[p2p-research] phyles: the economic mechanism of the networks (suggested must read for p2p community)

Thu Sep 16 22:41:23 CEST 2010

Hi David,

I'm really resonating with your vision and now realize that what I see as
the next step for the p2p foundation is a phyle producing knowledge products
based around the work we have been doing in the last few years on
documenting the emergence of this new networked civilisation ...

After talking about phyles on september 21, I'm presenting your book on
October 4, with a first installment,

because I'm still travelling, I would appreciate if you could yourself offer
a text for a second, and eventually third, instalmment, as I'm myself still
travelling ... of particular interest would be your historical take on the
italian practices in florence, genoa etc.. and what we can learn from this
today ..

Michel
<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-gurstein-open-data-update-end-user-requirements-for-effective-usage/2010/09/16>

Book of the Week: Phyles, Economic Democracy in the Network
Century<http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=10728>
[image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
Michel Bauwens
4th October 2010

 ** Book: Phyles: Economic Democracy in the Network
Century<http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf>.
by David de Ugarte *

This is a really remarkable, breakthrough and must-read book for the
p2p-oriented community, especially those groping for personal
sustainability, open business models and an economy of the commons, and
which outlines the new network form of phyles, as well as discussing
historical predecessors such as the greek Demos, the medieval Guild, and the
Renaissance passagium’s.

This will undoubtedly feature at the top or very near the top of my book of
the year selection. It fills a major missing piece in my own synthetic p2p
theory.

*David de Ugarte:*

*“This work is the last instalment in a series of books, written by half a
dozen authors besides me, that try to describe and understand, from a common
logic although from different angles, the vast social changes which took
place in the wake of the fall of the Berlin Wall. In the last twenty years,
we have seen how the division of the world into two great blocs gave way to
globalisation, while the emergence of the Internet produced a deep change in
the fundamental structures of power, always dependent on the management and
social control of information.*

*This substantial change converged and merged with a new paradigm of
conflict as apparently distributed and ungraspable. This new expression of
an emerging world cohering around distributed networks (the web, the
blogosphere, SMS networks) became apparent in its civic dimension when, all
over the democratic world, waves of cyberthrongs influenced political
processes which had apparently been under the full control of the powers
that be: from the fall of Estrada in Manila in 2002 to the Athens riots in
2008, through the 2004 13M in Madrid and the 2005 French swarming. This was
a distributed paradigm which, on the other hand, could be glimpsed in
conflicts since the 90’s, and which was given a label with the advent of
al-Qaeda: what are known as the post-modern wars.*

*In less than two decades, the whole world started to inculturate a
fundamental change in the shape of the great social network. The idea of
belonging was changing. The cohesive, explanatory power of nationality was
shrinking. Nations were starting to become both too small and too large to
explain who we are. The mass experience of virtual socialisation,
de-territorialised but personal, as well as the changes in the economic
system leading, in the face of the onslaught of networks and globalisation,
to what Juan Urrutia has called the coming capitalism, opened a period
characterised by the search for identity, by identitarian experimentation.*

*We are in the process of going from a world of decentralised networks to a
world of distributed networks. This is evidenced in communication as a
crisis in the information systems of agencies and newspapers; in the
cultural sphere as a crisis in the current industrial model for films,
books, and music; in democracy as citizens’ cyberthrongs; and in war as a
new paradigm. This shift leads us to a new paradigm, seen in the complex
world of collective identities in the increasingly important role of a new
kind of community, communities which are closer to the old real,
contiguity-based communities than to the great nationalistic imaginaries of
Modernity. We are experiencing, in that area, another shift, one taking us
from nations to networks.*

*Studying this latter dimension, the changes in the identity patterns of our
time, we discover a new kind of socio-economic organisation: the phyle. The
phyle is much more than a kind of business; it has, among its main features,
all the elements that articulate our time – it is born from the experience
of socialisation in virtual communities, it is transnational, and it
vindicates new forms of economic democracy which, in turn, link it to
traditional cooperativism.*

*Even more interesting: we find how organisations as distant from the hacker
world as some of the largest Sufi brotherhoods in Senegal, scourged by
immigration and the impact of distributed communications, plunged into a
crisis and developed new, identity-based forms of commercial networks, which
brought them closer and closer to phyles.*

*The study of phyles is not, at least today, the study of a mass phenomenon,
nor is it leaping onto the bandwagon of an uncertain prophecy of social
reform. It is the discovery, through the experience of a budding world, of
the limitations of economic democracy and its forms. It is not at all a
question of discarding the traditions and values of cooperativism. For a
century and half, cooperativism has been living proof that, even under
industrialism, it is possible to organise production differently, making
people its centre. But the distributed network society can go even farther.
Among other things, because the incentives it is based on in order to
innovate and generate cohesion are different from those in industrial
society.*

*In this book, we will discover how, paradoxically, the first phyle
replicates forms whose origins lie in the first trade revolution, which took
place in the Mediterranean between the 10th and 12th centuries, during the
apogee of the Sea Republics and the great trade networks that linked the
Muslim and Christian worlds. We will discover how much the new forms of
democratic business organisation, which distinguish between community and
demos, owe to medieval guilds. And above all we will see how the concepts of
equality and fraternity are redefined and permeate the production and trade
space creating a new kind of collective identity which takes personal
freedom as its basic structural criterion.*

*The new world, which we are all exploring every day, sends us many signs of
social and economic decomposition. This is not exactly an idyllic world.
However, it still is an open world where the only path that is closed is
turning back. The study of phyles is a bet on all that is cohesive and
democratic in the new world of networks: a bet because the models on which
we shall build our future will not be overly contradictory of those which
still have a libertarian optimism about progress.”*

*Topic 1: Abundance Logic vs Scarcity Logic*

*“Abundance logic is a seminal concept introduced by Juan Urrutia in 2002 as
the basis on which to understand what was then known as the “new economy”.*

*The classic example is the comparison between newspapers and the
blogosphere. In a newspaper, with a limited paper surface, publishing one
more line in an article entails suppressing a line somewhere else as in a
zero-sum game. By contrast, in the blogosphere, a space where the social
cost of an extra post is zero, any blogger’s publishing his or her
information does not decrease anyone else’s publication possibilities. The
marginal cost is zero. The need to collectively decide what is published and
what is not simply disappears. As opposed to scarcity logic, which generates
the need for democratic decision, abundant logic opens the door to
pluriarchy.*

*In such a universe, every collective or hierarchical decision on what to
publish or not can only be conceived as an artificial generation of
scarcity, a decrease in diversity, and an impoverishment for all.*

*For a generation and a professional domain whose work tools work under such
a logic, even economic democracy must be seen as a lesser evil, a truce with
reality in those social spaces – such as business – where scarcity still
prevails. In that way, innovators in the domain of social networks or
Internet design rediscover traditions as old as cooperatives from a new
perspective.”*

*Topic 2: Knowledge is always communal*

*“Interpretative, meaning-generating frameworks are in turn worlds resulting
from a sustained interaction within a community which self-identified by
means of its own knowledge system. For, in fact, knowledge exists only in
community, to the extent that it is often the community which adjectivises
knowledge: scientific community, scientific knowledge; faith community,
theological knowledge, etc.*

*What goes for a kind of supposedly universal knowledge also goes for
identitarian knowledge: from art to the particular knowledge of the
imaginary communities of nation, ideology, or sex, through the
meaninggenerating narratives of real communities, enterprises and families.*

*What the Internet has done is multiply the visibility and facilitate the
generation of new knowledge spaces, identities, and communities, making it
increasingly hard to homogeneously represent the map of social knowledge.
Where there used to be a four-piece puzzle, we now have a jigsaw made up of
millions of tiny pieces, the sea of flowers. Diversity makes us complex by
making us face the mirror of the very diversity of our environments.*

*So-called netocrats are really context gardeners, information processors,
communicators, hackers, bricoleurs who develop, transmit, or give value to
contexts: who overlap them or break them in the organic dance of the great
social digestion of information.*

*They have been professionally born and raised in a world in which the
irreducible nature of diversity is obvious, where everything is both
collaborative and identitarian, but where value is after all given by the
coherence of the community they are members of and the recognition they
obtain from it.”*

*Topic 3: In Phyles, Community precedes Enterprise*

*“Recognition and hierarchy do not go well together.*

*Forced cohesion tends to dissolve in a world where nothing is easier than
jumping from one network to another own, than identifying with and plunging
within an alternative context. Netocrat companies tend towards horizontality
and the almost complete lack of hierarchies, as these are counterproductive
when it comes to attaining the kind of incentives which motivate netocrats.
For this reasons, Juan Urrutia proposes differentiating them from
entrepreneurs and seeing them as we see scientists. They intend to make a
living, but that is not their final goal.*

*What they really want is recognition and the possibility of continued
learning.*

*In the midterm, netocrats feel more comfortable with the idea of living in
an economically autonomous business community than creating communities
around companies whose deep structure will still follow the industrial and
hierarchical logic of the old world.*

*Those business-empowered communities are what are known as phyles. To begin
with, all that is common to them all is the idea of the pre-eminence of
communities.” *

*Topic 4: On the link between Fraternity and Innovation*

*“In a world where the largest portion of any product’s value arises from
innovation, and therefore from the creative part of the production process,
valuegenerating incentives are not those aimed at managers, but those which
nurture community interaction and recognition.*

*This friction has now moved to the world of traditional business, as every
restructuring of the incentive system ends up modifying the property
structure. A business must be valuable to those who work, live, and trade
with it. And its value derives, above all, not so much from bonuses and
incentives as from a way of life.*

*Netocrats, Neo-Venetians, regard business management as one more duty of
their community citizenship. Just as time is no longer split between work
time (divine punishment) and life time (leisure), community and management
are no longer mutually alienated, but rather are fused in a space that can
only be described as fraternity.*

*The misunderstood Pope John Paul II once said that, while the 19th century
had been the century of liberty and the 20th century had been that of
equality, the 21st century would be the century of fraternity. Juan Urrutia,
in The Coming Capitalism, analysed the reasons for this. Fraternity, which
provides the foundation, beyond liberty and equality, for economic
democracy, is based precisely on what business organisations need to survive
in a global market which is undergoing a crisis and is, moreover, doomed to
change: an identity which makes it possible to attain assignations otherwise
unattainable in its absence and a taste for work in common which makes the
existence of a balance easier.*

*As we shall see, it is no longer a matter of moral admonition, but
something which companies themselves are increasingly willing to pay for.
Teaching, preparing, and organising economic democracy as a path and as an
experience is already a successful product.”*

On Fri, Sep 17, 2010 at 2:20 AM, Tom Crowl <culturalengineer at gmail.com>wrote:

> Michel, David,
>
> Just read the shorter pieces and these are beautiful and practical
> concepts! (will get to the longer with more time)... I'm so happy to be a
> part of this developing new vision for the world.
>
>  We arose out of peer to peer associations and its by rediscovering and
> re-empowering these vital roots that we can envision and build a sustainable
> and fulfilling world for our descendants.
>
> ..creating the next iteration.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tom Crowl
> http://CulturalEngineer.blogspot.com<http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Sep 16, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:
>
>> I find this quite fascinating:
>>
>> see http://deugarte.com/phyles, but especially the longer essay/book here
>> at http://deugarte.com/gomi/phyles.pdf (own summary at
>> http://p2pfoundation.net/Phyles)
>>
>> This economic structure of phyles, is a key missing element in p2p theory
>> (though I was groping for it in my own modelling of the economy of the
>> commons) , and a major conceptual breakthrough that I will be adding and
>> using in my own synthesis.
>>
>> David will contribute an article on community typology soon,
>>
>> I'm also asking him, since he is in cc,
>>
>> if he cannot provide separate articles on:
>>
>> - Neo-Venetianism and community centered businesses
>>
>> - Fraternity as the missing element in 20th century political theory and
>> practice
>>
>> I will be featuring David's book as book of the week very soon,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>> --
>> P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net
>>
>> Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
>> http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org
>>
>> Updates: http://del.icio.us/mbauwens; http://friendfeed.com/mbauwens;
>> http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens
>>
>> Think tank: http://www.asianforesightinstitute.org/index.php/eng/The-AFI
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>

-- 
P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net  - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

Connect: http://p2pfoundation.ning.com; Discuss:
http://listcultures.org/mailman/listinfo/p2presearch_listcultures.org

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