[p2p-research] conditions for successfull resilience

[Michel Bauwens]

Hi Kevin,

really interesting contribution, on these 2 contrasting ways, which reminds
me of the polarity between panoptism and holoptism ...

I hope you can contribute this to the blog?

but as you are indicating yourself, this shift won't be easy and may take
time ...

if you'd live here in east asia (think about the milk scandals), you'd
notice that these peer models have absolutely broken down under contemporary
capitalist conditions, and without regulatory oversight, thousands of people
are routinely poisoned and harmed in multiple ways ..

physical p2p doesn't work under conditions of communal breakdown, but our
new digital practices show a way forward,

in your blog contribution, I would love if you could address this aspect as
well, i.e. how to restore this dynamic?

Michel

On Sun, Feb 14, 2010 at 2:03 AM, Kevin Carson <
free.market.anticapitalist at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>
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