[p2p-research] conditions for successfull resilience

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/7/10, Samuel Rose <samuel.rose at gmail.com> wrote:

>  The illusion that some have operated under is that the industrial age
>  paradigms can be somehow force-fit into these emerging systems. The
>  reality is that industrial-age paradigms are fundamentally different
>  than many-to-many systems.  John Robb understands and acknowledges
>  this. So this paragraph is not about his writing, but about what I am
>  adding to the discussion. The industrial paradigm is fundamentally
>  about "control". The emerging p2p paradigm is fundamentally about
>  distribution of control. I think a huge amount of people in
>  communities realize this now. But, they look for guidance in
>  succeeding in operating in participatory ecologies. Not controlling
>  guidance, but guiding guidance. Guidance that offers clear paths to
>  meeting basic fundamental survival needs while distributing control.
>  For decades, following the commercial consolidation and decline of
>  Agronomy-based communities in the US, we've all outsourced, and
>  mortgaged our basic survival needs to industrial and commercial
>  systems that tend to control in non-distributed ways. Those industrial
>  systems benefited from us "users" having a narrow focus, guided by
>  one-way mediums, and funneling resources away from our control as an
>  "exchange" for food, energy, physical goods, culture "products", and
>  access. The emerging system massively empowers the individual and
>  people in their communities. But, having lived and worked in a
>  previous and arguably collapsing system, so completely different from
>  what is emerging, there is little available in the environment that
>  helps many people understand how to operate in this new environment.

This is somewhat related IMO to a paradigm shift from what James
Scott, in Seeing Like a State, calls social organizations that are
primarily transparent to the state, to social organizations that are
primary transparent to the people of local communities organized
horizontally and opaque to the state.

The latter kind of architecture, as described by Kropotkin, was what
prevailed in the networked free towns, villages, etc., of late
medieval Europe.  The primary pattern of social organization was
horizontal (guilds, etc.), with quality certification and reputational
functions aimed mainly at making individuals' reliability transparent
to one another.  To the state, such local formations were opaque.

With the rise of the absolute state, the primary focus became making
society transparent from above, and horizontal transparency was at
best tolerated.  Things like the systematic mapping of urban addresses
for postal service, the systematic adoption of family surnames that
were stable across generations (and the 20th century followup of
citizen ID numbers), etc., were all for the purpose of making society
transparent to the state.

Before this transformation, for example, surnames existed mainly for
the convenience of people in local communities, so they could tell
each other apart.  Surnames were adopted on an ad hoc basis for
clarification, when there was some danger of confusion, and rarely
continued from one generation to the next.  If there were multiple
Johns in a village, they might be distinguished by trade ("John the
Miller"), location ("John of the Hill"), patronymic ("John Richard's
Son"), etc.

By contrast, everywhere there have been family surnames with
cross-generational continuity, they have been imposed by centralized
states as a way of cataloguing and tracking the population--making it
transparent to the state, in Scott's terminology.

And there is a powerful residual cultural habit, among the general
public, of thinking of such things through the mind's eye of the
state.  E.g., if "we" didn't have some way of verifying compliance
with this regulation or that, some business or other might be able to
get away with so-and-so.

We need a shift in focus toward creating reputational and quality
assessment mechanisms on a networked basis, to make us as transparent
to *each other* as possible as providers of goods and services--and
not transparent to an all-seeing state.  In fact, the creation of such
mechanisms may well require active measures to render us to the state
(e.g. encryption, darknets, etc.) for protection *against* attempts to
suppress such local economic self-organization against the interests
of corporate actors.

To do this requires overcoming six hundred years or so of almost
inbred habits of thought, by which the state is the all-seeing
guardian of society protecting us from the possibility that someone,
somewhere might do something wrong if "the authorities" don't prevent
it.  We need to replace it with a habit of thinking in terms of
ourselves creating mechanisms to prevent *each other* from selling
defective merchandise, protecting *ourselves* from fraud, etc.  In
other words, we need to lose the centuries-long habit of thinking of
"society" as a hub-and-spoke mechanism and viewing the world from the
perspective of the hub, and instead think of it as a horizontal
network in which we visualize things from the perspective of
individual nodes.  We need to lose the habit of thought by which
transparency from above ever even became perceived as an issue in the
first place.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Center for a Stateless Society http://c4ss.org
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low-Overhead Manifesto
http://homebrewindustrialrevolution.wordpress.com
Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html