[p2p-research] The New Year’s Message of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To Do

[Michel Bauwens]

will appear tomorrow on our blog:
<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=12804>


<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=12804>

The New Year’s Message of the P2P Foundation: What Digital Commoners Need To
Do <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=12804>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
1st January 2011

 The following is *a meditation on the strategic phases in the construction
of a peer to peer world*

*What have we been doing in the last few years, and what should we be doing
next?* Here is a list of major undertakings, some well under way, some
barely begun. All need to be done, are interdependent on each other, but
need to be done ‘at the same time’, though there is a certain maturation
effect which may need to take place to move from one phase or priority to
another. Finding out these interdepencies and choosing amongst those
priorities is a matter of debate, strategising, and practical experience.

** use the existing infrastructures for immaterial exchange for personal and
social autonomy*

We started by creating an infrastructure that allowed for peer to peer
communication. Out of this striving came the internet and its end to end
principle, web 2.0 and its possibilities for participation, and social media
allowing for intense relational interaction, and tools such as wikis which
allow for the collaborative construction of knowledge.

The creation of this infrastructure was a combination of efforts of civil
society forces, governments and public funding, and private R&D and
commercial deployments. It’s an imperfect world full of governmental
control, corporate platforms, but also many capabilities for p2p interaction
that did not exist before.

My assessment is that this struggle can experience setbacks but can no
longer be undone. They have become civilisational achievements that are just
as necessary for p2p-commoners than for the powers that be, even if they can
impose a ‘dissent tax’

** change those infrastructures itself away from centralized and corporate
control*

But precisely because phase 1 is an imperfect one and partially if not
largely in control of forces which have their own agenda of (political)
control and (commercial) exploitation, as lately exemplified so well in the
corporate decisions around Wikileaks, we are increasingly realizing the need
to control these very infrastructures and insure that they can continue to
allow and even expand the possibilities for p2p communication and value
creation.

Hence the movements for free software, open standards, independent p2p
infrastructures. There are many efforts underway in this area, some
successful, some fledlging, some of which will go nowhere and be defeated.

Success on this front also depends on what the ‘enemy’ is doing. To the
degree they want to go too far in controlling the platforms, to that degree
they will mobilize the counterforces building the counter-infrastructures,
and convince more and more users to use them.

** use the existing infrastructrures, and the new p2p-transformed ones, to
change the very infrastructure of production of material goods, making it
more sustainable in the process*

As we get habituated to p2p communication and value creation, and move from
open software to open knowledge to open design, p2p communities get involved
in redesigning the means of production and making, i.e. open design
necessarily needs to a reconfiguration of production processes towards
‘distributrion’. Open design communities moreover have no perverse
incentives for planned obsolence or for hindering the sharing of innovation,
so the new infrastructures have a bias towards sustainability, but also to
relocalized production and a rationalisation of wasteful and unsustainable
material globalization.

** change the property structures of the infrastructure and means of
production in the process*

As the new modalities of open design and distributed manufacturing are
deployed, peers discover and experience the many constraints imposed by the
old order of production, such as modes of property, the lact of benefit or
revenue sharing, compound-interest based capital which is not easily
available for them etc … They start building their own platforms, governance
foundations, etc …This creates a need to extend p2p practices and modalities
to the rest of the economy, with efforts towards forms of peer funding, open
money, a revival of cooperatives and mutualism, and many other. Commoners
also discover their affinities with other counter-economies such as the
solidarity economy, fair trade, and other forms of commons-friendly
enterprise and start developing practical and political alliances

** raising of political awareness and expression as a means of overcoming
opposition*

As all the above processes are undertaken, digital commoners learn about and
experience the political and economic forces that are arraigned against
them, and become more politically aware, discovering the need for their own
modalities of political action and expression. They may also discover
affinities with the enemies of their enemies, other social movements,
commons-friendly enterpreneurs, etc

** transform the infrastructures so that the abundance of immaterial sharing
can co-exist with the sustainability of the planet, and the demands for
equity and social justice*

Immaterial cooperation rests on a physical infrastructure which is currently
part and parcel of an unsustainable mode of production. Commoners learn the
importance of recognizing the natural scarcities of the physical world and
how knowledge sharing and open design are themselves vital factors to
redesign the unsustainable infrastructure, and to transform it into
resilient modalities that insure the perenity of the new social practices.
Digital commoners ally with those forces that combine an interest in the
abundant sharing of immaterial resources, in the context of preserving
natural resources, and according to the principles of social equity.


-- 
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