The collaborative economy, driven by a convergence of numerous factors including the global economic recession, growing environmental consciousness and the growing ubiquity of information communication technologies (ICTs) is booming, with more than $2 billion in investment raised from venture capitalists
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and $3.5 billion generated for users in P2P models in 2013.
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The Baffler - 0 views
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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 O’Reilly’s thinking about technology.
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the O’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,
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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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making it seem as if the language of economics was, in fact, the only reasonable way to talk about the subject
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It’s easy to forget this today, but there was no such idea as open source software before 1998; the concept’s seeming contemporary coherence is the result of clever manipulation and marketing.
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Free Software Foundation, preoccupied with ensuring that users had rights with respect to their computer programs. Those rights weren’t many—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
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profound critique of the role that patent law had come to play in stifling innovation and creativity.
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Plenty of developers contributed to “free software” 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.
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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 outlet—the Open Source Initiative—and brought in O’Reilly to help them rebrand.
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The label “open source” may have been new, but the ideas behind it had been in the air for some time.
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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.
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“open source is not particularly a moral or a legal issue. It’s an engineering issue. I advocate open source, because . . . it leads to better engineering results and better economic results
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While free software was meant to force developers to lose sleep over ethical dilemmas, open source software was meant to end their insomnia.
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Stallman the social reformer could wait for decades until his ethical argument for free software prevailed in the public debate
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O’Reilly the savvy businessman had a much shorter timeline: a quick embrace of open source software by the business community guaranteed steady demand for O’Reilly books and events
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The coup succeeded. Stallman’s project was marginalized. But O’Reilly and his acolytes didn’t win with better arguments; they won with better PR.
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A decade after producing a singular vision of the Internet to justify his ideas about the supremacy of the open source paradigm, O’Reilly is close to pulling a similar trick on how we talk about government reform.
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O’Reilly cared for only one type of freedom: the freedom of developers to distribute software on whatever terms they fancied.
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is that which protects “my choice as a creator to give, or not to give, the fruits of my work to you, as a ‘user’ of that work, and for you, as a user, to accept or reject the terms I place on that gift.”
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O’Reilly opposed this agenda: “I 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.”
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According to this Randian interpretation of open source, the goal of regulation and public advocacy should be to ensure that absolutely nothing—no laws or petty moral considerations—stood in the way of the open source revolution
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must be opposed, since it would taint the reputation of open source as technologically and economically superior to proprietary software
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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 “open source” not displaced “free software” as the paradigm du jour.
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Profiting from the term’s ambiguity, O’Reilly and his collaborators likened the “openness” of open source software to the “openness” of the academic enterprise, markets, and free speech.
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“For me, ‘open source’ in the broader sense means any system in which open access to code lowers the barriers to entry into the market”).
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The language of economics was less alienating than Stallman’s language of ethics; “openness” was the kind of multipurpose term that allowed one to look political while advancing an agenda that had very little to do with politics
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the availability of source code for universal examination soon became the one and only benchmark of openness
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What the code did was of little importance—the market knows best!—as long as anyone could check it for bugs.
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The new paradigm was presented as something that went beyond ideology and could attract corporate executives without losing its appeal to the hacker crowd.
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What Raymond and O’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 own—an ideology that worshiped innovation and efficiency at the expense of everything else.
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What they had in common was disdain for Stallman’s moralizing—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.
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As long as everyone believed that “open source” implied “the Internet” and that “the Internet” implied “open source,” it would be very hard to resist the new paradigm
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Telling a coherent story about open source required finding some inner logic to the history of the Internet
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“If you believe me that open source is about Internet-enabled collaboration, rather than just about a particular style of software license,”
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The way O’Reilly saw it, many of the key developments of Internet culture were already driven by what he called “open source behavior,” even if such behavior was not codified in licenses.
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No moralizing (let alone legislation) was needed; the Internet already lived and breathed open source
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Openness as a happenstance of market conditions is a very different beast from openness as a guaranteed product of laws.
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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
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This is where the now-forgotten language of “freedom” made a comeback, since it was important to ensure that O’Reilly’s heroic Randian hacker-entrepreneurs were allowed to roam freely.
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Soon this “freedom to innovate” morphed into “Internet freedom,” so that what we are trying to preserve is the innovative potential of the platform, regardless of the effects on individual users.
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Lumping everything under the label of “Internet freedom” did have some advantages for those genuinely interested in promoting rights such as freedom of expression
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Forced to choose between preserving the freedom of the Internet or that of its users, we were supposed to choose the former—because “the Internet” stood for progress and enlightenment.
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their value proposition lay in the information they delivered, not in the software function they executed.
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to argue that the Internet could help humanity augment its “collective intelligence” and that, once again, open source software was crucial to this endeavor.
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Now it was all about Amazon learning from its customers and Google learning from the sites in its index.
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in 2004, O’Reilly and his business partner Dale Dougherty hit on the idea of “Web 2.0.” What did “2.0” mean, exactly?
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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.
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Tactically, “Web 2.0” could also be much bigger than “open source”; it was the kind of sexy umbrella term that could allow O’Reilly to branch out from boring and highly technical subjects to pulse-quickening futurology
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O’Reilly couldn’t improve on a concept as sexy as “collective intelligence,” so he kept it as the defining feature of this new phenomenon.
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What set Web 2.0 apart from Web 1.0, O’Reilly claimed, was the simple fact that those firms that didn’t embrace it went bust
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O’Reilly eventually stuck a 2.0 label on anything that suited his business plan, running events with titles like “Gov 2.0” and “Where 2.0.” Today, as everyone buys into the 2.0 paradigm, O’Reilly is quietly dropping it
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assumption that, thanks to the coming of Web 2.0, we are living through unique historical circumstances
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Take O’Reilly’s musings on “Enterprise 2.0.” What is it, exactly? Well, it’s the same old enterprise—for all we know, it might be making widgets—but now it has learned something from Google and Amazon and found a way to harness “collective intelligence.”
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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 “Internet-centrism.”
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“Open source” gave us the “the Internet,” “the Internet” gave us “Web 2.0,” “Web 2.0” gave us “Enterprise 2.0”: in this version of history, Tim O’Reilly is more important than the European Union
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For Postman, each human activity—religion, law, marriage, commerce—represents a distinct “semantic environment” with its own tone, purpose, and structure. Stupid talk is relatively harmless; it presents no threat to its semantic environment and doesn’t cross into other ones.
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Crazy talk, in contrast, challenges a semantic environment, as it “establishes different purposes and assumptions from those we normally accept.” To argue, as some Nazis did, that the German soldiers ended up far more traumatized than their victims is crazy talk.
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For Postman, one of the main tasks of language is to codify and preserve distinctions among different semantic environments.
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As he put it, “When language becomes undifferentiated, human situations disintegrate: Science becomes indistinguishable from religion, which becomes indistinguishable from commerce, which becomes indistinguishable from law, and so on.
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Some words—like “law”—are particularly susceptible to crazy talk, as they mean so many different things: from scientific “laws” to moral “laws” to “laws” of the market to administrative “laws,” the same word captures many different social relations. “Open,” “networks,” and “information” function much like “law” in our own Internet discourse today.
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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
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Our language could never properly account for the highly fluid and relational structure of our reality—or as he put it in his most famous aphorism, “the map is not the territory.”
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Korzybski argued that we relate to our environments through the process of “abstracting,” whereby our neurological limitations always produce an incomplete and very selective summary of the world around us.
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nothing harmful in this per se—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.
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He also encouraged his followers to start using “etc.” 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 “consciousness of abstraction.”
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“What are the characteristics of language which lead people into making false evaluations of the world around them?”
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O’Reilly openly acknowledges his debt to Korzybski, listing Science and Sanity among his favorite books
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It would be a mistake to think that O’Reilly’s linguistic interventions—from “open source” to “Web 2.0”—are random or spontaneous.
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There is a philosophy to them: a philosophy of knowledge and language inspired by Korzybski. However, O’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.
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O’Reilly, of course, sees his role differently, claiming that all he wants is to make us aware of what earlier commentators may have overlooked. “A metaphor is just that: a way of framing the issues such that people can see something they might otherwise miss,
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But Korzybski’s point, if fully absorbed, is that a metaphor is primarily a way of framing issues such that we don’t see something we might otherwise see.
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In public, O’Reilly modestly presents himself as someone who just happens to excel at detecting the “faint signals” of emerging trends. He does so by monitoring a group of überinnovators that he dubs the “alpha geeks.” “The ‘alpha geeks’ show us where technology wants to go. Smart companies follow and support their ingenuity rather than trying to suppress it,
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His own function is that of an intermediary—someone who ensures that the alpha geeks are heard by the right executives: “The alpha geeks are often a few years ahead of their time. . . . What we do at O’Reilly is watch these folks, learn from them, and try to spread the word by writing down (
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The name of his company’s blog—O’Reilly Radar—is meant to position him as an independent intellectual who is simply ahead of his peers in grasping the obvious.
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As Web 2.0 becomes central to everything, O’Reilly—the world’s biggest exporter of crazy talk—is on a mission to provide the appropriate “context” to every field.
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The thinker who emerges there is very much at odds with the spirit of objectivity that O’Reilly seeks to cultivate in public
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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
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O’Reilly meme-engineers a nice euphemism—“meme-engineering”—to describe what has previously been known as “propaganda.”
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how one can meme-engineer a new meaning for “peer-to-peer” technologies—traditionally associated with piracy—and make them appear friendly and not at all threatening to the entertainment industry.
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O’Reilly and his acolytes “changed the canonical list of projects that we wanted to hold up as exemplars of the movement,” while also articulating what broader goals the projects on the new list served. He then proceeds to rehash the already familiar narrative: O’Reilly put the Internet at the center of everything, linking some “free software” projects like Apache or Perl to successful Internet start-ups and services. As a result, the movement’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.
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His “correspondents” at O’Reilly Radar don’t work beats; they work memes and epistemes, constantly reframing important public issues in accordance with the templates prophesied by O’Reilly.
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Now, who stands to benefit from “cyberwarfare” being defined more broadly? Could it be those who, like O’Reilly, can’t currently grab a share of the giant pie that is cybersecurity funding?
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Frank Luntz lists ten rules of effective communication: simplicity, brevity, credibility, consistency, novelty, sound, aspiration, visualization, questioning, and context.
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Thus, O’Reilly’s meme-engineering efforts usually result in “meme maps,” where the meme to be defined—whether it’s “open source” or “Web 2.0”—is put at the center, while other blob-like terms are drawn as connected to it.
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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. “A 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,”
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News April 4 mail date March 29, 2013 Baffler party March 6, 2013 Žižek on seduction February 13, 2013 More Recent Press I’ve Seen the Worst Memes of My Generation Destroyed by Madness io9, April 02, 2013 The Baffler’s New Colors Imprint, March 21, 2013
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There is considerable continuity across O’Reilly’s memes—over time, they tend to morph into one another.
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James Grier Miller, Living Systems (1978) - 0 views
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My presentation of a general theory of living systems will employ two sorts of spaces in which they may exist, physical or geographical space and conceptual or abstracted spaces
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The characteristics and constraints of physical space affect the action of all concrete systems, living and nonliving.
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These conceptual and abstracted spaces do not have the same characteristics and are not subject to the same constraints as physical space
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Social and some biological scientists find conceptual or abstracted spaces useful because they recognize that physical space is not a major determinant of certain processes in the living systems they study
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one cannot measure comparable processes at different levels of systems, to confirm or disconfirm cross-level hypotheses, unless one can measure different levels of systems or dimensions in the same spaces or in different spaces with known transformations among them
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It must be possible, moreover, to make such measurements precisely enough to demonstrate whether or not there is a formal identity across levels
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Any change of state of matter-energy or its movement over space, from one point to another, I shall call action.
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Meaning is the significance of information to a system which processes it: it constitutes a change in that system's processes elicited by the information, often resulting from associations made to it on previous experience with it
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Information is a simpler concept: the degrees of freedom that exist in a given situation to choose among signals, symbols, messages, or patterns to be transmitted.
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. The amount of information is measured as the logarithm to the base 2 of the number of alternate patterns
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Signals convey information to the receiving system only if they do not duplicate information already in the receiver. As Gabor says:
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[The information of a message can] be defined as the 'minimum number of binary decisions which enable the receiver to construct the message, on the basis of the data already available to him.'
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The term marker was used by von Neumann to refer to those observable bundles, units, or changes of matter-energy whose patterning bears or conveys the informational symbols from the ensemble or repertoire.
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If a marker can assume n different states of which only one is present at any given time, it can represent at most log2n bits of information. The marker may be static, as in a book or in a computer's memory
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Communication of almost every sort requires that the marker move in space, from the transmitting system to the receiving system, and this movement follows the same physical laws as the movement of any other sort of matter-energy. The advance of communication technology over the years has been in the direction of decreasing the matter-energy costs of storing and transmitting the markers which bear information.
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There are, therefore, important practical matter-energy constraints upon the information processing of all living systems exerted by the nature of the matter-energy which composes their markers.
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If two parts are interrelated either quantitatively or qualitatively, knowledge of the state of one must yield some information about the state of the other. Information measures can demonstrate when such relationships exist
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The disorder, disorganization, lack of patterning, or randomness of organization of a system is known as its entropy (S)
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Increase of entropy was thus interpreted as the passage of a system from less probable to more probable states.
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according to the second law, a system tends to increase in entropy over time, it must tend to decrease in negentropy or information.
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. Making one or more copies of a given informational pattern does not increase information overall, though it may increase the information in the system which receives the copied information.
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the concept of Prigogine that in an open system (that is one in which both matter and energy can be exchanged with the environment) the rate of entropy production within the system, which is always positive, is minimized when the system is in a steady state.
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in systems with internal feedbacks, internal entropy production is not always minimized when the system is in a stationary state. In other words, feedback couplings between the system parameters may cause marked changes in the rate of development of entropy. Thus it may be concluded that the "information flow" which is essential for this feedback markedly alters energy utilization and the rate of development of entropy, at least in some such special cases which involve feedback control. While the explanation of this is not clear, it suggests an important relationship between information and entropy
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amount of energy actually required to transmit the information in the channel is a minute part of the total energy in the system, the "housekeeping energy" being by far the largest part of it
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In recent years systems theorists have been fascinated by the new ways to study and measure information flows, but matter-energy flows are equally important. Systems theory is more than information theory, since it must also deal with energetics - such matters as
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Only a minute fraction of the energy used by most living systems is employed for information processing
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I have noted above that the movement of matter-energy over space, action, is one form of process. Another form of process is information processing or communication, which is the change of information from one state to another or its movement from one point to another over space
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Communications, while being processed, are often shifted from one matter-energy state to another, from one sort of marker to another
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One basic reason why communication is of fundamental importance is that informational patterns can be processed over space and the local matter-energy at the receiving point can be organized to conform to, or comply with, this information
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. Conversely there is no regular movement in a system unless there is a difference in potential between two points, which is negative entropy or information
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If the receiver responds primarily to the material or energic aspect, I shall call it, for brevity, a matter-energy transmission; if the response is primarily to the information, I shall call it an information transmission
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Moreover, just as living systems must have specific forms of matter-energy, so they must have specific patterns of information
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.The word "set" implies that the units have some common properties. These common properties are essential if the units are to interact or have relationships. The state of each unit is constrained by, conditioned by, or dependent on the state of other units. The units are coupled. Moreover, there is at least one measure of the sum of its units which is larger than the sum of that measure of its units.
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a correspondence between two variables, x and y, such that for each value of x there is a definite value of y, and no two y's have the same x, and this correspondence is: determined by some rule
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the set of values on some scale, numerical or otherwise, which its variables have at a given instant
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If these comparable variations are so similar that they can be expressed by the same function, a formal identity exists between the two systems
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Science advances as the formal identity or isomorphism increases between a theoretical conceptual system and objective findings about concrete or abstracted systems
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A conceptual system may be purely logical or mathematical, or its terms and relationships may be intended to have some sort of formal identity or isomorphism with units and relationships empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy, in a region in physical space-time, which is organized into interacting interrelated subsystems or components.
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Both units and relationships in concrete systems are empirically determinable by some operation carried out by an observer
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distinguishes a concrete system from unorganized entities in its environment by the following criteria
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Their boundaries are discovered by empirical operations available to the general scientific community rather than set conceptually by a single observer
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which can potentially change over time, and whose change can potentially be measured by specific operations, is a variable of a concrete system
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number of its subsystems or components, its size, its rate of movement in space, its rate of growth, the number of bits of information it can process per second, or the intensity of a sound to which it responds
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not to be confused with intersystemic variations which may be observed among individual systems, types, or levels.
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Most concrete systems have boundaries which are at least partially permeable, permitting sizable magnitudes of at least certain sorts of matter-energy or information transmissions to pass them. Such a system is an open system. In open systems entropy may increase, remain in steady state, or decrease.
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impermeable boundaries through which no matter-energy or information transmissions of any sort can occur is a closed system
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In closed systems, entropy generally increases, exceptions being when certain reversible processes are carried on which do not increase it. It can never decrease.
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the general case of concrete systems, of which living systems are a very special case. Nonliving systems need not have the same critical subsystems as living systems, though they often have some of them
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maintain a steady state of negentropy even though entropic changes occur in them as they do everywhere else
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The difference permits them to restore their own energy and repair breakdowns in their own organized structure.
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They have a decider, the essential critical sub-system which controls the entire system, causing its subsystems and components to interact. Without such interaction under decider control there is no system.
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other specific critical sub-systems or they have symbiotic or parasitic relationships with other living or nonliving systems
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Their subsystems are integrated together to form actively self-regulating, developing, unitary systems with purposes and goals
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A partipotential system must interact with other systems that can carry out the processes which it does not, or it will not survive
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relationships abstracted or selected by an observer in the light of his interests, theoretical viewpoint, or philosophical bias.
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Some relationships may be empirically determinable by some operation carried out by the observer, but others are not, being only his concepts
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The relationships mentioned above are observed to inhere and interact in concrete, usually living, systems
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The verbal usages of theoretical statements concerning abstracted systems are often the reverse of those concerning concrete systems
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representing a class of phenomena all of which are considered to have some similar "class characteristic." The members of such a class are not thought to interact or be interrelated, as are the relationships in an abstracted system
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their physical limits often do not coincide spatially with the boundaries of any concrete system, although they may.
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important difference between the physical and biological hierarchies, on the one hand, and social hierarchies, on the other
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we propose to identify social hierarchies not by observing who lives close to whom but by observing who interacts with whom
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in most biological and physical systems relatively intense interaction implies relative spatial propinquity
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To the extent that interactions are channeled through specialized communications and transportation systems, spatial propinquity becomes less determinative of structure.
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cumulative body of knowledge of the past, contained in memories and assumptions of people who express this knowledge in definite ways
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On the other hand, the society is an aggregate of social subsystems, and as a limiting case it is that social system which comprises all the roles of all the individuals who participate.
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What Ruesch calls the social system is something concrete in space-time, observable and presumably measurable by techniques like those of natural science
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To Parsons the system is abstracted from this, being the set of relationships which are the form of organization. To him the important units are classes of input-output relationships of subsystems rather than the subsystems themselves
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system is a system of relationship in action, it is neither a physical organism nor an object of physical perception
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[action] is not concerned with the internal structure of processes of the organism, but is concerned with the organism as a unit in a set of relationships and the other terms of that relationship, which he calls situation
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One fundamental distinction between abstracted and concrete systems is that the boundaries of abstracted systems may at times be conceptually established at regions which cut through the units and relationships in the physical space occupied by concrete systems, but the boundaries of these latter systems are always set at regions which include within them all the units and internal relationships of each system
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If the diverse fields of science are to be unified, it would be helpful if all disciplines were oriented either to concrete or to abstracted systems.
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heathr: We're in a time when... - App.net - 1 views
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Intimacy Gradient and Other Lessons from Architecture - Life With Alacrity - 4 views
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Partner State - P2P Foundation - 0 views
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So here we have it, the new triarchy: - The state, with its public property and representative mechanisms of governance (in the best scenario) - The private sector, with the corporation and private property - The commons, with the Trust (or the for-benefit association), and which is the ‘property’ of all its members (not the right word in the context of the commons, since it has a different philosophy of ownership)
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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
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The commons ‘rents out’ the use of its resources to entrepreneurs. In other words, business still exists, though infinite growth-based capitalism does not.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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)"
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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
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the state does exist, and I believe that we can’t just imagine that we live in a future state-less society
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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.
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communal shareholding, i.e. the non-reciprocal exchange of an individual with a totality. It is totality that we call the commons.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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civil society has a relative power as well, through its capability of creating social movements and associations
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the endangerment of the biosphere through the workings of ‘selfish’ market players; the second is the role of the new digital commons.
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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.
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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.
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Welcome to the new reputation economy (Wired UK) - 1 views
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banks take into account your online reputation alongside traditional credit ratings to determine your loan
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reputation data becomes the window into how we behave, what motivates us, how our peers view us and ultimately whether we can or can't be trusted.
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But this wealth of data raises an important question -- who owns our reputation? Shouldn't our hard-earned online status be portable? If you're a SuperHost on Airbnb, shouldn't you be able to use that reputation to, say, get a loan, or start selling on Etsy?
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The difference today is our ability to capture data from across an array of digital services. With every trade we make, comment we leave, person we "friend", spammer we flag or badge we earn, we leave a trail of how well we can or can't be trusted.
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peer-to-peer marketplaces, where a high degree of trust is required between strangers; and where a traditional approach based on disjointed information sources is currently inefficient, such as recruiting.
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"People are currently underusing their networks and reputation," King says. "I want to help people to understand and build their influence and reputation, and think of it as capital they can put to good use."
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"The implication of our study is that different types of reward are coded by the same currency system." In other words, our brains neurologically compute personal reputation to be as valuable as money.
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Personal reputation has been a means of making socioeconomic decisions for thousands of years. The difference today is that network technologies are digitally enabling the trust we used to experience face-to-face -- meaning that interactions and exchanges are taking place between total strangers.
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Trust and reputation become acutely important in peer-to-peer marketplaces such as WhipCar and Airbnb, where members are taking a risk renting out their cars or their homes.
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When you are trading peer-to-peer, you can't count on traditional credit scores. A different measurement is needed. Reputation fills this gap because it's the ultimate output of how much a community trusts you.
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Welcome to the reputation economy, where your online history becomes more powerful than your credit history.
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A wave of startups, including Connect.Me, TrustCloud, TrustRank, Legit and WhyTrusted, are trying to solve this problem by designing systems that correlate reputation data. By building a system based on "reputation API" -- a combination of a user's activity, ratings and reviews across sites -- Legit is working to build a service that gives users a score from zero to 100. In trying to create a universal metric for a person's trustworthiness, they are trying to "become the credit system of the sharing economy", says Jeremy Barton, the 27-year-old San Francisco-based cofounder of Legit.
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are measuring social influence, not reputation. "Influence measures your ability to drag someone into action,"
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"Reputation is an indicator of whether a person is good or bad and, ultimately, are they trustworthy?"
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Early influence and reputation aggregators will undoubtedly learn by trial and error -- but they will also face the significant challenge of pioneering the use of reputation data in a responsible way. And there's a challenge beyond that: reputation is largely contextual, so it's tricky to transport it to other situations.
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Many of the ventures starting to make strides in the reputation economy are measuring different dimensions of reputation.
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Reputation capital is not about combining a selection of different measures into a single number -- people are too nuanced and complex to be distilled into single digits or binary ratings.
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It's the culmination of many layers of reputation you build in different places that genuinely reflect who you are as a person and figuring out exactly how that carries value in a variety of contexts.
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His company, and other reputation ventures, face some big challenges if they are to become, effectively, the PayPal of trust. The most obvious is coming up with algorithms that can't be easily gamed or polluted by trolls. And then there's the critical hurdle of convincing online marketplaces not just to open up their reputation vaults, but create a standardised format for how they frame and collect reputation data. "We think companies will share reputation data for the same reasons banks give credit data to credit bureaux," says Rob Boyle, Legit cofounder and CTO. "It is beneficial for one company to give up their slice of reputation data if in return they get access to the bigger picture: aggregated data from other companies."
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we will be able to perform a Google- or Facebook-like search and see a picture of a person's behaviour in many different contexts, over a length of time. Slivers of data that have until now lived in secluded isolation online will be available in one place. Answers on Quora, reviews on TripAdvisor, comments on Amazon, feedback on Airbnb, videos posted on YouTube, social groups joined, or presentations on SlideShare; as well as a history and real-time stream of who has trusted you, when, where and why. The whole package will come together in your personal reputation dashboard, painting a comprehensive, definitive picture of your intentions, capabilities and values.
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By the end of the decade, a good online reputation could be the most valuable currency in your possession.
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Private 'Distributed Ledgers' Miss the Point of a Blockchain | Bank Think - 0 views
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Some say it's a tool to enable transparency by ensuring that all members of a group receive cryptographically secured messages about participants’ activities
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Some are even bold enough to predict that distributed ledgers will end the madness of managing multiple database and reconciliation structures.
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Distributed ledgers have primarily claimed to supplant the need for Bitcoin's mining process by introducing trust requirements among participants. These ledgers also promise users the immutability of Bitcoin without the need for expensive mining operations.
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Blockchain technology is useful not because it offers efficiency in a world of message-passing but because it uses a complex process to settle value between untrusted parties.
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But distributed ledgers do not offer users the ability to easily convert their tokens and messages into fungible units of value. Nor do distributed ledgers escrow value between parties that don't trust each other.
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If a ledger is not a public resource, it will have the pressures incumbent to existing settlement systems plus the overhead of maintaining a shared database among competitors. What efficiency will remain thereafter remains dubious.
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their institutional users will probably find it expedient to hash their private-chain transactions and use those hashes to create bitcoin addresses and then send tiny fractions of a bitcoin to them to register their data at a location that cannot be hacked or changed.
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In other words, all private ledger/blockchains will lead to Bitcoin's Rome, driven there by its low cost and high public accountability.
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Why Great Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem - Forbes - 0 views
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“It is no longer enough to manage your innovation. Now you must manage your innovation ecosystem,” he writes.
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How do you take the measure of the ecosystem that your innovation will need to be part of and rely on? How do you not miss the blind spots that can lurk almost anywhere?
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Inequality: Why egalitarian societies died out - opinion - 30 July 2012 - New Scientist - 0 views
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FOR 5000 years, humans have grown accustomed to living in societies dominated by the privileged few. But it wasn't always this way. For tens of thousands of years, egalitarian hunter-gatherer societies were widespread. And as a large body of anthropological research shows, long before we organised ourselves into hierarchies of wealth, social status and power, these groups rigorously enforced norms that prevented any individual or group from acquiring more status, authority or resources than others.*
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How, then, did we arrive in the age of institutionalised inequality? That has been debated for centuries. Philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reasoned in 1754 that inequality was rooted in the introduction of private property. In the mid-19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels focused on capitalism and its relation to class struggle. By the late 19th century, social Darwinists claimed that a society split along class lines reflected the natural order of things - as British philosopher Herbert Spencer put it, "the survival of the fittest". (Even into the 1980s there were some anthropologists who held this to be true - arguing that dictators' success was purely Darwinian, providing estimates of the large numbers of offspring sired by the rulers of various despotic societies as support.)
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But by the mid-20th century a new theory began to dominate. Anthropologists including Julian Steward, Leslie White and Robert Carneiro offered slightly different versions of the following story: population growth meant we needed more food, so we turned to agriculture, which led to surplus and the need for managers and specialised roles, which in turn led to corresponding social classes.
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One line of reasoning suggests that self-aggrandising individuals who lived in lands of plenty ascended the social ranks by exploiting their surplus - first through feasts or gift-giving, and later by outright dominance
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At the group level, argue anthropologists Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd, improved coordination and division of labour allowed more complex societies to outcompete the simpler, more equal societies
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From a mechanistic perspective, others argued that once inequality took hold - as when uneven resource-distribution benefited one family more than others - it simply became ever more entrenched. The advent of agriculture and trade resulted in private property, inheritance, and larger trade networks, which perpetuated and compounded economic advantages.
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Many theories about the spread of stratified society begin with the idea that inequality is somehow a beneficial cultural trait that imparts efficiencies, motivates innovation and increases the likelihood of survival. But what if the opposite were true?
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In a demographic simulation that Omkar Deshpande, Marcus Feldman and I conducted at Stanford University, California, we found that, rather than imparting advantages to the group, unequal access to resources is inherently destabilising and greatly raises the chance of group extinction in stable environments.
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Counterintuitively, the fact that inequality was so destabilising caused these societies to spread by creating an incentive to migrate in search of further resources. The rules in our simulation did not allow for migration to already-occupied locations, but it was clear that this would have happened in the real world, leading to conquests of the more stable egalitarian societies - exactly what we see as we look back in history.
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In other words, inequality did not spread from group to group because it is an inherently better system for survival, but because it creates demographic instability, which drives migration and conflict and leads to the cultural - or physical - extinction of egalitarian societies.
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Egalitarian societies may have fostered selection on a group level for cooperation, altruism and low fertility (which leads to a more stable population), while inequality might exacerbate selection on an individual level for high fertility, competition, aggression, social climbing and other selfish traits.
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Big Data and Techno-panic ~or~ Fear, Loathing and Johannes Gutenberg | gonna.grow.wings - 0 views
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Bell believes that techno-panics are most disruptive when the emerging technology impacts all three of the following: Our relationship to time. Our relationship to space. Our relationship to other people. What struck me about these three relationships—besides, of course, the recognition that the current crop of technological advances will turn them upside down—was that they are all crucial to the context in which sensemaking takes place.
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In other words, the process of sensemaking relies on interacting with others to create a coherent map of an otherwise incoherent situation. This map is deeply linked context–a particular time, place, and set of individuals.
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Stay foundation Stuttgart - Stay Stiftung - 1 views
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What does the Stay Foundation do once the social enterprises have found each other? In the truest sense of the word development-aid.These local social enterprises lack the financial support to exploit their development potential. The team of the Stay Foundation in Stuttgart is sure that if funds are provided by industrial nations, which are then used for the expansion of existing social enterprises, it is development-aid on an equal footing. The challenge in Germany is therefore to attract companies and private individuals to invest in social enterprises in developing countries. In order to raise awareness of Africa and the local social enterprises which are active there, the team organises events for entrepreneurs, is present at events on the subject of Africa, informs private individuals about the foundation and its objectives, examines possibilities for funding and cooperation with the aim of supporting the remaining development in Africa.
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Why Great Innovations Fail: It's All in the Ecosystem - 0 views
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Michelin developed a revolutionary new kind of tire with sensors and an internal hard wheel that could run almost perfectly for 125 miles after a puncture.
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Mastery of the ecosystem is the great strength that made Apple the supreme success story of our time,
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In a world where mobile phone makers sold their devices to operators to sell to consumers, Jobs had such a powerful ecosystem that he could get operators to compete to partner with him: “And here was Apple, offering not just exclusive access to the most talked-about phone in history, but also exclusive access to Apple consumers—the most desirable customer segment imaginable
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How do you take the measure of the ecosystem that your innovation will need to be part of and rely on? How do you not miss the blind spots that can lurk almost anywhere?
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There are terrible pitfalls in the usual progression from prototype to pilot to rollout. It relies perilously on getting everything right from the very start. Often a far wiser and safer approach can be what Adner calls a “minimum viable footprint (MVF) rollout followed by a staged expansion.” In other words, start with a complete ecosystem, but a limited one.
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How Peer to Peer Communities will change the World - 0 views
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emergent communities of practice are developing new social practices that are informed by the p2p paradigm
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Instead what we see is a mutual accomodation between netarchical capital on one side, and peer production communities on the other.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The fact today is that capital is still capable of marshaling vast financial and material resources, so that it can create,
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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we are talking about the distribution of capitalism, not about a deeper change in the logic of our economy.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Making sure that we get a better alternative is actually the historical task of the p2p movement. In other words, it depends on us!
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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.
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shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 04 Jun 12
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Democrasoft Town Hall Online - 1 views
www.collaborizeclassroom.com/townhallonline
town town hall hall online goverannce community tool infrastructure
![](/images/link.gif)
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Town Hall meetings are designed to give voice to everyone within a community. Town Hall Online allows any and all members of the community to ask questions, voice their opinions and vote on issues of mutual concern. Discussion topics are self-contained engagement modules that can include attachments like documents, videos, links and more. They provide a written record of the conversation and include the ability for community members to vote and be counted on individual issues. Town Hall Online topics are organized by categories created by community members and/or moderators, which can be modified anytime, as needed. Best of all, with one click, any individual discussion topic can be shared to Facebook, LinkedIn or any of more than 200 social networks, so sharing the discussion with others outside your immediate community is quick, easy and effective. It's the ultimate in building consensus and getting the word out.
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Crowding Out - P2P Foundation - 1 views
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The curve indicates that while workers will initially chose to work more when paid more per hour, there is a point after which rational workers will choose to work less
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At that point, the leaders are no longer leaders of a community, and they turn out to be suckers after all, working for pittance, comparatively speaking
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under certain structural conditions non-price-based production is extraordinarily robust
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It just is not so easy to assume that because people behave productively in one framework (the social process of peer production that is Wikipedia, free and open source software, or Digg), that you can take the same exact behavior, with the same exact set of people, and harness them to your goals by attaching a price to what previously they were doing in a social process.
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There is, in fact, a massive amount of research that supports the idea that when you pay people to do something for you, they stop enjoying it, and distrust their own motivations. The mysterious something that goes away, and that “Factor X” even has a name: intrinsic motivation.
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Extrinsic rewards suggest that there is actually an instrumental relationship at work, that you do the activity in order to get something else
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If you pay me for it, it must be work
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It’s what we would call a robust effect. It shows up in many contexts. And there’s been considerable testing to try to find out exactly why it works. A major school of thought is that there is an “Overjustification Effect.” (http://kozinets.net/archives/133)
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Offering financial rewards for contributions to online communities basically means mixing external and intrinsic motivation.
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A good example is children who are paid by their parents for mowing the family lawn. Once they expect to receive money for that task, they are only willing to do it again if they indeed receive monetary compensation. The induced unwillingness to do anything for free may also extend to other household chores.
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Once ‘gold-stars’ were introduced as a symbolic reward for a certain amount of time spent practicing the instrument, the girl lost all interest in trying new, difficult pieces. Instead of aiming at improving her skills, her goal shifted towards spending time playing well-learned, easy pieces in order to receive the award (Deci with Flaste 1995)
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this is a more troubling example, as playing the harder pieces is also practicing - I would take this as a more complex mechanism at work - perhaps the reinterpretation by the girl that all playing was considered equal, due to the pricing mechanism, in which case the proximal solution would be to pay more for more complex pieces, or for levels of achievement - the question remains of why the extrinsic reward was introduced in the first place (unwillingness to practice as much as her parents wanted?) - which would indicate intrinsic motivation was insufficient in this case
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Suddenly, she managed to follow the prescription, as her own (intrinsic) motivation was recognized and thereby reinforced.
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The introduction of a monetary fine transforms the relationship between parents and teachers from a non-monetary into a monetary one
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"The effects of external interventions on intrinsic motivation have been attributed to two psychological processes: (a) Impaired self-determination. When individuals perceive an external intervention to reduce their self-determination, they substitute intrinsic motivation by extrinsic control. Following Rotter (1966), the locus of control shifts from the inside to the outside of the person affected. Individuals who are forced to behave in a specific way by outside intervention, feel overjustified if they maintained their intrinsic motivation. (b) Impaired self-esteem. When an intervention from outside carries the notion that the actor's motivation is not acknowledged, his or her intrinsic motivation is effectively rejected. The person affected feels that his or her involvement and competence is not appreciated which debases its value. An intrinsically motivated person is taken away the chance to display his or her own interest and involvement in an activity when someone else offers a reward, or commands, to undertake it. As a result of impaired self-esteem, individuals reduce effort.
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these are finally very useful - so from (a) as long as self determination is maintained (actively) extrinsic reward should not shut down intrinsic motivation AND (b) so long as motivations are recognized and reward dimensions OTHER THAN financial continue to operate, extrinsic reward should not affect intrinsic motivation
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External interventions crowd-out intrinsic motivation if the individuals affected perceive them to be controlling
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External interventions crowd-in intrinsic motivation if the individuals concerned perceive it as supportive
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In that case, self-esteem is fostered, and individuals feel that they are given more freedom to act, thus enlarging self-determination
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so effectively a system needs to ensure it is acting on all dimensions of reward, or at least those most important to the particular participant, ego (pride, recognition, guilt reduction, feeling needed, being helpful, etc), money (sustenance, beyond which it is less potent), meaning/purpose etc. If one ran experiments controlling for financial self sufficiency, then providing appreciation and recognition as well as the introduced financial reward, they might yield different results
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cultural categories that oppose marketplace modes of behavior (or “market logics”) with the more family-like modes of behavior of caring and sharing that we observe in close-knit communities (”community logics”)
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this is labor, this is work, just do it.
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When communal logics are in effect, all sorts of norms of reciprocity, sacrifice, and gift-giving come into play: this is cool, this is right, this is fun
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So think about paying a kid to clean up their room, paying parishioners to go to church, paying people in a neighborhood to attend a town hall meeting, paying people to come out and vote. All these examples seem a little strange or forced. Why? Because they mix and match the communal with the market-oriented.
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Payment as disincentive. In his interesting book Freakonomics, economist Steven Levitt describes some counterintuitive facts about payment. One of the most interesting is that charging people who do the wrong thing often causes them to do it more, and paying people to do the right thing causes them to do it less.
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You direct people _away_ from any noble purpose you have, and instead towards grubbing for dollars
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When people work for a noble purpose, they are told that their work is highly valued. When people work for $0.75/hour, they are told that their work is very low-valued
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you're going to have to fight your way through labour laws and tax issues all the way to bankruptcy
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Market economics. If you have open content, I can copy your content to another wiki, not pay people, and still make money. So by paying contributors, you're pricing yourself out of the market.
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You don't have to pay people to do what they want to do anyways. The labour cost for leisure activities is $0. And nobody is going to work on a wiki doing things they don't want to do.
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wow, exploitative in the extreme - no one can afford to do work for free, it cuts into paid work, family time etc. if they are passionate about something they will do it for free if they cannot get permission to do it for sustenance, but they still need to sustain themselves, and they are making opportunity cost sacrifices, and if you are in turn making money off of this you are an asshole.. go ahead look in the mirror and say "I am an asshole"
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No fair system. There's simply no fair, automated and auditable way to divvy up the money
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too complicated to do automatically. But if you have a subjective system -- have a human being evaluate contributions to an article and portion out payments -- it will be subject to constant challenges, endless debates, and a lot of community frustration.
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Gaming the system. People are really smart. If there's money to be made, they'll figure out how to game your payment system to get more money than they actually deserve
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They'll be trying to get as much money out of you as possible, and you'll be trying to give as little as you can to them
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If you can't convince people that working on your project is worth their unpaid time, then there's probably something wrong with your project.
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People are going to be able to sense that -- it's going to look like a cover-up, something sleazy
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Donate.
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Thank-you gifts
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Pay bounties
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The Revolution at hand - Op-Ed - Domus - 0 views
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Currently, our education prepares us to perform a job — at times any job — that pays us in terms of what we can possess and consume or, in other words, the goods that design and mass production consider to be to our satisfaction — at least partially.
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creating almost nonexistent necessities that are readily available and easy to narrate rather than investigating the problems and real needs of people and communities
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the need for large-scale production is disappearing due to the crystalline democratization of the means of production
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unable to model the exchanges that serve to give way to a new mode of radically inclusive and more equitable cooperative production
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Innovation and meaning have been restricted, trapped and suffocated by mechanisms of protection, monopolies, patents and copyrights.
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If you're lucky you will have patrons, not customers. Customers barely exist in the creative world now.
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A new distributed network of places of cultural and tangible production must be affirmed. The network will stem from fablabs, makerspaces and hackerspaces — the new factories — around the world, or from ambitious projects like the Italian Bottega 21: initiatives that unite the existing cultural heritage of places and traditions with currently available technologies
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We will teach students to investigate, discover and create work, products and services that the community needs, rather than merely follow any old curriculum while waiting for a "phantom" labour market to claim them
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"The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not 'how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology', but 'how can we organize a society around something other than employment?'
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Towards a Material Commons | Guerrilla Translation! - 0 views
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the modes of communication we use are very tightly coupled with the modes of production that finance them
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I’m focused on the policy formation around this transition to a new, open knowledge and commons-based economy, and that’s the research work I’m doing here
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We now have a technology which allows us to globally scale small group dynamics, and to create huge productive communities, self-organized around the collaborative production of knowledge, code, and design. But the key issue is that we are not able to live from that, right
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A lot of co-ops have been neo-liberalizing, as it were, have become competitive enterprises competing against other companies but also against other co-ops, and they don’t share their knowledge
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instead of having a totally open commons, which allows multinationals to use our commons and reinforce the system of capital, the idea is to keep the accumulation within the sphere of the commons.
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The result would be a type of open cooperative-ism, a kind of synthesis or convergence between peer production and cooperative modes of production
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then the material work, the work of working for clients and making a livelihood, would be done through co-ops
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But it hasn’t had much of a direct connection to this emerging commons movement, which shares so many of the values and principles of the traditional cooperative movement.
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There’s also a lot of peer-to-peer work going on, but it’s not very well versed around issues like cooperative organization, formal or legal forms of ownership, which are based on reciprocity and cooperation, and how to interpret the commons vision with a structure, an organizational structure and a legal structure that actually gives it economic power, market influence, and a means of connecting it to organizational forms that have durability over the long-term.
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The young people, the developers in open source or free software, the people who are in co-working centers, hacker spaces, maker spaces. When they are thinking of making a living, they think startups
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They have a kind of generic reaction, “oh, let’s do a startup”, and then they look for venture funds. But this is a very dangerous path to take
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Typically, the venture capital will ask for a controlling stake, they have the right to close down your start up whenever they feel like it, when they feel that they’re not going to make enough money
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Don’t forget that with venture capital, only 1 out of 10 companies will actually make it, and they may be very rich, but it’s a winner-take-all system
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I would like John to talk about the solidarity co-ops, and how that integrates the notion of the commons or the common good in the very structure of the co-op
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They don’t have a commons of design or code, they privatize and patent, just like private competitive enterprise, their knowledge
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Cooperatives, which are basically a democratic and collective form of enterprise where members have control rights and democratically direct the operations of the co-op, have been the primary stakeholders in any given co-op – whether it’s a consumer co-op, or a credit union, or a worker co-op.
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What was really fascinating about the social co-ops was that, although they had members, their mission was not only to serve the members but also to provide service to the broader community
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In the city of Bologna, for example, over 87% of the social services provided in that city are provided through contract with social co-ops
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The difference, however, is that the structure of social co-ops is still very much around control rights, in other words, members have rights of control and decision-making within how that organization operates
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And it is an incorporated legal structure that has formal recognition by the legislation of government of the state, and it has the power, through this incorporated power, to negotiate with and contract with government for the provision of these public services
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So, the social economy, meaning organizations that have a mutual aim in their purpose, based on the principles of reciprocity, collective benefit, social benefit, is emerging as an important player for the design and delivery of public services
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This, too, is in reaction to the failure of the public market for provision of services like affordable housing or health care or education services
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This is a crisis in the role of the state as a provider of public services. So the question has emerged: what happens when the state fails to provide or fulfill its mandate as a provider or steward of public goods and services, and what’s the role of civil society and the social economy in response?
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we have commonses of knowledge, code and design. They’re more easily created, because as a knowledge worker, if you have access to the network and some means, however meager, of subsistence, through effort and connection you can actually create knowledge. However, this is not the case if you move to direct physical production, like the open hardware movement
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I originally encountered Michel after seeing some talks by Benkler and Lessig at the Wizard of OS 4, in 2006, and I wrote an essay criticizing that from a materialist perspective, it was called “The creative anti-commons and the poverty of networks”, playing on the terms that both those people used.
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Some people have called the open hardware community a “candy” economy, because if you’re not part of these open hardware startups, you’re basically not getting anything for your efforts
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They conceive of peer production, especially Benkler, as being something inherently immaterial, a form of production that can only exist in the production of immaterial wealth
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From my materialist point of view, that’s not a mode of production, because a mode of production must, in the first place, reproduce its productive inputs, its capital, its labor, and whatever natural wealth it consumes
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From a materialist point of view, it becomes obvious that the entire exchange value produced in these immaterial forms would be captured by the same old owners of materialist wealth
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I wanted to create something like a protocol for the formation and allocation of physical goods, the same way we have TCP/IP and so forth, as a way to allocate immaterial goods
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share and distribute and collectively create immaterial wealth, and become independent producers based on this collective commons.
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One was the Georgist idea of using rent, economic rent, as a fundamental mutualizing source of wealth
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So, the unearned income, the portion of income derived from ownership of productive assets is evenly distributed
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typical statist communist reaction to the cooperative movement is saying that cooperatives can exclude and exploit one another
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But then, as we’ve seen in history, there’s something that develops called an administrative class, which governs over the collective of cooperatives or the socialist state, and can become just as counterproductive and often exploitive as capitalist class
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So, how do we create cooperation among cooperatives, and distribution of wealth among cooperatives, without creating this administrative class?
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This is why I borrowed from the work of Henry George and Silvio Gesell in created this idea of rent sharing.
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The idea is that if a cooperative wants an asset, like, an example is if one of the communes would like to have a tractor, then essentially the central commune is like a bond market. They float a bond, they say I want a tractor, I am willing to pay $200 a month for this tractor in rent, and other members of the cooperative can say, hey, yeah, that’s a good idea,we think that’s a really good allocation of these productive assets, so we are going to buy these bonds. The bond sale clears, the person gets the tractor, the money from the rent of the tractor goes back to clear the bonds, and after that, whatever further money is collected through the rent on this tractor – and I don’t only mean tractors, same would be applied to buildings, to land, to any other productive assets – all this rent that’s collected is then distributed equally among all of the workers.
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The idea is that people earn income not only by producing things, but by owning the means of production, owning productive assets, and our society is unequal because the distribution of productive assets is unequal
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This means that if you use your exact per capita share of property, no more no less than what you pay in rent and what you received in social dividend, will be equal
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But if you’re not working at that time, because you’re old, or otherwise unemployed, then obviously the the productive assets that you will be using will be much less than the mean and the median, so what you’ll receive as dividend will be much more than what you pay in rent, essentially providing a basic income
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It doesn’t seek to limit, control, or even tell them how they should distribute it, or under what means; what they produce is entirely theirs, it’s only the collective management of the commons of productive assets
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On paper this would seem to work, but the problem is that this assumes that we have capital to allocate in this way, and that is not the case for most of the world workers
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do we express our activism through the state, or do we try to achieve our goals by creating the alternative society outside
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My materialist background tells me that when you sell your labor on the market, you have nothing more than your subsistence costs at the end of it, so where is this wealth meant to come from
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I believe that the only reason that we have any extra wealth beyond subsistence is because of organized social political struggle; because we have organized in labor movements, in the co-op movement, and in other social forms
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To create the space for prefiguring presupposes engagement with the state, and struggle within parliaments, and struggle within the public social forum
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Instead, we should think that no, we must engage in the state in order to protect our ability to have alternative societies
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We can only get rid of the state in these areas once we have alternative, distributed, cooperative means to provide those same functions
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We can only eliminate the state from these areas once they actually exist, which means we actually have to build them
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What I mean by insurrectionary finance is that we have to acknowledge that it’s not only forming capital and distributing capital, it’s also important how intensively we use capital
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I’m not proposing that the cooperative movement needs to engage in the kind of derivative speculative madness that led to the financial crisis, but at the same time we can’t… it can’t be earn a dollar, spend a dollar
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they did things the organized left hasn’t been able to do, which is takeover industrial means of production
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if they can take over these industrial facilities, just in order to shut them down and asset strip them, why can’t we take them over and mutualize them?
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more ironic once you understand that the source of investment that Milken and his colleagues were working with were largely workers pension funds
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in Québec, there is a particular form of co-op that’s been developed that allows small or medium producers to pool their capital to purchase machinery and to use it jointly
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much more lean and accountable because they are accountable to boards of directors that represent the interests of the members
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I’ve run into this repeatedly among social change activists who immediately recoil at the notion of thinking about markets and capital, as part of their change agenda
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I had thought previously, like so many, that economics is basically a bought discipline, and that it serves the interests of existing elites. I really had a kind of reaction against that
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advocating for a vision of social change that isn’t just about politics, and isn’t just about protest, it has to be around how do we reimagine and reclaim economics
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I think what we’re potentially talking about here is to make the social economy hyper-productive, hyper-competitive, hyper-cooperative
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The paradox is that capital already knows this. Capital is investing in these peer production projects
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Part of the proposal of the FLOK society project in Ecuador will be to get that strategic reorganization to make the social economy strategic
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The Link Economy and Creditright - Geeks Bearing Gifts - Medium - 3 views
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contributory value accounting dimVal *jeffjarvis creditright
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News Commons used Repost as the basis of a content- and audience-sharing network among dozens of sites big and small in the state’s new ecosystem
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Huffington Post and Twitter can get thousands of writers — including me — to make content for free because it brings us audience and attention.
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Consider an alternative to syndication. I’ll call it reverse syndication. Instead of selling my content to you, what say I give it to you for free? Better yet, I pay you to publish it on your site. The condition: I get to put my ad on the content. I will pay you a share of what I earn from that ad based on how much audience you bring me.
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If content could travel with its business model attached, we could set it free to travel across the web, gathering recommendations and audience and value as it goes
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She searched Google for “embeddable article” and up came Repost.us, already created by entrepreneur and technologist John Pettitt. Repost very cleverly allowed embeddable articles to travel with the creator’s own brand, advertising, analytics, and links.
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First, he found that the overlap in audience between a creator’s and an embedder’s sites generally ran between 2 and 5 percent. That is to say, the embedders brought a mostly new audience to the creator’s content.
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Instead, Pettitt found that click-through ran amazingly high: 5 to 7 percent — and these were highly qualified clicks of people who knew what they were going to get on the other side of a link
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I call this creditright. We need a means to attach credit to content for those who contribute value to it so that each constituent has the opportunity to negotiate and extract value along the chain, so that each can gain permission to take part in the chain, and so that behaviors that benefit others in the chain can be rewarded and encouraged
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Each creator’s ads traveled with its content — though that wasn’t necessarily optimal, because an ad for a North Jersey hairdresser wouldn’t perform terribly well with South Jersey readers brought in through embedding.
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key factor in its failure: Repost could find many sites willing and eager to make their content embeddable. It didn’t find enough sites to embed the content.
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But the embedders got nothing aside from the free use of content — content that was just a link away anyway
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Our ultimate problem in media is that we do not have sufficient technical and legal frameworks for alternate business models.
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That formula was the key insight behind Google: that links to content are a signal of its value; thus, the more links to a page from sites that themselves have more links, the more useful, relevant, or valuable that content is likely to be
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Silicon Valley’s: Those people are your fans who are bringing value to you by sending you audiences and by contributing their creativity, and you’d be wise to build your businesses around making it easier, not harder, for them to get and share your content when and how they want it.
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And so, we came to agree that we need new technological and legal frameworks flexible enough to enable multiple models to support creativity.
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Hollywood’s side: People who download our content without buying it or who remix it without our permission — and the platforms that facilitate these behaviors — are stealing from us and must be stopped and punished.
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Imagine you are a songwriter. You hear a street poet and her words inspire you to write a song about her, quoting her in the piece. You go to a crowdfunding platform — Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or Patreon — to raise money for you to go into the studio and perform and distribute your song. Another songwriter comes along and remixes it, making a new version and also sampling from others’ songs. Both end up on YouTube and Soundcloud, on iTunes and Google Play. Audience members discover and share the songs. A particularly popular artist shares the remixed version on Twitter and Facebook and it explodes. A label has one of its stars record it. The star appears on TV performing it. A movie studio includes that song in a soundtrack. There are many constituents in that process: the subject, the songwriter, the patrons, the fans, the remixer, the distributor, the label, the star, the show, the studio, and the platforms. Each contributed value.
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Each may want to recognize value — but not all will want cash. There are other currencies in play: The poet may want credit and fame; the songwriter may want to sell concert tickets; the patrons may want social capital for discovering and supporting a new artist; the remixer may want permission to remix; the platforms may want a cut of sales or of subscription revenue; the show may want audience and advertising; the studio will want a return on its investment and risk.
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I’ve suggested they would be wiser to seek another currency from Google: data about the users, helping build better services for readers and advertisers and thus better businesses
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We will need a way to attach metadata to content, recording and revealing its source and the contributions of others in the chain of continuing creation and distribution.
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We need a marketplace to measure and value their contributions and a means to negotiate rewards and permissions
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And we need a legal framework to allow the flexible exploration of new models, some of which we cannot yet imagine.
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It took many more years for society to develop principles of free speech to balance the economic and political interests of those who would attempt to control a new tool of speech.
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We must reimagine the business of media and news from the first penny, asking where value is created, who contributes to it, where it resides, and how to extract it