[p2p-research] Fwd: [Fwd: "The Generative Logic of the Commons" - Abundance of Food...or Abundance of recipes?]

[Michel Bauwens]

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Julio Lambing <julio.lambing at e5.org>
Date: 2010/11/10
Subject: [Fwd: "The Generative Logic of the Commons" - Abundance of
Food...or Abundance of recipes?]
To: Silke Helfrich <Silke.Helfrich at gmx.de>, David Bollier <david at bollier.org>,
Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>, Beatriz Busaniche <
bea at vialibre.org.ar>, Heike Loeschmann <Loeschmann at boell.de>


fyi

-------- Original-Nachricht --------
Betreff:        "The Generative Logic of the Commons" - Abundance of
Food...or
Abundance of recipes?
Datum:  Wed, 10 Nov 2010 11:32:54 +0000
Von:    Brian Davey <briadavey at googlemail.com>
An:     rverzola at gn.apc.org, Julio Lambing <julio.lambing at e5.org>
CC:     John Jopling <johnj at thevillage.ie>, Richard Douthwaite
<richard at douthwaite.net>, Justin Kenrick <justinkenrick at yahoo.co.uk>



At the beginning of the final session of the international commons
conference participants were invited to express their worries,
criticisms and reservations. I stood up and said, roughly, the
following:

The participants who make up the conference perhaps should have
focused more on what kind of era we are living in. In the conference
there seemed to be two general understandings and the different
between them had not been brought out enough during the discussion.

On the one hand there were those for whom the commons were lifeboat
institutions for collective control over vital resources in a world in
crisis, a world in which production is likely to shrink because of
runaway climate change, depleting energy and water and other
resources. To a large degree these were people whose main focus of
attention was on natural commons - the atmosphere and climate; water
and the oceans; land and ecological systems...

On the other hand there were those for whom the commons represented an
entirely new mode of peer to peer production, which, when no longer
held back by the constraints imposed by intellectual property
restrictions, had the potential to usher in a world of
abundance....not only in the provision of free information services
like Wikipedia, created collectively and available to everyone, but
eventually extending into material production processes too - through
open source design of material goods and the spreading of new ideas
for cultivation. In short we stood at the beginning of an age of
abundance....The participants with this view tended to be those
involved in knowledge and cultural commons - eg those involved in
developing software etc.

After the conference I think these issues are so important that I have
written this follow up paper. Let me start it by observing that the
environmental movement has long been involved in a debate with the
political and economic mainstream that looks like this:

Environmentalists argue that we are actually approaching and
overstepping material limits to growth and the "carrying capacity" of
the planet's ecological systems. Meanwhile the mainstream argues that
we don't need to worry about any such thing because technology and
human ingenuity will see us through - so that growth can continue
indefinitely into the future....

Now I was not aware of anyone in the Berlin Commons conference who was
arguing for continued growth. And everyone I met in this conference
seemed to be aware of climate change and peak oil and gas.
Nevertheless,  the "abundance" argument did seem to me to be, at least
in part, a re-packaged variant of the "human ingenuity can see us
through" position - with the interesting spin on it, that human
ingenuity and creativity would see us through IF the corporate attempt
to enclose and privatise knowledge through intellectual property
(patents, copyright, royalties etc) can be lifted - so that
intellectual creation can occur as a genuine collective process and
anyone and everyone is free to take the ideas, designs, software and
creations of others, to correct them, amend them, adapt them, further
develop them, contribute to them and so on.....without having to pay
through the nose for the privilege.

Now in my view you can take these ideas too far. But before I explain
why I want to explain why I found this viewpoint refreshing and to
isolate a few kernels of truth.

40 years ago in my Trotskyite youth I used to attend conferences which
were almost the polar opposite of this one. Participants in these
earlier conferences were concerned to establish and agree upon what
was "the correct analysis", the correct way of interpreting the world
and what should be done about it. The "correct analysis" somehow
always seemed to be what the people you knew closest thought - because
you had worked out the ideas with them and, if you
disagreed.....well....it would be uncomfortable for you to go to all
the meetings and find that you were the odd person saying something
different.).

 But, of course, other people, often in or from other places, people
who had other relationships, typically worked out a slightly different
view of what was "correct". So that meant that, for them, you were
wrong, and, for you, they were wrong.

The conferences that resulted from this way of relating to "the truth"
were frustrating and unproductive. I remember people remarking, with
frustration, how the other factions didn't budge an inch in their
thinking and, no doubt, seen from their point of view, neither did we.
Difference was a problem - other peoples different viewpoints were
"wrong" while we were always "right".

I cannot say that everyone had the same experience at the
International Commons Conference. At least some people seemed to get
frustrated - but my own experience was mainly one in which the
participants there were at ease with the differences and prepared to
engage with people with a different viewpoint in a relaxed way - and
that was very refreshing.

Indeed when you adopted this relaxed acceptance of difference my
experience was that you tended to find that the people with the
different view were already aware of your viewpoint - they may not
have agreed with it as the best explanation but sometimes they would
accept it as plausible and another possible view.

Indeed I felt as if I was in a discussion in which participants who
had different views, were regarded as useful for testing out one's own
views, useful for seeing a different perspective that one might not
have had before. There was a sense that ideas and viewpoints are not
fixed and right or wrong, but always in development and the differing
ideas of other people were useful in helping one further develop one's
own ideas.

Here, I think, we have an emerging idea of one dimension of
"commoning" in the "knowledge commons" . I suspect it has arisen from
the experience of working things through in group processes of
software design or of cultural production. Here you have an open
mindedness that has arisen from the experience of open source software
design and the group development of ideas - where "bugs" are regarded
as inevitable, where they are ironed out in collective processes,
where someone else can perhaps creatively develop something that one
has done and intellectual creation is an inherently collective
process.

So I think that what I was experiencing was indeed a collective "mode
of production" at work - where "commoning", means active participation
in production, jointly with one's peers. And this is non egoistical,
non competitive, and not concerned with grabbing property rights and
personal advantage - which would, after all, slow down and damage the
collective process.

The idea that doing things in this way is much smoother and more
creative I can really accept....up to a point. I can thus also accept,
up to a point, that it is possible to conceive of responses to the
ecological and economic crises, being developed and designed
collectively and then applied to material production. I am aware, for
example, that there are processes involved in designing "eco-cars"
which are open source.

This idea can be extended even further from ideas and designs into
material production. Thus it would  not just be software and cultural
works that might be created without intellectual property in peer to
peer processes but material products made of "stuff" too - vehicles,
furniture, gardens. (Peer to peer here means co-production without an
intermediary or an organisation, like an employer, managing the entire
process and then claiming the group product as its own).

At its most developed this leads to the idea that open source designs
could be taken and used by anyone in local community work places.
These places of "free infrastruture" would operate like resource
centres and be equipped with computer steered machinery that would be
able to create real material products out of the digital designs. (So
called "Fab Labs" - see http://tangiblebit.com/ )

Well....that is where the theory of an intellectual commons goes into
material production..... However, at this point however I think we
need to come back to Earth.  For these are visions of the future that
I find difficult to believe in and I want to explain why.

The Berlin Commons conference documentation used a terminology about
the "generative logic of the commons" to refer to the way in which
commons can be and are productive. However, as some people pointed
out, even the digital commons are based on a material and energy
guzzling infrastructure - and although there may be well meaning
designers engaged in open source design processes trying to reduce the
energy usage and material throughput in the maintenance of the
internet infrastructure, the digital commons is by no means a free
lunch. Thus, for example,  making a personal computer costs 1800kWh of
energy and thus consumes 11 times its own weight in fossil fuels
before it gets into use...and that's also before we start to take into
account all the other computers and much bigger servers it will need
to be connected to and the energy they all take to run on...

But, for me, there are some important issues here that go way beyond
the issues about the energy used to create and run the internet and
its infrastructure. While it is true that a considerable part of the
financial costs of many products arises out of the design process, and
these costs are greater because of intellectual property impositions
and the charging of rent for the intellectual property, nevertheless,
the creativity that is freed up by knowledge commons operating without
intellectual property restraints cannot in and of themselves lift the
limits to growth which have been the core issue for ecological
economists.

So it is from this standpoint that I find it difficult to go all the
way with, for example, Roberto Verzola of the Philippine Greens, who
wrote a paper for the Berlin Conference called "Abundance and the
Generative Logic of the Commons". Yes, I agree with Roberto that the
internet is producing and abundance of "information and knowledge" but
information abundance is not the same as material abundance.

For one thing an abundance of knowledge and information that some
people have,  can remain unknown to, or  ignored, or otherwise
unattended to, by the people and institutions that need and ought to
know about that information and knowledge so that it is actually used.

In fact there is far more information and knowledge in the world than
we can all possibly devote our attention to and a whole set of
institutions exist to draw attention to the agendas of powerful
interests who are operating in unsustainable ways,and to draw
attention away from, to slander and to try to discredit information
and knowledge about things which need urgent action. Thus, for
example, there has been an abundance of information and knowledge for
decades about unsustainable types of economic development and about
sustainable alternatives - but there has also been a political
economic power structure that has felt able to ignore it, and seduce
the greater bulk of the population in rich countries to devote their
attention to consumption, shopping, celebrity life styles, sports, and
diverting entertainment. At the same time there has been a largely
successful campaign to deliberately mislead people about climate
change and other issues. So while there's a lot of information there
is a lot of ignorance too...... ignor - ance that is. This channelling
of mass attention is based on highly sophisticated knowledge of human
psychology - indeed the founder of the modern PR and marketing
industry, Edward Bernays, repeatedly drew attention to his
relationship to Signmund Freud, and his use of concepts that
manipulate the emotional predispositions of masses of people to suit
the power elite (including the bankers and the energy barons).

Secondly even if the abundance of information were to be used
helpfully in the search for solutions to our problems this information
abundance could only to a limited degree be converted into an
abundance of material goods - or more accurately, it has a limited
potential to mitigate the decline in production that is likely to
arise through energy descent.

Let me be careful to note that Roberto is well aware of peak oil but I
do not fully agree with his point of view when he writes in his paper
that:

" The massive bulk of water, carbon, iron, silicon and other minerals
on Earth as well as energy from the sun are also wellsprings of
abundance.

"The Earth's mineral abundance is non renewable a\nd must be managed
differently from renewable solar energy.

"As oil production peaks, for instance, cheap abundant oil will come
to an end. Peak oil should teach us an unforgettable lesson in
abundance management. Those who miss the lesson will go for more coal,
nuclear power and agrofuels. Those who get it will shift to clean
renewables, energy efficiency and planned "descent". Transition Towns
are leading the way.

"Solar energy makes possible other abundant energy resources such as
water, wind and wood. In 2009, renewables supplied 25% of total world
energy capacity, thanks to China's surging interest in biogas,
windpower and photovoltaics. Germany, too. Photovoltaics are made from
semiconducting silicon, the material base of the digital revolution
(Do you recall how expensive LCD projectors were ten years ago?) If
photovoltaics follow similar plunging price trends as other digital
goods. we can look forward to a Solar Age soon. Hydrogen from water
also promises another abundant energy source.

"In passing let me cite one more wellspring of abundance: webs of
positive human relationships in caring communities, which generate
feelings of peace, contentment, love happines and other psychic
rewards which defy quantification"

>From "Abundance and the Generative logic of the Commons" by Roberto
Verzola, Philippine Greens.Keynote speech for Stream III

End of Quote

Roberto's message seems to be - yes, there will be peak oil and it
will be a problem but it will only be a problem if the wrong energy
technologies are adopted in response. If we embrace energy efficiency,
and renewable energy technologies which are falling rapidly in price,
then there will not be a problem -  there will still be abundance -
and that's not to mention a non measurable abundance of good feelings
from positive human relations. (Quite what Roberto means by the word
"descent" is not clear to me).

As an ecological economist I find these ideas disturbing in this kind
of conference. They seem to contradict 100% the "Limits to Growth"
arguments developed originally in the study commissioned by the Club
of Rome in the 1970s and subsequently updated and confirmed by study
after study.

I can fully accept the possibility of a non measurable abundance of
good feelings arising out of positive human relationships....although
whether that possibility will in any way be actualised depends on our
succeess, or lack of success, in re-developing the commons and
commoning as the basis of human relationships.....however the notion
of an abundance in material abundance I do not find credible. This
wishes away the fact that Planet Earth has a limited ecological
carrying capacity and all the studies show we have already overshot it
considerably.

Lets go back to basics. First of all how do we explain and measure
what material production does occur? A good way of doing this is to
take the amount of energy that is applied in economic processes,
adjusting the measure of energy for the efficiency with which the
energy is delivered in the transformation of materials and "stuff"
that becomes embodied in products. Then you get a measure of the
amount of "work" done in material production - where the word "work"
is not a reference to human labour, but to the physics of the
application of energy to the transformation and movement of materials
- physical processes that are subject to the laws of thermodynamics.
Thus the amount of material production in the economy is related to
how much energy is applied AND how efficiently it is applied.

In fact, this way of llooking at production, and production growth,
does exceedingly well when it is
applied to real data. Two authors Ayres and Warr - used this way of
thinking to study growth in the US economy. Between 1900 and 1975 it
provide an almost perfect explanation for the trend growth of material
production.

http://www.iea.org/work/2004/eewp/ayres-paper1.pdf

Now there is still a place in this model for human ingenuity to
improve the efficiency with which energy is delivered to production.
And there is some place for immaterial production which might grow.
But immaterial production has to be embedded and embodied in material
processes and things too - even a hair cut requires, scissors,
premises, a chair, lighting....

And when it comes to producing stuff you cannot keep on increasing the
efficiency of energy delivery to production processes and nor can you
keep on increasing energy inputs either - especially at a point in
history when the concentrated power made possible by burning fossil
fuel energy sources starts to dwindle because of depletion, going over
the peak of oil production, gas peak and coal peak....(not to mention
the  atmospheric use peak which we passed some time ago).

But what about renewable energies? Can these not be the basis of
"abundance" - that is the argument of Roberto and I don't agree.

We need to get a grip on the key fact that there is an absolute limit
on the amount of solar and renewable energies available, no matter how
ingenious and cheap we engineer an infrastructure to capture it, and
no matter how good we are as gardeners and permaculture designers to
capture it through plants.

The "generative logic of the commons" has to work with the fact that
the power of raw sunshine at midday on a cloudless day is 1000W per
square metre - but that is 1000 W per m2 of area oriented towards the
sun, not per m2 of land area. To get the power per m2 of land area in
Britain, where I live, we need to compensate for the tilt between the
sun and the land, which reduces the intensity of midday sun to about
60% of its value at the equator. And of course it is not midday all
the time. And of course in Britain, and many other places it is cloudy
a lot of the time. In a typical UK location the sun shines during just
34% of daylight hours.

Globally total incoming solar radiation is 122 Petawatts which is 4
orders of magnitude greater than the total primary energy supply used
by humanity - but given the low density with which it falls across the
whole planet harvesting it for production processes is a costly energy
intensive process. Many of the current ideas for harvesting this solar
energy for human use assume that we can do this through biomass and
plant based photosynthesis. Perhaps indeed permaculture has much to
offer us - but it cannot resolve the fact that in Britain, after cloud
cover and all the other issues there is only 100 watts falling on each
meter of flat ground on average for the plants to harvest. Nor can
human ingenuity and the generatice logic of the commons do much about
the fact that the best plants, for example, in Europe, can only
convert 2% of that solar energy into carbohydrates.

What's more its as well to remember that humans already appropriate
30-40% of Net Primary Production of the planet (biomass) as food,
feed, fiber, and fuel with wood and crop residues supplying 10% of
total global human energy use.  Even a relatively small increase,
pushing human use of biomass up to 50% of the planets biomass
production would undermine and destroy many hugely important
eco-system services. In fact, because of the climate crisis, we need
to be using biomass to capture CO2 out of the atmosphere. The room for
maneovre barely exists, if at all.

Similar things can be said about other renewable energy resources.
Yes, they are part of the future. yes they are part of what is needed.
Yes, ingenuity can increase their efficiency in harvesting energy. But
no they cannot and will not ever be able to provide an "abundance" if,
by abundance we mean material production abundance.

With current human use of energy globally at about 13 Tera watts in
2005 as a measure we need to take in the significance of the fact
that, after solar energy

"No other renewable energy resource can provide more than 10 TW.
Generous estimates of technically feasible maxima (economically
acceptable rates would be much lower) are less than 10 TW for wind,
less than 5 TW for ocean waves, less than 2 TW for hydroelectricity
and less than 1 TW for geothermal and tidal energy and for ocean
currents. " (Vaclav Smil "Energy in Nature and Society. General
Energetics of Complex Systems." MIT Press, 2008, p382-383).

So lets review the argument. Material abundance requires an abundance
of energy to do the physical work of transforming and moving around
matter to turn good ideas and designs into products available to
users. At the moment humanity uses about 13 TW of energy and this
quantity is set to shrink quite dramatically in availability. No
matter how clever we are the amount that we can replace from
renewables is also strictly limited ....a renewable energy
infrastructure will take considerable energy to construct and will
have to concentrate natural energy fluxes dispersed over wide
geographical areas. Moreover these natural energy fluxes are
themselves subject to absolute limits in their availability.

My conclusion is that, to talk about abundance is a very misleading
message. Commons have much to offer us - sharing ideas without
intellectual property constraints will help us, sharing scarce
production and energy and pooling production arrangement and
infrastructures will too, sharing may bring us into human
relationships with many psychological and emotional rewards. In that
sense we may describe commons as "having a generative logic" - But an
"abundance"  is not a message that I agree with - if it taken to mean,
or implied to mean, an abundance of material production. In my opinion
to use the word "abundance" is a misleading picture of the future that
we are heading into.

An abundance of information about how we might make things is not the
same as an abundance of things - it is an abundance of recipes not an
abundance of food.





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