[p2p-research] Non digital commons a lot more complicated than Free Software

[j.martin.pedersen]

Michel,

You are right to warn about "being stuck in critique" - or in any other
rhetoric, whether self-styled or based on established ideology - and I
shall be the first to lament conventional, unreflective leftist positions.

As the subject line indicates, virtual commons are within free culture
commonly, in general, considered in isolation from the materiality that
makes them possible and which constitutes one of the fastest growing
environmental threats. This is not an ideological point, but a technical
point, and it continues to be a hidden aspect of free culture and
virtual commons, and will remain hidden until the philosophy and
language from within the movements recognise the material dependency and
enormous energy consumption that digital commons entail. That was and is
all I am saying: do not be in denial.

Generally, on a personal note, I proceed from the principle that one
should not bother criticising something that one does not care for:
critique is an attempt to improve: preguntando caminamos - and the
questioning as we walk is of course also of our own footsteps and
direction (in fact, when building alternatives there is not much else to
question). Else, it would risk ending up like in some western New Age
community where everyone is smiling with joy, although they are furious
on the inside, with themselves and with each other - for the more
enlightened, the more happy, and so to admit to *not* be happy and *not*
on the verge of nirvana would signal a failure. So we smile. In short:
denial, repression and the danger of explosion.

I don't understand what you mean with those who "just don't get it" -
for my part I am quite sure that most people understand very easily that
energy and hardware don't just drop from the sky, but have to be
generated and produced and that this production is environmentally and
humanly costly, *if* they are made aware of that - but you seem to
suggest that *I* just don't get "it" - "it" being your world view. Well,
what is it that I don't get?

I have answered in more detail below - hoping that this can become
either a constructive exchange, or that we can just leave it here - with
a view to clearing up some of the misunderstandings that were reflected
in your responses (to what I was trying to say).

On 29/11/10 01:09, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> hi martin,
> 
> you say "berlin" was allergic to stances directly confronting capital, can
> you give some concrete examples?

I said we heard it time and again during the conference and in
meetings - even in pejorative terms with gestures and with overbearing
shrugs. I was actually rather shocked, not so much by the arrogance and
superiority of it, as the assumption that such denigrating statements
were OK to make and reflected a common(s) sense. This is no place for
specifics, as they are personal, - if you managed to _not_ notice I am
rather surprised - but in some sense it doesn't matter, while in others
it matters a lot:

The movements of peasants, landless and indigenous - as well as urban
radical movements - I imagine, outnumber the digital commoners; and
without land and its resources there can be no cyberspace. After all,
half the population is still rural and many urban dwellers rely upon
their villages to feed them in the city, as anyone who has ever been
doing development work on the frontiers of capitalism will know all too
well.

Since the expansion of cyberspace threatens the commoners of the land,
there needs to be some sort of mutual recognition of the this
inter-dependence. Every time the digital commons discourse ignores and
denies this material foundation, the problem is consolidated. If you see
yourself as a public intellectual, then you must realise - as Lessig,
Benkler et al. before you - that you to quite some extent have to take
on the responsibility as a central contributor to defining (refining?)
the discourse of those who follow. At this stage, the digital commons
discourse is saturated with politics that build on the misleading
(deliberately misleading! (I will document this on demand)) discourse
established by the Ivy League leaders who have defined the territory
intellectually - and done so in such a manner as to not only pose
minimal threat to capital interests, but indeed to be helpful for their
expansion.

The movements for the defense of commons first had their de facto rights
articulated in the Charter of Forests (ca. 1215-1225), and apart from
various great uprisings - the last, in this part of the world, during
the Spanish Revolution in the 1930s - it has been a slow, but safe
decay: from having collective right of access to land for food, fuel and
building materials to abstract, individual rights that can be suspended
in a state of emergency, which have become permanent features in the
contemporary world.


> one thing worries me though, you say that we should wait "that we are all on
> the same page", but surely, that cannot be a reason for inaction, until the
> magical moment when that would happen? this stance, waiting for "once we are
> all on the same page .. then let us move forward", is a guarantee for
> staying in the critical stage, with no movement towards concretely building
> the alternatives ...

I am not sure why you choose to (mis)understand what I said in this way,
but to clarify: You asked me for *specific* answers and I said that I do
not have any real answers at this stage. Why not? Because I consider the
development of answers, solutions and action plans as necessarily a
collective effort that has to come from within the movement(s) - we find
the answers as we walk on, asking each other, reflecting  critically,
avoiding gooey eyed denial - like moths staring into the virtual light.
At this stage, my contribution is merely a philosophical questioning of
the politics of free culture.

When it comes to the way in which digital commons are embedded in
natural resource systems and what can be done about it, I said that an
important first step is towards *acknowledging* that problem. This means
in very simple terms that if you have not acknowledged and recognised a
problem, it is going to be difficult to solve it. Everytime the politics
and development of the digital commons rest on the false assumptions of
immateriality, the materiality is obscured further.

I don't have the answers - and I don't think that anyone has The Answers
- but if any set of solutions are to be developed from within the
digital commons movement with respect to the problematic embedding in
and exploitation of natural resources (as carried out by mining and
nuclear etc etc.), then that embedding must be faced up to.

"On the same page", then, refers to a collective recognition of the
problem, which should be seen as a prerequisite to collective solving of
the problem. You project ideology and negativity into that proposition -
I don't know why - and claim it is critique that is not constructive. I
think denial is much less constructive than trying to come to terms with
problems.

However, without claiming this is an answer, I do regularly visit
communities where surfing is limited to a few hours a day, unless there
is a particularly strong wind or a lot of sunshine, because they are off
the grid. As such, one of the questions that one could ask, as we walk
and chew gum and whatever else you like to do, is where are our projects
hosted? What could we do to create (non-General Electric patent-based,
non-industrial scale) wind powered, communally owned hosting on recycled
hardware for digital commons?


> in any case, the pages of the p2p foundation blog are open to any news and
> comments about the land issue, non-eurocentric visions of history, and the
> material basis of the digital commons,

Yes, that is good, and so is this list, and that is why I brought up the
point.


> the key for me is to go beyond the stage and stance of critique, that others
> "just don't get it", towards actually injecting such perspectives in
> concrete discourse, and associated with constructive action,


I don't know where you get this from, but if it came from anything I
said, let me clarify: I never said that anyone "didn't get it" - I said
that as a culture - a cultural norm - the material embedding is not
recognised and in a variety of ways even obscured through philosophical
ideas and concepts of social organisation that - as the subject line
still reads, and which is how this exchange came about - "Non digital
commons a lot more complicated than Free Software". This is only true
insofar as you see Free Software and other digital commons as having no
material base. In fact, they are infinitely more complicated, since they
are a techno-virtual layer on top of ecosystems - or, as it were,
digital commons require a material, technostructural underpinning. In
other words, digital commons need to address their hardware and energy
use, as part of their organisational processes and they should have
support in doing so. This is not about rejecting digital commons that
are impure, but rather about a conscious move away from "impurity".
Purity we can leave to the religions, but that does not mean we should
deny certain problematic "impurities."


> I find it hard to imagine that the labour movement would have gotten
> anywhere without using print media to the full extent, which is what they
> not only did, but was actually there central focus;  creating print vehicle
> for agitprop was actually the core activity of the revolutionary movements

There are many readings of the labour movements - some of which argue
very well that social-democracy and later the welfare system spelled the
beginning of the end of the working class movements, particularly with
respect to local control over local infrastructure. Indeed, the very
notion of a "working class" expresses a defeat of commoners of the land
and, as noted by Colin Ward, the welfare system, after the crises of the
1930s and in order to rebuild after the war, in many communities in
England shifted power from local communities to central government over
schools, libraries and so on. If print had helped the labour movements,
the centralised curriculum has long since subverted that advantage.

I don't agree with what seems to be your take on history and I think
that the writing of the history of the commoners rendered working
classes has only just begun - there is a lot to discuss and I am very
wary of anyone claiming to see a full picture of those particular
histories with specific reference to the transformation of the field of
forces within which they operate.

This is a very good place to start, by the way:

Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged, London: Allen Lane, 1991, Chapter
11: "Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage."

One could also consult the more philosophical:

“Social Democracy thought fit to to assign to the working class the role
of the redeemer of future generations, in this way cutting the sinews of
its greatest strength. This training made the working class forget both
its hatred and its spirit of sacrifice, for both are nourished by the
image of enslaved ancestors rather than that of liberated grandchildren”
(Walter Benjamin 1940/1982: 262).

Or the radically political (in the words of a critical liberal):

“The representative of the working classes, Sorel observed, becomes an
excellent bourgeois very easily. The hideous examples are before our
eyes – Millerand, Briand, Viviani, the spellbinding demagogue Jean
Jaurès with his easily acquired popularity. Sorel had once hoped for
much from these men, but was disillusioned. They all turned out to be
squalid earthworms, rhetoricians, grafters and intriguers like the rest”
(Isaiah Berlin 1955/1979: 313)

In any case, there is certainly substantial disagreements about whether
the working class has been successful, or whether it has been swallowed
up in a tide of non-principled stances of influence-seekers and
moderates, who smiled and said to just follow them.

Also, your statement about print technology and labour movements - apart
from relying upon a quetionable history reading - is deeply problematic
(or somewhat empty rhetoric). Compare with this statement:

"When the rains came, the small ponds of the poor people were filled."

Yes, that is true, but it also rained in the park of the rich and their
ponds were much bigger, so they were, in absolute terms, filled even more.

In that sense, you are mobilising the labour movements in a highly
questionable manner in defence and justification of your own position.

Technology changed *every*thing, the entire context for all parties
involved in any struggle, but it likely empowered the already empowered
more than the less empowered......

In a silly simplification:

If the power of the working class was 1.2 power points before print, and
if print added 2 times power, then they ended at 2.4 power points. If
the power of the rich was 3.1 before print, and if print added 2 times
power, then they ended at 6.2 power points.

Who gained most? Who gained most from the last twenty years of ICT
revolution? Wal-Mart, as they pioneered just-in-time and became the
fastest growing corporation in history since Ford (probably now dwarfed
by that commons enclosure operation called Facebook?). To realise the
potential power and emancipation for the oppressed that ICT might
deliver requires careful consideration, not mere promises based on a
dubious historical reading.

Finally, while I think that technological determinism can be a useful
tool to ponder history and development, I would much rather, as a
precautionary principle, go with the exact opposite of you....

....Here with reference to the work of James C. Scott, surprisingly an
Ivy League professor, but he is also towards retirement age, which is
usually when you hear them say something of radical (or even subversive)
interest:

""
In his most speculative and contested claim, Scott argues that even the
lack of a written language in many Zomian societies is an adaptive
measure and a conscious societal choice. For peasants, writing was,
first and foremost, a tool of state control - it was the instrument the
elite used to extract money, labor, and military service from them. As a
result, Scott argues, when those peasants escaped into the hills they
discarded writing in an attempt to ensure that similar coercive
hierarchies didn’t arise in the new societies they formed.

“I’ve studied peasant rebellions, and one of first things that early
peasant rebellions always do is to attack the records office,” says
Scott. “They associate writing with their oppression.”

The 20th century, with its arsenal of distance-devouring technologies
from the airplane to the Internet, has made it easier for states to
smooth the friction of landscape, and recent decades have also seen a
determined campaign among Asian states to bring their highland regions
into the fold, often by settling them with lowland people more loyal to
the national government. As a result, since World War II, Zomia has lost
much of its distinctive wildness.
"" --- from:

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/12/06/the_mystery_of_zomia/

See also "Zomia, A Zone of Resistance: The Last Great Enclosure Movement
and Stateless Peoples in Southeast Asia":
http://www.forcedmigration.org/events/2008/colsonlecture/

>From that perspective, your position is somewhat old school marxist,
insofar as I know and understand any of all that: we just have to keep
on pushing through capitalism and we will get to the promised land in
the end. It doesn't resonate with me. I would much rather ask critically
while we walk and use lessons from history written not by winners.


> I see more and more clearly that certain individuals and social  forces,
> instead of focusing their critical gaze on the system of infinite growth
> that is destroying the biosphere, are focusing their critical gaze on those
> who are actually closer to them; and seeking division instead of
> commonality; complaining about the imperfections and relative blindness of
> the free culture movement; rather than to see alignment between social
> forces that would have the greatest potential uniting.


Is this based on something I said? You have managed to turn the
whole thing around?!?! The current growth paradigm thrives on "renewable
technology" (wind turbines, hybrid cars), and digital commons  - these
are central to the growth vision. The expansion of digital commons is
destroying the biosphere. The critical gaze that focuses on the
materiality of cyberspace and thus the ecological problems of the
digital commons is precisely addressing the problem of infinite growth
in a non-simplistic manner - trying to negotiate an ambiguous problem:
how can we have digital networks without destroying the environment?


> To compare say the digital commons of appropedia, and its efforts to create
> sustainable and appropriate technology for local communities worldwide, with
> the multinational owners of a supermarket chain, is in my eyes, a perverse
> equation, and shows that a certain sense of priorities has been lost, ("Digital
> commons are parasites on natural resources and territories
> of people elsewhere in the world in much the same way as supermarkets are.")

It is not very helpful to shift from the general to the particular in
the middle of a conceptual discussion. I spoke of digital commons in
general - and pointed to a factual general problem - and you respond
with a specific example..... perhaps an exemption to prove the rule?

For what it is worth: It is not perverse, but a simple fact: the energy
use of a supermarket - from electricity use in the store to the fossil
fuel fertilisers used in the production of the commodities for sale - is
very comparable to the energy and resource use that digital commons
entail, if you see it from the perspective of the oppressed, landless or
through the eyes of the children disassembling hardware when it is
recycled. The supermarket helps some of the poor, some of the time - for
instance a single mother or the career, short-of-time feminist on her
way to a meeting about resisting the cuts - indeed, supermarkets can
help many people, including those who work for it, who would otherwise
be unemployed, but it comes with a tremendous cost for others, which is
"hidden".

The shareholders of Carrefour and Wal-Mart cheer on supermarkets, just
as the shareholders of IBM and Google cheer on Open Source, Open Access
and other areas of economic growth.


> the truth is, every living being and system is (inter)dependent on others
> and in that sense, a parasite ... what matters is to create sustainable
> flows between the various living systems, and to generate collective
> intelligence between autonomous individuals and communities, in order to
> achieve that, for which digital commons are not parasites, but essential
> enablers,

But they are also exploitors - through mining, heavy metal pollution,
sweatshop labour and so on - and this is not an ideological point, but
a simple fact.

However, all that said, I agree, let us break some eggs to make the
omelette. I never wanted to argue that the internet should be torn down
- what would I be doing here? - but it should be used consciously and in
recognition and full admittance of its costs. There is no such thing as
marginal reproduction cost, except in Wonderland, perhaps, where
perpetual motion machines are possible and where gravity can be defied
by will alone.

The immateriality argument about the relation between cost and
reproduction of digital goods, is really comparable to, say, the
relation between light in your house, on the one hand, and electricity
and the continued upkeep of the electrical infrastructure (nuclear power
plants, cables, wires, pylons, switches and so on) on the other: It
doesn't *seem to* cost anything when I flick the switch and the light
comes on in "my" house, so why isn't it just free? Would anyone take me
serious if I said that?


> as hard as it may be to do and understand, we need to chew gum and walk at
> the same time, using digital commons to organize, while working at the same
> time to lighten the physical footprint of digital commons, and using global
> open design communities to build open and 'light' infrastructures to achieve
> sustainability,

Yes, and I never said anything different - but how do you propose to
"lighten the footprint", as collective action, when the collective is in
denial about that footprint and when its leaders and consequently the
followers perpetuate the denial?

With the best of wishes,
martin