

At 30% conversion efficiency, and 1/6 average of peak, it is about 2.5kW 
continuous solar power. That is about what a person needs for a US lifestyle 
done energy efficiently.

What is the weight of the top ten meters of soil under 50 square meters (500 
cubic meters of dirt and rock)? Soil weight about 1000 kg per cubic meters; 
rock twice that or more. So, that is about half a million kg of matter do do 
stuff with per person. Cars weigh about 1000 kg. So that is the weight of 
one thousand cars. You want more than than, dig deeper. :-) Or process 
seawater from the China sea.

So, even in Macau, the worst possible place in terms of resource scarcity 
related to population density, there can be plenty of power, plenty of food 
(admittedly, some would be imported), plenty of matter to build stuff in the 
Earth's crust:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crust_%28geology%29

And then there is the ocean and outer space...

However, since the human body only uses about 100 watts of power, if one 
could convert electricity to glucose directly, assuming a 35% conversion 
there would be enough energy there to support about ten times the current 
population in Maccau, off only local sunlight converted to glucose. :-)

Again, note that the population density of Macau is 50 times that of 
Belgium, and 5000 times that of the USA. I'm just picking the most extreme 
case I can to prove a point, that there is plenty of resources to go around 
if we use them with imagination. Really, the deeper issue is, what kind of 
communities do we want to build? What kinds of lives and relationships do 
people want to have?

 > We are in friendly terms with the
 > environmental movement(s) that adresses these issues and becomes more
 > practical every day (renewables, solar, distributed energy...)

There is, as James Hughes points out, an unfortunate confluence of many 
aspects of the green movement and an anti-technology bias. There are many 
good reasons for it, of course. But it is a problem area:
   http://www.changesurfer.com/Acad/DemocraticTranshumanism.htm
"""
The Estrangement of Technology and the Left
So why did these two strains of thought become estranged in the late 20th 
century? Why are so many contemporary social democrats, feminists, and 
Greens suspicious and hostile to biotechnologies, computers and science in 
general? The answer probably starts with the left-romantic traditions that 
grew up in reaction to modern technology. William Morris’ pastoralist 
visions of a deindustrialized socialism, Luddite machine-wrecking by the 
proto-worker’s movement, and absorption into pseudo-science, spiritualism 
and back-to-land communalism by bohemian radicals were all reactions to 
capitalism. The romantics and Luddites associated technology with 
capitalism, and thought that they could create a healthier, more egalitarian 
society only by fighting the new technologies. In fact, in the Communist 
Manifesto Marx and Engels specifically warns against clerical, aristocratic 
and petit-bourgeois socialists who advance pastoralism and pre-industrial 
production as the cure to social ills.
   But it wasn’t until World War Two that the generally tight association of 
the Left with science, technology and reason began to be superceded by the 
romantic tradition. Left interest in re-engineering the nature of Man was 
silenced by Nazi eugenics. The gas chambers revealed that modern technology 
could be used by a modern state for horrific uses, and the atomic bomb posed 
a permanent technological threat to humanity’s existence. The ecological 
movement suggested that industrial activity was threatening all life on the 
planet, while the anti-nuclear power movement inspired calls for 
renunciation of specific types of technology altogether. The counter-culture 
attacked positivism, and lauded pre-industrial ways of life. While the 
progressives and New Dealers had built the welfare state to be a tool of 
reason and social justice, the New Left joined cultural conservatives and 
free-market libertarians in attacking it as a stultifying tool of 
oppression, contributing to the general decline in faith in democratic 
governments.
   Intellectual trends such as deconstruction began to cast doubt on the 
“master narratives” of political and scientific progress, while cultural 
relativism eroded progressives’ faith that industrialized secular liberal 
democracies were in fact superior to pre-industrial and Third World 
societies. As the Left gave up on the idea of a sexy, high-tech vision of a 
radically democratic future, libertarians became associated with 
technological progress. Techno-enthusiasm on the Left was supplanted by 
pervasive Luddite suspicion about the products of the corporate consumerist 
machine. Celebrating technology was something GE and IBM did in TV ads to 
cover up their complicity in napalming babies. Activists fight the machine.
"""

So, just be careful, considering that history, of forming technology policy 
based on association with some in the environmental movement (however well 
meaning). It's a big set of social problems. But it's not clear to me many 
Greens and some others have a well-thought-through cohesive position on 
technology. They are right to criticize specific technologies and specific 
infrastructures, but, remember, dogs and corn and potatoes and rice are some 
of the most advanced biotech we've come up with to-date. Do they suggest 
going back to having wolves as family pets instead of dogs, or going back to 
tiny plant yields from pre-human cultivars? Probably not -- wolves are 
unpredictable, and small potatoes are, well, small potatoes. :-) So, Greens 
need to think through their position on technology better IMHO.

 > - Our own priority as P2P movement is adressing the second factor, which
 > is the enclosure of the intellectual and scientific and cultural commons
 > which is being addressed by the „Open Everything Movements“.

And that's a good thing. And it's fair to limit one's focus.

Still, even as Wendel Berry suggests, lots of things need to get reconsidered:
   "In Distrust of Movements"
http://thegreenhorns.wordpress.com/essays/essay-in-distrust-of-movements-by-wendell-berry/
"""
What we must do above all, I think, is try to see the problem in its full 
size and difficulty. If we are concerned about land abuse, then we must see 
that this is an economic problem. Every economy is, by definition, a 
land-using economy. If we are using our land wrongly, then something is 
wrong with our economy. This is difficult. It becomes more difficult when we 
recognize that, in modern times, every one of us is a member of the economy 
of everybody else.
   But if we are concerned about land abuse, we have begun a profound work 
of economic criticism. Study of the history of land use (and any local 
history will do) informs us that we have had for a long time an economy that 
thrives by undermining its own foundations. Industrialism, which is the name 
of our economy, and which is now virtually the only economy of the world, 
has been from its beginnings in a state of riot. It is based squarely upon 
the principle of violence toward everything on which it depends, and it has 
not mattered whether the form of industrialism was communist or capitalist 
or whatever; the violence toward nature, human communities, traditional 
agricultures and local economies has been constant. The bad news is coming 
in, literally, from all over the world. Can such an economy be fixed without 
being radically changed? I don’t think it can.
   The Captains of Industry have always counselled the rest of us to be 
“realistic”. Let us, therefore, be realistic. Is it realistic to assume that 
the present economy would be just fine if only it would stop poisoning the 
air and water, or if only it would stop soil erosion, or if only it would 
stop degrading watersheds and forest ecosystems, or if only it would stop 
seducing children, or if only it would quit buying politicians, or if only 
it would give women and favoured minorities an equitable share of the loot? 
Realism, I think, is a very limited programme, but it informs us at least 
that we should not look for bird eggs in a cuckoo clock.
   OR WE CAN SHOW the hopelessness of single-issue causes and single-issue 
movements by following a line of thought such as this: We need a continuous 
supply of uncontaminated water. Therefore, we need (among other things) 
soil-and-water-conserving ways of agriculture and forestry that are not 
dependent on monoculture, toxic chemicals, or the indifference and violence 
that always accompany big-scale industrial enterprises on the land.
   Therefore, we need diversified, small-scale land economies that are 
dependent on people. Therefore, we need people with the knowledge, skills, 
motives and attitudes required by diversified, small-scale land economies. 
And all this is clear and comfortable enough, until we recognize the 
question we have come to: Where are the people? ...
"""

I don't agree entirely with Wendel Berry's conclusion -- for example, cities 
actually can be tremendously more sustainable environmentally in some ways, 
doing things more efficiently, but still, he's right that we need to rethink 
a lot of things. And we need educated people (not "schooled" people).

By the way, Jane Jacobs might suggest that as long as places like villages 
end up as city supply regions, and subject to the powers of the cities, it 
is the cities that might be in most need of ideological reform.

One can't deny that as long as villages are co-dependant economically with 
cities, if cities can produce cheap products of all sorts, villages will 
have a tough time surviving producing those same products if their markets 
are open to city competition (now easy through the internet). Villages could 
move to entirely self-sufficiency, but they risk either becoming isolated 
like North Korea, or they need to invent a very advanced village technology 
that is as capable of producing what people want and need at prices 
comparable to city prices. Maybe they can be somewhat higher due to 
convenience and security and self-determination, but not ten times or a 
hundred times higher for most things.

This, is, in general, a problem ever economic actor around the globe is 
facing right now as technology changes exponentially in many areas. 
Eventually the rate of core technological change in some areas may settle 
down as an S-curve, but right now, it is fast and hard to follow change.

Anyway, a village technology is an interesting question, but if it does not 
start from the premise of being about as good as what can be found in cities 
now in most areas, as well as taking in account ongoing changes, it will 
just be rejected ultimately, IMHO. A few might embrace any specific 
infrastructure ideologically, as a form of "voluntary simplicity" like the 
Amish, but somehow I doubt most will -- unless we have a global mindshift 
and even most of those in the cities long for something different in some ways.

Now, we may have that mindshift. We don't need as many fancy gadgets in some 
ways. But the core issues impacting most people are things like "work" and 
"compulsory school", and unless those are on the table for change, going up 
or down in gadgetry won't change most people's lives that significantly 
IMHO, even if some people might live longer in some scenarios with the right 
gadgetry.

Even the Amish adopt newer technologies, but in a more thoughtful way than 
most of us, IMHO, considering the impact on their sense of community. :-) 
So, perhaps we are talking about transitioning villages to an intentional 
community lifestyle similar to the Amish in some ways? I can't say that is 
entirely a bad thing. But even the Amish survive in part because people in 
the larger world around them who like them work to protect their interests 
at that level [like legal actions). But even in the Amish case, a nuclear 
war would destroy the Amish same as the rest of society. So, it is a choice 
with various ramifications, of what one wants to be engaged in or not 
engaged in. One might even argue the Amish do their part to prevent nuclear 
war by providing a good example. :-)

So, anyway, when you start talking about the *specifics* of what should be 
in those commonses, then you have to wrestle with these issues.

 > Opening up
 > the realm of ideas and allowing the massive collaboration of the general
 > intellect of the world is an essential condition of mastering the
 > ecological crisis and to the fulfillment of the better promises and
 > achievements of our civilisation through the building of a new
 > civilisation or rather new culture.

Well, yes and no. I mean, yes I want to believe that. :-) But, in practice, 
consider Cuba or China:
   "Our One-Party Democracy "
   http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1
"""
Watching both the health care and climate/energy debates in Congress, it is 
hard not to draw the following conclusion: There is only one thing worse 
than one-party autocracy, and that is one-party democracy, which is what we 
have in America today.
   One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a 
reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have 
great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult 
but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 
21st century. It is not an accident that China is committed to overtaking us 
in electric cars, solar power, energy efficiency, batteries, nuclear power 
and wind power. China’s leaders understand that in a world of exploding 
populations and rising emerging-market middle classes, demand for clean 
power and energy efficiency is going to soar. Beijing wants to make sure 
that it owns that industry and is ordering the policies to do that, 
including boosting gasoline prices, from the top down.
   Our one-party democracy is worse. The fact is, on both the energy/climate 
legislation and health care legislation, only the Democrats are really 
playing. With a few notable exceptions, the Republican Party is standing, 
arms folded and saying “no.” Many of them just want President Obama to fail. 
Such a waste. Mr. Obama is not a socialist; he’s a centrist. But if he’s 
forced to depend entirely on his own party to pass legislation, he will be 
whipsawed by its different factions. ...
"""

Now, of course I am all for peer activities towards sustainability. But as 
Manuel de Landa suggests, every real system is some synthesis of meshworks 
and hierarchies.

As I pointed out in my previous post "No time for the singularity", there 
are still more than enough nuclear bombs to wipe everyone out in a short 
time. One will not see threats like that diminish without either getting off 
the planet or bringing big governments back under some sort of humane 
control (as Freeman Dyson suggested, starting to see WMDs like nukes as an 
absolute moral evil like slavery, not a practical necessity, again as 
slavery used to be seen).

 > But there is a third necessary factor that is crucial for a thrivable
 > solution which would allow for further human evolution:  without true
 > active participation of all in the design and production of our material
 > life, without the involvement of the majority of human beings into the
 > effort to find a new social contract, we will not be able to reach the
 > goals of a better life on this planet.

Again, I'd really like to believe that. But the fact is, while most people 
might be followers if they saw some sense in it, most people are too busy 
dealing with work and compulsory schooling (and child-rearing) to give much 
thought to it.

The fact is, technologically, we can rethink our infrastructure by bringing 
together what millions of people have already developed and improved. This 
may only take the work of some core thousands of people at first. Sure, 
deploying it is an issue, as is refining it. But, for example, plenty of 
people know how to make better-insulated homes that don't need furnaces yet 
don't get moldy.
http://www.examiner.com/x-16053-Germany-Headlines-Examiner~y2009m7d12-No-furnace-required-a-German-idea-catches-on-in-the-US
So, there is plenty to draw from.

But sure, socially, you are right. We could use a global mindshift:
   http://www.global-mindshift.org/memes/wombat.swf
And we also could use more appropriate technology (and that doesn't mean 
crude technology). And we could use better ways to do local subsistence 
production. And we could use more of a gift economy (even if just 
digitally). And we could use a basic income and universal health care, to 
deal with market failures. Except maybe for the last, we don't entirely 
"need" those if we had less corruption and self-dealing in government, but 
all would help, especially given corruption and self-dealing in government.

But, when you play through those trends, if we got all those things, I think 
you end up at a post-scarcity society IMHO. It doesn't mean you end up where 
Ray Kurzweil envisions us in his techno-libertarian paradise designed by him 
for his own ends with a slave AI genie that fulfills his every whim, but 
there are many, many alternative visions by many writers. James P. Hogan has 
some. Ursula K. Le Guin has some. Iain Banks has some. There are many others.

At least, for me, perhaps most simply it comes down to looking at something 
like this video Ryan posted and, seriously, thinking about what this means 
for the value of most human labor real soon now:
   "Advanced Robot hand and arm"
http://www.hizook.com/blog/2009/08/03/high-speed-robot-hand-demonstrates-dexterity-and-skillful-manipulation

Seriously, take a look at that video and then reread your position 
statement. I'm not saying it will make you change it, but it will show it in 
a new light, as being about choices.

Ursula K. Le Guin has that theme in many books, about choices and serving a 
balance.

Still, we can talk all we want about saving villages or whatever, but if 
human labor is soon worthless, how are the villagers going to pay their 
property taxes? Or buy stuff in the market? Or afford medical care in the USA?

They just won't be able to do any of that, as long as there is a link 
between having a job and having a right to consume. As was said in 1964:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
   http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm
"The continuance of the income-through jobs link as the only major mechanism 
for distributing effective demand—for granting the right to consume—now acts 
as the main brake on the almost unlimited capacity of a cybernated 
productive system."

So, we are making some choices about how we want to see things.

And we are even making choices about what sort of little mini-economies we 
want to allow to persist (like with tax policies or other regulations).

 > Therefore P2P has to join forces
 > with the third mass movement on this planet, which could roughly be
 > characterized as the social justice movement, involving the struggles of
 > workers, farmers, entrepreneurs and knowledge workers.

Sure. It's a good idea. Same as I said in the "No time for the singularity" 
post. Ray Kurzweil doesn't see it that way in general (being economically 
libertarian and heavily rewarded for being a CEO of a capitalistic 
enterprise). But I agree those things should link up.

But you still can't deny that robot video. That's stuff in the lab now (that 
is in Japan), But there are versions outside the lab. You have to see that 
economically it makes sense to deploy it as it improves -- even in *China*. 
Then where does that leave everyone whose livelihood depends on "work" 
instead of "capital"? A race to the bottom for wages, as has already been 
happening in the USA with offshoring and increasing automation.
   "US families turn to food stamps as wages drop"
   http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/c1e698a2-9984-11de-ab8c-00144feabdc0.html

The jobs are not coming back IMHO. We're going to see massive structural 
changes before this is over (as Marshal Brain suggests). To make plans 
outside of that trend seems to invite the plans being out of touch with 
major trends and so more likely not to succeed.

 > We currenly see a strategic convergence of these three movements and we
 > think it is our own responsibility to help make it happen.

Make "what" happen? What is "it"?

That is the issue. There is not just one "it". From:
   http://www.blessedunrest.com/
"""
Paul Hawken has spent over a decade researching organizations dedicated to 
restoring the environment and fostering social justice.
 From billion-dollar nonprofits to single-person dot.causes, these groups 
collectively comprise the largest movement on earth, a movement that has no 
name, leader, or location, and that has gone largely ignored by politicians 
and the media. Like nature itself, it is organizing from the bottom up, in 
every city, town, and culture. and is emerging to be an extraordinary and 
creative expression of people's needs worldwide.
   Blessed Unrest explores the diversity of the movement, its brilliant 
ideas, innovative strategies, and hidden history, which date back many 
centuries. A culmination of Hawken's many years of leadership in the 
environmental and social justice fields, it will inspire and delight any and 
all who despair of the world's fate, and its conclusions will surprise even 
those within the movement itself. Fundamentally, it is a description of 
humanity's collective genius, and the unstoppable movement to reimagine our 
relationship to the environment and one another.
"""

So, that both supports what you are talking about, but also in a sense 
undermines it as far as a sense of "responsibility". :-)

"Think globally, act locally, plan modestly". (Renee Dubois)

Now, that may be hard advice to follow when you lead an organization about 
creating movements in a socially entrepreneur way like for Franz and Michel. 
:-) They are our one-in-ten-million:
   http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0907/p02s05-lign.html
"It doesn't happen that often. There is only 1 social entrepreneur for every 
10 million of the rest of us, according to calculations of Ashoka, an 
organization that funds social entrepreneurs around the world. Ashoka 
founder Bill Drayton bases his calculations on nearly 30 years' worth of 
seeking out the elusive combination of vision and passion that social 
entrepreneurs put into practice. "The core defining element is that they 
simply cannot come to rest ... until their dream has become a new pattern 
across all of society," says Mr. Drayton. "This is very different from 
everyone else: the scholar or the artist expresses an idea, and they're 
happy. The manager ... make[s] the company work. The social worker, the 
professional help people ... make their lives better. None of that would 
remotely satisfy the social entrepreneur. Their job is to change the system.""

I don't want to discourage you. I'm more in the scholar or artist category 
myself (if that), happy enough to put out some ideas. We need social 
entrepreneurs. Entrepreneur away. :-)

Still, these trends are just something to think about, how to best be part 
of all the "blessed unrest".

 > We believe that
 > a perceived identification between P2P and post scarcity is counter to
 > that goal, because post-scarcity is intentionally ignoring important
 > issues raised by the other two movements, i.e. the ecological and social
 > justice movement.

Well, again, you are painting a large set of thoughts about abundance and 
post-scarcity with a broad brush. And it is mostly justified, but not entirely.

Still, as I said at the start, I could see how you might want to do that 
strategically, especially given that Ray Kurzweil and things like the 
Singularity University and others have dominated the media on this, coming 
from a libertarian perspective.

So, I certainly understand where you are coming from. I don't like a lot of 
things Kurzweil etc. say either. :-) But I am in the minority there.
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/fea3249d9aa19e9e?hl=en

As is, to some degree, someone like James Hughes with his own approach, in a 
minority there:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democratic_transhumanism
"""
Democratic transhumanism, a term coined by Dr. James Hughes in 2002, refers 
to the stance of transhumanists (advocates for the development and use of 
human enhancement technologies) who espouse liberal, social and/or radical 
democratic political views.[1][2][3][4]
   According to Hughes, the ideology "stems from the assertion that human 
beings will generally be happier when they take rational control of the 
natural and social forces that control their lives."[2]The ethical 
foundation of democratic transhumanism rests upon rule utilitarianism and 
non-anthropocentric personhood theory.[5]
   While raising objections both to right-wing and left-wing 
bioconservatism, and libertarian transhumanism, Hughes aims to encourage 
democratic transhumanists and their potential progressive allies to unite as 
a new social movement and influence biopolitical public policy.[2][4]
   An attempt to expand the middle ground between technorealism and 
techno-utopianism, democratic transhumanism can be seen as a radical form of 
techno-progressivism.[6]
"""

See also:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Techno-progressivism
"""
Techno-progressivism, technoprogressivism, tech-progressivism or 
techprogressivism (a portmanteau combining "technoscience-focused" and 
"progressivism") is a stance of active support for the convergence of 
technological change and social change. Techno-progressives argue that 
technological developments can be profoundly empowering and emancipatory 
when they are regulated by legitimate democratic and accountable authorities 
to ensure that their costs, risks and benefits are all fairly shared by the 
actual stakeholders to those developments.[1][2]
"""

It's hard to find commonality sometimes. People have limited time. To be 
clear, I'm not saying your position is unreasonable. I can see a lot of 
sense in it from some perspectives. I'm just saying that you are making some 
of those choices based on assumptions which may or may not bear out.

 > Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation
 > Franz Nahrada, Global Villages Network

All the best.

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