Group items tagged

Because of the Web, the first time in history human mind becomes a critical circulating asset in society that ordinary people can buy, sell, produce, and share.

In a first phase, the commons simply emerges as an added alternative.

becoming a subsector of society, and starts influencing the whole

phase transition and transformation will need to occur.

how a commons-dominated, i.e. after the phase transition, society would look like.

At its core would be a collection of commons, represented by trusts and for-benefit associations, which protect their common assets for the benefit of present and future generations

The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.

More likely is that the corporate forms will be influenced by the commons and that profit will be subsumed to other goals, that are congruent with the maintenance of the commons.

The state will still exist, but will have a radically different nature

Much of its functions will have been taken over by commons institutions, but since these institutions care primarily about their commons, and not the general common good, we will still need public authorities that are the guarantor of the system as a whole, and can regulate the various commons, and protect the commoners against possible abuses. So in our scenario, the state does not disappear, but is transformed, though it may greatly diminish in scope, and with its remaining functions thoroughly democratized and based on citizen participation.

In our vision, it is civil-society based peer production, through the Commons, which is the guarantor of value creation by the private sector, and the role of the state, as Partner State, is to enable and empower the creation of common value. The new peer to peer state then, though some may see that as a contradictio in terminis, is a state which is subsumed under the Commons, just as it is now under the private sector. Such a peer to peer state, if we are correct, will have a much more modest role than the state under a classic state society, with many of its functions taken over by civil society associations, interlinked in processes of global governance. The above then, this triarchy, is the institutional core which replaces the dual private-public binary system that is characteristic of the capitalist system that is presently the dominant format.

fundamental mission is to empower direct social-value creation, and to focus on the protection of the Commons sphere as well as on the promotion of sustainable models of entrepreneurship and participatory politics

the state becomes a 'partner state' and enables autonomous social production.

the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society

retreating from the binary state/privatization dilemma to the triarchical choice of an optimal mix amongst government regulation, private-market freedom and autonomous civil-society projects

the role of the state

“the peer production of common value requires civic wealth and strong civic institutions.

trigger the production/construction of new commons by - (co-) management of complexe resource systems which are not limited to local boundaries or specific communities (as manager and partner) - survey of rules (chartas) to care for the commons (mediator or judge) - kicking of or providing incentives for commoners governing their commons - here the point is to design intelligent rules which automatically protect the commons, like the GPL does (facilitator)"

the emergence of the digital commons. It is the experience of creating knowledge, culture, software and design commons, by a combination of voluntary contributions, entrepreneurial coalitions and infrastructure-protecting for-benefit associations, that has most tangibly re-introduced the idea of commons, for all to use without discrimination, and where all can contribute. It has drastically reduced the production, distribution, transaction and coordination costs for the immaterial value that is at the core also of all what we produce physically, since that needs to be made, needs to be designed. It has re-introduced communing as a mainstream experience for at least one billion internet users, and has come with proven benefits and robustness that has outcompeted and outcooperated its private rivals. It also of course offers new ways to re-imagine, create and protect physical commons.

stop enclosures

peer to peer, i.e. the ability to freely associate with others around the creation of common value

communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.

It is customary to divide society into three sectors, and what we want to show is how the new peer to peer dynamic unleashed by networked infrastructures, changes the inter-relationship between these three sectors.

In the current ‘cognitive capitalist’ system, it is the private sector consisting of enterprises and businesses which is the primary factor, and it is engaged in competitive capital accumulation. The state is entrusted with the protection of this process. Though civil society, through the citizen, is in theory ‘sovereign’, and chooses the state; in practice, both civil society and the state are under the domination of the private sector.

it fulfills three contradictory functions

Of course, this is not to say that the state is a mere tool of private business.

protect the whole system, under the domination of private business

protector of civil society, depending on the balance of power and achievements of social movements

protector of its own independent interests

Under fascism, the state achieves great independence from the private sector , which may become subservient to the state. Under the welfare state, the state becomes a protector of the social balance of power and manages the achievements of the social movement; and finally, under the neoliberal corporate welfare state, or ‘market state’, it serves most directly the interests of the financial sector.

key institutions and forms of property.

The state managed a public sector, under its own property.

The private sector , under a regime of private ownership, is geared to profit, discounts social and natural externalities, both positive and negative, and uses its dominance in society to use and dominate the state.

civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations

Capitalism has historically been a pendulum between the private and the public sector

However, this configuration is changing,

the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.

participatory politics

Peer production gives us an advance picture of how a commons-oriented society would look like. At its core is a commons and a community contributing to it, either voluntarily, or as paid entrepreneurial employees. It does this through collaborative platforms using open standards. Around the commons emerges enterprises that create added value to operate on the marketplace, but also help the maintenance and the expansion of the commons they rely on. A third partner are the for-benefit associations that maintain the infrastructure of cooperation. Public authorities could play a role if they wanted to support existing commons or the creation of new commons, for the value they bring to society.

if a commons is not created as in the case of the digital commons, it is something that is inherited from nature or former generations, given in trust and usufruct, so that it can be transmitted to our descendents. The proper institution for such commons is therefore the trust, which is a corporate form that cannot touch its principal capital, but has to maintain it.

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 – to capture the attention

psychotechniques – 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

“if food advertising on TV were banned, significant reductions in the prevalence of childhood obesity are possible.” (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 — 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 company’s control.

This is a profoundly game-changing approach

big data that is the rush for consumers’ 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 doesn’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 “VRM+” 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 customers’ 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 “big” 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 “being cool” 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

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 “the economy” 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 world’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 end—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 governance—green governance—can fulfill this logic and ethic. Properly done, it can move us beyond the neoliberal State and Market alliance—what we call the ‘State/Market’—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 ‘outside’ 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 ‘value’ 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)

people confuse collaboration with teamwork.

Teams are created when managers need to work closely together to achieve a joint outcome.

actions are interdependent

committed to a single result

joint decisions

cautious about taking unilateral action

someone with the authority to resolve disputes

Team members may dislike

each other

But with a good leader they can still perform.

Collaborators face a different challenge

they often also have competing goals

the shared goal is usually only a small part of their responsibilities

collaborators cannot rely on a leader to resolve differences

collaborators cannot walk away from each other, when they disagree.

a collaborative relationship

is a form of customer-supplier relationship in which the participants have all the difficulties of contracting with each other without the power to walk away if the other party is being unreasonable or insensitive.

my advice is to avoid relying on a collaborative relationship except in the rare cases when a company objective is important enough to warrant some collaborative action but not so important as to warrant a dedicated team.

collaboration requires emotional engagement

respect

creatively bargain

other over costs and benefits.

don't think of it as a permanent solution

collaborative relationship

transition to an easier form of interaction

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 ‘capturing that value’, 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 ‘mission-oriented’ 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 ‘diagonal’ 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. What’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 ‘there’ 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 ‘long haul’, 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, “we wouldn’t be stronger by opening up to participation and community dynamics”. 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 ‘benefit‘, a ‘mission’, 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 ‘enables and empowers’ 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 don’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.