Group items tagged

everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place

continuous interchange and dialogue of citizens as they determine their collective life

Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.

consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons

infrastructures of collaboration, which are managed by a new type of ‘for-benefit associations’

democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons

which are not derived or secondary from either the private or state forms.

civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.

democratically decide

the ‘common good’ of society as a whole

The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.

Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.

true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.

Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.

Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.

designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders

mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.

surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners

ethical mechanism that subsumes profit making under the social goal of strengthening the commons.

because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .

A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.

mobilization of social forces to obtain a new social contract

And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.

Hence, an increased exodus of productive  capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetization, which only operates at its margins.

Where there is no tension between supply and demand, their can be no market, and no capital accumulation

Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly and they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation.

Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, there is no return of income for these value creators

This means that social media platforms are exposing an important fault line in our system

If you did not contribute, you had no say, so engagement was and is necessary.

⁃   At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on ⁃   These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production ⁃   Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures ties them to the values and goals of the commons communities, and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximising profit at any cost

the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.

Today, it is proto-mode of production which is entirely inter-dependent with the system of capital

Is there any possibility to create a really autonmous model of peer production, that could create its own cycle of reproduction?

contribute

and whose mission is the support of the commons and its contributors

In this way, the social reproduction of commoners would no longer depend on the accumulation cycle of capital, but on its own cycle of value creation and realization

Phyles are mission-oriented, purpose-driven, community-supportive entities that operate in the market, on a global scale, but work for the commons.

peer production license, which has been proposed by Dmytri Kleiner.

Thijs Markus writes  so eloquently about Nike in the Rick Falkvinge blog, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place.

Hence the need for SOPA/PIPA , ACTA'S and other attempts to criminalize the right to share.

An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a CommonCost are produced together such that the CommonCost is reduced.

shared infrastructure costs

2) The current system beliefs that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let's call this feature, enforced 'artificial scarcity'.

1) Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let's call this feature, runaway 'pseudo-abundance'.

So what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavours: 1) the mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources 2) the mutualizing of material productive resources

how does global governance look like in P2P civilization?

Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!

they are the last remaining vestiges of pre-capitalist organisation within… capitalism

The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices

The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”

Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life

Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.

The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).

Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing

In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making

Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling

One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)

He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero 

As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)

Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.

Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order

Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.

In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.

There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?

an association of beneficiaries.

A trustee (custodian) for the CHM would be elected by the representatives

to oversee the legal operation of a collective entity

The representatives would also appoint a Manager, for a parallel partnership venture, to identify opportunities to develop the common pool resource in accord with a transparent revenue-sharing formula

Each representative would have power to exercise a veto with regard to the resource development proposal(s) circulated by the manager.

Once an agreed formula (non-vetoed by the countries) emerged for recognizing needed inputs, and for overall revenue-sharing, the manager of the nondominium partnership would arrange open tenders to seek economic partners to maximize the value of the common pool resources.

Revenues from ensuing activities would be distributed to the association members on the originally-agreed basis

Oversight of compliance would rest with the nondominium’s trustee

Ostrom’s key principles of successful collective choice agreements and monitoring by independent auditors.

Moreover, it does not confer the active power of control held under common law by a Trustee on behalf of beneficiaries,

the proposed negative or passive veto right of stewardship differs fundamentally from conventional property rights of absolute ownership and temporary use under Condominium

The Caspian Partnership agreement would comprise a master framework agreement within which a myriad of associative agreements between the Caspian littoral nations individually or severally would be registered.”

encourage Ostrom’s user association-based systems of economic governance

"Areas recognized as being the heritage of mankind are defined by treaties as falling outside of nation-state jurisdiction and ownership, and are to be instead developed on a basis that benefits all human beings

the combination of Elinor Ostrom’s economic governance strategies with nondominium legal structures can lead to a new basis for common pool resources to be developed on a basis benefiting all of humanity.