Commons.fi

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.

Managerial pay has increased prodigiously; income inequality has sharpened, affecting women and marginalized communities most acutely, and trillion of dollars of individual wealth have been tucked away in tax havens. Beyond that, there has been a general shift away from direct employment, leaving more and more workers vulnerable to stalled worker rights, as well as declining wages and benefits.

the Web has not made good on its cyber-utopian promises of democracy or social well-being; the rise of the digital commons and practices of peer production, while profoundly important, has not succeeded in generating business models that can deliver livelihoods for practitioners.

highly concentrated ownership of robots seems the likely outcome

financing and legal support

Platform co-ops have emerged in areas like child care, art, journalism, transportation, social media, and food.

it is time to determine in which sector this business model works best

public policy

centralization of data and platforms ownership

The fairer digital economy we need is already emerging everywhere around us.

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.

Nor has the euro reduced inequality among European countries.

The prolonged depression has helped fuel the rise of right-wing nationalists and Euroskeptics. In Austria, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, and elsewhere, radical right-wing parties now enjoy more success at the polls than at any time since the 1930s.

Trust in EU institutions,

has fallen through the floor.

The reason currency pegs often depress economic growth lies in the essential nature of monetary arrangements.

Varoufakis

Galbraith

Stiglitz

All three would prefer that the system be reformed.

Galbraith offers the most succinct explanation of why the system has benefited Germany at the expense of weaker economies:

The Greek story is properly a European story in which, as in all European stories, Germany takes the leading role.

Varoufakis, Galbraith, and Stiglitz differ on the details, but they all blame the euro system and, especially, Germany.

Stiglitz shows that international systems of pegged currencies, of which Europe’s single currency represents only an extreme example, “have long been associated with recessions and depressions.”

Most observers now attribute these troubles to the euro.

In the real world, however, countries have diverse market positions and domestic institutions, which means that macroeconomic convergence is hard to come by.

a currency peg prevents the governments of countries that run trade deficits and incur debt from pursuing healthy economic policies to correct the problem.

normally loosen domestic monetary policy (thereby lowering interest rates and stimulating investment), let its currency depreciate (thereby boosting exports, reducing imports, and transferring income to the sector of the economy that produces competitive goods), and increase government spending (thereby stimulating consumption and investment).

Deficit countries are thus left with only one way to restore their competitiveness: “internal devaluation,” the politically correct term for austerity

permanent austerity becomes the only way to maintain international equilibrium.

Citizens grasp at increasingly radical new parties and lack the faith in Europe required to enact needed reforms.

Germany has emerged almost unscathed—at least so far.

Yet the costs of a flawed monetary system may eventually boomerang and depress growth even in Germany. Austerity is slowly reducing Germany’s ability to sell its goods to other European countries,

Despite the EU principle of free movement, many informal barriers to mobility still protect special interests.

to force the German economy into line

the EU could discourage trade surpluses by imposing a tax on them

Another set of structural policies would encourage large fiscal transfers and migration in order to offset the inequities that the euro has induced. In essence, this would replicate the movements of capital and people that make single currencies viable within individual countries.

fiscal transfers from creditor countries such as Germany to deficit countries such as Greece and Italy.

Stiglitz proposes, Germany and other surplus countries could do more to accept and encourage continuous migration flows from deficit countries.

Germans are unlikely to renounce the export-led growth that has stemmed from their 60-year tradition of high savings, low inflation, and modest labor contracts. They are even less likely to accept massive fiscal transfers to other countries.

Stiglitz offers the most thorough evaluation of the possible options. There are three. The first entails reforming the fundamental structure of the euro system so that it generates growth and distributes the benefits fairly. Stiglitz details how the EU and the European Central Bank might rewrite tax laws, loosen monetary policy, and change corporate governance rules in order to boost wage growth, consumer spending, and investment.

Political opposition to immigration is already strong in Austria, Denmark, Germany, and the Netherlands, and these countries would not tolerate many millions of additional foreigners.

a second policy option: muddling through. In this scenario, member states would strengthen the EU’s ability to manage the crisis.

European Stability Mechanism,

The burden of the current system on deficit countries must also be eliminated—a change that requires far more serious reform. Eventually, Europe would have to restructure its debt,

GDP-indexed bonds

eurobonds

the solvency of national banks,

Yet Germany and other creditor governments are naturally hesitant to accept financial responsibility for debtor countries.

Such reforms would also require the EU to massively expand its oversight over national financial systems,

If neither of the two options to save the single currency and restart growth is viable, this leaves only a third option: abolishing the euro.

Although Stiglitz would prefer that the euro be reformed, he admits that “there is more than a small probability that it will not be done” and therefore argues for breaking up the system.

from Grexit to his preferred alternative of breaking the eurozone into several subgroups, each with its own currency.

Yet even the radical step of breaking up the eurozone, Stiglitz makes clear, would probably help deficit countries only if Germany agreed to increase domestic spending, rein in speculation, and reduce deficits.

Abolishing the euro might slightly improve the options for deficit countries, but absent deeper structural reforms, it would not eliminate the underlying problem.

depressing reading, because in the end, they suggest that there is no easy way out of Europe’s predicament, given the current political constraints. In the long run, muddling through may be the worst outcome, and yet it is the most likely.

In response to such a bleak prognosis, many European federalists, particularly on the left, contend that Europe’s real problem is its “democratic deficit.” If only EU institutions or national governments were more representative, they argue, then they would enjoy sufficient legitimacy to solve these problems. The EU needs more transparency in Brussels, more robust direct elections to the European Parliament, a grand continent-wide debate, and political union, the argument runs, so that the resulting European superstate would be empowered to impose massive fiscal transfers and macroeconomic constraints on surplus countries. Alternatively, if more radical alternatives could be fully debated in national elections, then member states might muster the power to pull out of the eurozone or renegotiate their terms in it.

everything comes down to choices made by self-interested sovereign states. Governments have little incentive to make charitable and risky concessions, even in a united Europe with economic prosperity on the line. Politicians simply lack the strength and courage to make a genuine break with the status quo, either toward federalism or toward monetary sovereignty.

We could call this pseudo-abundance,

continuous capital accumulation

overuse and depletion of natural resources

Scarcity Engineering

Scarcity engineering is what we call this continuous attempt to undo natural abundance where it occurs.

“Intellectual property”

the ability of this privatized knowledge to create profits

A good recent example of this “patent lag” effect is the extraordinary growth of 3D printing, once the technology lost its patents.

Perpetually Increasing Social Injustice

more and more wealth into fewer hands through compound interest, rent seeking, purchasing legislation, etc.

To what degree does the Commons and peer-to-peer production function as a potential solution for these three interrelated structural crises of capitalism?

Digital networks (such as the internet) have recently enabled a new type of Commons where the knowledge required for human action and value creation has been mutualized. This has led to global open design communities, which jointly create open knowledge pools (e.g. Wikipedia), free software (e.g. the Linux Operating System) or open designs to enable physical production

Commons-based peer production emerges when technology enables the creation of open, contributory systems that create Commons.

The global open design communities engaging in peer production and mutualization of productive knowledge have no such perverse incentives. These communities design to ensure participation and are “naturally” inclined to design sustainable products and services.

The privatization and patenting of knowledge and technical solutions hampers the widespread distribution of necessary innovations. No such impediments exist in the open contributory systems of peer production communities, where innovation anywhere in the network is instantly available to the whole.

Peer production, independent of the profit motive, invites and facilitates the creation of solidarity-based forms of economic entities. Being generative towards human communities, these entities are more likely based on socially just forms of value sharing.

The Revolution Is Already Happening

responses take three forms:1. The sustainability and ecological/environmental movements, attempting to find solutions for the planet’s survival;2. The “Open,” “Commons” and “Sharing” movements, stressing the need for shareable knowledge and mutualized physical resources;3. The cooperative and solidarity economy, focusing on fairness.

The good news is that Commons-based peer production is the best way to bring these three necessary aspects together into one coherent system. However, for this to happen, the various movements need enabling tools and capacities. An example is the open source circular economy

Similarly, open and platform cooperativism — the convergence of socially just forms of production with shareable knowledge — allows all contributing citizens to create fair, generative livelihoods around the shared resources they need and co-create.

We’ve seen post-capitalist practices emerging since the late 20th century — for example, the 1983 invention of the universally available browser. Citizens have been empowered to create value through open contributory systems; these create universally available knowledge, which in turn can be used for material production.

emerging globally

the salaries of chief executives rising by more than 300 times than that of the average US worker

USA

ichest 1% (not including capital gains) equals that of the bottom 90%

“Citizens know that the establishment has either lied to them or been totally incompetent. They feel that the economic system is rigged. They have lost trust in government and in the fairness of the political and economic system.”

I believe we can construct a world where the economy performs better for all, based on solidarity”.

“Some governments cut down on social security to grow GDP,” he said, “but the really important aspect is well-being. People actually feel better when they co-operate rather than being selfish.”

“There is going to be volatility, and co-ops are better able to manage risks than the private sector,”

Asked how much co-operatives could achieve while surviving in competitive markets, Prof Stiglitz warned that they “cannot ignore the laws of the economy”.

government regulation

t isn’t just the issue of government vs private sector.”

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

Option 1: Euro-reformism

One (fast receding) option is the standard variety of euro-reformism, practised typically by social democrats who argue for ‘more democracy’,

dynamic analyses

The EU’s institutions are incapable of being reformed through the standard process of inter-governmental deliberations and gradual treaty changes.

Option 2: Lexit

This (Lexit) option raises concerns regarding its realism and probity. Is its agenda feasible? In other words, is it a realistic prospect that, by (in Kouvelakis’ words) calling for referenda to leave the EU, the Left can block “the forces of the xenophobic and nationalist Right from winning hegemony and diverting the popular revolt”? And, is such a campaign consistent with the Left’s fundamental principles?

the EU was constructed intentionally as a democracy-free zone designed to keep the demos out of decision-making

Given that the EU has established free movement, Lexit involves acquiescence to (if not actual support for) its ending and for the re-establishment of national border controls

the Left should demand common minimum wages in exchange for its support for the Single Market

xenophobic Right

do they truly believe that the Left will win the discursive and policy war against the fossil fuel industry by supporting the re-nationalisation of environmental policy?

Option 3: DiEM25’s proposal for disobedience

Instead, DiEM25 proposes a pan-European movement of civil and governmental disobedience with which to bring on a surge of democratic opposition to the way European elites do business at the local, national and EU levels.

national parliaments and governments have power

a progressive national government can only use this power if it is prepared for a rupture with the EU troika.

a clash with the EU establishment is inescapable.

wilfully disobeying the unenforceable EU ‘rules’ at the municipal, regional and national levels while making no move whatsoever to leave the EU.

Undoubtedly, the EU institutions will threaten us

Consider the profound difference between the following two situations: The EU establishment threatening progressive Europeanist governments with ‘exit’ when they refuse to obey its authoritarian incompetence, and Progressive national parties or governments campaigning alongside the xenophobic Right for ‘exit’.

It is the difference between: (A) Clashing against the EU establishment in a manner that preserves the spirit of internationalism, demands pan-European action, and sets us fully apart from the xenophobic Right, and (B) Walking hand-in-hand with nationalisms that will, inescapably, reinforce the xenophobic Right while allowing the EU to portray the Left as populists insufficiently distinguishable from Nigel Farage, Marine Le Pen etc.

The Left’s traditional internationalism is a key ingredient of DiEM25, along with other constituent democratic traditions from a variety of political projects (including progressive liberalism, feminist and ecological movements, the ‘pirate’ parties etc.).

DiEM25 proposes a rebellion to deliver authentic democracy at the levels of local government, national governments and the EU.

This leftwing objection to DiEM25’s call for a pan-European movement is interesting and puzzling. In effect, it argues that democracy is impossible on a supranational scale because a demos must be characterised by national and cultural homogeneity.

The Left, lest we forget, traditionally opposed the bourgeois belief in a one-to-one relationship between a nation and a sovereign parliament. The Left counter-argued that identity is something we create through political struggle (class struggle, the struggle against patriarchy, the struggle for smashing gender and sexual stereotypes, emancipation from Empire etc.).

in order to create the European demos that will bring about Europe’s democracy

Only through this pan-European network of rebel cities, rebel prefectures and rebel governments can a progressive movement become hegemonic in Italy, in Greece, in England, indeed anywhere.

The question for Europe’s Left, for progressive liberals, Greens etc. is, now, whether this struggle, this project, should take the form of a campaign to leave the EU (e.g. Lexit) or, as DiEM25 suggests, of a campaign of civil, civic and governmental disobedience within but in confrontation with the EU

to those who berate DiEM25 and its call for a pan-European democratic movement as utopian, our answer is that a transnational, pan-European democracy remains a legitimate, realistic long-term goal, one that is in concert with the Left’s time honoured internationalism. But this objective must be accompanied by pragmatism and a precise plan for immediate action:

Oppose any talk of ‘more Europe’ now

Present Europeans with a blueprint (a comprehensive set of policies and actions) of how we plan to re-deploy Europe’s existing institutions

ensure that the same blueprint makes provisions for keeping internationalism alive in the event that the EU establishment’s incompetent authoritarianism causes the EU’s disintegration

“The EU will be democratised. Or it will disintegrate!”

We cannot predict which of the two (democratisation or disintegration) will occur. So, we struggle for the former while preparing for the latter.

DiEM25’s Progressive Agenda for Europe will be pragmatic, radical and comprehensive. It will comprise policies that can be implemented immediately to stabilise Europe’s social economy, while:

affording more sovereignty to city councils, prefectures and national parliaments, proposing institutional interventions and designs that will reduce the human cost in case the euro collapses and the EU fragments, and setting up a democratic Constitution Assembly process that enables Europeans to generate a European identity with which to bolster their reinvigorated national cultures, parliaments and local authorities.

Conclusion:

The EU is at an advanced stage of disintegration. There are two prospects. The EU is not past the point of no return (yet) and can, still, be democratised, stabilised, rationalised and humanised The EU is beyond the point of no return and incapable of being democratised. Therefore, its disintegration is certain, as is the clear and present danger of Europe’s descent into a postmodern version of the deflationary 1930s

So, what should progressives do?

Campaign vigorously along internationalist, cross-border, lines all over Europe for a democratic Union – even if we do not believe that the EU can, or ought to, survive in its current form Expose the EU Establishment’s authoritarian incompetence Coordinate civil, civic and governmental disobedience across Europe Illustrate through DiEM25’s own transnational structure how a pan-European democracy can work at all levels and in all jurisdictions Propose a comprehensive Progressive Agenda for Europe which includes sensible, modest, convincing proposals for ‘fixing’ the EU (the euro even) and for managing progressively the EU’s and the euro’s disintegration if and when the Establishment brings it on.

collectively our choices and agency are the ultimate guarantors of any values we may wish to secure

They can create their own cultural spaces to deliberate, collaborate and share resources without market and state structures that are often cumbersome, expensive, anti-social or predatory. 

A key political challenge of our time is to figure out new ways to preserve and extend the democratic capacities of ordinary people and rein in unaccountable market/state power, otherwise known as neoliberalism. 

Neoliberal economics and policy insist upon debt-driven economic growth, extractivist uses of the Earth, consumerism and nationalism

the creative use of new digital technologies on open network platforms could inaugurate liberating new forms of “open source governance.”

The superstructures of law and governance can achieve only so much without the consent of the governed.

Benkler

Rifkin

Tapscott

Mason

Bauwens

potentially transformative Commons Sector

the innovations now unfolding in various tech spaces suggest the outlines of new post-capitalist institutions

new types of group deliberation and governance software platforms such as Loomio and Co-budget; digital platforms that enable better management of ecological resources; and “blockchain ledger” technology, which is enabling new forms of network-native self-organization, collective action and “smart contracts”

online guilds

commons

open design and manufacturing communities

citizen-science

a process of commoning

to create functioning commons

The collaborative communities now emerging on digital platforms do not worry so much about resource-depletion or free riders – problems that affect the management of water, fisheries and land – as how to intelligently curate information from the multitudes and design effective self-governance structures for virtual collaboration.   

The point of the commons paradigm, despite its many different flavors, is this:  It provides “protected” space in which to re-imagine production and governance. 

“digital divide”

more accessible and transparent than conventional state democracy and more solidly grounded through bottom-up participation and ethical accountability

Digital networks are becoming deeply entangled with all aspects of life

our lives with digital technologies are profoundly affecting how we regard property, political life, and economic life

Facebook, Google, Uber, Airbnb and other corporate “gig economy” players

Unlike these capital-driven enterprises, the collaborations that I am describing are fundamentally non-market and socially mindful in character. They are less defined by technology per se than by the new social forms and political /cultural attitudes that they engender. 

to move people beyond the producer/consumer dyad and formalistic notions of citizenship, and enable people to enact a more personal, DIY vision of self-provisioning and governance. 

The state, having cast its lot with capital accumulation and growth, is losing its credibility and competence in addressing larger needs. 

With the rise of market-centrism and rational choice economics, government was devalued and allowed a role only in cases of ‘market failure.’ 

standard economics today largely ignores the fundamental, affirmative role that government plays in facilitating functional, trustworthy markets.

popular distrust of government has soared.  And why not?  Government has lost its actual capacities to serve many non-market social and ecological needs. 

Given this void and the barriers to democratic action, many citizens who might otherwise engage with legitimate state policymaking have shifted their energies into “transnational, polycentric networks of governance in which power is dispersed,”

the solidarity economy, Transition Towns, peer production, the commons

Thus the impasse we face today:  The neoliberal market/state agenda is inflicting grievous harm on the planet, social well-being and democracy – yet the market/state remains largely unresponsive to popular demands for change.

The (Still-Emerging) Promise of Open Source Governance

commons based on open tech platforms will play a central role in transforming our politics and polity

Electronic networks are now a defining infrastructure shaping the conduct of political life, governance, commerce and culture.

many legacy institutions and social practices continue to exist.  But they have no choice but to evolve

online commons are lightweight social systems that, with the right software and norms, can run quite efficiently on trust, reciprocity and modest governance structures

that enable users to mutualize the benefits of their own online sharing

Rifkin notes that the extreme productivity of digital technologies is lowering the marginal costs of production for many goods and services to near zero.  This is undercutting the premises of conventional markets, which are based on private owners using proprietary means to extract profits from nature, communities and consumers.

We are glimpsing at the outlines of a new economic system based on sharing and the collaborative commons. It is the first new paradigm-shifting system since the introduction of capitalism and communism. 

The “collaborative commons” that Rifkin describes is a hybrid capitalist/commons economy that is able to exploit the efficiencies and higher quality produced on open networks. 

“prosumers”

are able to create their own goods and services

But when some good or service is offered for at no cost, it really means that the user is the product:  our personal data, attention, social attitudes lifestyle behavior, and even our digital identities, are the commodity that platform owners are seeking to “own.”  

To combat corporate exploitation of open platforms, many efforts are now afoot to establish digital commons as viable alternatives.  The new models are sometimes called “platform co-operativism.

Digital commons are materializing in part because it is easier and more socially satisfying to participate in a commons

the most valuable networks are those that facilitate group affiliations to pursue shared goals – or what I would call commons

Open source tools and principles could unleash this value – but it would subvert the business model.

“hacktivists,” makers, software programmers and social media innovators who are consciously attempting to build tech platforms that can meet needs in post-capitalist ways, often via commons

Kaikessa yksinkertaisuudessaan Brynjolfssonin teesi on se, että teollinen vallankumous muutti maailman perusteellisesti.

höyry ja sähkö toivat ihmisen käyttöön tuhansia kertoja enemmän voimaa

yhteiskuntarakenne mullistui ja luotiin demokratian, sosiaaliturvan ja työttömyyskorvauksen kaltaisia innovaatioita.

Teollinen vallankumous korvasi fyysistä, mekaanista työtä. Nyt ensimmäistä kertaa koneet ovat alkaneet laajassa mitassa korvata ajattelutyötä. Kaikenlainen rutiinitietotyö postin lajittelusta röntgenkuvien analyysiin on siirtymässä koneille.

Ensimmäisessä vaiheessa koneet oppivat tekemään rutiinitietotyötä. Sellaista joka pystytään koodaamaan yksiselitteisiksi käskyiksi. Tämä vallankumous on ollut käynnissä jo pari vuosikymmentä.

Toinen vaihe on iskenyt toden teolla lävitse vasta aivan viime vuosina. Se perustuu koneoppimiseen, joka tarkoittaa sitä että emme opeta koneelle valmiita sääntöjä. Vaan annamme koneelle tietynlaisen hermoverkoston ja sen jälkeen laitamme sen opettelemaan jotakin asiaa antaen jatkuvaa palautetta onnistumisesta.

jatkuvan palautteen ansiosta se kehittyy huimaa vauhtia

itseoppivat verkostot avaavat koneille aivan uusia maailmoja kasvojentunnistuksesta itsenäiseen autolla ajamiseen

Robotti osaa nykyään ajaa myös polkupyörää

Kokeilemalla ja kaatumalla tarpeeksi monta kertaa.

Yhä useammat ihmistoiminnot tulevat korvautumaan koneilla ja ohjelmilla lähivuosina etenkin länsimaissa, joissa ihmistyö on kallista.

1) Opetusjärjestelmä pitää uudistaa. Työ ja elämä tulee jatkossa muuttumaan sellaista vauhtia että koulu ei kykene opettamaan niitä taitoja mitä kahdenkymmen vuoden tai edes kymmenen vuoden päästä työelämässä tarvitaan. Siksi koulun kannattaa keskittyä metataitoihin: Luovuuden ja yrittäjämäisen asenteen opettamiseen sekä itse oppimiskyvyn vahvistamiseen, jotta ihminen kykenee elämänmittaiseen oppimiseen.

2) Yrittäjyyteen tulee panostaa. Murros tulee kadottamaan ison osan vanhoista työpaikoista. Yhdysvalloissa arviolta puolet nykyisistä työtehtävistä on vaarassa seuraavan kahdenkymmenen vuoden aikana ja Etlan selvityksen mukaan Suomessakin kolmasosa on vaarassa kadota. Toisaalta murros synnyttää myös uusia mahdollisuuksia ja työtehtäviä. Valtion tai muun tahon on kuitenkin vaikea keskusjohtoisesti keksiä mitä uusia ammatteja voi murroksen myötä syntyä. Parhaiten ne löytyvät ruohonjuuritason kokeiluilla eli sillä että ihmiset ryhtyvät yrittäjinä kokeilemaan jotakin uutta ja sitten parhaat kokeilut kasvavat ja alkavat työllistää ihmisiä.

3) Resurssien tehokkaampi uudelleenjako. Automatisaatio johtaa hyvin helposti ’winner takes all’ -tyyppiseen talouteen, jossa marginaalinen joukko yritysten omistajia nousee miljardööreiksi, mutta keskipalkkaista ja matalapalkkaista työtä on yhä vähemmän tarjolla.

työn osuus BKT:stä ja yritysten voittojen osuus BKT:stä kehittyivät jokseenkin tasatahtia toisesta maailmansodasta lähtien, mutta vuodesta 2002 jälkimmäinen on lähtenyt hurjaan nousuun ja edellinen laskuun.

nykyisen yhteiskuntajärjestelmän puitteissa automatisaation taloudelliset hyödyt valuvat harvalukuisen joukon taskuun, kun taas isoa osaa erityisesti vähänkoulutetusta työvoimasta uhkaa työttömyys.

Miten sitten huolehditaan tasaisemmasta tulonjaosta ja siitä, että kaikilla on mielekästä tekemistä myös tulevaisuudessa?

perustulokokeilusta

Valitettavasti vaikka tietoisuus murroksesta on lisääntynyt, ei selkeitä ratkaisuja tai politiikkasuosituksia tunnu vielä olevan hirveästi tarjolla.