[p2p-research] P2P revolution?

[Kevin Carson]

On 5/4/10, Maria Droujkova <droujkova at gmail.com> wrote:

> > The feudal age had the church. Modernity had the university.
> > > What does peer production have?

> The internet.

> > 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.

> Institutions -> Networks

Along those lines, the ubiquitous trend I see is taking place in many
different ways:  as the old corporate and state hierarchies become
unsustainable, they're being forced to decentralize, harden their
component units, and increase the initiative of those in last-mile
networks.

They try to retain some sort of residual control, in ways that Andy
Robinson has commented on here:  i.e. the Nixon Doctrine as a way of
pulling back from most direct superpower policing and working instead
through proxies, attempts to maintain corporate control of networked
manufacturing through ownership of IP, etc.  But by progressively
outsourcing and delegating functions, they're putting themselves
increasingly in the position of redundant nodes, so that their
artificial property rights are the *only* source of control they
retain.  At some point, the networked producers, having built the new
society within the old corporate shell, will decide to "break the
corporate integument" and ignore their IP and other property rights.

-- 
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
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Organization Theory:  A Libertarian Perspective
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html