[p2p-research] P2P revolution?

[Kevin Carson]

On 4/30/10, Daniel Araya <levelsixmedia at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>  I resonate with alot of what you're writing here Kevin. I think networked
> production will change things dramatically. But the only economies in the
> world right now that are seeing significant economic growth are
> industrializing ones (BRIC, etc). This may change in the near future but for
> the moment it is BRIC countries that are predicted to become the largest in
> the world (while advanced countries begin to contract). To my mind, the P2P
> 'revolution' looks alot more like of a bunch of guys on listerves talking
> about a revolution in the abstract. I might concede that advanced economies
> lack the leadership to fully leverage peer networks for production. But for
> the moment, my money is on Asia and the development of industrialized
> capitalism outside the West. There we see a revolution in the concrete.
>
> For a fully fleshed out P2P revolution to unfold you will need to integrate
> the education system in some way. Its not going to simply happen
> spontaneously-- at least not in the numbers you would need to make
> ubiquitous. The feudal age had the church. Modernity had the university.
> What does peer production have?

My gut instinct is that what peer production has is less about some
new institutional basis than about the unsustainability of the *old*
centralized, hierarchical institutions.  States are being hollowed
out, IP is becoming untenable as a method of controlling the value
created by human capital, and the imploding cost of garage production
machinery means most investment capital is becoming superfluous.

-- 
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