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[ox-en] Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi



A nice interview of Cosma Orsi with Michel Bauwens, reposted from 
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/interview-on-peer-to-peer-politics-with-cosma-orsi/2008/04/10
and blogged citing parts here
http://www.keimform.de/2008/04/10/michel-bauwens-on-peer-to-peer-politics/

+++

Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi

Here’s the text of an interview in preparation of a trip to Italy in May 
2008. Interviewer is Cosma Orsi.

Q: Your recent reflections gravitates around an alternative paradigm of 
production that you have named P2P political economy. What is this 
concept all about?

My main argument is that we have the development of a new set of 
technological affordances, which changes the conditions in which the 
production of social value can take place, and that this fundamentally 
challenges the supremacy of the classic for-profit mode of production. 
This time, not because the workers have undertaken any conscious 
challenge to it, but because it enables the direct social production of 
use value, through new life practices that are largely outside the 
control of capital, and with means of production which have been 
socialized to a very significant degree. These new processes are 
post-capitalist rather than capitalist, in the sense that they no 
longer need any specific role of capital for their reproduction.

The key characteristic of our new technological infrastructure, i.e. 
distributed networks, is that they allow individuals to freely engage 
and relate to each other around common projects. This has a multitude 
of important effects. By dramatically lowering the thresholds of 
participation in such common projects, a much wider range of 
motivations, instead of just monetary ones, have become productive.

Amongst the newly enabled social processes, the first in importance is 
therefore the ability to produce complex artefacts in common, without 
recourse to either a for-profit or state-based form of social 
organization; second, the ability to scale small groups dynamics on a 
global scale, below the scale where hierarchical simplification would 
be needed, and so the possibility to replace hierarchical allocation by 
the bottom-up coordination through a multitude of small groups and 
individuals; third, the ability in the context of production of 
non-rival and ‘immaterial’ goods, to share them without any loss of 
usage or value by the sharer, so that a non-reciprocal logic of 
voluntary contributions, coupled with universal availability, not only 
becomes possible, but even a natural requirement which does not impose 
any substantial extra cost to the system. This is why I focus on 
the ‘peer to peer’ logic as a ‘non-reciprocal’ form of generalized 
exchange, which does not need any reciprocity. It is a form of communal 
shareholding which should clearly be distinguished from any 
reciprocity-based gift economy. It works in the immaterial sphere of 
non-rival goods, but because every physical production is also the 
result of an immaterial design, it also has a big impact on the 
totality of productive processes.

In short, we now have commons-based peer production as a third mode of 
production, self-organization of such peer projects as a third mode of 
peer governance, and peer property as new mode of protecting that 
common from private appropriation.

The political economy of the common is no longer based on the 
circulation of capital, but on the circulation of the common. The 
precondition for such social cooperation is the pre-existence, or 
self-creation, of open and free raw material, i.e. material for which 
no permission or payment has to be given; the raw material is processed 
through new techniques, which have lowered the threshold of 
participation to such a degree that every form of motivation becomes 
productive, including especially the non-monetary ones, and finally, 
the output takes the form of a commons, through a new type of licenses, 
which act as a legal guarantee against private appropriation; this in 
turn creates a new layer of open and free raw material which can serve 
for the next phase of social cooperation, in a virtuous cycle of common 
creation.

Q: The political economy you advocate is radically different from the 
actual economic orthodoxy especially with respect to its ontological 
basis (human nature). What is your understanding of human nature and 
society?

The political economy of capital is based on the assumption of 
individuality, i.e. the existence of atomized, unrelated individuals in 
need of socialization through institutions. And these individuals are 
generally divorced from the means of production. This rational economic 
man has never existed, but has been the ideological basis of economic 
practices and public policies. It’s only basis of truth is that 
capitalism attempts to create such a situation, and generally 
disintegrates traditional human ties; and also that, before widespread 
connectivity, human linkages were more limited in time and space.

The new situation is based on a recognition and realization of 
relationality as the basis of human civilization, i.e. the recognition 
that we are always already related in various peer groups, many of them 
chosen on the basis of affinity. Our identity is constructed through 
our engagement and contributions through common projects. Cooperation 
is primary, and competition happens through the ideological choices we 
have to make between ‘projects’ we adhere to, or else we start our own. 
The new cooperative individualism also coincides through the new 
structural conditions of important sections of the knowledge workers, 
who have easy access to the computers and networks they need to create 
value, because these have been socialized to such an extent that they 
are no longer in the monopolistic hands of capital. But peer production 
is by no means limited to such knowledge workers, it becomes rather a 
generalized social practice, an ‘aspect’ of everyones life.

I’m not a technological determinist, but see technology itself as 
already the result of changes in consciousness of its designers, and 
the newly designed affordances then in turn starts to change broader 
layers of the population. Peer to peer is the combined result of a 
change in ontology, i.e. the shift we just discussed from individuality 
to relationality (and not a return to premodern community-based 
wholism); of a change in epistemology towards participative knowing, 
i.e. a refusal of the subject-object split of modernity, as well as the 
radical split between experts and laypeople, and a rejection of the 
distinction between producers and consumers; instead, we experience a 
shift towards a demand for co-creation and co-design, towards 
produsers, i.e. production without manufacturing by the users 
themselves, and an ascendancy of professional amateurs that are no 
longer subjected to credentialist demands of institutional validation. 
Peer production is based on the elimination of permission-asking and a 
shift to the self-selection of tasks, the continued probabilistic 
production of the continuously improved but never finished common 
artefacts, and quality control through communal validation of the 
self-same community of peers, through intelligently designed collective 
choice systems. Finally, there is a new axiology, i.e. set of values, 
in which sharing becomes the default option, and the demand for 
meaningful, passionate, self-unfolding and non-alienated work becomes a 
primary psycho-social reality for growing numbers of the population, 
especially our educated and networked youth. The key new value is not 
just the demand for ‘equality’ of the industrial working class, but a 
recognition of the equipotentiality of all productive individuals. This 
means that all human beings are considered to be better or worse in a 
range of skills, with none of the skills being a measure of superiority 
over any other skill. The key then becomes designing production as a 
series of granular projects that can be self-selected for equipotential 
matching between the task and the self-assessing individual, which is 
only a posteriori validated by the community of peers. In other words, 
the motto is: “Let hundred flowers bloom, and only select the best 
bouquet afterwards!!”

The new social imaginary is conscious of the invisible infrastructures 
which determine the scope of freedom in human relationships, and 
attempt to overcome any contradiction between self-interest and 
altruism by designing directly for congruence between individual and 
collective interests, making the social an ethical surplus deriving 
from open collaboration.

I see humanity evolving from a civilization based on exchange, to one 
based on ‘contributions’.

Q: Do you see peer production as a way of re-empowering a worn-out civil 
society that has been dispossessed of much of its creativity as a 
result of three centuries of capitalistic exploitation?

Yes, peer to peer practices are a sign of the rebirth, and the coming to 
prominence, of civil society as the primary actor of social life. Look 
at our language: civil society organizations are either called 
non-profit, or non-governmental, implying that they are derivative from 
either corporations or the state. But the new breed of institutions 
that are managing peer production, such as the Wikimedia or the Mozilla 
Foundations, call themselves with the positive moniker of for-benefit, 
implying a positive identity and practice. Peer production is the mode 
of production, governance and property arising out of civil society, 
and it has to be clearly distinguished, from the private or public 
alternatives. Peer production is not state production, peer governance 
is neither bureaucracy nor representative democracy, and peer property 
is inclusive common property, not collective public property. The key 
concern of peer governance is to eliminate permission seeking, to 
abolish credentialism, to avoid democratic negotiation where possible, 
to forego market pricing but most of all: to avoid the emergence of a 
collective individual which arises out of the community, crystallizes, 
and then turns against it or appropriates the common resources to its 
own benefit. Peer production is post-capitalist, but it does not 
necessarily abolish the market, rather it subsumes it as a subsystem 
for allocating scarce goods according to the price mechanism; it does 
not abolish the state, but expects the state to become a partner which 
empowers and enables the infrastructure of participation, through which 
the direct social production of value can occur. I call this the 
Partner State approach.

Q: One of your main concern is to make crystal clear that P2P approach 
is not an utopia. Rather it arises from a new and intentional moral 
vision, that ‘holds the potential for a major breakthrough in social 
evolution, leading to the possibility of a new political, economic, and 
cultural ‘formation’ with a new coherent logic’. What you mean when you 
refer to a new and intentional moral vision?

Many approach social change through idealism, desiring a new type of 
human being, which quickly degenerates in a moralistic and therefore 
authoritarian approach, based on a vision of how people should behave. 
By contrast, my own approach is naturalistic. Let’s first of all 
observe what kind of peer to peer practices are already emerging? From 
this empirical basis, we can ask ourselves the question: which of these 
practices exemplifies our ethical values, exemplify more freedom and 
equality, yet are efficient in creating social value? And from this 
naturally flows a practice of emancipation, which works mainly through 
interconnection and design. How can we interconnect the new life 
practices so that they can learn from each other and become stronger? 
How can we, once we understand the pattern language of the successes, 
generalize them through value-conscious design, stimulating a potential 
that is already there by lowering transaction and coordination costs, 
and discouraging negative behaviour’s by making them more ‘expensive’ 
to choose? This is a very realistic approach of ‘attainable 
micro-utopias’, but which, through their interconnection, can in the 
long term change the very basis of our civilization.

Q: One of the most attention-grabbing point of your reasoning is that 
peer production embodies a concept of property (rights) substantially 
different from the one entailed by capitalism. Peer production is, in 
fact, geared around a legal infrastructure tailored for and aimed at 
the creation of what you called Information Commons. Can you explain 
what the technicalities of this alternative form of property are?

Every social form needs a technique for social reproduction, and in the 
case of peer production it is crucial that it is protected from private 
appropriation. Peer property is common property, not private nor public 
property. Private property is exclusionary, simply put: what is mine, 
is not yours. Public property is both of all of us, but also crucially 
from none of us. The latter is a consequence of its representational 
format. We choose, democratically, or it is chosen for us, that a 
collective body represents the sovereignty over that property, so that 
it can in fact exclude. The collective therefore potentially excludes 
the individual. But common property takes a novel position, it is both 
from you and me, and we cannot exclude each other from using it. So 
peer property stands for the universal availability of what has been 
commonly constructed.

However, it comes in two slightly different formats, one appropriate for 
the sharing economy and one appropriate for the commons economy. In the 
sharing economy, the individual or small group produces an artefact, 
over which it retains sovereignty, but it can decide over various 
modalities of sharing. A typical example of this are the Creative 
Commons licences, which say: you can use my creative output, under such 
and such conditions. The other format is used for commons-based peer 
production, where it is clear that large collectives are building a 
common artefact. In this case the basic rule is that, though your 
attribution and therefore ownership is recognized, it is in fact part 
of a common pool, which takes precedence. You can use it, copy it, 
modify it, but every modification is also automatically part of the 
same common pool. Typical example is the General Public License used by 
the free software community.

There is a third case, where corporations attempt to integrate various 
aspects of peer production in their own value and production chains, or 
attempt to monetize common production. Such cases, though they may 
involve sharing or distributed production, do not constitute peer 
property, but may have various dangerous clauses, such as claiming that 
all your creative output is in fact property of the platform. This is a 
new type of enclosure.

Q: P2P not only refers to the economy but also to a radically different 
form of governance. With respect to this latter issue, you have claim 
that at the heart of peer governance lies the idea of multitude and 
absolute democracy. To back-up your argument you make explicit 
reference to authors such as Toni Negri, Miguel Benasayag, and John 
Holloway. In what sense P2P can bring about such a tall order? And 
above all, as any reference to democracy cannot avoid dealing with the 
issue of participation, could you explain what notion of participation 
underpins your normative claim?

Peer production stands for autonomy in cooperation, an economy 
consisting of free contributions. This mode of production is in stark 
contrast with the traditional notion of the capitalist economy, where a 
theoretical political economy, the freedom to regularly choose your 
representatives in the political sphere, is coupled with a working 
sphere that is hierarchical and even feudal, i.e. the submission of the 
division of labour to the owners of capital With peer production, the 
co-producers do directly participate in the decision making process. 
Those that do the work, decide about it, that is the central principle. 
This is done by eliminating permission to the greatest possible extent, 
i.e. relying on self-selection, in the context of a probabilistic 
production process, coupled with meritocratic adhocacries in the small 
groups(changing configurations of leadership according to context), and 
processes of communal validation after the production. When you are 
operating in a sphere of abundance, of non-rival goods that can be 
reproduced by all at marginal cost, then there is no need for either a 
market, a hierarchy, or even a democracy, in order to allocate 
resources, since they are freely allocated by the individuals 
themselves, who are the productive resources of the system. This is the 
strength of peer production, but also its weakness. For example, the 
work for both Linux and Wikipedia can be self-regulated, but the 
infrastructure of cooperation is still costly, and therefore, a new 
type of for-benefit organizations, following formal democratic rules, 
usually takes care of it. As soon as you need to allocate resources, 
you need formal mechanisms in order to mitigate the ‘tyranny of 
structurelessness’, and this will best take a representational form. 
Therefore, in my view, which may differ from the authors you cite, peer 
production is only complementary to democracy, not a replacement for 
it. However, we can expect that the range of realities where peer 
governance will apply, will increase over time. The space of 
non-representationality will likely become more important than the 
sphere of representationality. We can also imagine that in a society 
where such voluntary contributions become dominant, the pressure will 
be such that the democratic institutions will be really democratic, and 
not just under the influence of the corporate interests which now 
dominate the state form.

Q: In your writing you have dedicated much time in making a clear 
distinction between P2P economic process and other form of economic 
organization such as the gift economy. In this regard, you maintain 
that P2P production methods are not a gift economy based on equal 
sharing, but a form of communal shareholding based on participation. 
Why this distinction is so crucial to your argument?

The distinction is crucial in the context of what anthropologists call 
the crowding out phenomenom, i.e. one social logic can push out another 
one.

The gift economy is a system of reciprocity and symmetry. The one that 
gives creates prestige for him/herself, and an obligation in the 
receiver, who will want to restore the equality of the relationship 
through giving something in return. It’s a system based on personal 
relations. It was the basis of the tribal systems of production. The 
market on the other hand, is a system of exchange, of equal value 
against equal value, of impersonal relations. Communal shareholding 
relies differently on the ‘kindness of strangers’, it expands the 
sphere of social cooperation to people we don’t know, but also work on 
the common project, and are therefore willing to share.

Communal shareholding is based on the logic: you give what you can to 
the commons, from which anybody can take according to need. You do not 
get anything specific back, but indirectly of course, you get many 
different benefits: knowledge, relationships, reputation. But even 
those that do not really participate, still benefit from using the 
whole commons. Such voluntary contributions arise out of a convergence 
of individual and common interest, and a wide range of different 
motivations. For example, when you start sharing revenues, with some 
contributors obtaining monetary rewards and not others, this in fact 
discourages further voluntary contributions, because the inequality it 
introduces. Market mechanisms are really destructive to a commons, so 
if there is an ecology of businesses creating added value to the 
commons in order to create a market for their scarce goods, they need 
to practice ‘benefit sharing’, i.e. a general support to the commons as 
a whole, rather than inequality inducing rewards.

My issue with the gift economy is more ideological. It is used by free 
market apologists to sustain their vision of rational economic man, 
which only gives because he/she receives, but peer production belongs 
to a different logic. I think it is good for humanity to have a fuller 
vision of human motivation, and understand under which conditions such 
non-reciprocal engagement is possible, a research that would be 
obscured by an insistence on the notion of a gift economy.

Now, an important point is this: non-reciprocal peer production only 
works for non-rival goods that can be shared without loss; in the 
material world of scarcity and rival goods, we do need either 
exchange-based or reciprocity based mechanisms. Non-reciprocal open 
design communities need to be coupled with market-based built only 
capitalism, or other forms of allocation.

Q: You have argued that while hierarchy is predicated on creating 
sameness through identification and exclusion, and is associated with 
the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment, P2P is ‘about 
unity-in-diversity, it is concrete ‘post-Enlightenment’ universalism 
predicated on common projects.’ Is this a way for saying that peer 
production is sustained - and legitimized - by a conception of (social) 
justice able to stand the challenges inherent to the post-modern era?

The key ontological principle of peer to peer relationality 
is “equipotentiality”. This is a vision of humanity of all of us being 
a wide variety of combinations of different skills and endeavours, with 
different levels of excellence for each, but none of these skills being 
inferior or superior in the abstract. This means that I can recognize 
you for your contribution in a common project, and you can recognize me 
for a different contribution to the same or to another project. We 
overcome our fragmentation and isolation through the construction of 
our identities through the common projects we are engaged with, 
building a great cosmic “mash-up” which enriches our universe through 
free contributions. In our encounter with other human beings we both 
look for difference, and for affinity. The difference is what enriches 
us and what is common unites us. We know from each other that we 
contribute to widely different projects. Each person therefore needs to 
be honoured for his/her unique mix of skills and contributions, and 
deserves a general income for his contribution to social wealth, which 
he produces through the very fact of being alive and to be 
always-already related. The general unconditional income is coupled 
with a minimal request for contributions to the common good, so as to 
make society sustainable, and by a wide variety of reputation and 
wealth acknowledgement systems which allow us to recognize the 
extraordinary contributions of each according to context and to develop 
appropriate rewards for it.

Q: Your proposal is gaining moment. You managed to organised several 
university workshops here in Europe [notably in France at the Sorbonne 
University and Nottingham Trent University] to discuss at academic 
level this paradigm. Furthermore, there is a growing interest on the 
part of commercial enterprises in understanding P2P processes, as shown 
by the fact that your time is now divided up between implementing the 
theoretical aspect and delivering seminars for commercial enterprises. 
How do you explain this interests on the part of market enterprises, 
and in light of such a growing interest, what kind of future do you 
envisage, say in the next 20 or 30 years, for peer production?

Market players understand that the use of peer production principles is 
a competitive advantage. I formulate this as the ‘law of asymmetric 
competition’. It states that if a for-profit company, using wage labour 
and proprietary IP, is facing competition from a for-benefit 
institution that can draw on a large circle of volunteers and uses open 
ownership formats, the former will tend to eventually lose out to the 
latter. The reason is that peer production filters out any but the most 
productive motivation, i.e. intrinsic positive motivation stemming from 
passion, and strives for absolute quality, i.e. producing the very best 
common artefact, never finished but continuously upgraded, while its 
private competitor will only strive for relative quality, i.e. being 
better than the competition. From this follows a derivative: any 
for-profit company, or public authority for that matter, that adopts 
open/free, participatory and commons-oriented practices will tend to 
gain competitive advantages compared to those that do not do so. This 
drives the adoption of peer to peer practices in the market sphere, and 
strengthens the overall peer to peer logic in society. The process is 
very similar to how slavery changed to feudalism, and feudalism to 
capitalism: by a mutual reconfiguration of both the elite and the 
producing classes. Marx’s vision was a historical anomaly which we now 
know has never been confirmed.

So the image of change is the following: peer to peer develops as a germ 
form in the margins of the market, and is increasingly adopted, until 
it eventually achieves some kind of parity. At some point in time the 
old meta-system enters into crisis, and the already existing new 
subsystem becomes the new meta-system.

The best scenario is that the enlightened sections of the elite first 
recognize that there needs to be a new global compact to save the earth 
from biospheric destruction, say a form of green capitalism, but to 
succeed, it necessarily will adopt many p2p features, and in any case, 
such change can only come through a revival of popular power to drive 
the system to such reform, which in itself will strengthen 
participatory politics. This in turn creates the space for the germ 
form to grow to a level of equivalency – think of the situation before 
the French Revolution with the absolute monarchs arbitraging between a 
rising bourgeoisie and a declining feudal order. At some point, 
frustration that the advantages of the new form are being frustated 
through the old form of social organization, may then lead to a tipping 
point, in which the new subsystem becomes dominant. This scenario has 
of course nothing automatic, it depends on the pressures of the 
populations driven by the effects of climate catastrophes, and in the 
second phase, in the power of peer producers. My hopes are driven by 
the following conviction: that to maintain a infinite growth system 
within a finite environment cannot in any case be a sustainable form of 
society. The question then becomes: what will replace it? It will 
either be a new system of hyper-exploitation, based on a return to 
authoritarianism, similar to the period of disintegration following the 
decline of the Roman Empire; or it can transform to a higher level of 
complexity, which in my view is the peer to peer based civilization. 
Can we really envisage that humanity chooses for some kind of 
collective suicide, and not for the obvious way out? Of course we can 
envisage it, but our energies should better be directed to create the 
desired future, and to consider it as a ‘conditional inevitability’. In 
this context, a reconfiguration of some market forces to a position of 
netarchical capitalism, their transformation into ‘enablers and 
empowerers of the direct social production of value’, as we see already 
happening, seems like a good bet. Such forces are both partially allies 
of peer producers, but of course they also have different interests. 
Can we compare it again to the end of the Roman empire. It was 
certainly better to be a serf than a slave, and at the same time, for 
former slaveholders, it was a way to externalise the cost of fully 
feeding their slaves, by making them responsible for their own 
livelihood. Mutual interest of both the elite and the producing classes 
led to a reconfiguration of the class system into the new equilibrium 
of feudalism.

Q: Some American authors, such as Eric Raymond, but also ‘common-ists’ 
such as Lawrence Lessig (Lessig,2004), through his arguments for a 
Creative Commons, remain suspicious about P2P processes as they claim 
that are still embedded into a market logic. How you respond to these 
critics?

Eric Raymond is a libertarian, and though a supporter of the 
business-friendly form of free software, i.e. open source, is not a 
friend of the idea of the commons, which he equates with collectivism. 
But I believe this is because of his ideological blinders as a 
libertarian, since he in practice cooperates with the free software 
commons. Lawrence Lessig is a liberal, his form of the commons is the 
individually-oriented Creative Commons, which allows for individuals to 
decide on a degree of sharing, but is not focused on created complex 
commonly owned artefacts as only the General Public License can. He is 
a genuine liberal who believes in the positive values of classic 
liberalism. He does not have a clear vision of peer to peer processes 
as a social dynamic. Yochai Benkler does however.

Overall, of all the authors who write about peer to peer, they are 
either business people who see new monetary opportunities, as with Don 
Tapscott’s Wikinomics; or left liberals who see it as a new positive 
adjunct to the market; finally, there are cynical leftists who only see 
how it is being used by capital, and do not see its emancipatory 
potential, in other words, they have already given capitalism the 
victory. In contrast, I belong to the strand who sees peer production 
as both immanent in the system, while it retains its transcendent, 
liberatory potential. One is the condition for the other. The Oekonux 
(Linux Economy) group is similar in its approach. Its immanence is not 
a proof of its weakness, but of its strength. It is not a 
anticapitalist strain within the industrial system, but already a 
postcapitalist, postmonetary logic, a new productive life practice that 
has the potential to replace the current system. The market, the 
hierarchy, and even democracy are but means to allocate scarce 
resources, but peer governance is the direct voluntary self-allocation 
of resources, divorced from monetary motives. What we need to do is to 
develop a literacy of participation, evolve the self-consciousness of 
sharing and commons-based communities, of distributed 
and ‘crowdsourced’ labour, so that they can intelligently engage with 
platform owners and businesses associated with their commons. The new 
lines of tension are between these communities and the corporate 
institutions they are engaging with, but at the same time, the joint 
world of peer production still needs to protect itself against the 
retrograde forces of proprietary ownership and artificial scarcities 
that impede sharing and commons-production. Ultimately, we will also 
need to tackle the peer production of infrastructures themselves, but 
we are not at this stage yet.

Q: Moving away from these critics, I would like to end this interview 
placing the emphasis upon two rather bold claims: the first one is that 
peer production is potentially able to change the nature of capitalism 
and the second that it has the potentiality of solving the free rider 
problem. Both brave claims, indeed…

Global capitalism is facing the same conundrum as ancient Rome: a crisis 
of extensive accumulation, because it can no longer externalize 
environmental costs. But switching to intensive growth in the 
immaterial world creates a crisis of value. Indeed, marginal 
reproduction costs for non-rival immaterial goods destroys the logic of 
scarcity which is the basis of the market. So marketization, 
monetization, moves to the margins of the new commons. Direct social 
production of value rises exponentially, but its monetization only 
linearly at its margins. Furthermore, anything that needs to be 
produced physically, has to be designed ‘immaterially’first, through 
processes that are not fundamentally different from software and 
knowledge creation. It is therefore only a matter of time that open 
design communities striving for absolute quality, start making designs 
that will eventually be better than those that can be produced by for 
profit companies. Accepting that the primary processes of social 
innovation will take place outside the sphere of capital, will 
necessarily need to new social structures. Just as the Roman 
slaveholders were faced with the fact that a turn to intensive growth 
could only happen by freeing the slaves, so capital is faced with the 
fact that the experience economy won’t be capitalist in its core. A 
change of the core logic of the system seems inevitable, though it is 
of course difficult to predict the precise nature of the new social 
contract around the primacy of the peer to peer logic.

The free rider problem is only a major problem in the physical commons, 
where it is a matter of smart governance and regulation; in the 
immaterial sphere, though there are problems with spamming, trolling 
and the like, free riding by itself is not a key problem. On the 
contrary, it is the very nature of a peer to peer system that it makes 
every form of usage a productive resource for the system as a whole. 
Whereas for centralized and decentralized systems more usage is 
problematic, because it uses up more resources, peer to peer design 
creates the opposite dynamic. Every peer is turned into a resource of 
the system.

The new proprietary platforms exist because of design choices, they have 
decentralized and centralized setups that are expensive to maintain, 
and therefore require centralized capital. However, it is my conviction 
that these constraints could eventually be designed away in fully 
distributed infrastructures. Eventually, we already see it happening, 
other productive machinery than just the computer, will also know the 
same process of miniaturisation, of lowering capital requirements, and 
this will introduce distributed dynamics in the sphere of physical 
production. The key issue will then become: how do we combine the 
non-reciprocal peer to peer logic of immaterial production, with the 
need for reciprocity in the physical production of scarce material 
goods. When we have the answer to that question, we will have the 
maturity to shift to a full peer to peer based political economy and 
civilization. There are already a number of thinkers, such as Christian 
Siefkes in his book on the Peer Economy, thoroughly thinking about how 
a shift from a economy of exchange to an economy of contributions, 
could occur. But at the P2P Foundation, we prefer a continued empirical 
analysis of what is actually happening on the ground, through the 
self-creativity of peer groups grappling with the challenges of 
sustainability.

-- 
Start here: www.meretz.de
_________________________________
Web-Site: http://www.oekonux.org/
Organization: http://www.oekonux.de/projekt/
Contact: projekt oekonux.de



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