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Jukka Peltokoski

Economic Democracy and the Billion-Dollar Co-op | P2P Foundation - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...24

cooperative osuuskunta energia energiaosuuskunta sähköverkko demokratia yhteisötalous jukkap2p Unioni

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17 - No Cached
  • Candidate Donald Trump made a campaign stop in February 2016 hosted by South Carolina’s Broad River Electric Cooperative.
  • By the onset of the Great Depression, few people in the rural United States had electricity at home—about 10 percent. The power companies that had lit up the cities simply didn’t see enough profit in serving far-flung farmers. But gradually some of those farmers started forming electric cooperatives—utility companies owned and governed by their customers—and strung up their own lines.
  • We typically think of our democratic institutions as having to do with politicians and governments. But there are democratic businesses, too—not just these electric co-ops, but also hulking credit unions, mutual-insurance companies, and ubiquitous cooperative brands from Land O’Lakes to the Associated Press. Their democracy is fragile. When it’s not exercised or noticed, these creatures act on their own volition.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • Local co-ops band together to form larger co-ops of co-ops—power suppliers that run power plants, cooperatively owned mining operations, and democratic banks that finance new projects.
  • It’s also a neglected democracy
  • by member-owners of the co-ops
  • and by a society that forgets what cooperative economic development have achieved.
  • Electric cooperatives are conservative institutions, carrying out the business of reliability while balancing their members’ interests with formidable inertia. But they’re also poised to lead a radical shift to a more renewable distributed-energy grid. They can be fiefdoms for long-entrenched establishments, but they’re also bastions of bottom-up, local self-governance.
  • depends not just on the whims of investors or on the promises of presidents, but on the readiness of the people who use it to organize.
  • We Own It, for instance, is a new network started by young but seasoned cooperators determined to support organizing among co-op members
  • Heneghan believes that co-ops are uniquely positioned to benefit. Their lean, local, customer-centered kind of business has already made them pioneers in easy, low-risk financing for energy-efficiency improvements and renewables.
  • Co-ops not locked into G&T contracts have been especially ambitious in switching to renewables.
  • electric co-ops still lag behind the national average in their use of renewables. The local co-ops are bound to their decades-long G&T contracts, and the G&Ts say they can’t walk away from their past investments in coal anytime soon.
  • co-op staffs know as well as anyone that their democracy is in some respects nominal—an opportunity, but by no means a guarantee.
  • According to Derrick Johnson, the president of One Voice and the state NAACP, “Our ultimate goal is to help them understand how to develop a strategy to maximize members’ participation.” Then, he hopes, “they can begin to think about renewable energy differently.”
  • Without member pressure, for instance, managers often have an incentive to sell more power rather than helping members reduce their consumption, their costs, and their carbon footprints.
  • In particular, he pointed out the billions of dollars in “capital credits” that co-ops collectively hold—excess revenues technically owned by members, but that often go unclaimed, serving as a pool of interest-free financing.
  • “There are so many things that point to a structural change in the electrical industry.” He compared the change to what cellular did to telephones.
  • By way of explanation, a staff member repeated what I’ve been told by the leaders of other big co-ops: Low turnout means that members are satisfied.
  • “If the members are not involved in any significant way, the directors become very insular, and they can basically do with the co-op as they please.”
  • As the Trump administration assembles its promised trillion-dollar infrastructure plan, it seems unlikely to unleash a fresh spree of cooperative rural development.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 25 May 17
     
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Jukka Peltokoski

Exploring the commons by Marco Berlinguer | OpenDemocracy | Social Network Unionism - 0 views

snuproject.wordpress.com/...marco-berlinguer-opendemocracy

commons unionism snu Berlinguer uusi työ immateriaalitalous cognitarian

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 13 Oct 12 - No Cached
  • Today’s rediscovery of the notion of the commons stems directly from the need to regulate and to explore how to enable the collaborative action of a multiplicity of protagonists who are autonomous
  • Transform! started work in 2004 on the project ‘Networked Politics’, through which we explored
  • new organisational forms of collective action and the implications of an economy increasingly based on information, knowledge and communication.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • In October 2009, we co-promoted the first Free Culture Forum (FCF)
  • The FCF released a Charter for Innovation, Creativity and Access to Knowledge
  • The Charter lists a variety of ways of achieving sustainability developed by initiatives based on free culture principles, some more consolidated, some still experimental
  • The Charter also promotes the principle of combining several sources of finance, as a way of guaranteeing independence of the creators.
  • What we call the Free Culture Movements comprises a wide range of experiences mainly emerging in the framework of the internet and the digital revolution.
  • We are still living in a capitalist society; and in the last twenty years, one major change has been the qualitatively new importance of information, communication and knowledge both in the economy and in society at large.
  • communities of highly individualised members
  • the potential opened up by the new technologies
  • This goes together with a second question we have often dealt with, that is, why these ‘networked forms’ are emerging in so many movements and indeed in so many aspects of present-day society.
  • these forces have one of their fundamental roots in the movements of the 1960s and 70s and specifically in two salient facts: the shake-up of the Fordist, patriarchal, hierarchical institutions of post-war capitalism and the (connected) repercussions of the massive expansion of higher education.
  • We need to better conceptualise the anthropological transformation which underlies these new patterns of social relationships
  • Which leads us to a third area of issues: the movements we analyse have been emerging from the very core of societal innovation of the last decades. What do we call this? Post-Fordism? The knowledge economy? Informationalism? Cognitive capitalism?
  • When we started Networked Politics, we wanted first of all to deepen the comprehension of the problems that had emerged in the innovative forms and principles of organisation in the global movements. It was in this way that we came to discover parallels with the organisational forms that had emerged in the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement, as well as with various experiences of web communities of collaborative production
  • as producing common resources.
  • logics based on openness to the ‘outside’
  • the logic behind the internet itself
  • But there is also another aspect of this social nature of production that needs to be noted: in many senses, the flows of production appeared to shift away from the formal boundaries of what is traditionally considered productive work, to spread into society at large.
  • the social nature of these processes seems to put pressure on any regulatory, governance and accounting system closed within the boundaries of formally isolated organisations.
  • this configuration also brings people to questioning the adequacy, legitimacy and efficiency of property regimes as we know them, be they private or state mechanisms.
  • The increasing rediscovery of the notion of commons by these movements and many beyond them – has its roots here.
  • When we look at the qualities which need to be mobilised and at the forms of organisation of production in these spheres, we observe an increasing importance of attitudes and capacities
  • creativity, flexibility, development of information, continuous learning, problem-solving, initiative, communicational and relational skills, decision-making, attention, experiential/practical/”tacit” knowledge.
  • embedded in individuals and are not easily reproducible and controllable through planned command or automated mechanisms.
  • depend on motivations which are not easily reducible to the monetary
  • a blurring of entrepreneurial and managerial functions and of dependent work
  • another dimension where the experience of the FC-movements is interesting. There are experiments of a different kind around these problems
  • related to the meshing and mobilisation of different motivations, non-hierarchical division of labour, collaboration and coordination, and so on.
  • working on the basis of a distributional/sharing
  • First, where knowledge, information and communication play a central role, the processes of production appear intrinsically and more immediately social. They benefit and rely on flows and networks of production which go beyond the formal boundaries of any specific organisation (not to say single individuals).
  • a third cluster of problems
  • The increased immaterial and social nature of the processes of production and of products is creating a series of problems in the systems of measures.
  • Such problems are evidently further complicated by the digital revolution, which made it possible that a digital product, once created, can be potentially reproduced “easier, faster, ubiquitously and almost free”
  • In this lies another clue that fundamental difficulties are emerging, which point toward what could be called a crisis of the system of value – which, indeed, has many other roots, well beyond this realm.
  • Fordist forms of production, to be deployed in a non-destructive way, required the invention of a new institutional framework, which crystallised in the Keynesian revolution; which, in turn, to be effectively deployed required the invention of a new system of (public and private) measures and accounts, which culminated in the famous – and today widely contested concept of – Gross National Product. Doesn’t this resonate with the present?
Jukka Peltokoski

ZCommunications | Occupy Homes, One Year On And Growing Daily by Laura Gottesdiener | Z... - 0 views

www.zcommunications.org/ng-daily-by-laura-gottesdiener

asunnottomuus housing occupy Occupy Homes tragedy of the anti-commons

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 23 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • On December 6, the one-year anniversary of the Occupy Homes movement, Meusa and Wheeler were only two among thousands of people who gathered for coordinated direct actions focused on the human right to housing. Building on a year filled with eviction blockades, house takeovers, bank protest and singing auction blockades, the anniversary of Occupy Homes demonstrated that the groups were still committed to risking arrest to keep people sheltered. Yet, even more significantly, the day’s events demonstrated a crystallization of the movement’s central message: that decent and dignified housing should be a human right in the United States.
  • The actions appear to be snowballing. In Atlanta, Occupy our Homes took over a second house on December 8. In Minneapolis, the group opened up another house on December 23 in an action led by Carrie Martinez, who refused to celebrate Christmas with her partner and 12-year-old son in the car where they’d been living since their eviction in October.
  • Like the first Occupy Homes day of action on December 6, 2011, the events demonstrated a high level of coordination and communication among housing groups in various cities — this time drawing on the language and tactics that had been successful throughout the past year.
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  • As the small crowd marched to Meusa and Wheeler’s new home, for instance, people chanted, “Empty houses and houseless people — match them up!” This was a refrain that echoes the rallying cry commonly used by J.R. Fleming, chairman of Chicago’s Anti-Eviction Campaign. (His wording is to match “homeless people with peopleless houses.”)
  • Similarly, in Woodland, activists covered Alma Ponce’s lawn with tents — an allusion to the fall 2011 occupations that has also been used in eviction blockades in Alabama and Georgia over the last year.
  • One important shift evident on the anniversary is that Occupy Homes groups have started rallying more and more behind a rights-based framework to explain why they are pursuing direct action.
  • “Housing is a human right, not for the banks to hold hostage,” Michelene Meusa said a few days after the action, when, at M&T Bank’s request, the Atlanta Police Department arrested her and three others for criminal trespassing. When she refused to leave, she made an explicit comparison between her civil disobedience and the actions of the civil rights movement.
  • The shift towards a human-rights framing of the housing movement and away from following the Occupy movement’s focus on economic unfairness — i.e., “Banks got bailed out, we got sold out” — is significant. The human rights framework is often more powerful in movements led by people of color, drawing strength, as Meusa did, from the civil rights era and cutting through the class divisions that plague housing in a way that movements focused only on mortgage loan modifications cannot.
  • With the continued onslaught of foreclosures across the United States, the question remains: How much will these movements have to scale up to make structural changes, rather than just individual changes?
  • Housing organizing during the Great Depression provides some instructive parallels. The economic devastation since 2008 has been quite similar to what the nation experienced throughout that period. In 1933, for example, banks foreclosed on an average of 1,000 homes every day. In 2010, the rate of displacement was comparable: The average number of foreclosures was more than 2,500 homes a day, and the population has increased two-and-a-half fold.
  • The scale of housing organizing during the early 1930s, however, dwarfs what we have seen so far today. Crowds of hundreds, and sometimes even thousands of people, mobilized to stop evictions in New York, Chicago, Detroit, Gary, Youngstown, Toledo and other urban centers, mostly under the direction of the Communist Party. As in much of current housing organizing, women were often on the front lines. Masses of these women filled the streets as others climbed to the roofs and poured buckets of water on the police below. Women beat back the police officers’ horses by sticking them with long hat pins or pouring marbles into the streets. If the police were successful in moving the family’s furniture out to the curb, the crowd simply broke down the door and moved the family’s belongings back inside after the police had left.
  • Rural communities also formed anti-foreclosure organizations, combining the fight for housing with the fight for fair wages, especially in the sharecropping South. Hundreds of thousands of farmers came together to form anti-eviction and tenants-rights groups
  • This movement achieved substantial legislative gains. Housing policy became a major part of the New Deal, culminating in the National Housing Act of 1934, which established the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) to provide affordable loans to spur homeownership, and the Housing Act of 1937, which established public housing authorities across the country.
  • the establishment of public housing systemically changed the landscape and ideology around housing in the United States and was “one of the most successful federal programs in the 20th century,” according to Damaris Reyes, the executive director of the public housing advocacy group Good Old Lower East Side.
  • By this measure, the Occupy Homes network and aligned housing movements still have light-years to go — a reality that many organizers acknowledge. Yet the conditions have changed since 1930s, suggesting that what we need are not massive federal construction and lending programs, but rather a shift in the way housing rights are perceived and enacted in the U.S. Rather than coping with the scarcity of the 1930s, the United States now confronts vast, unprecedented wealth and gaping economic inequality — a condition that is perhaps best illustrated by the fact that there are upwards of a dozen empty and unused houses for every homeless person in the nation.
  • With more than enough wealth and roofs to provide safe and dignified homes for the country’s population, the challenge today is to demonstrate that this situation of desperate need coexisting with wasted excess is not one we need to accept.
Jukka Peltokoski

Owning is the New Sharing | Open Co-op Commons - 1 views

open.coop/...owning-is-the-new-sharing

osuuskunta omistus yhteisötalous coop opencoop jakamistalous neweconomy osuuskuntateoria commons p2p sharing owning jukkap2p

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • “I’m working to find a steady economic base,” he said. “I don’t really want to put it into the hands of the VCs.” Venture capitalists, that is — the go-to source of quick and easy money for clever tech entrepreneurs like him. He’d get cash, but they’d get the reins.
  • new company,Swarm, the world’s first experiment in what he was calling “cryptoequity.”
  • Swarm would be a crowdfunding platform, using its own virtual currency rather than dollars; rather than just a thank-you or a kickback, it would reward backers with a genuine stake in the projects they support.
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  • Entrepreneurs could sidestep the VCs by turning to a “swarm” of small investors — and maybe supplant the entire VC system. By the end of the summer, he’d raised more than a million dollars in cryptocurrency. The legality of the model is uncertain,
  • High hopes for a liberating Internet have devolved into the dominance of a few mega-companies and the NSA’s watchful algorithms. Platforms entice users to draw their communities into an apparently free and open commons, only to gradually enclose it by tweaking terms of service, diluting privacy, or charging fees for essential features.
  • Facebook started flocking to Ello
  • The line between workers and customers has never been so blurry. Online platforms depend on their users
  • looking for ways to build platforms of their own.
  • VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing.
  • OuiShare, which connects sharing-economy entrepreneurs around the world
  • it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
  • Loomio is now being used by governments, organizations, and schools; a significant portion of the current usage comes from Spain’s ascendant political party, Podemos.
  • new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between.
  • aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
  • Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “zero marginal cost society” in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations.
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • form of ownership
  • Cooperative intelligence
  • Occupy’s kind of direct democracy and made it available to the world in the form of an app — Loomio
  • It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus — though they prefer the term “collaboration” — about decisions that affect their lives.
  • Enspiral, an “open value network” of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • Rather than giving up on ownership, people are looking for a different way of practicing it.
  • The worker cooperative is an old model that’s attracting new interest among the swelling precariat masses
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits
  • multi-stakeholder cooperative — one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once
  • “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
  • Sensorica pays workers for their contributions to the product. Unlike Sovolve, they participate in the company democratically. Everything from revenues to internal criticism is out in the open, wiki-style, for insiders and outsiders alike to see.
  • Only one device has been sold
  • Bitcoin
  • makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs,
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum,
  • to develop decentralized social networks,
  • even an entirely new Internet
  • Swarm’s competition makes it hard not to notice the inequalities built into the models vying to disrupt the status quo. Bitcoin’s micro-economy holds the dubious distinction of being more unequal than the global economy as a whole. On a sharing platform, who owns, and who just rents? In an economy of cooperatives, who gets to be a member, and who gets left out?
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes — it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows. This recognition has been built into some of the most significant efforts under the banner of the so-called “new economy” movement. They’re often offline, but that makes them no less innovative.
  • connecting them to large anchor institutions in their communities; hospitals and universities with deep pockets can help a new enterprise become viable much more quickly than it can on its own
  • Government is an important source of support, too. Perhaps more than some go-it-aloners in tech culture might like to admit, a new economy will need new public policies
  • The early followers Francis of Assisi at first sought to do away with property altogether
  • There are many ways to own. Simply giving up on ownership, however, will mean that those who actually do own the tools that we rely on to share will control them.
  • changing what owning means altogether.
  • Jukka Peltokoski on 28 Oct 16
     
    Omistaminen on uusi yhteinen.
Jukka Peltokoski

Fearless Cities: the new urban movements | Red Pepper - 0 views

www.redpepper.org.uk/cities-the-new-urban-movements

city kaupunki kapinakaupunki Fearless Cities jukkap2p vasemmisto kunta kuntapolitiikka yhteisötalous commons

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 25 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • ‘Fearless Cities’, a gathering of over 700 people, representing dozens of experiments in taking power at city level, to empower citizens’ movements worldwide. More than a coming together of a series of local experiments, it marked the ‘coming out’ party for a new global social movement.
  • A wave of new municipalist movements has been experimenting with how to take – and transform – power in cities large and small.
  • it became necessary to change who the movement made demands of.
  • ...33 more annotations...
  • the housing rights activist and feminist Ada Colau – took control of the Catalan capital
  • citizens started to wonder what would happen if the movement tried to occupy the institutions too
  • From the beginning, this was not a simple return to electoral politics but an experiment in transforming local institutions. It was to use municipal institutions not instead of movement organising but to support, expand and generalise the movement.
  • it’s about the blossoming of examples around the world where citizens are successfully winning their cities.
  • internationalist
  • the list of radical civic platforms standing up to entrenched political interests continues to grow.
  • there are a number of principles and practices that the new municipalist movements share
  • The political theorist Margaret Kohn once defined municipalism as ‘a politics of everyday life concerned with the issues that immediately affect citizens, including education, policing, jobs, culture and services. Municipalism is a political approach to community.’
  • The role of the municipality was to foster associations that challenge concentrations of power in the hands of a small elite. Capturing the city hall was never an end in itself but rather one method in expanding the scope of experiments in popular participation.
  • the continued erosion of basic living standards and increasing inequality driven by the myth that there is ‘no alternative’ has increased awareness that revolutionary change extends beyond ‘economics’ to every aspect of our lived experiences.
  • the new municipal citizens’ movements have arisen out of the failure of national political parties or street-based organising to deliver transformative change
  • This new municipalism may be picking-up where the alter-globalisation movement left off, retaining and reinvigorating the concepts of prefiguration, experimenting with ‘diagonal’ methods for dispersing power, and fuelling the expansion of non‑state, non-market ways of organising our societies.
  • This provides fertile ground for the development of a progressive post-capitalist politics that can win.
  • Women are at the forefront of many of these citizens’ movements
  • The feminisation of politics means encouraging a political style that openly expresses doubts and contradictions – backed by a values-based politics that emphasizes the role of community and ‘the commons’.
  • open spirit is at the centre of the new political culture
  • The commons is much broader than an economic strategy for resource management; it’s about building forms of autonomy and social solidarity as the substance of our day-to-day lives.
  • the Commons Lab
  • Department of the Commons
  • These are not occupied but liberated spaces.
  • social centres
  • ‘citizen patrimony’, which would formalise and expand a network of spaces across the city where the municipality provides greater resources and public infrastructure for self-managed common use.
  • The collaboration between citizens’ groups, cooperatives and municipalities is also at the heart of many of the attempts to return public services to public ownership.
  • There are many reasons why cities and regions want to take services back under public ownership, but reducing cost (especially for poor people), improving the quality of services, and increasing financial transparency are recurrent themes. Efforts to create better conditions for workers are another key driver. In the energy sector, which accounts for around a third of the cases where services have been returned to public ownership, the shift is often driven by efforts to tackle climate change.
  • Taking control of the energy supply also means that the council can better coordinate efforts to reduce energy use.
  • A number of French municipalities have taken back control of school meals from corporations to protect local agriculture and improve the quality of meals.
  • Increasing citizens’ control is not just about taking over existing institutions, but building new democratic processes that involve citizens in the day-to-day decision making of their cities.
  • it involves changing how citizens interact with the city government.
  • participatory budgeting
  • These municipalist projects are beginning to define new ways for progressive movements to organise, challenging and moving beyond dichotomies that have traditionally haunted the left.
  • The objective is to use municipal institutions as part of a project of autonomy – to expand the commons, to build non-state institutions and to empower citizens (not their representatives) to control the collective conditions in which they live their lives.
  • The new municipalism isn’t about winning elections; it’s about building, transforming and distributing power.
  • We must do it ourselves. It’s time to win back our cities.
Jukka Peltokoski

Solidarity with the Pirate Bay and the future of the Internet | School of Commoning - 0 views

www.schoolofcommoning.com/...pirate-bay-and-future-internet

commons peter sunde meretz pirate bay tekijänoikeudet internet avaaz

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 10 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • The following letter is a message we received via email from Stefan Meretz who expresses great concern both regarding Peter Sunde's (The Pirate Bay spokesperson) imprisonment and the way Avaaz is handling the petition to pardon him. Stefan calls for our solidarity as commoners.
  • Dear Commoners,Peter Sunde has to go to prison. As you may know, Peter was thespokesperson for The Pirate Bay (TPB). He was convicted for someridiculous charges, because a copyright infringement did not happenwith the Pirate Bay (they shared torrent files, not copyrightedmaterial). But the copyright industry was and is very angry aboutthat. There are strong actions going on against TPB. The strategy isthe same as with Wikileaks: They pick out some single persons and tryto make an example.Now, Peter wrote a plea for pardon. Rick Falkvinge (founder of theswedish pirate party) translated the plea to english, worth reading:http://falkvinge.net/2012/07/06/aftermath-of-the-pirate-bay-trial-peter-sundes-plea-in-his-own-words/Peter: http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/10/wow-update-on-all-the-support/http://blog.brokep.com/2012/07/13/sweden-is-a-small-pond-with-a-few-big-fish/A supporter of Peter Sunde launched a community petition on Avaaz:http://www.avaaz.org/en/petition/Grant_Peter_Sundes_of_The_Pirate_Bay_plea_for_pardonCommunity petitions are made bottom-up, not from Avaaz itself. Aftergetting support from The Pirate Bay (they put it on the frontpage:http://thepiratebay.se/) over 100.000 signers have been reached withinthree days.However, there are weird things going on behind the scenes, becauseAvaaz asked their network, whether the petition should be removed,since Avaaz "will only support petitions that our community agrees arenot offensive, inflammatory or otherwise objectionable". Huh? Belowthe articlehttp://www.s-info.se/region/show_news.asp?id=120&news=16919 there is avoting, but the votes are handled completely intransparent. Avaaz isfiltering out all incoming signatures for Peter from their communitypetition start page: http://www.avaaz.org/en/
Jukka Peltokoski

The Revolution will (not) be decentralised: Blockchains - Commons TransitionCommons Tra... - 0 views

commonstransition.org/t-be-decentralised-blockchains

ethereum blockchain commons commonstransition bollier

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 11 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • Decentralised topologies and non-discriminatory protocols have been all but replaced by a recentralisation of infrastructure, as powerful corporations now gatekeep our networks. Everything might be accessible, but this access is mediated by a centralised entity. Whoever controls the data centre exercises political and economic control over communications. It’s difficult to see how we can counteract these recentralising tendencies in order to build a common core infrastructure.
  • These centralising tendencies have also reared their head in cryptocurrencies.
  • powerful mining pools now control much of the infrastructure and rent-seeking individuals control a lion’s share of Bitcoin’s value.
  • ...36 more annotations...
  • the underlying architecture has potentials not only for the future of money, but also for the future of networked cooperation.
  • Blockchain-based technologies may still have a role to play.
  • Just as Bitcoin makes certain financial intermediaries unnecessary, new innovations on the blockchain remove the need for gatekeepers from other processes
  • The broader implication is that the blockchain could support the activities and resources necessary to the commons
  • A lot of what follows is pretty speculative, but worth discussing in the context of peer-production.
  • The blockchain is the distributed ledger that keeps track of all transactions made using the Bitcoin cryptocurrency. Arguably this is Bitcoin’s key innovation
  • the blockchain could support new forms of peer-production, and fully decentralised infrastructures for applications as varied as finance, mesh networks, cloud databases and share economies.
  • claim is that blockchain-based technologies such as Ethereum can support and scale distributed forms of cooperation on a global scale.
  • There are a number of start-ups and groups currently innovating in this space such as Ethereum, Ripple and Mastercoin.
  • extends the decentralised capabilities of Bitcoin beyond financial transactions
  • Bitcoin involves two parameters: a trustless database (more on this later) and a transactions system capable of sending value from place to place
  • Ethereum builds a generalised framework that extends the capabilities of the blockchain to allow developers to write new consensus applications.
  • Distributed Organisations & the Trust Web:
  • Decentralised Autonomous Organisations.
  • it doesn’t matter whether I believe in my fellow peers just so long as I believe in the technical efficiency of the blockchain protocol.
  • Where questions about how to reach consensus, negotiate trust and especially scale interactions beyond the local are pervasive in the commons, the blockchain looks set to be a game changer.
  • ‘consensus’ algorithms
  • Cohen and Mougayar have dubbed this innovation the “trust web”
  • Ethereum incentivises participation, encouraging actors to contribute without introducing centralisation
  • Node Incentivisation:
  • In order to use an Ethereum application, users make micropayments to the developers in ether, Ethereum’s coin, or ‘cryptofuel’ as they term it.
  • Monetary transactions aside, this encourages people to contribute to the commons and puts systems in place to try and protect its resources from commercial expropriation.
  • a change to infrastructure
  • Decentralised Infrastructures:
  • Instead, we can imagine infrastructure as something immaterial and dispersed, or managed through flexible and transient forms of ownership.
  • The payoff seems to be that new blockchain-based technologies have the potential to support new forms of commons-based peer production, supplying necessary tools for cooperation and decision making, supporting complementary currencies and even provisioning infrastructures.
  • Other issues concern the design of trustless architectures and smart property.
  • Trustless Architectures: First of all, what kind of subjectivity does the blockchain support?
  • ‘trust in the code.’
  • proof-of-work is not a new form of trust, but the abdication of trust altogether as social confidence in favour of an algorithmic regulation
  • the blockchain could support not only cryptocurrencies but also other financial instruments like equity, securities and derivatives; smart contracts and smart property; new voting systems; identity and reputation systems; distributed databases; and even the management of assets and resources like energy and water.
  • proceeds from a perspective that already presumes a neoliberal subject and an economic mode of governance in the face of social and/or political problems. ‘How do we manage and incentivise individual competitive economic agents?’ In doing so, it not only codes for that subject, we might argue that it also reproduces that subject
  • Smart Property:
  • new controls implied by smart property also have worrying implications
  • Property doesn’t disappear, but instead it is enforced and exercised in different ways. If rights were previously exercised through norms, laws, markets and architectures, today they are algorithmically inscribed in the object.
  • There is real potential in the blockchain if we appreciate it not as some ultimate techno-fix but as a platform that, when combined with social and political institutions, has real possibilities for the future of organisation.
Jukka Peltokoski

Postcapitalism and the city - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...12

'paul mason' p2pfoundation post-capitalism information jukkap2p technology commons

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 12 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • bullshit jobs
  • Capitalism’s response mechanisms
  • a) to maximise capacity utilisation of low-skilled labour and of assets.
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  • b) to artificially inflate the price and profitability of labour inputs
  • Things that in all previous eras of capitalism the elite desired to be as cheap as possible—to ease wage pressures—are now made as expensive as possible
  • capital migrates away from production and from private-sector services towards public sector services.
  • capitalism being replaced by a stagnant neo-feudalism
  • central bank, pumping money into the system
  • the state, propping up effectively insolvent banks
  • the migrant labour exploiter
  • the innovator someone who invents a way of extracting rent from low-wage people
  • But as soon as technology allowed it, we started to create organisations where the positive effects of networked collaboration were not captured by the market.
  • Wikipedia
  • Fortunately there is a third impact of info-tech. It has begun to create organisational and business models where collaboration is more important than price or value.
  • Linux
  • the platform co-operatives
  • The technology itself is in revolt against the monopolised ownership of intellectual property, and the private capture of externalities.
  • We must promote the transition to a non-capitalist form of economy which unleashes all the suppressed potential of information technology, for productivity, well.being and culture.
  • The strategic aim is: to reduce the amount of work done to the minimum; to move as much as possible of human activity out of the market and state sectors into the collaborative sector; to produce more stuff for free.
  • If the aim is for humanity to do as little work as possible, you can do it through three mechanisms. One is to automate. The other is to reduce the input costs to labour, so that we can survive on less wages and less work. The third is to push forward rapidly the de-linking of work and wages.
  • The city is where the networked individual wants to live
  • First—be overt. Help people to conceptualise the transition by actually talking about it.
  • Next—switch off the great neoliberal privatisation machine.
  • We know what it’s there for—to hand public assets to the private sector so that the profits of decaying businesses are temporarily boosted
  • The next proposal is more radical: model reality as a complex system.
  • Next—promote the basic income.
  • The basic income is an idea whose time is coming, because there won’t be enough work to go around. For me the basic income is a one-off subsidy for automation—to un-hook humanity from bullshit job creation and promote the delinking of work and wages.
  • However, it’s a transitional measure.
  • Next—actively promote the collaborative sector over the market and the state.
  • You have to understand the benefits of these entities are not completely measurable in GDP terms.
  • The building block is the co-op, the credit union, the NGO, the non-profit company, the peer-to-peer lender and the purely voluntary or social enterprise.
  • You have to promote new ways of measuring activity and progress.
  • Finally, understand and fight the battle over the externalities.
  • the state and eventually the commons should have first rights to all the data just the same as in a republic it owns all the land
  • Ultimately, however, the greatest good comes from the common ownership and exploitation of data, because it establishes the principle that this vast new information resource—which is our collaborative behaviour captured as data—is part of the commons.
  • Would capitalism collapse?
  • But you would attract the most innovative capitalists on earth, and you would make the city vastly more livable for the million-plus people who call it home.
  • No. The desperate, frantic “survival capitalists” would go away—the rip-off consultancies; the low-wage businesses; the rent-extractors.
  • All the other challenges would remain: the environmental challenge—not just low carbon but the preservation of quality living environments in a city sometimes deluged with visitors. Also the ageing challenge and the debt challenge.
  • a common platform for the left, for social democracy and for liberal capitalism
  • I could be completely wrong. But if I am right, it makes sense for all cities to ask themselves: could we become the first city to begin a demonstrable and tangible transition away from neoliberal capitalism, towards a society of high equality, high well-being, high collaboration?
  • the collaborative city, the city of participatory democracy, the networked city
Jukka Peltokoski

Incubator.coop: an Incubator for Platform Cooperatives | P2P Foundation - 0 views

blog.p2pfoundation.net/...13

Incubator.coop kiihdyttämö start up osuuskunta cooperative yhteiskunnallinenyritys rahoitus yhteisörahoitus Unioni alustaosuuskunta

shared by Jukka Peltokoski on 13 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • 1. Conventional Incubators are not viable in themselves.  Instead they act as a business development tool for “side-car” investors trying to pick winners.  We think you need an incubator that exists to serve its incubatees.2. Conventional Incubators look for a 1-in-1000 unicorn to repay their many wrong bets.  We think you need an incubator that creates businesses of value that go the distance.3. Conventional Incubators looks for exceptional talent.  We think you need an incubator for collective endeavours4. Conventional Incubators function with a top-down approach.  We think you need an incubator that harnesses the wisdom of the crowd.5. Conventional Incubators promote returns for the 1%.  We think you need an incubator where 1 Member = 1 Vote6. Conventional Incubators run for 6-months.  We think you need an incubator that supports the whole period of development from formation through to operation.
  • We help any type of Cooperative to ‘Form, Organise, Fund and Operate‘.  The exciting areas of new CoOp formation include:– Community Owned Enterprises – anything from a pub to a post-office, school to satellite, house to hospital– Platform or Online CoOperatives – these are being created by online communities in place of Venture Capital backed 2-sided marketplaces
  • Collaborative ventures employ a variety of tools (web apps, social media, wikis etc.) and strategies (regular group meetings, webinars etc.) to make working as a group functional.There are some challenges with working as a group that aren’t solved by todays technology and they include1. Reaching a timely and productive consensus that in turn creates “collaboration paralysis“.  2. Groups try to be decentralised, but often most have a bottleneck around finance related decisions.3. Collectives need a way to track and incentivise efforts with non-financial and / or financial rewards and4. Groups need a way to create agreement contingent on future outcomes on the blockchain to improve trust within commerce
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  • The extent of the tools we can offer comes down to the success of this crowdfunding campaign.If we get the money to develop the technology, then projects going through incubation can offer supporters black chain agreements and in turn offer payment contingent of future events.  This is a big deal.
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