Peer2Politics

This 2-part piece aims to locate cybernetic systems theory and digital developments within the context of the now-structural economic ‘crisis’ and project of world libertarian communism, or to put this term another way, ‘the human project’…

“Labor is different from other factors of production in one regard. Owners of land and capital will dispose of their full supply, guided only by one consideration: Revenue maximization. If labor were governed by the same law, workers would work as much as they were physically able to on a sustainable basis. But in fact there’s a backward-bending supply curve of labor because, unlike using land and capital, expending labor — at least after a certain point — is unpleasant. Labor, unlike a piece of land or a lump of coal, has to be persuaded to supply its own productive services — to crawl out of bed in the morning and go into a place it would rather not be.

Extracted from “The Telekommunist Manifesto” as authored by John Magyar, B.A., J.D. and Dmytri Kleiner, the Peer Production License (henceforth PPL) is somewhat of a hybrid between a Copyleft and Creative Commons license. Kleiner himself describes it as a “Copyfarleft License”. The standout feature which distinguishes it from a standard Creative Commons non-commercial license is that it’s geared to create counter-economic networks for ethical economy players.

'a commons regime takes steps to protect the "resource" that the commons jointly manages/owns/cares for. More specifically the words "protecting the resource" means setting an absolute scale limit on its use. The commoners will set a scale of use for grazing a commons, or fishing a river, or taking water from an irrigation system. That is to say they set a maximum physically measured use - so many cows over the summer, so many gallons or water, so many fish per season. (NOT, so much $ worth of milk etc)

"In the introduction of the book, Taleb describes it as follows: "Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better."

“The picture of hackers versus spooks, positioning free and open source software as an alternative to the surveillance technologies of the NSA, just doesn’t hold up. Appelbaum must know that the NSA has a long history of engagement with open-source software, so “closed source proprietary malware for cops” mischaracterizes the technology of surveillance. The NSA Boundless Informant data-mining tool proclaims that it “leverages FOSS technology”, specifically the Hadoop File System, MapReduce (perhaps built on the Apache Accumulo project, which was created by the NSA and contributed to the Apache Foundation), and CloudBase.

"“The theory of exodus proposes that the most effective way of opposing capitalism and the liberal state is not through direct confrontation but by means of what Paolo Virno has called ‘engaged withdrawal,’ mass defection by those wishing to create new forms of community.

“Chapter 7 is typical of the book. Here is a collection of people who record and track their everyday lives online, and then analyze and quantify their existence, from toothbrushing to reading to fecal contents. These “datasexuals” now have a social movement, of a sort, which they call the “Quantified Self” movement. It would be easy to dismiss the Quantified Selfers as harmless eccentrics if they did not have a significant presence among the opinion shapers and leading lights of Silicon Valley, and if the mindset they embody was not clearly present, if in moderated form, in the wider digital world, and if the assumptions and goals were not oozing out over the rest of us. From quantifying oneself in a private context it is a short step to the presentation of self through these numbers, and the use of them as a basis for optimization and refinement. So Morozov cites Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn, who says that self tracking is a way to “acknowledge that you have bugs, that there’s new development to do on yourself” (237) so that we can algorithmically measure, tweak, and refine ourselves and our self-presentation to the world.