[p2p-research] Is the p2p approach utopian?

Tue May 11 05:33:26 CEST 2010

This is great, Michel. (a few thoughts inline and will post to blog)

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 3:59 PM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:
> This will be published on the 17th, and calls for a 'triarchical' political
> approach to social change, aligning constructing alternatives, social
> mobilization, and commons oriented policy frameworks,
>
> Michel
>
>
>
>
> So the approach of the P2P Foundation, as proposed by myself, and there may
> be other views as we are a pluralist platform, is the internetwork all the
> human initiatives towards open and free, participatory, and commons oriented
> practices, and the open infrastructures needed to make it happen.
>

It seems at least at times we advocate practices and principles of
foresight.  The research by P2P Foundation consistently uncovers
evidence that systems are highly interconnected, emergent, dynamic,
complex-adaptive, and perpetually evolving.

> Our approach is subjective-objective, but the last term is very important.
> Without the necessary maturation of objective modalities of production and
> human organization, a subjectivist approach based on the human will, like
> say the Negrian waiting for insurrectionist rapture, would not succeed. Open
> infrastructures need to be build, social organizational forms and
> institutions need to be built, while AT THE SAME TIME, human consciousness
> evolves and becomes politicized.
>
> In a recent seminar of the Universidade Nomada in Venice, Italy, where a lot
> of post-autonomist thinkers and activists where present, some of the
> speakers outrightly dismissed any open development as already coopted by
> capital. Geert Lovink, not an autonomist himself, went even so far as
> declaring the free culture movement as public enemy.
>

Can you point to a reference of this view by Geert Lovink? I am having
trouble understanding the position.

> This is evidently not our approach. While we think that cooptation will
> happen, and is happening, we also see it as a necessary maturation of the
> new infrastructure of social production, of the new  sharing and
> commons-oriented consciousness, and these are trends which are to the
> advantage of the communities of peer producers and sharers.

In P2P systems, there is threshold where cooptation by mostly
commercial-interested entities breaks down. The core recognizable
principle can be seen in triadic relationships. Where a connection,
relationship, or "flow" of energy between A and B is facilitated by an
entity that is more like A and B (more like a "peer" than not), there
is a lack of cooptation. The more triadic connections where
connection/relationship/flow between A/B resembles A/B, the more
resistant to cooptation the system will become to
connection/relationship/flow facilitator that is not like A/B (so long
as what is "like" A/B performs better than what is not "like").

A/B as human entities collaborate to choose facilitators of various
relationships. Given rate of change in existential conditions, A/B as
human entities can benefit from a plurality of choices about how to
facilitate any given relationship (it could be more appropriate to
centralize or decentralize, depending on the specific existential
conditions). Contrary to common belief, both the system and individual
can reap greater rewards by leaving the choice in the hands of the
individual. For instance, a common daily choice made by individuals is
to invest their energy, time, resources in various

> It is within
> these trends, that social trends for autonomy need to take place, that
> social charters need to be imposed or negotiated, which maintain the maximum
> autonomy for the commons and their communities. But we are not waiting for
> any ‘red dawn’, we are changing the maximum aspects of our life that we can,
> interconnecting our efforts, learning from each other and our mutual
> experiences. While the end goal is a restructuring  of our economy and
> civilizational forms, we are not waiting for any rapture. Phase transition
> will happen, needs to happen, as infinite growth systems cannot endure in
> finite systems, but  it could be a transition that worsen humanity’s fate
> and condition, or it could be the p2p transition we are hoping for. But this
> doesn’t require as much shouting radical slogans from the rooftops, as
> patient but continuous work in new infrastructures, while obviously
> restructuring our own consciousness in the process, and thinking about the
> necessary political forms that are needed.
>
> The way I see it, we need three elements to succeed.
>
> First, we need to construct the alternatives. I want to insist that this is
> not a reactionary struggle for say, pure relocalization, or small utopian
> communities, like the utopian socialists of the 19th century, what Marx
> called ‘dwarfish forms’. Rather we are building a new system of production
> which recombines  an important amount of relocalization (because physical
> material globalization is a disaster for sustainability), but combined by a
> globally connected infrastructure of mutual coordination and collective
> learning, which can achieve a  hyper-growth in human productive innovation.
>
> At the same time, we need to build and associate with powerful social
> movements, that struggle against the attacks of the now ‘extreme neoliberal’
> state, which attacks the very social fabric of society to save the predatory
> financial system. But for such social movements, it is not sufficient just
> to say no,  and have a politics of refusal, and it is certainly not
> sufficient to return to socialist statist approaches, but they need an
> awareness of the alternative social and productive infrastructures that need
> to be strengthened in order to have a better alternative.
>
> Finally, we need a political extension, one that, based on a
> commons-oriented policy framework, and a push towards replacing the
> corporate welfare state with a Partner State, that institutes commonfare
> (Andrea Fumagalli) and retakes control of the ‘commanding heights of the
> economy’, now in the hands of the destructive predatory factions that have
> taken control of the market states (as proposed by Nick Dyer-Whiteford).
>

I agree with all. I'd add 4th that there is a need for a basic
operating knowledge about what is emerging and how and why it is
*different* than what we've already experienced, plus how it is an
extension and evolution of the same. Understanding the nature of what
is emerging is crucial to operating successfully. Most are focused on
what is collapsing.

> It is the combination of constructive open communities, mobilized social
> movements, and a political extension of the power of both, in a grand
> alliance of the commons, which will be necessary to turn the maturation of
> open practices and infrastructures, into the necessary phase transition that
> can save us from the coming barbarisms.
>
> --
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>
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>
> Think thank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>
>
>
>
>

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