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in title, tags, annotations or urlSensorica - 0 views
Dependability in peer production - 1 views
measures that p2p networks undertake to increase dependability in material peer production activities.
IoPA economic level ecosystem level legal level tech level social level standard level undecided levelundecided level
Open Insulin - 3 views
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OS operates as both a legal entity (non-profit) and a philosophical paradigm for facilitating widespread access Primary focus is to research and develop the first open source protocols to produce insulin and insulin production hardware simply and economically.
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Quote: We are looking to the precedents of the "Defensive Patent License" and the "Peer Production License", and the "Humanitarian Technology and Intellectual Property License Agreement."
ThreeFold - 0 views
All's Not Fair in Science and Publishing | The Scientist Magazine® - 0 views
www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/32287/title/All-s-Not-Fair-in-Science-and-Publishing/
shared by Francois Bergeron on 02 Jan 13
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My takeaway lesson was that the safest strategy was to divulge my results only after they were accepted for publication. And I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels this way. Science is too often a cutthroat venture, with publications as the currency for measuring one’s success. But with everyone keeping their findings secret until they have been approved by the peer-review process, aren’t we slowing the course of scientific discovery?
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Many believe that false attribution is actually increasing in frequency, likely motivated by the steady decrease in grant-funding rates.
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If scientific administrators aspire to accelerate innovation by encouraging team science, they must address this issue. Our university system should reward scientists who are honest and fair in their dealings with fellow investigators. Specific protocols for guiding research and managing disagreements must be designed. Accurate laboratory records should reflect appropriate credit, and websites sponsored by international scientific organizations should be similarly designed to display accurate attribution of preliminary scientific discoveries. In addition, journals could post final drafts of papers before publication, allowing anonymous comments during a probationary period. If a substantive objection arises, the journal should require revisions or even reject the paper.
The Social Organization of Production: Cooperatives and Peer Production - 1 views
Crisis of Value Theory - P2P Foundation - 0 views
p2pfoundation.net/Crisis_of_Value_Theory
shared by Kurt Laitner on 11 Jul 12
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Michel Bauwens Kevin Carson capitalism alternative economy paper
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In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information commons is being created, which is increasingly out of the control of cognitive capitalism.
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The emergence of the peer model of production, based on the non-rivalrous nature and virtually non-existent marginal cost of reproduction of digital information, and coupled with the increasing unenforceability of “intellectual property” laws, means that capital is incapable of realizing returns on ownership in the cognitive realm.
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capital is becoming an a posteriori intervention in the realization of innovation, rather than a condition for its occurrence
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What this announces is a crisis of value, most such value is ‘beyond measure’, but also essentially a crisis of accumulation of capital.
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“the core logic of the emerging experience economy, operating as it does in the world of non-rival exchange, is unlikely to have capitalism as its core logic.”
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This takes the form both of “intellectual property” law, as well as direct subsidies from the taxpayer to the corporate economy
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crisis of realization under state capitalism to capital’s growing dependence on the state to capture value from social production and redistribute it to private corporate owners
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The state capitalist system will reach a point at which, thanks to the collapse of the portion of value comprised of rents on artificial property, the base of taxable value is imploding at the very time big business most needs subsidies to stay afloat.
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We live in a political economy that has it exactly backwards. We believe that our natural world is infinite, and therefore that we can have an economic system based on infinite growth. But since the material world is finite, it is based on pseudo-abundance. And then we believe that we should introduce artificial scarcities in the world of immaterial production, impeding the free flow of culture and social innovation, which is based on free cooperation, by creating the obstacle of permissions and intellectual property rents protected by the state. What we need instead is a political economy based on a true notion of scarcity in the material realm, and a realization of abundance in the immaterial realm.
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Brains and bodies still need others to produce value, but the others they need are not necessarily provided by capital and its capacities to organize production.
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The household and informal economies have been allowed to function to the extent that they bear reproduction costs that would otherwise have to be internalized in wages; but they have been suppressed (as in the Enclosures) when they threaten to increase in size and importance to the point of offering a basis for independence from wage labor. “
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one of intensive development, to grow in the immaterial field, and this is basically what the experience economy means
Owning Together Is the New Sharing by Nathan Schneider - YES! Magazine - 0 views
www.yesmagazine.org/...ng-together-is-the-new-sharing
shared by Kurt Laitner on 05 Jan 15
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ouishare sensorica loomio enspiral cobudget ethereum sovolve swarm ownership sharing paper
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VC-backed sharing economy companies like Airbnb and Uber have caused trouble for legacy industries, but gone is the illusion that they are doing it with actual sharing
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The notion that sharing would do away with the need for owning has been one of the mantras of sharing economy promoters. We could share cars, houses, and labor, trusting in the platforms to provide. But it’s becoming clear that ownership matters as much as ever.
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Léonard and his collaborators are part of a widespread effort to make new kinds of ownership the new norm. There are cooperatives, networks of freelancers, cryptocurrencies, and countless hacks in between. Plans are being made for a driver-owned Lyft, a cooperative version of eBay, and Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are scheming to build a crowdsourcing platform they can run themselves. Each idea has its prospects and shortcomings, but together they aspire toward an economy, and an Internet, that is more fully ours.
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Jeremy Rifkin, a futurist to CEOs and governments, contends that the Internet-of-things and 3-D printers are ushering in a “ zero marginal cost society“ in which the “collaborative commons” will be more competitive than extractive corporations
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once the VC-backed sharing companies clear away regulatory hurdles, local co-ops will be poised to swoop in and spread the wealth
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“We’re moving into a new economic age,” says Marjorie Kelly, who spent two decades at the helm of Business Ethics magazine and now advises social entrepreneurs. “It needs to be sustainable. It needs to be inclusive. And the foundation of what defines an economic age is its form of ownership.”
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It’s a worker-owned cooperative that produces open-source software to help people practice consensus—though they prefer the term “collaboration”—about decisions that affect their lives.
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From the start Loomio was part of Enspiral, an “open value network“ of freelancers and social enterprises devoted to mutual support and the common good.
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The team members recently had to come to terms with the fact that, for the time being, only some of them could be paid for full-time work They called the process “participatory downsizing.”
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And they can take many forms. Loomio and other tech companies, for instance, are aspiring toward the model of a multi-stakeholder cooperative—one in which not just workers or consumers are voting members, but several such groups at once.
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Loconomics is a San Francisco-based startup designed, like TaskRabbit, to manage short-term freelance jobs
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“People who have been without for a long time,” she says, “often operate with a mindset that they can’t share what they have, because they don’t know when that resource will come along again.”
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As Loconomics prepares to begin operations this winter, it’s running out of the pocket of the founder, Josh Danielson
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The ambition of a cooperative Facebook or Uber—competitive, widespread, and owned by its community—still seems out of reach for enterprises not willing to sell large parts of themselves to investors. Organizations like
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His fellow OuiShare founder Benjamin Tincq is concerned that too much fixation on a particular model will make it hard for well-meaning ventures to be successful. “I like the idea that we don’t need to have a specific legal status,” he says. “It’s more about hacking an existing legal status and making these hacks work.”
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Fenton’s new undertaking, Sovolve, proposes to “create innovative solutions to accelerate social change,” much as CouchSurfing did, but it’s doing the innovating cautiously. All work is done by worker-owners located around the world. Sovolve uses an internal platform—soon to become a product in its own right—through which contributors decide how much they want to be paid in cash and how much in equity. They can see how much others are earning. Their virtual workplace is gamified, with everyone working to nudge their first product, WonderApp, into virality
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Loomio’s members use a similar system, which they call Loomio Points. But Sovolve is no cooperative; contributors are not in charge.
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Open-source software and share-alike licenses have revived the ancient idea of the commons for an Internet age. But the “ commons-based peer production“ that Sensorica seeks to practice doesn’t arise overnight. Just as today’s business culture rests on generations of accumulated law, habit, and training, learning to manage a commons successfully takes time
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It makes possible decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs, which exist entirely on a shared network
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The most ambitious successor to Bitcoin, Ethereum, has raised more than $15 million in crowdfunding on the promise of creating such a network.
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all with technology that makes collective ownership a lot easier than a conventional legal structure
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A project called Eris is developing a collective decision-making tool designed to govern DAOs on Ethereum, though the platform may still be months from release.
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For now, the burden of reinventing every wheel at once makes it hard for companies like Sensorica and Loomio to compete
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For instance, Cutting Edge Capital specializes in helping companies raise money through a long-standing mechanism called the direct public investment, or DPO, which allows for small, non-accredited investors.
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Venture funding may be in competition with Dietz’s cryptoequity vision, but it provides a fearsome head start
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Co-ops help ensure that the people who contribute to and depend on an enterprise keep control and keep profits, so they’re a possible remedy for worsening economic inequality
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Sooner or later, transforming a system of gross inequality and concentrated wealth will require more than isolated experiments at the fringes—it will require capturing that wealth and redirecting its flows
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A less consensual strategy was employed to fund the Catalan Integral Cooperative in Spain; over the course of a few years, one activist borrowed around $600,000 from Spanish banks without paying any of it back.
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In Jackson, Mississippi, Chokwe Lumumba was elected mayor in 2013 on a platform of fostering worker-owned cooperatives, although much of the momentum was lost when Lumumba died just a few months later.
Co-Creating as Disruption to the Dominant Cultural Framework » Wirearchy - 0 views
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Barcamps, Wordcamps, Govcamps, Foo Camps, Unconferences, high-end celebrity-and-marketing-and venture-capital ‘experience’ markets, new cultural and artistic festivals with technology-and-culture-making themes
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appearance, development and evolution of social tools, web services, massive storage, and the ongoing development of computer-and-smart-devices development
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People are searching for ways to find others with similar interests and motivations so that they can engage in activities that help them learn, find work, grow capabilities and skills, and tackle vexing social and economic problems
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rules about self-management, operate democratically, and produce results grounded in ownership and the responsibilities that have been agreed upon by the ‘community’
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The relationships and flows of information can be transferred to online spaces and often benefit from wider connectivity.
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What’s coming along next ? “Smart” devices and Internet everywhere in our lives ? Deep(er) changes to the way things are conceived, carried out, managed and used ? New mental models ? Or, will we discover real societal limits to what can be done given the current framework of laws, institutions and established practices with which people are familiar and comfortable ?
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It is clear evidence that the developmental and learning dynamics generated by continuous or regular feedback loops are becoming the norm in areas of activity in which change and short cycles of product development are constants.
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clothes, homes, cars, buildings, roads, and a wide range of other objects that have a place in peoples’ daily life activities
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experiencing major growth, equally in terms of hardware, software and with respect to the way the capabilities are configured and used
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that key opportunities associated with widespread uptake of the IoT are derived from the impact upon peoples’ activities and lives
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Clearly these early (and now not-so-weak) signals and patterns tell us that the core assumptions and principles that have underpinned organized human activities for most of the past century
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are being changed by the combinations and permutations of new, powerful, inexpensive and widely accessible information-processing technologies
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The short description of each scenario reinforces the perception that we are both individually and collectively in transition from a linear, specialized, efficiency-driven paradigm towards a paradigm based on continuous feedback loops and principles of participation, both large and small in scope.
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a dynamic two-way flow of power and authority based on knowledge, trust, credibility and a focus on results, enabled by interconnected people and technology.
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the role of social media and smart mobile devices in the uprisings in Egypt, Libya and elsewhere in the Middle East
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The roots of organizational development (OD) are in humanistic psychology and sociology action and ethnographic and cybernetic/ socio-technical systems theory. It’s a domain that emerged essentially as a counter-balance to the mechanistic and machine-metaphor-based core assumptions about the organized activities in our society.
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Organizational development principles are built upon some basic assumptions about human motivations, engagement and activities.
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in recent years created models that help clarify how to evaluate and respond to the continuous turbulence and ambiguity generated by participating in interconnected flows of information.
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contexts characterized by either Simple, Complicated or Chaotic dynamics (from complexity theory fundamentals). Increasingly, Complexity is emerging as a key definer of the issues, problems and opportunities faced by our societies.
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Co-creating in a wide range of forms, processes and purpose may become an effective and important antidote to the spreading enclosure of human creative activity.
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But .. the dominant models of governance, commercial ownership and the use and re-use of that which is co-created by people are going to have to undergo much more deep change in order to disrupt the existing paradigm of proprietary commercial creation and the model of socio-economic power that this paradigm enables and carries today.
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
The basic orientation of p2p theory towards societal reform: transforming civil society, the private and the state - 1 views
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in a capitalist system, ‘civil society’ is not directly productive of the goods and services that we need to survive, live and thrive
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everything that needs to be made, has to be designed through collaborative innovation in the first place
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Both civil society and the notion of citizenship can be criticized for being insufficiently inclusionary, and therefore as ‘mechanisms of exclusion’.
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consisting of shared depositories of knowledge, code and design; the communities of contributors and users of such commons
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democratically governed by all participants and stakeholders in such commons
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civil society is the locus of the shared abundance of value creation, and the place for the continual dialogue regarding the necessities of common life.
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democratically decide
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the ‘common good’ of society as a whole
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The difference is that the commons where the immaterial value is created are positioned in a field of abundance characteristic for non-rival or anti-rival goods; while the for-benefit associations are responsible for the sometimes contentious allocation of rival infrastructures.
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Whereas the commons themselves are plurarchies based on permissionless contribution, forking and other rights guaranteeing the diversity of contributions and contributors; the for-benefit associations are democratically governed.
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true reform of the private sector and the corporate form.
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Under conditions of the rule of capital, for-profit corporations are beholden to work for the interests of the shareholders. This format allows for the accumulation of capital, but also indirectly of political power, through the power of money to influence politics and politicians. For-profit corporations are part of a system of infinite growth and compound interest, must continuously compete with other corporations, and therefore, also minimize costs. For-profit corporations are designed to ignore negative environmental externalities by avoiding to pay the costs associated with them; and to ignore positive social externalities, also by avoiding to pay for them. In terms of sustainability, corporations practice planned obsolescence as a rule, because while the market is a scarcity allocation mechanism, capitalism itself is a scarcity maintenance and creation mechanism. Anti-sustainable practices are systemic and part of the DNA of the for-profit corporation.
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Under conditions of peer production, design and innovation moves to commons-based communitiies, which lack the incentive for unsustainable design; products are inherently design for sustainability, and the production process itself is designed for openness and distribution.
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designed to make the commoners and the commons themselves sustainable, by not ‘leaking’ surplus value to external shareholders
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mission-oriented, community supportive, sustainability-oriented corporate forms, that operate in the marketplace but do not themselves reproduce capitalism.
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surplus value stays within the commons, allows its autonomous social reproduction, and sustains the commoners
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because commons and their communities are themselves specific, and do not automatically take into account the common good of society as a whole .
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A Partner State functions center around enabling and empowering social production and abandons some of the paternalistic aspects of the welfare state by focusing on strengthening the possibilities of autonomy.
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.
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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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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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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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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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.
Beyond Blockchain: Simple Scalable Cryptocurrencies - The World of Deep Wealth - Medium - 0 views
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I clarify the core elements of cryptocurrency and outline a different approach to designing such currencies rooted in biomimicry
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This post outlines a completely different strategy for implementing cryptocurrencies with completely distributed chains
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we are interested in the resilience that comes from building a rich ecosystem of interoperable currencies
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Holdings are electronic and only exist and operate by virtue of a community’s agreement about how to interpret digital bits according to rules about operation and accounting of the currency.
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Specifically, access, issuance, transaction accounting, rules & policies, should be collectively visible, known, and held.
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This cryptographic structure is used to enable a variety of people to host the data without being able to alter it.
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there must be a way to associate these bits with some kind of account, wallet, owner, or agent who can use them
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Other things that many take for granted in blockchains may not be core but subject to decisions in design and implementation, so they can vary between implementations
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does not have to be money. It may be a reputation currency, or data used for identity, or naming, etc
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Then you must tackle the problem of always tracking which coins exist, and which have been spent. That is one approach — the one blockchain takes.
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You might optimize for anonymity if you think of cryptocurrency as a tool to escape governments, regulations, and taxes.
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if you want to establish and manage membership in new kinds of commons, then identity and accountability for actions may turn out to be necessary ingredients instead of anonymity.
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In the case of the MetaCurrency Project, we are trying to support many use cases by building tools to enable a rich ecosystem of communities and current-sees (many are non-monetary) to enhance collective intelligence at all scales.
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Managing consensus about a shared reality is a central challenge at the heart of all distributed computing solutions.
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If we want to democratize money by having cryptocurrencies become a significant and viable means of transacting on a daily basis, I believe we need fundamentally more scalable approaches that don’t require expensive, dedicated hardware just to participate.
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Blockchain is about managing a consensus about what was “said.” Ceptr is about distributing a consensus about how to “speak.”
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how nature gets the job done in massively scalable systems which require coordination and consistency
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Each speaker of a language carries the processes to understand sentences they hear, and generate sentences they need
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we certainly don’t carry some kind of global ledger of everything that’s ever been said, or require consensus about what has been said
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there is certainly no global ledger with consensus about the state of trillions of cells. Yet, from a single zygote’s copy of DNA, our cells coordinate in a highly decentralized manner, on scales of trillions, and without the latency or bottlenecks of central control.
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Imagine something along the lines of a Java Virtual Machine connected to a distributed version of Github
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Every time this JVM runs a program it confirms the hash of the code it is about to execute with the hash signed into the code repository by its developers
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This allows each node that intends to be honest to be sure that they’re running the same processes as everyone else. So when two parties want to do a transaction, and each can have confidence their own code, and the results that your code produces
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Then you treat it as authoritative and commit it to your local cryptographically self-validating data store
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Allowing each node to treat itself as a full authority to process transactions (or interactions via shared protocols) is exactly how you empower each node with full agency. Each node runs its copy of the signed program/processes on its own virtual machine, taking the transaction request combined with the transaction chains of the parties to the transaction. Each node can confirm their counterparty’s integrity by replaying their transactions to produce their current state, while confirming signatures and integrity of the chain
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If both nodes are in an appropriate state which allows the current transaction, then they countersign the transaction and append to their respective chains. When you encounter a corrupted or dishonest node (as evidenced by a breach of integrity of their chain — passing through an invalid state, broken signatures, or broken links), your node can reject the transaction you were starting to process. Countersigning allows consensus at the appropriate scale of the decision (two people transacting in this case) to lock data into a tamper-proof state so it can be stored in as many parallel chains as you need.
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When your node appends a mutually validated and signed transaction to its chain, it has updated its local state and is able to represent the integrity of its data locally. As long as each transaction (link in the chain) has valid linkages and countersignatures, we can know that it hasn’t been tampered with.
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If you can reliably embody the state of the node in the node itself using Intrinsic Data Integrity, then all nodes can interact in parallel, independent of other interactions to maximize scalability and simultaneous processing. Either the node has the credits or it doesn’t. I don’t have to refer to a global ledger to find out, the state of the node is in the countersigned, tamper-proof chain.
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Just like any meaningful communication, a protocol needs to be established to make sure that a transaction carries all the information needed for each node to run the processes and produce a new signed and chained state. This could be debits or credits to an account which modify the balance, or recoding courses and grades to a transcript which modify a Grade Point Average, or ratings and feedback contributing to a reputation score, and so on.
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By distributing process at the foundation, and leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity, our approach results in massive improvements in throughput (from parallel simultaneous independent processing), speed, latency, efficiency, and cost of hardware.
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Another noteworthy observation about humans, cells, and atoms, is that each has a general “container” that gets configured to a specific use.
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Likewise, the Receptors we’ve built are a general purpose framework which can load code for different distributed applications. These Receptors are a lightweight processing container for the Ceptr Virtual Machine Host
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Ceptr enables a developer to focus on the rules and transactions for their use case instead of building a whole framework for distributed applications.
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Most people think that money is just money, but there are literally hundreds of decisions you can make in designing a currency to target particular needs, niches, communities or patterns of flow.
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the challenging task of tracking all the coins that exist to ensure there is no counterfeiting or double-spending
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You wouldn’t need to manage consensus about whether a cryptocoin is spent, if your system created accounts which have normal balances based on summing their transactions.
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In a mutual credit system, units of currency are issued when a participant extends credit to another user in a standard spending transaction
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Managing the currency supply in a mutual credit system is about managing credit limits — how far people can spend into a negative balance
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keep in mind there can be different classes of accounts. Easy to create, anonymous accounts may get NO credit limit
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What if I alter my code to give myself an unlimited credit limit, then spend as much as I want? As soon as you pass the credit limit encoded in the shared agreements, the next person you transact with will discover you’re in an invalid state and refuse the transaction.
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If two people collude to commit an illegal transaction by both hacking their code to allow a normally invalid state, the same still pattern still holds. The next person they try to transact with using untampered code will detect the problem and decline to transact.
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Hawala is a network of merchants and businessmen, which has been operating since the middle ages, performing money transfers on an honor system and typically settling balances through merchandise instead of transferring money
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To minimize key management infrastructure, each hawaladar’s public key is their address or identity on the network. To join the network you get a copy of the software from another hawaladar, generate your public and private keys, and complete your personal profile (name, location, contact info, etc.). You call, fax, or email at least 10 hawaladars who know you, and give them your IP address and ask them to vouch for you.
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Once 10 other hawaladars have vouched for you, you can start doing other transactions because the protocol encoded in every node will reject a transaction chain that doesn’t start with at least 10 vouches
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As described in the Mutual Credit section, at the time of transaction each party audits the counterparty’s transaction chain.
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Our hawala crypto-clearinghouse protocol has two categories of transactions: some used for accounting and others for routing. Accounting transactions change balances. Routing transactions maintain network integrity by recording information about hawaladar
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The final hash of all of the above fields is used as a unique transaction ID and is what each of party signs with their private keys. Signing indicates a party has agreed to the terms of the transaction. Only transactions signed by both parties are considered valid. Nodes can verify signatures by confirming that decryption of the signature using the public key yields a result which matches the transaction ID.
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As with accounting transactions, the hash of the above fields is used as the transaction’s unique key and the basis for the cryptographic signature of both counterparties.
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Remember, instead of making changes to account balances, routing transactions change a node’s local list of peers for finding each other and processing.
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It would be possible for someone to hack the code on their node to “forget” their most recent transaction (drop the head of their chain), and go back to their previous version of the chain before that transaction. Then they could append a new transaction, drop it, and append again.
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After both parties have signed the agreed upon transaction, each party submits the transaction to separate notaries. Notaries are a special class of participant who validate transactions (auditing each chain, ensuring nobody passes through an invalid state), and then they sign an outer envelope which includes the signatures of the two parties. Notaries agree to run high-availability servers which collectively manage a Distributed Hash Table (DHT) servicing requests for transaction information. As their incentive for providing this infrastructure, notaries get a small transaction fee.
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This approach introduces a few more steps and delays to the transaction process, but because it operates on independent parallel chains, it is still orders of magnitude more efficient and decentralized than reaching consensus on entries in a global ledger
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millions of simultaneous transactions could be getting processed by other parties and notaries with no bottlenecks.
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There are other solutions to prevent nodes from dropping the head of their transaction chain, but the approach of having notaries serve out a DHT solves a number of common objections to completely distributed accounting. Having access to reliable lookups in a DHT provides a similar big picture view that you get from a global ledger. For example, you may want a way to look up transactions even when the parties to that transaction are offline, or to be able to see the net system balance at a particular moment in time, or identify patterns of activity in the larger system without having to collect data from everyone individually.
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By leveraging Intrinsic Data Integrity to run numerous parallel tamper-proof chains you can enable nodes to do various P2P transactions which don’t actually require group consensus. Mutual credit is a great way to implement cryptocurrencies to run in this peered manner. Basic PKI with a DHT is enough additional infrastructure to address main vulnerabilities. You can optimize your solution architecture by reserving reserve consensus work for tasks which need to guarantee uniqueness or actually involve large scale agreement by humans or automated contracts.
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It is not only possible, but far more scalable to build cryptocurrencies without a global ledger consensus approach or cryptographic tokens.
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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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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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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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
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.
Evolving Towards a Partner State in an Ethical Economy - 0 views
www.realitysandwich.com/_partner_state_ethical_economy
shared by Tiberius Brastaviceanu on 02 Apr 12
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ethical economy new economy paper theory value networks Bauwens Michel
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Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy
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Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and ad hoc.
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Everyone can contribute without permission, but such a priori permissionlessness is matched with mechanisms for 'a posteriori' communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called 'maintainers' and the 'editors', decide
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allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a 'object-oriented' cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its 'peer governance' mechanisms
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The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, the hierarchy and democracy, is a 'distribution of tasks'
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no longer a division of labor between 'jobs', and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call 'stigmergic signalling'
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every participating individual can see what is needed, or not and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution
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has achieved capacities both for global coordination, and for the small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms and that it does this without 'command and control'! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.
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And they have to be, because an undemocratic institution would also discourage contributions by the community of participants.
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Hence, an increased exodus of productive capacities, in the form of direct use value production, outside the existing system of monetization, which only operates at its margins.
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Where there is no tension between supply and demand, their can be no market, and no capital accumulation
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Facebook and Google users create commercial value for their platforms, but only very indirectly and they are not at all rewarded for their own value creation.
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Since what they are creating is not what is commodified on the market for scarce goods, there is no return of income for these value creators
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If you did not contribute, you had no say, so engagement was and is necessary.
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⁃ At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on ⁃ These commons are enabled and protected through nonprofit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, which empowers and enables that social production ⁃ Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies, whose legal structures ties them to the values and goals of the commons communities, and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximising profit at any cost
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the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems.
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Is there any possibility to create a really autonmous model of peer production, that could create its own cycle of reproduction?
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contribute
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In this way, the social reproduction of commoners would no longer depend on the accumulation cycle of capital, but on its own cycle of value creation and realization
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Phyles are mission-oriented, purpose-driven, community-supportive entities that operate in the market, on a global scale, but work for the commons.
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Thijs Markus writes so eloquently about Nike in the Rick Falkvinge blog, if you want to sell $5 shoes for $150 in the West, you better have one heck of a repressive IP regime in place.
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An economy of scope exists between the production of two goods when two goods which share a CommonCost are produced together such that the CommonCost is reduced.
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2) The current system beliefs that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let's call this feature, enforced 'artificial scarcity'.
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1) Our current system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let's call this feature, runaway 'pseudo-abundance'.
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So what are the economies of scope of the new p2p age? They come in two flavours: 1) the mutualizing of knowledge and immaterial resources 2) the mutualizing of material productive resources
Blueprint for P2P Society: The Partner State & Ethical Economy - 1 views
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The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation which makes the project 'collectively' sustainable
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The enterpreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors 'sustainable', by providing an income, and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.
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Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices that may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy?
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My answer will be an emphatic yes, and stronger yet, I will argue that we are witnessing a new model for the state. A 'P2P' state, if you will.
What do we need corporations for and how does Valve's management structure fit into today's corporate world? | Valve - 0 views
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Valve’s management model; one in which there are no bosses, no delegation, no commands, no attempt by anyone to tell someone what to do
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Every social order, including that of ants and bees, must allocate its scarce resources between different productive activities and processes, as well as establish patterns of distribution among individuals and groups of output collectively produced.
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the allocation of resources, as well as the distribution of the produce, is based on a decentralised mechanism functioning by means of price signals:
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Interestingly, however, there is one last bastion of economic activity that proved remarkably resistant to the triumph of the market: firms, companies and, later, corporations. Think about it: market-societies, or capitalism, are synonymous with firms, companies, corporations. And yet, quite paradoxically, firms can be thought of as market-free zones. Within their realm, firms (like societies) allocate scarce resources (between different productive activities and processes). Nevertheless they do so by means of some non-price, more often than not hierarchical, mechanism!
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The miracle of the market, according to Hayek, was that it managed to signal to each what activity is best for herself and for society as a whole without first aggregating all the disparate and local pieces of knowledge that lived in the minds and subconscious of each consumer, each designer, each producer. How does this signalling happen? Hayek’s answer (borrowed from Smith) was devastatingly simple: through the movement of prices
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The idea of spontaneous order comes from the Scottish Enlightenment, and in particular David Hume who, famously, argued against Thomas Hobbes’ assumption that, without some Leviathan ruling over us (keeping us “all in awe”), we would end up in a hideous State of Nature in which life would be “nasty, brutish and short”
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Hume’s counter-argument was that, in the absence of a system of centralised command, conventions emerge that minimise conflict and organise social activities (including production) in a manner that is most conducive to the Good Life
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Hayek’s argument was predicated upon the premise that knowledge is always ‘local’ and all attempts to aggregate it are bound to fail. The world, in his eyes, is too complex for its essence to be distilled in some central node; e.g. the state.
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The idea here is that, through this ever-evolving process, people’s capacities, talents and ideas are given the best chance possible to develop and produce synergies that promote the Common Good. It is as if an invisible hand guides Valve’s individual members to decisions that both unleash each person’s potential and serve the company’s collective interest (which does not necessarily coincide with profit maximisation).
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Valve differs in that it insists that its employees allocate 100% of their time on projects of their choosing
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In contrast, Smith and Hayek concentrate their analysis on a single passion: the passion for profit-making
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Hume also believed in a variety of signals, as opposed to Hayek’s exclusive reliance on price signalling
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One which, instead of price signals, is based on the signals Valve employees emit to one another by selecting how to allocate their labour time, a decision that is bound up with where to wheel their tables to (i.e. whom to work with and on what)
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He pointed out simply and convincingly that the cost of subcontracting a good or service, through some market, may be much larger than the cost of producing that good or service internally. He attributed this difference to transactions costs and explained that they were due to the costs of bargaining (with contractors), of enforcing incomplete contracts (whose incompleteness is due to the fact that some activities and qualities cannot be fully described in a written contract), of imperfect monitoring and asymmetrically distributed information, of keeping trade secrets… secret, etc. In short, contractual obligations can never be perfectly stipulated or enforced, especially when information is scarce and unequally distributed, and this gives rise to transaction costs which can become debilitating unless joint production takes place within the hierarchically structured firm. Optimal corporation size corresponds, in Coase’s scheme of things, to a ‘point’ where the net marginal cost of contracting out a service or good (including transaction costs) tends to zero
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As Coase et al explained in the previous section, the whole point about a corporation is that its internal organisation cannot turn on price signals (for if it could, it would not exist as a corporation but would, instead, contract out all the goods and services internally produced)
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Each employee chooses (a) her partners (or team with which she wants to work) and (b) how much time she wants to devote to various competing projects. In making this decision, each Valve employee takes into account not only the attractiveness of projects and teams competing for their time but, also, the decisions of others.
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Hume thought that humans are prone to all sorts of incommensurable passions (e.g. the passion for a video game, the passion for chocolate, the passion for social justice) the pursuit of which leads to many different types of conventions that, eventually, make up our jointly produced spontaneous order
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Valve is, at least in one way, more radical than a traditional co-operative firm. Co-ops are companies whose ownership is shared equally among its members. Nonetheless, co-ops are usually hierarchical organisations. Democratic perhaps, but hierarchical nonetheless. Managers may be selected through some democratic or consultative process involving members but, once selected, they delegate and command their ‘underlings’ in a manner not at all dissimilar to a standard corporation. At Valve, by contrast, each person manages herself while teams operate on the basis of voluntarism, with collective activities regulated and coordinated spontaneously via the operations of the time allocation-based spontaneous order mechanism described above.
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In contrast, co-ops and Valve feature peer-based systems for determining the distribution of a firm’s surplus among employees.
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There is one important aspect of Valve that I did not focus on: the link between its horizontal management structure and its ‘vertical’ ownership structure. Valve is a private company owned mostly by few individuals. In that sense, it is an enlightened oligarchy: an oligarchy in that it is owned by a few and enlightened in that those few are not using their property rights to boss people around. The question arises: what happens to the alternative spontaneous order within Valve if some or all of the owners decide to sell up?