[p2p-research] Repurposing Profit for User Freedom

[Ryan Lanham]

On 2/4/10, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> I must say I am baffled Ryan.
>
> You say the commons must not be coercive, and I agree in principle (though
> in reality, I'm not sure 'absolute non-coercion is possible, there are
> always paradoxes, the need to defend the commons from depredation, etc..),
>
> But at the same time, you defend practices like terminator seed, which
> destroy the natural cycles of reproduction, lock farmers into total
> dependence, and are used by some of the most evil corporations on earth,
> whose whole policy relies on coercion and legal attack, up to the absurd
> levels of jailing farmers who are simply downstream of GMO fields ...
>
> Such practices have nothing to do with protecting investments, and all to
> do with creating permanent monopolies
>
> Michel



Michel,

I am equally baffled.  What you argue for is a set of ideas we know has
failed and has always failed.  Where is the permanent monopoly in our
world?  The US?  The British Empire?  Japan, Inc?  Microsoft?  GM?
Volkswagon?  They are all swept away by progress.  So too will be Monsanto.
Someday Africa like China will train its own GMO scientists who will built
their own capacities to have whatever sorts of seeds they need.  And if they
are blocked by a patent, they will grow something else.

The big pharma companies are rapidly dying.  This is no secret and is widely
covered in many well-known and respected outlets like the blog Pharma
Gossip.  They have been cutting staff for years.  The old model doesn't
work.  It won't work in GMO.  So the response is to go back to some sort of
communal property idea?  Why?  Free and P2P are winning all over.  It's a
total route.  I hear people over and over again discussing how cheap
computing and entertainment have become...by innovation...not by forced
sharing.  Capacity is abundance.  Technoliogy is capacity.  R&D makes
technology. R&D = abundance...over time.  Sure, there are time constraints,
but only for a period that is deemed acceptable to create incentives for
progress.

Farmers are not imprisoned by GMO, they are liberated by it.  They have new
options to produce products people want more--on, say, a Paris or
Atlanta market shelf.  If some of that enabling technology is compensated,
everyone can win...a chemist in St. Louis and a grower in Malawi become
partners.  If it is forced that the seed becomes free, then it is not
produced, and the farmer in Malawi grows poor crops and the chemist in St.
Louis doesn't send her daughter to college but rather lives a life of quiet
despair sipping nodka like some old apparatchik in Belarus.

This all seems so obvious to me, I must admit I feel great frustration at
arguing it.  From my perspective it feels like it is arguing about the truth
of Darwinian evolution or the efficacy of vaccines.  It is just obvious and
measureable.  But I have learned enough to know that what can seem obvious
can be wrong, so I keep rechecking.

I have grave doubt that capitalism can be surplanted as an engine of
R&D--the great hope.  My sadness derives from the fact that it is starting
to reach levels of diminishing returns do to free and open systems and the
rapid acceleration (especially this) of technology development.  This is
evolutionary and unstoppable.  There will be a new order.  I simply hope it
is an order that works for people and doesn't recook failed ideas from the
past.

What saddens me is that seemingly most of the people associated with the
free and open systems movement do not understand why they are
succeeding...and that is because they are applying 19th century socialist
theories to a very much 21st century problem.  R&D...competitive actions
offering free...open...that is what is winning.  Not some tired idea of a
utopian socialism.

Ryan
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