Philippe Aigrain * Conditions for synergy between free non-market exchanges and the economy (was: [ox-en] Conference documentation)
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Sat, 23 Jan 2010 20:15:21 +0100
Hi list!
Here is the documentation of Philippe's presentation. Below is a plain
text paraphrase taken from the slides. I recommend checking out the
graphics which are contained in the PDF which is in
http://www.oekonux-conference.org/documentation/texts/
The graphics are simple but support the text very nicely.
Grüße
Stefan
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Conditions for synergy between the economy and the sphere of nonmarket information exchanges
============================================================================================
Philippe Aigrain
company: www.sopinspace.com
tools: www.coment.net
www.glinkr.net
blog: paigrain.debatpublic.net
writings: paigrain.debatpublic.net/?page_id=11
activism: laquadrature.net
The text of the talk in the notes pages.
These slides can be used according to the terms of the
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
A few preliminary remarks:
When I speak of non-market information exchanges this a wider sphere
than commonsbased peer production of information, but my key focus is
on this latter universe.
Why would want synergy with the economy when much sucks in it? Because
we are not talking the same economy but a restructured one, and
because in a transition phase, it is not good to be in a pure
confrontational situation.
Last, my presentation has notes. They contain what I should be saying
if I were a decent orator. They will be made available.
1. history
==========
Let's start by by playing back a few centuries of history at the rate
of one minute per century.
=====
[see page 3]
Let's give a look at the societies of the 15th and 16th centuries as
described in Fernand Braudel's "Civilisation matérielle, économie et
capitalisme".. A great part of human activities are "non-market"
(self-production and subsistance, barter). A much smaller part are
currency-mediated exchanges (what I call market in the strict sense).
Autonomous finance (meaning finance that does not purely accompany
exchanges of goods) exists but is comparately much smaller.
=====
[see page 4]
Let's travel now to the industrial era, to the last century
until 1970. Non-market has shrunk, end even more, it is considered as
a left-over. It's worth one small comment in the introduction to
National accounts : "domestic production such as vegetable gardens and
exchange of work between individuals has not been accounted for." As
you can see, finance has grown very much, but still is in some form of
relation with the size of market activities, even though...
=====
[see page 5]
it can inflate...
=====
[see page 6]
and subsequently shrink.
=====
[see page 7]
Let's now come to our present. The critics of "merchandization" or
Jeremy Rifkin in "The Age of Access: The New Culture of
Hypercapitalism, Where all of Life is a Paid-For Experience" claim
that the market expands to invade everything. They are right in the
sense that it tries. But this expansive trend, together with the
insane expansion of finance and other bubbles such as the copyright
and patent monopoly pricing bubbles may actually hide a deep trend at
"de-marketization", due to the growth of a huge sphere of non-market
information production, exchange and usage.
There are clear signs of this: the share of GDP of providing means to
non-market exchanges of information is twice bigger in developed
countries to the economy of selling information as goods or services.
=====
[see page 8]
Let's forget about finance (a welcome rest these days, but I will come
back to it) and focus on what is truly important: what relation is
being built between the currency-mediated economy and the non-market
sphere)
2. nonmarket information
========================
Let's first look at some essential properties of the non-market
sphere.
=====
[see page 10]
First of all, the non-market sphere of information is a blossoming
ecosystem with a great number of components: pieces of software,
individual works, papers, data, items of public expression, entries in
encyclopedias. These components are generally interdependent, they
make sense together, though in different manners : direct technical
interdependency for software, indirect interdependency for artistic
works that belong to a same school or style. Or somewhere in between,
direct reuse but still independence in usage for instance in remix
music.
=====
[see page 11]
A second important property for the non-market sphere of information
is that it was often created either without making some aims explicit,
or by using contract / transactional instruments to emulate the
definition of a commons statute. It is all the more important to
measure how the functioning of the transaction/contract-based market
sphere differs from the commons.
The ternary nature of the commons illustrated on the right side of
this slide is at the heart of what makes them a new founding paradigm
at the age of information. We must remember it when we will discuss
the relationship between the currencymediated economy and the
non-market commons : when we create some forms of relationship, we
risk importing the transactional/contract approach in the internals of
the commons production.
=====
[see page 12]
The non-market sphere is important because of the human activities it
enables. A key aspect is the replacement of the producer/consumer or
creator/receptor face-to-face by a continuum of positions. Please note
that the extreme points do not disappear. We will always (I hope)
spend time listening to pieces of recorded music by just playing it
From start to end. But the fact that we can also do lots other things
and through that move across the continuum by small steps is a key
contribution of the non-market commons.
=====
3. A simple hybrid economy?
===========================
There is an implicit answer that has been given by great thinkers to
the question of this talk: "just let it happen and things will work
out". "Just recognize the non-market sphere as valuable, stop
conducting a war against it, keep the market where it belongs, and
things will be right".
There is an element of truth or plausibility in that answer: when
something as useful as a rich non-market sphere of information
production and exchange exists, it is clear that there will be
generate a rich economy to provide means to it and to provide services
using it.
So why do I think we need to take a more proactive approach at
structuring the relationship between the economy and the commons
nonmarket sphere? There are 2 reasons, one dealing with creating the
conditions for the very existence of the commons and the second one
being based on scaleability challenges.
=====
[see page 14]
Remember that slide?
Well, there is another side to it. If there is a war staged against
non-market sharing of works of all types, it is because it has the
potential to do something to part of the market activities and through
that to a share of the financial bubble.
Not that all or even many of market activities will in any away suffer
From people spending more and more time accessing, using and producing
information commons material. Many will only benefit from it. But some
very important components will indeed suffer: Rifkin's hypercapitalism
capture of time is an example, and those people who sell (only) the
wind of free reproduction of information at monopoly prices being
another.
This is not just a small problem with a few minor pathological
players. Of course, they are bound to suffer anyway unless we allow
them to make us all suffer by losing all of our fundamental rights.
But it makes sense to organize a credible phasing out scenario out of
this model. We don't want to find ourselves in the situation of
spending hundreds of billions on "saving the media industry" just like
government presently do on the car industry because they failed to
force them to evolve before. One way to force them to evolve is to
make competition easier for other "non-market compatible" models.
The economy is not the sum of business models
---------------------------------------------
When the optimistic hybrid economy thinkers wish to substantiate their
optimism, they use examples. These examples are indeed enlightening:
yes Radiohead can make lots of money respecting non-market freedoms
and telling people to pay whatever they think worth for the downloads.
Yes Jamendo does a great job of giving access to voluntarily shared
music recordings and might even be sustainable if it builds a leader
position in this domain.
But does it scale up? My answer to this is "it depends". It depends
upon how we couple the non-market activities with the funding of their
conditions of existence, that is with whatever our economy will
become. Right now it does not work because to be sustainable Jamendo
*and* the musicians that share on it depend either on channels (record
sales, concerts) that are often controlled by interests that do share
their values, or on mechanisms that risk polluting the commons such as
advertising.
4. Which coupling?
==================
Ways of coupling, creatings connections between the currency-mediated
economy and the commons vary mostly by the scale at which these links
are established. One extreme is total marketization, where each
individual production in the commons would depend on business models
schemes and related investment. The other extreme is the basic income
model where every individual is given means of existence and allocates
freely his or her time to activities of one's choice. Many of the
interesting things happen "in between". The free software commons fare
not too bad using a mix of the two extremes and of indirect funding
through the university system. But even in this mature well
functioning commons, there are issues of scaling up in particular
regarding some forms of innovation.
=====
[see page 17]
This is an illustration in my book "Cause commune: l'information entre
bien commun et propriété" (Common cause: information between commons
and property).
I produced it to illustrate why it is critical to have connections
(meaning funding) at the level of the overall commons human ecosystem
and not just at the level of individual components through "business
models". You can look at this with the lens of transaction cost
analysis or at the level of protecting ecosystems' values, and in both
cases you will find (and one can quantitavely model) that using only
micro-level funding will bias the ecosystem and inpoorish it. One
finds similar findings in the study of biodiversity, cultural
diversity, etc.
However, this does not tell us which macrolevel fundings whould exist,
and most of my work since 2005 has been on further exploring this
issue.
4. The creative contribution example
====================================
* A recognition of nonmarket file sharing between individuals of
digitally published works
* Associated with a flatrate contribution by (broadband) internet
subscribers
* Used for both remuneration (reward to) of worked used on the
Internet and for funding of the conditions of creation (what leads
to production of future works)
I will use an example developed in my last book: Internet & creation:
comment reconnaître les échanges sur internet en finançant la création
(Internet & Creation: how to recognize Internet file sharing while
funding creation) as an experiment on the choice of which coupling to
build between a non-market ecosystem and the currency-mediated
economy.
My proposals build on earlier proposals from a 2003 proposal by EFF in
the US to many proposals in Europe since. They all share common
elements (the first two bullet points on my slide).
5. Conditions for healthy synergy
=================================
* Respecting the "good properties" of nonmarket commons
* Decentralized free allocation of resources
* Usage driven assessment of value
* Freedom of organization enabled by nontransactional rights
* Scaleable to accomodate growth of nonmarket "quaternary sector"
* Positive retroaction in terms of social justice
Here are some criteria that I motion to be essential to this choice.
The first one regards "respecting and enriching the commons". The
second regards scaleability. If one believes that information
production and exchange will be a quaternary sector after the
agricultural, industrial and sectors, one needs to ensure its
conditions of existence not just at the present level, but at a much
wider scale. The last one regards social justice overall (not just in
the commons). If we fail to address it, our nice concrete alternatives
will just be crashed by the consequences of insane inequality in
societies and in the world.
=====
[see page 20]
I summarize this graphically by going back to the ternary structure of
the commons.
I guess the two points above should be self explanatory, though the
practical translation for instance in governance mechanisms can be
very difficult.
Let's look at the third one below. Please remember that what we are
talking about is how the conditions of existence of the human
activities that create and use the commons are realized. When I say
that "not too much deperdition occur", what is meant is that money (or
similar ressources) that are allocated should not leak too much
towards "non-commons compatible" segments of the economy such as
speculative finance and other forms of rent-seeking.
Concretely, in the case of P2P licensing, this would mean that not too
big a share of the remuneration of usage of works in free sharing
should go to artists or contributors that would get much more than
needed for pursuing their life and activities.
=====
[see page 21]
All of this breaks down to curves of this type. Don't just go in sleep
mode because you would think this is one more long tail boring stuff.
Actually what is represented here is how different the cumulated
distribution of attention to works can be in a commons world and in a
published or controlled distribution environment.
This analysis is substantiated by empirical case studies (by myself on
open information communities and the open Internet, by others on P2P
file sharing).
Refs:
* Philippe Aigrain in First Monday 11(6) and in the Internet &
Création book (in French)
* TNO/IViR study on impact of P2P
For distribution of attention in the overall Internet, I will soon
publish the core stuff on my blog and later as a more formal paper.
=====
[see page 22]
Now, let's look at what I claim is likely to be a distribution of
attention in the free usage of digital representations of creative
works such as music. One thing we see is that stars still get a
significant share of attention, but a much smaller one that in a
publishing or distribution controlled world.
So some equity will come directly from the good properties of the
commons. But to do better, one needs to change also things such as the
distribution functions (how much money one gets from a given level of
usage). In an information world it must go sublinear rather that
overlinear as in the world of publishing on physical carriers.
However, remember that in a world where transactions costs kill you,
perfection is the worse enemy of justice.