Category:P2P Transition

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The transition to a peer-to-peer (P2P) society implies that our relationships become less hierarchical (in the context of domination hierarchies, not hierarchies of empowerment), and increasingly between equals ; that is, between peers. Power is diffused and more 'distributed' across society. In the understanding of the P2P Foundation, we are in a transitional period towards a system that can act within planetary boundaries, which also require a form of social equity. This is achieved through the model of a commons-centric society. This doesn't require abolishing the other forms of allocation which have existed in tandem for 5,000 years, i.e. commoning, the gift economy, redistribution (the state) and market allocation, but a new equilibrium amongst them, and a evolution from a market-centric capitalist society, to a commons-centric post-capitalist society.

The pages in this category involve, in some way or other, the question of how we are getting there or what it would be like. There are many insights to be had from previous transitions in society between one system and another.


Contextual Quote

William Irwin Thompson: Transitions are Catastrophes

"The transition from one World to another is a catastrophe, in the sense of the catastrophe theory of René Thom. Indeed, a catastrophe is the making conscious of an Unconscious Polity; it is the feeling in Being of a domain that is unknown to thinking. Catastrophes are often stimulated by the failure to feel the emergence of a domain, and so what cannot be felt in the imagination is experienced as embodied sensation in the catastrophe. When rational knowing and political governance no longer serve to feel the actual life of a World, then consciousness becomes embodied in experience outside the world-picture but still within the invisible meta-domain. The conscious process is reflected in the imagination; the unconscious process is expressed as karma, the generation of actions divorced from thinking and alienated from feeling. Catastrophes are discontinuous transitions in Culture- Nature through which knowing has an opening to Being. This moment of passing-together through a catastrophe, this occasion of com-passionate participation, presents an opportunity for a shift from karmic activity to Enlightenment. Thus the transition from one World-Structure to another is characterized by catastrophes in which the Unconscious Polities become visible. At such times there can be a rapid flip-over or reversal in which the unthinkable becomes possible.

No governing elite will allow us to think this transition from one World-Structure to another, but imagination and compassion will allow us to feel what we cannot understand. As "Nature" comes to its end in our scientific culture, the relationship between conscious and unconscious will change and the awareness of immanent mind in bacteria and of autopoesis in devices of Artificial Intelligence will give us a new appreciation of the animism of ancient world-picture. The "Man" of the historical set of Culture-Nature will come to his end in a new irrational world of angels and devils, elementals and cyborgs. In this science fiction landscape, this invisible meta-domain in which we already live, the end of Nature as unconscious karma makes of Enlightenment and Compassion a new political possibility."

(https://web.archive.org/web/20050907215906/http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC14/Thompson.htm)


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Pages in category "P2P Transition"

The following 94 pages are in this category, out of 94 total.