Re: [ox-en] Free Software and social movements in South America
- From: Michael Bauwens <michelsub2003 yahoo.com>
- Date: Sat, 9 Jun 2007 03:09:22 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Graham,
Thanks for your points
My comments after <<CAPITAL
But two things are likely to happen:
1) for profit companies will increasingly face for
benefit production companies beating them at
asymmetric competition
2) this will drive the adoption by for profit
companies themselves of non-proprietary software (and
designs generally), of partially open, free ,
participatory, commons oriented strategies as an
adjunct or key part of their strategies. Quite a few
will shift to attention market strategies, built only
capitalism modes, and commons oriented derivatives
modes
the new will partially destroy the older models, but
can also create a crisis of accumulation as lots of
the new practices are not fully monetizable
OK. For example, wikipedia competing with Britannica, Britannica's
attempts to counter by putting some material on line for free,
for-profit wikipedia clones competing with both but clearly achieving
tiny revenues, etc. So maybe a crisis of accumulation in the
encyclopedia business, and others like it. But a crisis of accumulation
big enough to effect the whole system? Seems unlikely..
Or even taking one company: Microsoft becoming a distributor for Suse
and Xandros - will that really have a negative effect on overall
software revenues?
<<THE COMBINED effects of the 3 emerging paradigms will affect gradually a large part of the sphere of immaterial production, which is dominant in the west, and combined with the environmental crisis, I believe this is an eventually serious double whammy for the current configuration of capitalism … The best way out for the system seems some combination of natural/green capitalism with a new mechanism for compensation the positive externalities of social innovation, such as a basic income. I believe, as someone once said, we tend to overestimate the short term, but underestimate the long term effects of the underflow. I believe we are indeed talking about structural fault lines here.
3) peer production communities will continue to arise,
but its members facing precarious circumstances,
leading to social tensions and demands for reform
Programmers barricade the streets? Again, the numbers of people involved
relative to the whole system seem too small. System-affecting social
tensions like that still seem more likely to be coming from say the
Chinese factory workers than a coalition of programmers, graphic
designers etc..
<<NOT programmers, but peer producers in the totality of the sphere of immaterial production, but you are right that the other world can still cause major disruptions as well. I believe that the lack of a return mechanism for social production, which leads to precarity, is indeed a rather serious social problem, and that mobilizations, such as the French intermittents case, can indeed occur. But apart from eventual street tensions, there is a continued jockeying for institutional adaptation and reform, think about the tensions around copyright and filesharing, the pharma-system induced deaths in the South etc… these will be ongoing as well
4) the miniaturization/distribution of physical
production leads to a situation where the kind of
centralization of capital may become obsolete and does
not require wage relationship types of capitalism.
Social innovation compliments and replaces
entrepreneurial modes of innovation,
putting capital
out of the a priori picture but putting it in the a
posteriori picture,
I don't understand that phrase, could you explain it?
<<BECAUSE of the lower capital requirements in the immaterial sphere, the role of capital is much less important, and innovation does not need it. Only after the Darwinistic process of selection, when solutions are being adopted and costs are incurred (servers…) is there a pressing need for capital, therefore, it intervenes after, not before. The internal entrepreneurial model, financed by VC’s in exchange for IP, is making place for other models, not relying on IP.
note the capital requirements of
internet companies have fallen by 80% in 10 years,
venture capital is only minimally present in web 2.0
and is slowly deserting open source influenced
software industry because of lack of a clear business
model
The P2P Foundation researches, documents and promotes peer to peer alternatives.
Wiki and Encyclopedia, at http://p2pfoundation.net; Blog, at http://blog.p2pfoundation.net; Newsletter, at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
Basic essay at http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=499; interview at http://poynder.blogspot.com/2006/09/p2p-very-core-of-world-to-come.html; video interview, at http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/09/29/network_collaboration_peer_to_peer.htm
----- Original Message ----
From: graham <graham theseamans.net>
____________________________________________________________________________________
Yahoo! oneSearch: Finally, mobile search
that gives answers, not web links.
http://mobile.yahoo.com/mobileweb/onesearch?refer=1ONXIC
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de