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Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy - 0 views

  • In the  emerging institutional model of peer production
  • we can distinguish an interplay between three partners
  • a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design;
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  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players
  • a set of "for-benefit institutions' which manage the 'infrastructure of cooperation'
  • an enterpreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons;
  • Can we also learn something about the politics of this new mode of value creation
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy
  • we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
  • The post-democratic logic of community
  • these communities are not democracies
  • because democracy, and the market, and hierarchy, are modes of allocation of scarce resources
  • Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.
  • Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is  matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori'  communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors',  decide
  • These decisions require expertise, not communal consensus
  • tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence
  • allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms
  • The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy,  is a 'distribution of tasks'
  • no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'
  • work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent
  • every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution
  • this new model
  • has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.
  • And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      disagree, there are many ways to ethically distribute governance, not just democracy
  • 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.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      key divergence from birth/process citizenship driven democracy
  • โƒ   At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on โƒ   These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production โƒ   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.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ie value equations..?
  • 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
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      defined as?
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "ad hoc": perhaps based on context, needs and everyone's understanding of the situation
  • 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?
  • conflicts between contributors
  • are not decided by authoritarian fiat, but by 'negotiated coordination'.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The Baffler - 0 views

  • This tendency to view questions of freedom primarily through the lens of economic competition, to focus on the producer and the entrepreneur at the expense of everyone else, shaped Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s thinking about technology.
  • the Oโ€™Reilly brand essence is ultimately a story about the hacker as hero, the kid who is playing with technology because he loves it, but one day falls into a situation where he or she is called on to go forth and change the world,
  • His true hero is the hacker-cum-entrepreneur, someone who overcomes the insurmountable obstacles erected by giant corporations and lazy bureaucrats in order to fulfill the American Dream 2.0: start a company, disrupt an industry, coin a buzzword.
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  • gospel of individualism, small government, and market fundamentalism
  • innovation is the new selfishness
  • mastery of public relations
  • making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
  • memes are for losers; the real money is in epistemes.
  • โ€œOpen source softwareโ€ was also the first major rebranding exercise overseen by Team Oโ€™Reill
  • Itโ€™s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the conceptโ€™s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
  • ideological cleavage between two groups
  • Richard Stallman
  • Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights werenโ€™t manyโ€”users should be able to run the program for any purpose, to study how it works, to redistribute copies of it, and to release their improved version (if there was one) to the public
  • โ€œfree software.โ€
  • association with โ€œfreedomโ€ rather than โ€œfree beerโ€
  • copyleft
  • profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
  • Plenty of developers contributed to โ€œfree softwareโ€ projects for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. Some, like Linus Torvalds, the Finnish creator of the much-celebrated Linux operating system, did so for fun; some because they wanted to build more convenient software; some because they wanted to learn new and much-demanded skills.
  • Stallmanโ€™s rights-talk, however, risked alienating the corporate types
  • he was trying to launch a radical social movement, not a complacent business association
  • By early 1998 several business-minded members of the free software community were ready to split from Stallman, so they masterminded a coup, formed their own advocacy outletโ€”the Open Source Initiativeโ€”and brought in Oโ€™Reilly to help them rebrand.
  • โ€œopen sourceโ€
  • The label โ€œopen sourceโ€ may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
  • In those early days, the messaging around open source occasionally bordered on propaganda
  • This budding movement prided itself on not wanting to talk about the ends it was pursuing; except for improving efficiency and decreasing costs, those were left very much undefined.
  • extremely decentralized manner, using Internet platforms, with little central coordination.
  • In contrast to free software, then, open source had no obvious moral component.
  • โ€œopen source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. Itโ€™s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
  • While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
  • Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
  • Oโ€™Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for Oโ€™Reilly books and events
  • The coup succeeded. Stallmanโ€™s project was marginalized. But Oโ€™Reilly and his acolytes didnโ€™t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
  • A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, Oโ€™Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
  • much of Stallmanโ€™s efforts centered on software licenses
  • Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s bet wa
  • the โ€œcloudโ€
  • licenses would cease to matter
  • Since no code changed hands
  • So what did matter about open source? Not โ€œfreedomโ€
  • Oโ€™Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
  • the freedom of the producer
  • who must be left to innovate, undisturbed by laws and ethics.
  • The most important freedom,
  • is that which protects โ€œmy choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a โ€˜userโ€™ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.โ€
  • Oโ€™Reilly opposed this agenda: โ€œI completely support the right of Richard [Stallman] or any individual author to make his or her work available under the terms of the GPL; I balk when they say that others who do not do so are doing something wrong.โ€
  • The right thing to do, according to Oโ€™Reilly, was to leave developers alone.
  • According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothingโ€”no laws or petty moral considerationsโ€”stood in the way of the open source revolution
  • Any move to subject the fruits of developersโ€™ labor to public regulation
  • must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
  • the advent of the Internet made Stallmanโ€™s obsession with licenses obsolete
  • Many developers did stop thinking about licenses, and, having stopped thinking about licenses, they also stopped thinking about broader moral issues that would have remained central to the debates had โ€œopen sourceโ€ not displaced โ€œfree softwareโ€ as the paradigm du jour.
  • Profiting from the termโ€™s ambiguity, Oโ€™Reilly and his collaborators likened the โ€œopennessโ€ of open source software to the โ€œopennessโ€ of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
  • โ€œopen to intellectual exchangeโ€
  • โ€œopen to competitionโ€
  • โ€œFor me, โ€˜open sourceโ€™ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the marketโ€).
  • โ€œOpenโ€ allowed Oโ€™Reilly to build the largest possible tent for the movement.
  • The language of economics was less alienating than Stallmanโ€™s language of ethics; โ€œopennessโ€ was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
  • highlight the competitive advantages of openness.
  • the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
  • What the code did was of little importanceโ€”the market knows best!โ€”as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
  • The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
  • What Raymond and Oโ€™Reilly failed to grasp, or decided to overlook, is that their effort to present open source as non-ideological was underpinned by a powerful ideology of its ownโ€”an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
  • What they had in common was disdain for Stallmanโ€™s moralizingโ€”barely enough to justify their revolutionary agenda, especially among the hacker crowds who were traditionally suspicious of anyone eager to suck up to the big corporations that aspired to dominate the open source scene.
  • linking this new movement to both the history of the Internet and its future
  • As long as everyone believed that โ€œopen sourceโ€ implied โ€œthe Internetโ€ and that โ€œthe Internetโ€ implied โ€œopen source,โ€ it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
  • Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
  • โ€œIf you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,โ€
  • everything on the Internet was connected to everything elseโ€”via open source.
  • The way Oโ€™Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called โ€œopen source behavior,โ€ even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
  • No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
  • apps might be displacing the browser
  • the openness once taken for granted is no more
  • Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
  • One of the key consequences of linking the Internet to the world of open source was to establish the primacy of the Internet as the new, reinvented desktop
  • This is where the now-forgotten language of โ€œfreedomโ€ made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
  • Soon this โ€œfreedom to innovateโ€ morphed into โ€œInternet freedom,โ€ so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
  • Lumping everything under the label of โ€œInternet freedomโ€ did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
  • Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the formerโ€”because โ€œthe Internetโ€ stood for progress and enlightenment.
  • infoware
  • Yahoo
  • their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
  • The โ€œinfowareโ€ buzzword didnโ€™t catch on, so Oโ€™Reilly turned to the work of Douglas Engelbart
  • to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its โ€œcollective intelligenceโ€ and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
  • Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
  • The idea of the Internet as both a repository and incubator of โ€œcollective intelligenceโ€
  • in 2004, Oโ€™Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of โ€œWeb 2.0.โ€ What did โ€œ2.0โ€ mean, exactly?
  • he primary goal was to show that the 2001 market crash did not mean the end of the web and that it was time to put the crash behind us and start learning from those who survived.
  • Tactically, โ€œWeb 2.0โ€ could also be much bigger than โ€œopen sourceโ€; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow Oโ€™Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
  • Oโ€™Reilly couldnโ€™t improve on a concept as sexy as โ€œcollective intelligence,โ€ so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
  • What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, Oโ€™Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didnโ€™t embrace it went bust
  • find a way to harness collective intelligence and make it part of their business model.
  • By 2007, Oโ€™Reilly readily admitted that โ€œWeb 2.0 was a pretty crappy name for whatโ€™s happening.โ€
  • Oโ€™Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like โ€œGov 2.0โ€ and โ€œWhere 2.0.โ€ Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, Oโ€™Reilly is quietly dropping it
  • assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
  • Take Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s musings on โ€œEnterprise 2.0.โ€ What is it, exactly? Well, itโ€™s the same old enterpriseโ€”for all we know, it might be making widgetsโ€”but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness โ€œcollective intelligence.โ€
  • tendency to redescribe reality in terms of Internet culture, regardless of how spurious and tenuous the connection might be, is a fine example of what I call โ€œInternet-centrism.โ€
  • โ€œOpen sourceโ€ gave us the โ€œthe Internet,โ€ โ€œthe Internetโ€ gave us โ€œWeb 2.0,โ€ โ€œWeb 2.0โ€ gave us โ€œEnterprise 2.0โ€: in this version of history, Tim Oโ€™Reilly is more important than the European Union
  • For Postman, each human activityโ€”religion, law, marriage, commerceโ€”represents a distinct โ€œsemantic environmentโ€ with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesnโ€™t cross into other ones.
  • Since it mostly consists of falsehoods and opinions
  • it can be easily corrected with facts
  • to say that Tehran is the capital of Iraq is stupid talk
  • Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it โ€œestablishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.โ€ To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
  • For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
  • As he put it, โ€œWhen language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
  • pollution
  • Some wordsโ€”like โ€œlawโ€โ€”are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific โ€œlawsโ€ to moral โ€œlawsโ€ to โ€œlawsโ€ of the market to administrative โ€œlaws,โ€ the same word captures many different social relations. โ€œOpen,โ€ โ€œnetworks,โ€ and โ€œinformationโ€ function much like โ€œlawโ€ in our own Internet discourse today.
  • For Korzybski, the world has a relational structure that is always in flux; like Heraclitus, who argued that everything flows, Korzybski believed that an object A at time x1 is not the same object as object A at time x2
  • Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our realityโ€”or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, โ€œthe map is not the territory.โ€
  • Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of โ€œabstracting,โ€ whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
  • nothing harmful in this per seโ€”Korzybski simply wanted to make people aware of the highly selective nature of abstracting and give us the tools to detect it in our everyday conversations.
  • Korzybski developed a number of mental tools meant to reveal all the abstracting around us
  • He also encouraged his followers to start using โ€œetc.โ€ at the end of their statements as a way of making them aware of their inherent inability to say everything about a given subject and to promote what he called the โ€œconsciousness of abstraction.โ€
  • There was way too much craziness and bad science in Korzybskiโ€™s theories
  • but his basic question
  • โ€œWhat are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?โ€
  • Tim Oโ€™Reilly is, perhaps, the most high-profile follower of Korzybskiโ€™s theories today.
  • Oโ€™Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
  • It would be a mistake to think that Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s linguistic interventionsโ€”from โ€œopen sourceโ€ to โ€œWeb 2.0โ€โ€”are random or spontaneous.
  • There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, Oโ€™Reilly deploys Korzybski in much the same way that the advertising industry deploys the latest findings in neuroscience: the goal is not to increase awareness, but to manipulate.
  • Oโ€™Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. โ€œA metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
  • But Korzybskiโ€™s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we donโ€™t see something we might otherwise see.
  • In public, Oโ€™Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the โ€œfaint signalsโ€ of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of รผberinnovators that he dubs the โ€œalpha geeks.โ€ โ€œThe โ€˜alpha geeksโ€™ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
  • His own function is that of an intermediaryโ€”someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: โ€œThe alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at Oโ€™Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
  • The name of his companyโ€™s blogโ€”Oโ€™Reilly Radarโ€”is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
  • โ€œthe skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can thinkโ€
  • As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, Oโ€™Reillyโ€”the worldโ€™s biggest exporter of crazy talkโ€”is on a mission to provide the appropriate โ€œcontextโ€ to every field.
  • In a fascinating essay published in 2000, Oโ€™Reilly sheds some light on his modus operandi.
  • The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that Oโ€™Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
  • meme-engineering lets us organize and shape ideas so that they can be transmitted more effectively, and have the desired effect once they are transmitted
  • Oโ€™Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemismโ€”โ€œmeme-engineeringโ€โ€”to describe what has previously been known as โ€œpropaganda.โ€
  • how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for โ€œpeer-to-peerโ€ technologiesโ€”traditionally associated with piracyโ€”and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
  • Oโ€™Reilly and his acolytes โ€œchanged the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,โ€ while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: Oโ€™Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some โ€œfree softwareโ€ projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movementโ€™s goal was no longer to produce a completely free, independent, and fully functional operating system but to worship at the altar of the Internet gods.
  • Could it be that Oโ€™Reilly is right in claiming that โ€œopen sourceโ€ has a history that predates 1998?
  • Seen through the prism of meme-engineering, Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s activities look far more sinister.
  • His โ€œcorrespondentsโ€ at Oโ€™Reilly Radar donโ€™t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by Oโ€™Reilly.
  • Or take Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s meme-engineering efforts around cyberwarfare.
  • Now, who stands to benefit from โ€œcyberwarfareโ€ being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like Oโ€™Reilly, canโ€™t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
  • Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
  • Thus, Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s meme-engineering efforts usually result in โ€œmeme maps,โ€ where the meme to be definedโ€”whether itโ€™s โ€œopen sourceโ€ or โ€œWeb 2.0โ€โ€”is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
  • The exact nature of these connections is rarely explained in full, but this is all for the better, as the reader might eventually interpret connections with their own agendas in mind. This is why the name of the meme must be as inclusive as possible: you never know who your eventual allies might be. โ€œA big part of meme engineering is giving a name that creates a big tent that a lot of people want to be under, a train that takes a lot of people where they want to go,โ€
  • News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 ลฝiลพek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press Iโ€™ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Bafflerโ€™s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
  • There is considerable continuity across Oโ€™Reillyโ€™s memesโ€”over time, they tend to morph into one another.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

P2P Foundation ยป Blog Archive ยป Ethical Marketing in Age of Horizontal Social... - 0 views

  • the development of marketing is sensible to its environment and is hence already self-limiting itself according to the previously mentioned legal and social framework
  • neuromarketing
  • explore new inner dynamics of marketing, new directions in the field of possibilities offered by the current organology and its articulations between techniques and social organization in order to influence and shape marketing as an associative force โ€“ in opposition to its current dissociative force โ€“ in the larger psychic, social and technic organology
  • ...70 more annotations...
  • find new ways of efficiency
  • arbitration between efficiency and care
  • a global thinking of the problem
  • Fighting the attention and desire resource shortage: stoping to use advertisement?
  • The question is rather here to think the moderation of the psychopower
  • empower transindividuation, i.e. to make sure that an economic activity creates more possibilities of individuation than it tend to destroy by attempting to capture attention and canalize motivation in a funnel. Empower transindividuation would imply to empowering actors of their own lifestyle, winning back the savoir-vivre prescribing production
  • Should marketing stop using psychopower?
  • marketing ethics guidelines
  • transactions are more likely to be morally defensible if both parties enter it freely and fully informed
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • putting freedom as a criteria of morality
  • the industrial use of pycho- and neuropower tend to fall under the category of barriers to freedom
  • neurotechniques โ€“ to capture the attention
  • psychotechniques โ€“ to attempt to create motivation
  • Most people think commercials are a small price to pay for these benefits
  • advertising
  • denying the schemes of addiction and the fact that we are becoming through the objects of attentions
  • right to avoid attention capture by advertising
  • progress made in cognitive sciences proving that
  • reward system being abnormally stimulated
  • Advertisements exploit
  • vulnerability and reinforce their overconsumption behaviors
  • โ€œif food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.โ€ (Veerman et al. 2009)
  • What is at stake falls to be much more complex than the sole Freedom of Speech invoked for the advertiser
  • liberty of non-reception
  • would mean to guaranty every citizen the right to choose where and when he wants to access the advertising information
  • Change in the industrial and commercial paradigm
  • Economy of contribution and peer production
  • An economy of contribution means that users of a service are contributing to the production of these services.
  • example
  • is open-source software that are contributively build by potentially hundreds of developers organized in communities
  • minimize the gap between the producer and consumer
  • blur the frontier between professionals and amateurs
  • The Copernican revolution of the Vendor Relationship Management paradigm
  • change in the commercial paradigm, described as an Intention Economy i.e. the opposite of the Attention Economy
  • consumers are charged to express and discuss their intention
  • with businesses rather than the usual paradigm in which businesses where fighting for a piece of canalized motivation
  • Implementing such a system would nevertheless imply that marketing departments dispose of a system in which they could value their supplies and where they could be easily found by customers. Doc Searls promotes his answer to this issue: the Vendor Relationship Management system.
  • the belief that free customers are more valuable than captive ones โ€” to themselves, to vendors, and to the larger economy.
  • To be free
  • 1. Customers must enter relationships with vendors as independent actors.
  • 2. Customers must be the points of integration for their own data.
  • 3. Customers must have control of data they generate and gather. This means they must be able to share data selectively and voluntarily.
  • 4. Customers must be able to assert their own terms of engagement.
  • 5. Customers must be free to express their demands and intentions outside of any one companyโ€™s control.
  • This is a profoundly game-changing approach
  • big data that is the rush for consumersโ€™ information potentially leading to the same dead-end of attention destruction and affective saturation than the former offline paradigm
  • VRM system working as a marketplace
  • the goal of marketing should be to increase the likelihood and frequency of free and informed transactions in the marketplace
  • less imperfect and less biased information in a cultural context overvaluing transparency, and a bigger atomicity due to the hereafter introduced trend for re-localized peer production.
  • 3.2.2.3 VRM and externalization of the socialization process
  • Promoting the end of advertisement
  • means to find a new way to make the information circulate, what was the primary goal of advertisement
  • Until there is no alternative to massive advertisement campaign for the information circulation, it is indeed hard to ask entrepreneurs and managers to get rid of those successors of propaganda: such a transition process necessarily imply adaptation costs from the producer and the consumer side, and possible competitive disadvantage against competitors still maximizing profit through advertisement means
  • But the internet transformation of the general organology offers new way to think information circuits and potentially constitute an opportunity to externalize the socialization process of products that is to empower citizen-consumers organized in communities
  • Empowering groups of citizen doesnโ€™t annihilate the risks of mis-use or counterproductive interest-taker behaviors but a well-designed system of trust between peers could minimize this risk by creating a dependency to what social capital other peers give you, as it is happening in the sharing economy: the credibility of a contributive peer would be guaranteed through what the P2P Foundation calls Feedback systems and peer-police
  • a strong structuration of products characteristics, allowing customers to personalize their choices according to their desire and constraints: such a โ€œVRM+โ€ system
  • Marketing would then be the art of being as high as possible in this ranking, as it is happening in SEO for search engines, but in this context of criteria explosion, marketing would then be the disciple of listening to customersโ€™ wishes and aspiration needing an attention, in order to kick in the production or to adapt the following series.
  • 3.2.2.4 Toward a possible equi-power
  • Such a system would tremendously re-configure the balance of power and tend toward a form of equi-power i.e. a social organization in which abuses of a โ€œbigโ€ would be the potential object of a ranking sanction by the peers
  • self-regulative function
  • a form of economic Darwinism would let to conscious organization the right to curve their path toward a durable configuration in accordance with the social ecosystem.
  • the idea of equi-power is a form of homogenization of the social matter, in which the distortions in the balance of power would be compensated by the gathering of small forces sharing a common interest
  • Such a sanction systems, if successfully implemented, would make value-destructing businesses progressively decline and hopefully bankrupt,
  • long-term valuable strategic choice
  • long term satisfyingly high ranking
  • It would be utopic to think that the โ€œbeing coolโ€ marketing
  • would disappear, but marketers would have to make those two objectives compose together.
  • This social capital contagion is nevertheless a tool that would need to be controlled in its form of violence by extensive testings and iterations with forms of protections for the smallest peers, that is to say to keep this form of social violence to institutionalized, classic forms of businesses, clearly beyond the line of what should be acceptable in the global village.
  • the goal is here to create an artificial form of majority that is a self-censuring responsible behavior of corporations
Kurt Laitner

Tracking Sensors Invade the Workplace - WSJ.com - 0 views

  •  
    via @changeist there are ethical issues around intent, but full intermediation has some benefits for value metrics, will be interesting to see how this gets balanced, perhaps the value equation is the layer of indirection needed
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

The commons law project: A vision of green governance - 0 views

  • โ€œcommons lawโ€ (not to be confused with common law)
  • Commons law consists of those social practices, cultural traditions and specific bodies of formal law that recognize the rights of commoners to manage their own resources
  • Ever since the rise of the nation-state and especially industrialized markets, however, commons law has been marginalized if not eclipsed by contemporary forms of market-based law
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • individual property rights and market exchange have been elevated over most everything else, and this has only eroded the rights of commoners,
  • reframe the very notion of โ€œthe economyโ€ to incorporate non-market sharing and collaboration.
  • we had concluded that incremental efforts to expand human rights and environmental protection within the framework of the State/Market duopoly were simply not going to achieve much
  • the existing system of regulation and international treaties has been a horrendous failure over the past forty years. Neoliberal economics has corrupted and compromised law and regulation, slashing away at responsible stewardship of our shared inheritance while hastening a steady decline of the worldโ€™s ecosystems
  • We concluded that new forms of ecological governance that respect human rights, draw upon commons models and reframe our understanding of economic value, hold great promise
  • An economics and supporting civic polity that valorizes growth and material development as the precondition for virtually everything else is ultimately a dead endโ€”literally.
  • Achieving a clean, healthy and ecologically balanced environment requires that we cultivate a practical governance paradigm based on, first, a logic of respect for nature, sufficiency, interdependence, shared responsibility and fairness among all human beings; and, second, an ethic of integrated global and local citizenship that insists upon transparency and accountability in all activities affecting the integrity of the environment.
  • We believe that commons- and rights-based ecological governanceโ€”green governanceโ€”can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market allianceโ€”what we call the โ€˜State/Marketโ€™โ€”which is chiefly responsible for the current, failed paradigm of ecological governance.
  • The basic problem is that the price system, seen as the ultimate governance mechanism of our polity, falls short in its ability to represent notions of value that are subtle, qualitative, long-term and complicated.
  • These are, however, precisely the attributes of natural systems.
  • Exchange value is the primary if not the exclusive concern.
  • anything that does not have a price and exists โ€˜outsideโ€™ the market is regarded (for the purposes of policy-making) as having subordinate or no value.
  • industry lobbies have captured if not corrupted the legislative process
  • regulation has become ever more insulated from citizen influence and accountability as scientific expertise and technical proceduralism have come to be more and more the exclusive determinants of who may credibly participate in the process
  • we have reached the limits of leadership and innovation within existing institutions and policy structures
  • it will not be an easy task to make the transition from State/Market ecological governance to commons- and rights-based ecological governance
  • It requires that we enlarge our understanding of โ€˜valueโ€™ in economic thought to account for nature and social well-being; that we expand our sense of human rights and how they can serve strategic as well as moral purposes; that we liberate ourselves from the limitations of State-centric models of legal process; and that we honor the power of non-market participation, local context and social diversity in structuring economic activity and addressing environmental problems.
  • articulate and foster a coherent new paradigm
  • deficiencies of centralized governments (corruption, lack of transparency, rigidity, a marginalized citizenry)
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Blueprint for P2P Society: The Partner State & Ethical Economy - 1 views

  • A new way to produce is emerging
  • through free association of peers
  • an interplay between three partners
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • A community of contributors
  • An enterpreneurial coalition
  • A set of for-benefit institutions which manage the "infrastructure of cooperation"
  • There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players.
  • The contributors create the use value
  • The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation which makes the project 'collectively' sustainable
  • The enterpreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors 'sustainable', by providing an income, and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.
  • Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy?
  • My answer will be an emphatic yes, and stronger yet, I will argue that we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

If not Global Captalism - then What? - 0 views

  • I posit an optimistic view of the potential for Society from the emergence of a new and โ€œOpenโ€ form of Capitalism.
  • Open Capital
  • the concept of โ€œOpenโ€ Capital is โ€œso simpleโ€ฆ. it repels the mind".
  • ...162 more annotations...
  • Open Capital is defined as โ€œa proportional share in an enterprise for an indeterminate timeโ€
  • โ€˜Enterpriseโ€™ is defined as โ€˜any entity within which two or more individuals create, accumulate or exchange Valueโ€.
  • Value is to Economics as Energy and Matter are to Physics.
  • The Metaphysics Of Value
  • division between โ€œsubjectโ€ and โ€œobjectโ€.
  • primary reality is โ€œQualityโ€
  • formless and indefinable
  • not a โ€œthingโ€
  • a non-intellectual awareness or โ€œpre-intellectual realityโ€
  • but an event at which the subject becomes aware of the object and before he distinguishes it
  • Quality is the basis of both subject and object
  • distinguish between โ€œStaticโ€ and โ€œDynamicโ€ Quality
  • treating Value as a form of โ€œQualityโ€ as envisioned by Pirsig.
  • Riegel
  • defined โ€œValueโ€ as โ€œ the Relativity of Desireโ€ again implying indeterminacy.
  • Pirsigโ€™s approach Capital may be viewed as โ€œStaticโ€ Value and Money as โ€œDynamicโ€ Value. โ€œTransactionsโ€ are the โ€œeventsโ€ at which individuals (Subjects) interact with each other or with Capital (both as Objects) to create forms of Value and at which โ€œValue judgmentsโ€ are made based upon a โ€œValue Unitโ€.
  • The result of these Value Events /Transactions is to create subject/object pairings in the form of data ie Who โ€œownsโ€ or has rights of use in What,
  • at what Price
  • accounting data
  • Neo-Classicalโ€ Economics confuses indeterminate Value with a marketโ€“ determined Price โ€“
  • Data may be static
  • This Data identifies the subject with objects such as tangible โ€˜Material Valueโ€™
  • Data may itself constitute โ€˜Intellectual Valueโ€™
  • It, too, may then be defined in a subject/object pairing through the concept of โ€œintellectual propertyโ€.
  • Other forms of Value are however not definable by data:
  • โ€œsentimentalโ€ Value
  • Emotional Valueโ€™
  • 'Spiritual Valueโ€™
  • We may therefore look at the โ€œtransactionโ€ or โ€œvalue eventโ€ in a new light.
  • The creation and circulation of Value essentially comprises the concept we know of as โ€œMoneyโ€.
  • Money / Dynamic Value
  • โ€œThe purpose of money is to facilitate barter by splitting the transaction into two parts, the acceptor of money reserving the power to requisition value from any trader at any time
  • money
  • value unit dissociated from any object
  • monetary unit
  • the basis relative to which other values may be expressed
  • The monetary process is a dynamic one involving the creation and recording of obligations as between individuals and the later fulfilment of these obligations
  • The monetary โ€œValue Eventโ€/ Transaction involves the creation of โ€œCreditโ€
  • obligation to provide something of equivalent Value at a future point in time.
  • These obligations may be recorded on transferable documents
  • database of โ€œCreditโ€/obligations is not Money, but temporary โ€œCapitalโ€
  • โ€œWorking Capitalโ€
  • Static Value โ€“ which only becomes โ€œMoneyโ€/ Dynamic Value when exchanged in the transitory Monetary process.
  • what we think of as Money is in fact not tangible โ€œcashโ€ but rather
  • the flow of data between databases of obligations maintained by Credit Institutions
  • or dynamic
  • Banks literally โ€œloanโ€ Money into existence
  • In exchange for an obligation by an Individual to provide to the Bank something of Value
  • Bankโ€™s obligation is merely to provide another obligation at some future time
  • These Bank-issued obligations are therefore
  • claim upon a claim upon Value
  • The true source of Credit is the Individual, not the intermediary Bank
  • this Money they create from nothing despite the fact that it is literally Value-less
  • Thus there is no true sharing of Risk and Reward involved in Lending
  • issue in relation to Credit/Debt and this relates to the nature of Lending itself.
  • the practice of Lending involves an incomplete exchange in terms of risk and reward: a Lender, as opposed to an Investor, has no interest in the outcome of the Loan, and requires the repayment of Principal no matter the ability of the Borrower to repay.
  • Ethical problem
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      "The Lender has no interest in the outcome of the loan", i.eย doesn'tย care whatย happens in the end. The Lender ins not interested in the economical outcome of the Lender-Loner relation. So in fact there is no real risk sharing. the only risk for the Lender is when the Lonerย doesn'tย pay back, which is not really a risk... In fact it is a risk for the small bank, who has to buy money from the central bank, but not for the central bank.ย 
  • Money is not
  • an โ€œObjectโ€ circulating but rather a dynamic process of Value creation and exchange by reference to a โ€œValue Unitโ€.
  • Capital/ Static Value
  • Capital represents the static accumulation of Value
  • Some forms of Capital are โ€œproductiveโ€
  • An ethical question
  • in relation to Productive Capital relates to the extent of โ€œproperty rightsโ€ which may be held over it thereby allowing individuals to assert โ€œabsoluteโ€ permanent and exclusive ownership - in particular in relation to Land
  • our current financial system is based not upon Value but rather a claim upon Value
  • Financial Capital consists of two types:
  • โ€œDebtโ€
  • โ€œEquityโ€
  • Interest
  • obligations of finite/temporary duration but with no participation in the assets or revenues
  • absolute and permanent ownership/participation (without obligation) in assets and revenues
  • discontinuity between Debt and Equity
  • at the heart of our current problems as a Society
  • The Enterprise
  • โ€˜Charitableโ€™ Enterprise
  • โ€˜Socialโ€™ Enterprise
  • Value
  • exchanged in agreed proportions;
  • Value is exchanged for the Spiritual and Emotional Value
  • โ€˜Commercialโ€™ Enterprise
  • โ€˜closedโ€™
  • Value are exchanged between a limited number of individuals
  • Early enterprises were partnerships and unincorporated associations
  • need for institutions which outlived the lives of the Members led to the development of the Corporate body with a legal existence independent of its Members
  • The key development in the history of Capitalism was the creation of the โ€˜Joint Stockโ€™ Corporate with liability limited by shares of a โ€˜Nominalโ€™ or โ€˜Parโ€™ value
  • over the next 150 years the Limited Liability Corporate evolved into the Public Limited Liability Corporate
  • Such โ€œClosedโ€ Shares of โ€œfixedโ€ value constitute an absolute and permanent claim over the assets and revenues of the Enterprise to the exclusion of all other โ€œstakeholdersโ€ such as Suppliers, Customers, Staff, and Debt Financiers.
  • The latter are essentially โ€˜costsโ€™ external to the
  • owners of the Enterprise
  • maximise โ€˜Shareholder Valueโ€™
  • There is a discontinuity/ fault-line within the โ€˜Closedโ€™ Corporate
  • It has the characteristics of what biologists call a โ€˜semi-permeable membraneโ€™ in the way that it allows Economic Value to be extracted from other stakeholders but not to pass the other way.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      It is a way to extract value from productive systems. It is a system of exploitation.ย 
  • Capital most certainly is and always has been - through the discontinuity (see diagram) between:โ€˜Fixedโ€™ Capital in the form of shares ie Equity; and โ€˜Workingโ€™ Capital in the form of debt finance, credit from suppliers, pre-payments by customers and obligations to staff and management.
  • irreconcilable conflict between Equity and Debt
  • xchange of Economic Value in a Closed Corporate is made difficult and true sharing of Risk and Reward is simply not possible
  • No Enterprise Model has been capable of resolving this dilemma. Until now.
  • Corporate Partnerships with unlimited liability
  • mandatory for partnerships with more than 20 partners to be incorporated
  • in the USA
  • it is the normal structure for professional partnerships
  • Limited Liability Partnerships
  • In the late 1990's
  • litigation
  • The UK LLP is supremely simple and remarkably flexible.
  • All that is needed is a simple โ€˜Member Agreementโ€™ โ€“ a legal protocol which sets out the Aims, Objectives. Principles of Governance, Revenue Sharing, Dispute Resolution, Transparency and any other matters that Members agree should be included. Amazingly enough, this Agreement need not even be in writing, since in the absence of a written agreement Partnership Law is applied by way of default.
  • The ease of use and total flexibility enables the UK LLP to be utilised in a way never intended โ€“ as an โ€˜Openโ€™ Corporate partnership.
  • โ€˜Openโ€™ Corporate Partnership
  • concepts which characterise the โ€˜Openโ€™ Corporate Partnership
  • it is now possible for any stakeholder to become a Member of a UK LLP simply through signing a suitably drafted Member Agreement
  • โ€˜Openโ€™
  • supplier
  • employee
  • may instead become true Partners in the Enterprise with their interests aligned with other stakeholders.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Can SENSORICA be a UK LLP?
  • no profit or loss in an Open Corporate Partnership, merely Value creation and exchange between members in conformance with the Member Agreement.
  • Proportional shares
  • in an Enterprise constitute an infinitely divisible, flexible and scaleable form of Capital capable of distributing or accumulating Value organically as the Enterprise itself grows in Value or chooses to distribute it.
  • Emergence of โ€œOpenโ€ Capital
  • example of how โ€˜Temporary Equityโ€™ may operate in practice
  • The Open Capital Partnership (โ€œOCPโ€)
  • Within the OCP Capital and Revenue are continuous: to the extent that an Investee pays Rental in advance of the due date he becomes an Investor.
  • Open Capital โ€“ a new Asset Class
  • create a new asset class of proportional โ€œsharesโ€/partnership interests
  • in Capital holding OCPโ€™s
  • Property Investment Partnerships (โ€œPIPโ€™sโ€)
  • Open Corporate Partnerships as a Co-operative Enterprise model
  • A Co-operative is not an enterprise structure: it is a set of Principles that may be applied to different types of enterprise structure.
  • Within a Partnership there is no โ€œProfitโ€ and no โ€œLossโ€.
  • Partnerships
  • mutual pursuit of the creation and exchange of Value
  • Partners do not compete with each othe
  • the crippling factors in practical terms have been, inter alia: the liability to which Member partners are exposed from the actions of their co-partners on their behalf; limited ability to raise capital.
  • they favour the interests of other stakeholders, are relatively restricted in accessing investment; are arguably deficient in incentivising innovation.
  • The โ€˜newโ€™ LLP was expressly created to solve the former problem by limiting the liability of Member partners to those assets which they choose to place within its protective โ€˜semi-permeable membraneโ€™
  • However, the ability to configure the LLP as an โ€œOpenโ€ Corporate permits a new and superior form of Enterprise.
  • it is possible to re-organise any existing enterprise as either a partnership or as a partnership of partnerships.
  • the revenues
  • would be divided among Members in accordance with the LLP Agreement. This means that all Members share a common interest in collaborating/co-operating to maximise the Value generated by the LLP collectively as opposed to competing with other stakeholders to maximise their individual share at the other stakeholdersโ€™ expense.
  • facilitate the creation of LLPโ€™s as โ€œCo-operatives of Co-operativesโ€.
  • he โ€˜Commercialโ€™ Enterprise LLP โ€“ where the object is for a closed group of individuals to maximise the value generated in their partnership. There are already over 7,000 of these.
    • Tiberius Brastaviceanu
       
      Can SENSORICA be one of these?
  • the Profit generated in a competitive economy based upon shareholder value and unsustainable growth results from a transfer of risks outwards, and the transfer of reward inwards, leading to a one way transfer of Economic Value.
  • This,
  • will very often impoverish one or more constituency of stakeholders
  • A partnership, however, involves an exchange of value through the sharing of risk and reward.
  • Whether its assets are protected within a corporate entity with limited liability or not, it will always operate co-operatively โ€“ for mutual profit.
  • Open Capital, Economics and Politics
  • continuity between Capital as Static Value and Money as Dynamic Value which has never before been possible due to the dichotomy between the absolute/infinite and the absolute/finite durations of the competing claims over assets โ€“ โ€œEquityโ€ and โ€œDebtโ€
  • Open Capital Partnership gives rise to a new form of Financial Capital of indeterminate duration. It enables the Capitalisation of assets and the monetisation of revenue streams in an entirely new way.
  • It is possible to envisage a Society within which individuals are members of a portfolio of Enterprises constituted as partnerships, whether limited in liability or otherwise.
  • Some will be charitable
  • Others will be โ€˜socialโ€™
  • โ€˜Commercialโ€™ enterprises of all kinds aimed at co-operatively working together to maximise value for the Members.
  • the process has already begun
  • Capitalism
  • superior
  • to all other models, such as Socialism.
  • It can only be replaced by another โ€˜emergentโ€™ phenomenon, which is adopted โ€˜virallyโ€™ because any Enterprise which does not utilise it will be at a disadvantage to an Enterprise which does.
  • The โ€˜Openโ€™ Corporate Partnership is: capable of linking any individuals anywhere in respect of collective ownership of assets anywhere; extremely cheap and simple to operate; and because one LLP may be a Member of another it is organically flexible and โ€˜scaleableโ€™. The phenomenon of โ€œOpen Capitalโ€ โ€“ which is already visible in the form of significant commercial transactions - enables an extremely simple and continuous relationship between those who wish to participate indefinitely in an Enterprise and those who wish to participate for a defined period of time.
  • Moreover, the infinitely divisible proportionate โ€œsharesโ€ which constitute โ€˜Openโ€™ Capital allow stakeholder interests to grow flexibly and organically with the growth in Value of the Enterprise. In legal terms, the LLP agreement is essentially consensual and โ€˜pre-distributiveโ€™: it is demonstrably superior to prescriptive complex contractual relationships negotiated adversarially and subject to subsequent re-distributive legal action. Above all, the โ€˜Openโ€™ Corporate Partnership is a Co-operative phenomenon which is capable, the author believes, of unleashing the โ€œCo-operative Advantageโ€ based upon the absence of a requirement to pay returns to โ€œrentierโ€ Capitalists.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

ISSI-5-2014 - 0 views

  • The proposals should include an international dimension in particular with the following countries: Brazil, Republic of South Africa, India, Canada, Australia, Russia, United States of America, Japan and China.
  • encourage the modernisation of institutional practices and culture in research institutions, Higher Education Institutions and funding agencies, to promote Responsible Research and Innovation
  • increase Responsible Research and Innovation uptake in research organizations
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • developing a Responsible Research and Innovation Plan covering five RRI keys (societal engagement, gender equality and gender in research and innovation content, open access, science education and ethics) in each participating institution.
  •  
    "Topic: Supporting structural change in research organisations to promote Responsible Research and Innovation"
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views

  • role of p2p movement
  • historical role
  • horizontalisation of human relationships
  • ...55 more annotations...
  • allowing the free aggregation of individuals around shared values or common value creation
  • a huge sociological shift
  • new life forms, social practices and human institutions
  • emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
  • ethical revolution
  • openness
  • participation
  • inclusivity
  • cooperation
  • commons
  • the open content industry in the U.S. to reach one sixth of GDP.
  • political expressions
  • the movement has two wings
  • constructive
  • building new tools and practices
  • resistance to neoliberalism
  • we are at a stage of emergence
  • difficulty of implementing full p2p solutions in the current dominant system
  • At this stage, there is a co-dependency between peer producers creating value, and for-profit firms โ€˜capturing that valueโ€™, but they both need each other.
  • Peer producers need a business ecology to insure the social reproduction of their system and financial sustainability of its participants, and capital needs the positive externalities of social cooperation which flow from p2p collaboration.
  • peer producing communities should create their own โ€˜mission-orientedโ€™ social businesses, so that the surplus value remains with the value creators, i.e. the commoners themselves, but this is hardly happening now.
  • Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
  • the horizontal meets the vertical
  • mostly hybrid โ€˜diagonalโ€™ adaptations
  • For peer producers the question becomes, if we cannot create our own fully autonomous institutions, how can we adapt while maintaining maximum autonomy and sustainability as a commons and as a community.
  • Why p2p have failed to create successful alternatives in some areas?
  • In commons-oriented peer production, where people aggegrate around a common object which requires deep cooperation, they usually have their own infrastructures of cooperation and a ecology combining community, a for-benefit association managing the infrastructure, and for-profit companies operating on the market place; in the sharing economy, where individuals merely share their own expressions, third party platforms are the norm. It is clear that for-profit companies have different priorities, and want to enclose value so that it can be sold on the marketplace. This in fact the class struggle of the p2p era, the struggle between communities and corporations around various issues because of partly differential interests.
  • Even commercially controlled platforms are being used for a massive horizontalisation and self-aggregation of human relationships, and communities, including political and radical groups are effectively using them to mobilize. Whatโ€™s important is not just to focus on the limitations and intentions of the platform owners, but to use whatever we can to strengthen the autonomy of peer communities.
  • requires a clever adaptation
  • use for our own benefit
  • The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
  • platforms that can easily and quickly offer services, creating network effects
  • without network effects, there is no โ€˜thereโ€™ there, just an empty potential platform.
  • p2p activists should work on both fronts
  • using mainstream platforms for spreading their ideas and culture and reach greater numbers of people, while also developing their own autonomous media ecologies, that can operate independently, and the latter is an engagement for the โ€˜long haulโ€™, i.e. the slow construction of an alternative lifeworld.
  • The commons and p2p are really just different aspects of the same phenomena; the commons is the object that p2p dynamics are building; and p2p takes place wherever there are commons.
  • So both p2p and the commons, as they create abundant (digital) or sufficient (material) value for the commoners, at the same time create opportunities to create added value for the marketplace. There is no domain that is excluded from p2p, no field that can say, โ€œwe wouldnโ€™t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamicsโ€. And there is no p2p community that can say, we are in the long term fully sustainable within the present system, without extra resources coming from the market sector.
  • One trend is the distribution of current infrastructures and practices, i.e. introducing crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, social lending, digital currencies, in order to achieve wider participation in current practices. That is a good thing, but not sufficient. All the things that I mention above, move to a distributed infrastructure, but do not change the fundamental logic of what they are doing.
  • we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
  • No matter how good you are, no matter how much capital you have to hire the best people, you cannot compete with the innovative potential of open global communities.
  • the p2p dynamics
  • the new networked culture
  • the opposite is also happening, as we outlined above, more and more commons-oriented value communities are creating their own entrepreneurial coalitions. Of course, some type of companies, because of their monopoly positions and legacy systems, may have a very difficult time undergoing that adaptation, in which case new players will appear that can do it more effectively.
  • the corporate form is unable to deal with ecological and sustainability issues, because its very DNA, the legal obligation to enrich the shareholders, makes its strive to lower input costs,  and ignore externalities.
  • we need new corporate structures, a new type of market entity, for which profit is a means, but not an end, dedicated to a โ€˜benefitโ€˜, a โ€˜missionโ€™, or the sustenance of a particular community and/or commons.
  • abundance destroys scarcity and therefore markets
  • open design community
  • will inherently design for sustainability
  • for inclusion
  • conceive more distributed forms of manufacturing
  • entrepreneurs attaching themselves to open design projects start working from an entirely different space, even if they still use the classic corporate form. Prevent the sharing of sustainability designs through IP monopolies is also in my view unethical and allowing such patents should be a minimalist option, not a maximalist one.
  • The high road scenario proposes an enlightened government that โ€˜enables and empowersโ€™ social production and value creation and allows a much smoother transition to p2p models; the low road scenario is one in which no structural reforms take place, the global situation descends into various forms of chaos, and p2p becomes a survival and resilience tactic in extremely difficult social, political and economic circumstances.
  • accelerated end of capitalism
  • Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
  • I donโ€™t really think in terms of technological breakthroughs, because the essential one, globally networked collective intelligence enabled by the internetworks, is already behind us; that is the major change, all other technological breakthroughs will be informed by this new social reality of the horizontalisation of our civilisation. The important thing now is to defend and extend our communication and organisation rights, against a concerted attempt to turn back the clock. While the latter is really an impossibility, this does not mean that the attempts by governments and large corporations cannot create great harm and difficulties. We need p2p technology to enable the global solution finding and implementation of the systemic crises we are facing.
Kurt Laitner

The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society... - 1 views

  • under the โ€˜leadershipโ€™ of corporations and those members of our society who have access to capital.
  • Despite all democratic advances, the state forms have clearly been captured by private interests.
  • in a capitalist system, โ€˜civil societyโ€™ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
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  • 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 โ€˜mechanisms of exclusionโ€™.
  • 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 โ€˜for-benefit associationsโ€™
  • democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      hmm
  • 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
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      ? our values need be expressed in every action within the matrix, not just when a 'vote' is held, in fact general democratic 'voting' should probably disappear
  • the โ€˜common goodโ€™ of society as a whole
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      there is no such thing
  • 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.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      !!!
  • 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.
    • Kurt Laitner
       
      really?
  • 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 โ€˜leakingโ€™ 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
  •  
    Good synopsis of the big picture by Michel
Kurt Laitner

Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views

  • 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
  • Their main contribution to society has been facilitating new kinds of transactions
  • The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But itโ€™s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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  • Whoever owns the platforms that help us share decides who accumulates wealth from them, and how
  • Lรฉonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they 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 โ€œ zero marginal cost societyโ€œ in which the โ€œcollaborative commonsโ€ will be more competitive than extractive corporations
  • once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
  • People are recognizing that doing business differently will require changing who gets to own what.
  • โ€œWeโ€™re moving into a new economic age,โ€ says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. โ€œIt needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.โ€
  • Itโ€™s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensusโ€”though they prefer the term โ€œcollaborationโ€โ€”about decisions that affect their lives.
  • From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an โ€œopen value networkโ€œ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
  • a companion tool, CoBudget, to help them allocate resources together
  • The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process โ€œparticipatory downsizing.โ€
  • And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperativeโ€”one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
  • Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
  • โ€œPeople who have been without for a long time,โ€ she says, โ€œoften operate with a mindset that they canโ€™t share what they have, because they donโ€™t know when that resource will come along again.โ€
  • As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, itโ€™s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
  • The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uberโ€”competitive, widespread, and owned by its communityโ€”still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like 
  • His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. โ€œI like the idea that we donโ€™t need to have a specific legal status,โ€ he says. โ€œItโ€™s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.โ€
  • Fentonโ€™s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to โ€œcreate innovative solutions to accelerate social change,โ€ much as CouchSurfing did, but itโ€™s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platformโ€”soon to become a product in its own rightโ€”through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
  • Loomioโ€™s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
  • Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the โ€œ commons-based peer productionโ€œ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesnโ€™t arise overnight. Just as todayโ€™s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
  • It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
  • The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
  • all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
  • A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
  • For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
  • For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
  • Venture funding may be in competition with Dietzโ€™s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
  • Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so theyโ€™re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
  • Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringesโ€”it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
  • A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
  • In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Tiberius Brastaviceanu

Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework ยป Wirearchy - 0 views

  • more open people processes
  • Participative processes like Open Space, World Cafes, Unconferences, Peer Circles
  • Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital โ€˜experienceโ€™ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
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  • maker faires
  • community-and-consensus building, organizing for activism and fundraising
  • The impetus behind this explosion is both technological and sociological
  • Technological
  • information technology and the creation and evolution of the Internet and the Web
  • appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
  • Sociological
  • People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
  • get informed and take action
  • Developing familiarity and practice with open and collaborative processes
  • play and work together
  • rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the โ€˜communityโ€™
  • The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
  • Today, our culture-making activities are well engaged in the early stages of cultural mutation
  • Whatโ€™s coming along next ?  โ€œSmartโ€ devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ?  Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ?  New mental models ?  Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
  • Shorter cycle-based development and release
  • Agile development
  • It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
  • The Internet of Things (IoT)
  • clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoplesโ€™ daily life activities
  • experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
  • The IoT concept is being combined with the new-ish concepts of Open Data and Big Data
  • ethical, political and social impact policy decisions
  • that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoplesโ€™ activities and lives
  • โ€˜weโ€™ are on our way towards more integrated eco-systems of issues, people and technologies
  • participation and inclusion enabled by interconnectedness are quickly becoming the โ€˜new rulesโ€™
  • What the Future May Hold
  • the โ€˜scenario planningโ€™ approach
  • worldโ€™s politics, economics, anthropology, technology, psychology, sociology and philosophy
  • A scenario planning exercise carried out by the Rockefeller Foundation
  • Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
  • are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
  • The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
  • cultural โ€˜mutationโ€™
  • Wirearchy
  • a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
  • the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
  • The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory.  Itโ€™s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
  • Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
  • Participative Work Design โ€“ The Six Criteria
  • in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
  • contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
  • peer-to-peer movement(s) unfolding around the world
  • Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
  • But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
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