Peer2Politics

“When Gutenberg invented the printing press the deployment of knowledge outside of the clergy and nobility quickly caused problems in the institutions of the feudal system; the decline of feudalism significantly expanded science and the university, and radically changed the world and its operations to lead us to the industrial era.

This is a French-language interview on the possible convergence between commons-based peer production and the social and solidarity economy.

“I was recently asked to talk about the idea of “open”, and I realized the term is used in at least eight different ways. The distinct interpretations are all important in different but interlocking ways. Getting them confused leads to a lot of misunderstanding, so it’s good to review them all.

‘Co-operative accumulation to what end’ is a strategic issue, John. So too, is the invisibility of the ecological in this discourse and the question of how we invent language and practices that explicitly help us to live within limits. Practically none of the comments you so far have received touch on the latter point. Here are some further reflections, grist for the commonweal so to speak. (Please note that I have not had the benefit of reading Robin’s paper. I am only picking up on the thread.)

“Historically, the anti-statist tendency in Marxism has been largely carried in a very different ‘worker council’ tradition, that, against the powers of party and state has insisted on the role of workplace assemblies as the loci of decision-making, organization and power. In an essay antediluvian by digital standards, ‘Workers’ Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society,’ written in 1957 but republished in 1972, immediately after the Soviet crushing of Hungary’s Workers Councils, Cornelius Castoriadis noted the frequent failure of this tradition to address the economic problems of a ‘totally self-managed society.’ The question, he wrote, had to be situated ‘firmly in the era of the computer, of the knowledge explosion, of wireless and television, of input-output matrices’, abandoning ‘socialist or anarchist utopias of earlier years’ because ‘the technological infrastructures … are so immeasurably different as to make comparisons rather meaningless’ (Castoriadis, 1972: np).

This article set out to show, through the Helix_T wind turbine project, two things: first, on a theoretical level, that CBPP is not limited to ICT, but that in conjunction with the emerging technological capabilities of 3D printing, it can also produce really promising hardware, globally designed (with the direct or indirect support of Commons-based communities) and locally pro- duced. Second, beyond its illustrative role as a case study, the Helix_T also contributes to the quest for novel solutions to the urgent need for (autonomous) renewable sources of energy, more as a development process and less as a ready-to-apply solution. And while the Helix_T does not offer huge amounts of energy and suffers from several shortcomings, we showed that it is possible to create a low-cost, DIY wind turbine with 3D printed modules in a cost-effective way to provide individuals with small amounts of clean energy. The illustration has also worked in theory by showing that it is possible to produce innovative hardware based on CBPP. The case shows that for someone with only very partial initial knowledge, it is feasible to start a similar project based on an interesting idea and to succeed in implementing it through the collaboration with Commons-oriented communities while using CBPP products and tools.

Let’s imagine that we are living at the dawn of human history. Back then there were very small bands and tribes of 30, 40 or 50 people. The women usually went out foraging and the men went hunting. They did it in groups and when they came back from foraging or hunting they had some kind of rule that established that the elderly got this, the female got that. However, anthropologically speaking, the important thing is that the totality of the tribe was a primary entity and the individuals were part of the tribe. In anthropological terms, this is called “communal shareholding”. So at the dawn of human history, the human anthropological system was communal.

“What is optimal scale? The optimum size for the use of resources, starting with capital itself, that are used as means of production. Logically, scale is optimal for a particular market size and for a given technology.

“All isn’t lost for distributed power, though. For institutional power the Internet is a change in degree, but for distributed power it’s a change of kind. The Internet gives decentralized groups – for the first time – access to coordination. This can be incredibly empowering, as we saw in the SOPA/PIPA debate, Gezi, and Brazil. It can invert power dynamics, even in the presence of surveillance censorship and use control.

“Most co–operative practice is single stakeholder. Therefore the co-op sector divides between typically consumer co-ops, worker co-ops and farmer co-ops, each generally with their backs to each other and walking away from each other. This one dimensional aspect is impeding in my view an untapped revolutionary economic potential for a new generation of full dimensional co-ops to ignite.

“All commodities have to be understood as having a use value and exchange value. If I have a steak the use value is that I can eat it and the exchange value is how much I had to pay for it.

Submitted to the Program in Media Arts and Sciences, School of Architecture and Planning, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Media Arts and Sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, June 2013

When we talk about the end of workplaces and lifetime employment, please don’t get the wrong idea. This has nothing to do with what Silicon Valley and venture capitalists are now calling the “sharing economy.” It was once the darling of open source advocates and socially-conscious entrepreneurs, but I now consider the term “sharing economy” to be co-opted by predatory business models. Here’s how it happened.