[ox-en] Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi
- From: Stefan Meretz <stefan.meretz hbv.org>
- Date: Thu, 10 Apr 2008 23:10:42 +0200
A nice interview of Cosma Orsi with Michel Bauwens, reposted from
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/interview-on-peer-to-peer-politics-with-cosma-orsi/2008/04/10
and blogged citing parts here
http://www.keimform.de/2008/04/10/michel-bauwens-on-peer-to-peer-politics/
+++
Interview on Peer to Peer Politics with Cosma Orsi
Here’s the text of an interview in preparation of a trip to Italy in May
2008. Interviewer is Cosma Orsi.
Q: Your recent reflections gravitates around an alternative paradigm of
production that you have named P2P political economy. What is this
concept all about?
My main argument is that we have the development of a new set of
technological affordances, which changes the conditions in which the
production of social value can take place, and that this fundamentally
challenges the supremacy of the classic for-profit mode of production.
This time, not because the workers have undertaken any conscious
challenge to it, but because it enables the direct social production of
use value, through new life practices that are largely outside the
control of capital, and with means of production which have been
socialized to a very significant degree. These new processes are
post-capitalist rather than capitalist, in the sense that they no
longer need any specific role of capital for their reproduction.
The key characteristic of our new technological infrastructure, i.e.
distributed networks, is that they allow individuals to freely engage
and relate to each other around common projects. This has a multitude
of important effects. By dramatically lowering the thresholds of
participation in such common projects, a much wider range of
motivations, instead of just monetary ones, have become productive.
Amongst the newly enabled social processes, the first in importance is
therefore the ability to produce complex artefacts in common, without
recourse to either a for-profit or state-based form of social
organization; second, the ability to scale small groups dynamics on a
global scale, below the scale where hierarchical simplification would
be needed, and so the possibility to replace hierarchical allocation by
the bottom-up coordination through a multitude of small groups and
individuals; third, the ability in the context of production of
non-rival and ‘immaterial’ goods, to share them without any loss of
usage or value by the sharer, so that a non-reciprocal logic of
voluntary contributions, coupled with universal availability, not only
becomes possible, but even a natural requirement which does not impose
any substantial extra cost to the system. This is why I focus on
the ‘peer to peer’ logic as a ‘non-reciprocal’ form of generalized
exchange, which does not need any reciprocity. It is a form of communal
shareholding which should clearly be distinguished from any
reciprocity-based gift economy. It works in the immaterial sphere of
non-rival goods, but because every physical production is also the
result of an immaterial design, it also has a big impact on the
totality of productive processes.
In short, we now have commons-based peer production as a third mode of
production, self-organization of such peer projects as a third mode of
peer governance, and peer property as new mode of protecting that
common from private appropriation.
The political economy of the common is no longer based on the
circulation of capital, but on the circulation of the common. The
precondition for such social cooperation is the pre-existence, or
self-creation, of open and free raw material, i.e. material for which
no permission or payment has to be given; the raw material is processed
through new techniques, which have lowered the threshold of
participation to such a degree that every form of motivation becomes
productive, including especially the non-monetary ones, and finally,
the output takes the form of a commons, through a new type of licenses,
which act as a legal guarantee against private appropriation; this in
turn creates a new layer of open and free raw material which can serve
for the next phase of social cooperation, in a virtuous cycle of common
creation.
Q: The political economy you advocate is radically different from the
actual economic orthodoxy especially with respect to its ontological
basis (human nature). What is your understanding of human nature and
society?
The political economy of capital is based on the assumption of
individuality, i.e. the existence of atomized, unrelated individuals in
need of socialization through institutions. And these individuals are
generally divorced from the means of production. This rational economic
man has never existed, but has been the ideological basis of economic
practices and public policies. It’s only basis of truth is that
capitalism attempts to create such a situation, and generally
disintegrates traditional human ties; and also that, before widespread
connectivity, human linkages were more limited in time and space.
The new situation is based on a recognition and realization of
relationality as the basis of human civilization, i.e. the recognition
that we are always already related in various peer groups, many of them
chosen on the basis of affinity. Our identity is constructed through
our engagement and contributions through common projects. Cooperation
is primary, and competition happens through the ideological choices we
have to make between ‘projects’ we adhere to, or else we start our own.
The new cooperative individualism also coincides through the new
structural conditions of important sections of the knowledge workers,
who have easy access to the computers and networks they need to create
value, because these have been socialized to such an extent that they
are no longer in the monopolistic hands of capital. But peer production
is by no means limited to such knowledge workers, it becomes rather a
generalized social practice, an ‘aspect’ of everyones life.
I’m not a technological determinist, but see technology itself as
already the result of changes in consciousness of its designers, and
the newly designed affordances then in turn starts to change broader
layers of the population. Peer to peer is the combined result of a
change in ontology, i.e. the shift we just discussed from individuality
to relationality (and not a return to premodern community-based
wholism); of a change in epistemology towards participative knowing,
i.e. a refusal of the subject-object split of modernity, as well as the
radical split between experts and laypeople, and a rejection of the
distinction between producers and consumers; instead, we experience a
shift towards a demand for co-creation and co-design, towards
produsers, i.e. production without manufacturing by the users
themselves, and an ascendancy of professional amateurs that are no
longer subjected to credentialist demands of institutional validation.
Peer production is based on the elimination of permission-asking and a
shift to the self-selection of tasks, the continued probabilistic
production of the continuously improved but never finished common
artefacts, and quality control through communal validation of the
self-same community of peers, through intelligently designed collective
choice systems. Finally, there is a new axiology, i.e. set of values,
in which sharing becomes the default option, and the demand for
meaningful, passionate, self-unfolding and non-alienated work becomes a
primary psycho-social reality for growing numbers of the population,
especially our educated and networked youth. The key new value is not
just the demand for ‘equality’ of the industrial working class, but a
recognition of the equipotentiality of all productive individuals. This
means that all human beings are considered to be better or worse in a
range of skills, with none of the skills being a measure of superiority
over any other skill. The key then becomes designing production as a
series of granular projects that can be self-selected for equipotential
matching between the task and the self-assessing individual, which is
only a posteriori validated by the community of peers. In other words,
the motto is: “Let hundred flowers bloom, and only select the best
bouquet afterwards!!”
The new social imaginary is conscious of the invisible infrastructures
which determine the scope of freedom in human relationships, and
attempt to overcome any contradiction between self-interest and
altruism by designing directly for congruence between individual and
collective interests, making the social an ethical surplus deriving
from open collaboration.
I see humanity evolving from a civilization based on exchange, to one
based on ‘contributions’.
Q: Do you see peer production as a way of re-empowering a worn-out civil
society that has been dispossessed of much of its creativity as a
result of three centuries of capitalistic exploitation?
Yes, peer to peer practices are a sign of the rebirth, and the coming to
prominence, of civil society as the primary actor of social life. Look
at our language: civil society organizations are either called
non-profit, or non-governmental, implying that they are derivative from
either corporations or the state. But the new breed of institutions
that are managing peer production, such as the Wikimedia or the Mozilla
Foundations, call themselves with the positive moniker of for-benefit,
implying a positive identity and practice. Peer production is the mode
of production, governance and property arising out of civil society,
and it has to be clearly distinguished, from the private or public
alternatives. Peer production is not state production, peer governance
is neither bureaucracy nor representative democracy, and peer property
is inclusive common property, not collective public property. The key
concern of peer governance is to eliminate permission seeking, to
abolish credentialism, to avoid democratic negotiation where possible,
to forego market pricing but most of all: to avoid the emergence of a
collective individual which arises out of the community, crystallizes,
and then turns against it or appropriates the common resources to its
own benefit. Peer production is post-capitalist, but it does not
necessarily abolish the market, rather it subsumes it as a subsystem
for allocating scarce goods according to the price mechanism; it does
not abolish the state, but expects the state to become a partner which
empowers and enables the infrastructure of participation, through which
the direct social production of value can occur. I call this the
Partner State approach.
Q: One of your main concern is to make crystal clear that P2P approach
is not an utopia. Rather it arises from a new and intentional moral
vision, that ‘holds the potential for a major breakthrough in social
evolution, leading to the possibility of a new political, economic, and
cultural ‘formation’ with a new coherent logic’. What you mean when you
refer to a new and intentional moral vision?
Many approach social change through idealism, desiring a new type of
human being, which quickly degenerates in a moralistic and therefore
authoritarian approach, based on a vision of how people should behave.
By contrast, my own approach is naturalistic. Let’s first of all
observe what kind of peer to peer practices are already emerging? From
this empirical basis, we can ask ourselves the question: which of these
practices exemplifies our ethical values, exemplify more freedom and
equality, yet are efficient in creating social value? And from this
naturally flows a practice of emancipation, which works mainly through
interconnection and design. How can we interconnect the new life
practices so that they can learn from each other and become stronger?
How can we, once we understand the pattern language of the successes,
generalize them through value-conscious design, stimulating a potential
that is already there by lowering transaction and coordination costs,
and discouraging negative behaviour’s by making them more ‘expensive’
to choose? This is a very realistic approach of ‘attainable
micro-utopias’, but which, through their interconnection, can in the
long term change the very basis of our civilization.
Q: One of the most attention-grabbing point of your reasoning is that
peer production embodies a concept of property (rights) substantially
different from the one entailed by capitalism. Peer production is, in
fact, geared around a legal infrastructure tailored for and aimed at
the creation of what you called Information Commons. Can you explain
what the technicalities of this alternative form of property are?
Every social form needs a technique for social reproduction, and in the
case of peer production it is crucial that it is protected from private
appropriation. Peer property is common property, not private nor public
property. Private property is exclusionary, simply put: what is mine,
is not yours. Public property is both of all of us, but also crucially
from none of us. The latter is a consequence of its representational
format. We choose, democratically, or it is chosen for us, that a
collective body represents the sovereignty over that property, so that
it can in fact exclude. The collective therefore potentially excludes
the individual. But common property takes a novel position, it is both
from you and me, and we cannot exclude each other from using it. So
peer property stands for the universal availability of what has been
commonly constructed.
However, it comes in two slightly different formats, one appropriate for
the sharing economy and one appropriate for the commons economy. In the
sharing economy, the individual or small group produces an artefact,
over which it retains sovereignty, but it can decide over various
modalities of sharing. A typical example of this are the Creative
Commons licences, which say: you can use my creative output, under such
and such conditions. The other format is used for commons-based peer
production, where it is clear that large collectives are building a
common artefact. In this case the basic rule is that, though your
attribution and therefore ownership is recognized, it is in fact part
of a common pool, which takes precedence. You can use it, copy it,
modify it, but every modification is also automatically part of the
same common pool. Typical example is the General Public License used by
the free software community.
There is a third case, where corporations attempt to integrate various
aspects of peer production in their own value and production chains, or
attempt to monetize common production. Such cases, though they may
involve sharing or distributed production, do not constitute peer
property, but may have various dangerous clauses, such as claiming that
all your creative output is in fact property of the platform. This is a
new type of enclosure.
Q: P2P not only refers to the economy but also to a radically different
form of governance. With respect to this latter issue, you have claim
that at the heart of peer governance lies the idea of multitude and
absolute democracy. To back-up your argument you make explicit
reference to authors such as Toni Negri, Miguel Benasayag, and John
Holloway. In what sense P2P can bring about such a tall order? And
above all, as any reference to democracy cannot avoid dealing with the
issue of participation, could you explain what notion of participation
underpins your normative claim?
Peer production stands for autonomy in cooperation, an economy
consisting of free contributions. This mode of production is in stark
contrast with the traditional notion of the capitalist economy, where a
theoretical political economy, the freedom to regularly choose your
representatives in the political sphere, is coupled with a working
sphere that is hierarchical and even feudal, i.e. the submission of the
division of labour to the owners of capital With peer production, the
co-producers do directly participate in the decision making process.
Those that do the work, decide about it, that is the central principle.
This is done by eliminating permission to the greatest possible extent,
i.e. relying on self-selection, in the context of a probabilistic
production process, coupled with meritocratic adhocacries in the small
groups(changing configurations of leadership according to context), and
processes of communal validation after the production. When you are
operating in a sphere of abundance, of non-rival goods that can be
reproduced by all at marginal cost, then there is no need for either a
market, a hierarchy, or even a democracy, in order to allocate
resources, since they are freely allocated by the individuals
themselves, who are the productive resources of the system. This is the
strength of peer production, but also its weakness. For example, the
work for both Linux and Wikipedia can be self-regulated, but the
infrastructure of cooperation is still costly, and therefore, a new
type of for-benefit organizations, following formal democratic rules,
usually takes care of it. As soon as you need to allocate resources,
you need formal mechanisms in order to mitigate the ‘tyranny of
structurelessness’, and this will best take a representational form.
Therefore, in my view, which may differ from the authors you cite, peer
production is only complementary to democracy, not a replacement for
it. However, we can expect that the range of realities where peer
governance will apply, will increase over time. The space of
non-representationality will likely become more important than the
sphere of representationality. We can also imagine that in a society
where such voluntary contributions become dominant, the pressure will
be such that the democratic institutions will be really democratic, and
not just under the influence of the corporate interests which now
dominate the state form.
Q: In your writing you have dedicated much time in making a clear
distinction between P2P economic process and other form of economic
organization such as the gift economy. In this regard, you maintain
that P2P production methods are not a gift economy based on equal
sharing, but a form of communal shareholding based on participation.
Why this distinction is so crucial to your argument?
The distinction is crucial in the context of what anthropologists call
the crowding out phenomenom, i.e. one social logic can push out another
one.
The gift economy is a system of reciprocity and symmetry. The one that
gives creates prestige for him/herself, and an obligation in the
receiver, who will want to restore the equality of the relationship
through giving something in return. It’s a system based on personal
relations. It was the basis of the tribal systems of production. The
market on the other hand, is a system of exchange, of equal value
against equal value, of impersonal relations. Communal shareholding
relies differently on the ‘kindness of strangers’, it expands the
sphere of social cooperation to people we don’t know, but also work on
the common project, and are therefore willing to share.
Communal shareholding is based on the logic: you give what you can to
the commons, from which anybody can take according to need. You do not
get anything specific back, but indirectly of course, you get many
different benefits: knowledge, relationships, reputation. But even
those that do not really participate, still benefit from using the
whole commons. Such voluntary contributions arise out of a convergence
of individual and common interest, and a wide range of different
motivations. For example, when you start sharing revenues, with some
contributors obtaining monetary rewards and not others, this in fact
discourages further voluntary contributions, because the inequality it
introduces. Market mechanisms are really destructive to a commons, so
if there is an ecology of businesses creating added value to the
commons in order to create a market for their scarce goods, they need
to practice ‘benefit sharing’, i.e. a general support to the commons as
a whole, rather than inequality inducing rewards.
My issue with the gift economy is more ideological. It is used by free
market apologists to sustain their vision of rational economic man,
which only gives because he/she receives, but peer production belongs
to a different logic. I think it is good for humanity to have a fuller
vision of human motivation, and understand under which conditions such
non-reciprocal engagement is possible, a research that would be
obscured by an insistence on the notion of a gift economy.
Now, an important point is this: non-reciprocal peer production only
works for non-rival goods that can be shared without loss; in the
material world of scarcity and rival goods, we do need either
exchange-based or reciprocity based mechanisms. Non-reciprocal open
design communities need to be coupled with market-based built only
capitalism, or other forms of allocation.
Q: You have argued that while hierarchy is predicated on creating
sameness through identification and exclusion, and is associated with
the abstract universalism of the Enlightenment, P2P is ‘about
unity-in-diversity, it is concrete ‘post-Enlightenment’ universalism
predicated on common projects.’ Is this a way for saying that peer
production is sustained - and legitimized - by a conception of (social)
justice able to stand the challenges inherent to the post-modern era?
The key ontological principle of peer to peer relationality
is “equipotentiality”. This is a vision of humanity of all of us being
a wide variety of combinations of different skills and endeavours, with
different levels of excellence for each, but none of these skills being
inferior or superior in the abstract. This means that I can recognize
you for your contribution in a common project, and you can recognize me
for a different contribution to the same or to another project. We
overcome our fragmentation and isolation through the construction of
our identities through the common projects we are engaged with,
building a great cosmic “mash-up” which enriches our universe through
free contributions. In our encounter with other human beings we both
look for difference, and for affinity. The difference is what enriches
us and what is common unites us. We know from each other that we
contribute to widely different projects. Each person therefore needs to
be honoured for his/her unique mix of skills and contributions, and
deserves a general income for his contribution to social wealth, which
he produces through the very fact of being alive and to be
always-already related. The general unconditional income is coupled
with a minimal request for contributions to the common good, so as to
make society sustainable, and by a wide variety of reputation and
wealth acknowledgement systems which allow us to recognize the
extraordinary contributions of each according to context and to develop
appropriate rewards for it.
Q: Your proposal is gaining moment. You managed to organised several
university workshops here in Europe [notably in France at the Sorbonne
University and Nottingham Trent University] to discuss at academic
level this paradigm. Furthermore, there is a growing interest on the
part of commercial enterprises in understanding P2P processes, as shown
by the fact that your time is now divided up between implementing the
theoretical aspect and delivering seminars for commercial enterprises.
How do you explain this interests on the part of market enterprises,
and in light of such a growing interest, what kind of future do you
envisage, say in the next 20 or 30 years, for peer production?
Market players understand that the use of peer production principles is
a competitive advantage. I formulate this as the ‘law of asymmetric
competition’. It states that if a for-profit company, using wage labour
and proprietary IP, is facing competition from a for-benefit
institution that can draw on a large circle of volunteers and uses open
ownership formats, the former will tend to eventually lose out to the
latter. The reason is that peer production filters out any but the most
productive motivation, i.e. intrinsic positive motivation stemming from
passion, and strives for absolute quality, i.e. producing the very best
common artefact, never finished but continuously upgraded, while its
private competitor will only strive for relative quality, i.e. being
better than the competition. From this follows a derivative: any
for-profit company, or public authority for that matter, that adopts
open/free, participatory and commons-oriented practices will tend to
gain competitive advantages compared to those that do not do so. This
drives the adoption of peer to peer practices in the market sphere, and
strengthens the overall peer to peer logic in society. The process is
very similar to how slavery changed to feudalism, and feudalism to
capitalism: by a mutual reconfiguration of both the elite and the
producing classes. Marx’s vision was a historical anomaly which we now
know has never been confirmed.
So the image of change is the following: peer to peer develops as a germ
form in the margins of the market, and is increasingly adopted, until
it eventually achieves some kind of parity. At some point in time the
old meta-system enters into crisis, and the already existing new
subsystem becomes the new meta-system.
The best scenario is that the enlightened sections of the elite first
recognize that there needs to be a new global compact to save the earth
from biospheric destruction, say a form of green capitalism, but to
succeed, it necessarily will adopt many p2p features, and in any case,
such change can only come through a revival of popular power to drive
the system to such reform, which in itself will strengthen
participatory politics. This in turn creates the space for the germ
form to grow to a level of equivalency – think of the situation before
the French Revolution with the absolute monarchs arbitraging between a
rising bourgeoisie and a declining feudal order. At some point,
frustration that the advantages of the new form are being frustated
through the old form of social organization, may then lead to a tipping
point, in which the new subsystem becomes dominant. This scenario has
of course nothing automatic, it depends on the pressures of the
populations driven by the effects of climate catastrophes, and in the
second phase, in the power of peer producers. My hopes are driven by
the following conviction: that to maintain a infinite growth system
within a finite environment cannot in any case be a sustainable form of
society. The question then becomes: what will replace it? It will
either be a new system of hyper-exploitation, based on a return to
authoritarianism, similar to the period of disintegration following the
decline of the Roman Empire; or it can transform to a higher level of
complexity, which in my view is the peer to peer based civilization.
Can we really envisage that humanity chooses for some kind of
collective suicide, and not for the obvious way out? Of course we can
envisage it, but our energies should better be directed to create the
desired future, and to consider it as a ‘conditional inevitability’. In
this context, a reconfiguration of some market forces to a position of
netarchical capitalism, their transformation into ‘enablers and
empowerers of the direct social production of value’, as we see already
happening, seems like a good bet. Such forces are both partially allies
of peer producers, but of course they also have different interests.
Can we compare it again to the end of the Roman empire. It was
certainly better to be a serf than a slave, and at the same time, for
former slaveholders, it was a way to externalise the cost of fully
feeding their slaves, by making them responsible for their own
livelihood. Mutual interest of both the elite and the producing classes
led to a reconfiguration of the class system into the new equilibrium
of feudalism.
Q: Some American authors, such as Eric Raymond, but also ‘common-ists’
such as Lawrence Lessig (Lessig,2004), through his arguments for a
Creative Commons, remain suspicious about P2P processes as they claim
that are still embedded into a market logic. How you respond to these
critics?
Eric Raymond is a libertarian, and though a supporter of the
business-friendly form of free software, i.e. open source, is not a
friend of the idea of the commons, which he equates with collectivism.
But I believe this is because of his ideological blinders as a
libertarian, since he in practice cooperates with the free software
commons. Lawrence Lessig is a liberal, his form of the commons is the
individually-oriented Creative Commons, which allows for individuals to
decide on a degree of sharing, but is not focused on created complex
commonly owned artefacts as only the General Public License can. He is
a genuine liberal who believes in the positive values of classic
liberalism. He does not have a clear vision of peer to peer processes
as a social dynamic. Yochai Benkler does however.
Overall, of all the authors who write about peer to peer, they are
either business people who see new monetary opportunities, as with Don
Tapscott’s Wikinomics; or left liberals who see it as a new positive
adjunct to the market; finally, there are cynical leftists who only see
how it is being used by capital, and do not see its emancipatory
potential, in other words, they have already given capitalism the
victory. In contrast, I belong to the strand who sees peer production
as both immanent in the system, while it retains its transcendent,
liberatory potential. One is the condition for the other. The Oekonux
(Linux Economy) group is similar in its approach. Its immanence is not
a proof of its weakness, but of its strength. It is not a
anticapitalist strain within the industrial system, but already a
postcapitalist, postmonetary logic, a new productive life practice that
has the potential to replace the current system. The market, the
hierarchy, and even democracy are but means to allocate scarce
resources, but peer governance is the direct voluntary self-allocation
of resources, divorced from monetary motives. What we need to do is to
develop a literacy of participation, evolve the self-consciousness of
sharing and commons-based communities, of distributed
and ‘crowdsourced’ labour, so that they can intelligently engage with
platform owners and businesses associated with their commons. The new
lines of tension are between these communities and the corporate
institutions they are engaging with, but at the same time, the joint
world of peer production still needs to protect itself against the
retrograde forces of proprietary ownership and artificial scarcities
that impede sharing and commons-production. Ultimately, we will also
need to tackle the peer production of infrastructures themselves, but
we are not at this stage yet.
Q: Moving away from these critics, I would like to end this interview
placing the emphasis upon two rather bold claims: the first one is that
peer production is potentially able to change the nature of capitalism
and the second that it has the potentiality of solving the free rider
problem. Both brave claims, indeed…
Global capitalism is facing the same conundrum as ancient Rome: a crisis
of extensive accumulation, because it can no longer externalize
environmental costs. But switching to intensive growth in the
immaterial world creates a crisis of value. Indeed, marginal
reproduction costs for non-rival immaterial goods destroys the logic of
scarcity which is the basis of the market. So marketization,
monetization, moves to the margins of the new commons. Direct social
production of value rises exponentially, but its monetization only
linearly at its margins. Furthermore, anything that needs to be
produced physically, has to be designed ‘immaterially’first, through
processes that are not fundamentally different from software and
knowledge creation. It is therefore only a matter of time that open
design communities striving for absolute quality, start making designs
that will eventually be better than those that can be produced by for
profit companies. Accepting that the primary processes of social
innovation will take place outside the sphere of capital, will
necessarily need to new social structures. Just as the Roman
slaveholders were faced with the fact that a turn to intensive growth
could only happen by freeing the slaves, so capital is faced with the
fact that the experience economy won’t be capitalist in its core. A
change of the core logic of the system seems inevitable, though it is
of course difficult to predict the precise nature of the new social
contract around the primacy of the peer to peer logic.
The free rider problem is only a major problem in the physical commons,
where it is a matter of smart governance and regulation; in the
immaterial sphere, though there are problems with spamming, trolling
and the like, free riding by itself is not a key problem. On the
contrary, it is the very nature of a peer to peer system that it makes
every form of usage a productive resource for the system as a whole.
Whereas for centralized and decentralized systems more usage is
problematic, because it uses up more resources, peer to peer design
creates the opposite dynamic. Every peer is turned into a resource of
the system.
The new proprietary platforms exist because of design choices, they have
decentralized and centralized setups that are expensive to maintain,
and therefore require centralized capital. However, it is my conviction
that these constraints could eventually be designed away in fully
distributed infrastructures. Eventually, we already see it happening,
other productive machinery than just the computer, will also know the
same process of miniaturisation, of lowering capital requirements, and
this will introduce distributed dynamics in the sphere of physical
production. The key issue will then become: how do we combine the
non-reciprocal peer to peer logic of immaterial production, with the
need for reciprocity in the physical production of scarce material
goods. When we have the answer to that question, we will have the
maturity to shift to a full peer to peer based political economy and
civilization. There are already a number of thinkers, such as Christian
Siefkes in his book on the Peer Economy, thoroughly thinking about how
a shift from a economy of exchange to an economy of contributions,
could occur. But at the P2P Foundation, we prefer a continued empirical
analysis of what is actually happening on the ground, through the
self-creativity of peer groups grappling with the challenges of
sustainability.
--
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