Gordon Cook Interviews Michel Bauwens

The Gordon Cook Interview (0): the summary of our analysis of global economic changes

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

Gordon Cook’s Summary:

Looking at the apparent ramping up of a fresh stage in the economic crisis, one has to begin to wonder about the sustainability of the global economic system that is generally thought of as “free market capitalism.” Michel Bauwens set the stage for this issue by asking: “what will replace it? A reactionary power structure of increased exploitation, in a global struggle for dwindling resources amongst overpopulation, food and water and resource depletion and climate change, with scattered pockets of resilient communities ... or a new p2p system centered around open commons of knowledge, code and designs, linked to relocalized and more distributed property formats, with forms of global governance that protect the planet?” In an interview done earlier this year in Bangkok. Michael Bauwens explains how over the last several years he has built the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. “P2P is nothing else than a premise of a new type of civilization that is not exclusively geared towards the profit motive,” he says.

Whereas Yochai Benkler identified peer production in the context of the Internet, Michel has gone on well beyond that to identify a broad array fundamental changes underway that are burrowing, termite like, at the foundations of global capitalism.

The intersection of the internet, and Moore’s law are reshaping the environment of what it is possible to do with in a decentralized collaborative environment that needs far less capital that could ever have been imagined before. Michel points out that “With the bursting of the internet bubble there was Big crisis. No more money. But instead of stopping innovation accelerates. Now why?”

“My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital. At least this is true when you make advances in knowledge in software and in design. Of course there are always exceptions where you need resources for a really big machine. But as a general rule what you need is smart people working together with computers and having access to a network.”

“The role of capital is that it is needed after innovation is done. It is needed to scale what can be done rather inexpensively with the new digital tools. However, especially with things digital and with the network “when capital intervenes it is to enclose.”

Michel continues: “Think about what happened to Rome many centuries ago. In was a crisis of extensive globalizaton. The slave-based Roman empire could no longer afford to conquer and administer the territory it needed in order to get new raw materials. What happened as a reaction was a return to localization. The smart slave owner must have thought: if I free my slaves and transform them into serfs, then I will need no longer a thousand soldiers to discipline them, but I can accomplish this with only 100 soldiers. I will let them work for themselves, take half of what they produce and will better off than I was before. Those who did this were better suited to survive than those who did not.’

“But you also had an open global design community operating in early feudal Europe – this community was the Catholic Church. The itinerant monks were the guarantors of the old knowledge and as they traveled, they were also means for spreading new knowledge. The monastic orders were the ones turning forests into new agricultural lands. They invented new techniques that, unencumbered by copyright, they happily share across all Europe.’ ‘Think about this. It is what we have now. A crisis of extensive globalization. Technological advances can play a role in playing around some limits, but technology is not a magical wand that can wish away resource depletion and social contradictions.”

“So, what we have is that, in the face of this people are beginning to relocalize while we have a global open design community that is the internet. As the old structure slowly collapses, you have to be ready with something else because going on the streets and saying give us this or give us that when there is no one there to give it to you anymore just doesn’t work very well. What peer to peer would like to do is see that society has choices by which it can rebuild other than ones dependent on centralized force. But, and this is crucial, localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter. The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons.”

Globally there are tens of thousands of people involved in creating and building the new knowledge commons that Michel speaks of. What he is doing is an unusual but extremely valuable function of connecting globally sprouting independent seedlings into a global web of interest where participants can learn from each other and reinforce the building of life rafts to give humanity a better chance of successfully transitioning the huge changes it faces.

The interview contained in this issue describes much of the content and thinking behind these changes. In doing so it gives an added picture of how the internet is affecting the global economy. A picture that is something of a grassroots parallel to the more corporate and traditional take of the Power of Pull June COOK Report issue. The content and ideology of the peer to peer knowledge commons – the “what” and the “why” is the primary subject matter of this issue. As I have worked on this material I have realized the HOW of michel’s doing this is very likely as important or even more o that the what and the why? I have already begun work on material that will explain that.

One of the problems addressed by the authors of the Power of Pull is the need to increase the speed of learning to organize what is learned so that it is findable and useable by others. I believe that Michel has developed a methodology of doing this by means of very novel ways of using social networking tools in a well thought out framework that accomplishes what cannot be achieved by their use in isolation. We are talking about the ability to create a knowledge and wisdom infrastructure far more substantial than anything seen before.

The Gordon Cook Interview (1): On the origins of our engagement with P2P

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

COOK Report: What did you do before you became the chronicler of the “commons?”

Bauwens: I was an idealist in my youth, but meeting with reality I had mostly a business career.

My last job in regular business from 1999 to 2002 was working for Belgacom – a large telecommunications firm. Towards the end I became very uneasy about the creative accounting principles that seem to be required for survival in such a large company.

In my view what was required to maintain accounts of large companies was almost entirely political and about as trustworthy as the statistics used in the five-year plans of the former Soviet economies.

That made me uncomfortable. This set me on a course of re-thinking to adapt to what society is when I looked around at all the indicators – land, water, climate, energy supplies, - if you see all those indicators going in the wrong direction and you see the world not reacting in any serious way, I felt that I could not play the game anymore. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010

I became convinced that the corporate world could not change anymore on its own – that it would only change when impelled to do so by external threats to its survival. Consequently the onus of needed change is to be found in civil society. Let me give you an anecdote that was important for me. I was something of an internet guru in my own country. In the 1990s my first major task at Belgacom was to make it into an “e” company – one that understood the Internet.

The second task was to integrate all the different internet companies into a coherent strategy. Finally a third task was to head an internal think tank on long-term strategy.

It was a phone company by culture. It wanted to change but never could figure out how to do so.

As a result it was unstable and characterized by a lot of infighting. In April 2001 the Internet bubble burst in a big way and people began to say that it was a catastrophe because the internet innovation machine was stuck. There was no more capital left for startup companies. Now I made an observation that Clay Shirky did as well – that instead of slowing down, innovation actually accelerated. This was an apparent anomaly. Big crisis. No more money. But instead of stopping innovation accelerates. Now why?

My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital.

COOK Report: Because it was coming from a different place?

Bauwens: Exactly. What it showed me was that the assumed linkage between capitalism entrepreneurship and innovation no longer functioned in the same way so that the assumed old Schumpeterian model where risk capital supports innovators and then uses intellectual property to seal the advantages it obtains just did not seem to operate because innovation was not stopping. I had to find an explanation. My explanation was that you now can innovate without access to capital. At least this is true when you make advances in knowledge in software and in design. Of course there are always exceptions where you need resources for a really big machine. But as a general rule what you need is smart people working together with computers and having access to a network. It is only when they become so successful that the multitudes start to crush their server that they need access to capital. You can invent a Facebook, a Bittorrent, and an e-Bay or a Google basically by means of a few people who sit down and write code. What this showed me was that innovation had moved in an arguable way to civil society. Capital needs come at the end of the process rather than at the beginning, and I consider this a very significant change, because it means that ‘social’ innovation is becoming productive and more significant than any internal R & D.

Not only does this mean that no corporate group can hope to compete with a whole universal network, but also that the conditions for success are quite different. Social innovation requires social innovation and sharing, as otherwise it discourages participation.

COOK Report: In 1992 I found myself shoved in that direction when, in two year’s time, the number of supercomputer centers in the USA went from 5 to 4 and my job at OTA ended. Dave Hughes pointed out that I could use the new technology to write about and describe for others what was going on because the cost of entry needed to do so was extremely low.

Bauwens: Yes you were one of the pioneers. But for young people now the role of capital is that it is needed after innovation is done. It is needed to scale what can be done rather inexpensively with the new digital tools.

But even this can be questioned by saying scaling is necessary IF you want to play that game. I think the key thing that we must understand is that when capital intervenes it is to enclose.

For example as Ebden Moglen of the Free Software Foundation has argued, there is no reason why Facebook should have to be highly centralized. Today you can scale small group dynamics globally without having to have centralization. The reason that Facebook wants centralization is because it is determined to capture all the user’s data and control it in one place.

If you want to scale what you are doing in a way such that it can be monetized and monopolized, then you need capital. But its is possible to imagine other ways which is what people at the Peer to Peer Foundation are looking at is how to scale by internetworking. In this case you do loose control over a marketable scarcity. Movement away from centralized scaling is a choice that causes all kinds of problems but it is also one that increasing numbers of people want to make. In a way, what is changing is a shift from the scarcity engineering of the market, to the abundance engineering of a commons. (However, it is often ‘surrounded’ by an entrepreneurial coalition creating market value around it)

COOK Report: I would imagine that many people are very thirsty for an opportunity to become self-sustaining.

Bauwens: I think about the experience of my own father. A self-made man who did not go to school and who was happy and proud just to have a job, even if that job was in itself potentially meaningless. In his generation people who were unemployed were depressed and suffered from a loss of self-worth. But in the current generation many people can find meaningful pursuits regardless of pay. They sometimes must move away from a meaningful pursuit in order to survive but generally they want to be able to return there and survive.

This is a real social revolution. This means that the peer-to-peer dynamics of this social revolution that I am trying to describe to you are continuous regardless of how the economy is doing. When the economy is good there is always a surplus of people having time on their hands in between projects, on weekends and so on but when things are bad like with the current meltdown, then people have even more time on their hands. That cognitive surplus is actually always there, in one way or another. So peer-to-peer profits from both cyclical and counter-cyclical trends.

The Gordon Cook Interview (2): The parallel with the transition of the Roman Empire

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

Consequences of Changes in Distribution of Knowledge – from Rome to the Present

With knowledge widely distributed and independent from the large corporations and with tools that can enable large number of people to access this knowledge, you have a situation that shifts the old distribution of power in a very fundamental way. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 Think about what happened to Rome many centuries ago. In was a crisis of extensive globalizaton.

The slave-based Roman empire could no longer afford to conquer and administer the territory it needed in order to get new raw materials. What happened as a reaction was a return to localization.

The smart slave owner must have thought: if I free my slaves and transform them into serfs, then I will need no longer a thousand soldiers to discipline them, but I can accomplish this with only 100 soldiers. I will let them work for themselves, take half of what they produce and will better off than I was before. Those who did this were better suited to survive than those who did not.

But you also had an open global design community operating in early feudal Europe – this community was the Catholic Church. The itinerant monks were the guarantors of the old knowledge and as they traveled, they were also means for spreading new knowledge. The monastic orders were the ones turning forests into new agricultural lands. They invented new techniques that, unencumbered by copyright, they happily shared across all Europe.

Think about this. It is what we have now. A crisis of extensive globalization. The whole world has been globalized. We have an issue of adequate raw materials and an issue of what we have done to the biosphere. Our industrial agriculture is impoverishing the soil and wasting water. All of this means that extensive globalization is essentially dead. It can still walk and may do so for another 30 years but ultimately, an infinite growth system can just not last in a finite environment. Technological advances can play a role in playing around some limits, but technology is not a magical wand that can wish away resource depletion and social contradictions. So, what we have is that, in the face of this people are beginning to relocalize while we have a global open design community that is the internet. As the old structure slowly collapses, you have to be ready with something else because going on the streets and saying give us this or give us that when there is no one there to give it to you anymore just doesn’t work very well. What peer to peer would like to do is see that society has choices by which it can rebuild other than ones dependent on centralized force.

Localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter. The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons.

But, and this is crucial, localization by itself cannot compete with centralization unless it is smarter.

The way we achieve this is physical localization carried out within the context of a global information commons. As John Robb says: localize what you can and virtualize everything else! For example if you want to experiment locally with organic agriculture, you can easily benefit from the innovation being done by organic farmers all over the world. If you do this then you have better access to innovation than the R&D department of any multinational. These global small group dynamics can have a global coordination effect that can out complete what the old centralized multinational can do. However, this requires the building and intermesh-working of new collaborative platforms and cooperative structures that are not all there yet, but they are definitely ‘under construction’ by many communities in the world. This is what I document in my mindmap Everything Open and Free at

http://www.mindmeister.com/28717702/everything-open-and-free see pages 6 and 7 above and also available as a “prezi” presentation via

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/open-everything-p2p-presentation-for-tedx-brussels/2009/11/23 .

COOK Report: And with e-science at the universities that source of corporate knowledge is beginning to tilt toward open source?

Bauwens: Exactly. I’d to compare this process in analogy with the class structure re-alignment at the end of the Roman Empire. Smart capital is starting to align itself with the new dynamics just as the smarter slave owners changed their ways when the Roman system was in crisis. You have a segment of capital that is reactionary. The RIAA for example. They only have one answer and that is to repress and sue grannies and babies. But you also have a more enlightened segment like – eBay, Google and Amazon – that try to align themselves with the new dynamics. The movement is spiral. You have an alignment of peer producers and what I will call netarchical capital that is used to enable cooperation of those building p2p networked commons.

(http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-concept-and-thesis-of-netarchical-capitalism/2010/01/27 ).

In contrast with classical Marxism, I contend that deep social change only happens when there is a coincidental alignment of both the managerial and producing classes, towards the ‘chaotic attractor’ of the new system which is visible in seed form.

Peer production is about engineering abundance and deciding how you manage abundance.

The role of capital is to manage scarcity. It’s a market logic where you are all the time allocating access to rivalrous scarce goods. The problem that you find is that you can’t make money directly out of abundance. When you have abundant goods, the only thing you can do is share them or give them away. Abundance creates wealth and value, just not always monetizable wealth.

As Glyn Moody has argued about open source: it saves a lot of money which can be used for other purposes, but in itself, the new open source economy creates less marketable value than its monopolistic predecessor.

The Gordon Cook Interview (3): Abundance engineering vs. scarcity engineering

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

What I See Emerging: Engineering Abundance versus Managing Scarcity

So how can we describe the new model of production? At the core you have an open design community formed from knowledge, code, and design.

http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Business.

From making software we begin to move in the direction of making actual things. We have a loose community of people who contribute at various levels. There is a common knowledge core that is continuously fed by various parties. Around that you have entrepreneurial coalitions which, understanding the value of the commons, try to create marketable scarcities around the commons.

When they are successful they can strengthen the commons by sharing benefits. For example IBM now makes more money with open source than with its patents and is known for sending back a sizable chunk of money to the open source software community both because they hire people internally but also through financial support of various foundations. The commons itself is usually managed by what I call a for-benefits association. It is usually an NGO like the Wikimedia Foundation which manages the infrastructure of cooperation, without having any command and control power over the production process itself. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 The innovation you have here is the assumed scarcity of knowledge and labor. When you have an NGO you direct these carefully because you assume they are scarce. Today these NGOs merely manage infrastructure. They do not tell anyone what to do. This is what I see as a new model that is already functioning for 15 years in software but is now massively and rapidly moving into the physical world. Open hardware and distributed manufacturing projects, like Arduino follow pretty much the same model.

There are many variations of this. Apple with very good industrial design has created an ecosystem which, although carefully controlled, many people want to become a part of.

Remember how difficult it used to be to do software for a telecommunications company. It would take years of negotiation and you would get 10% of the cut and no one would do it. But the Apps Store for the I-Phone is a very different matter. Although Apple still controls the process, their genius has been in opening it up so that everyone can participate. And the next extra step forward is then Android, where anyone can create an app, and Google does not control the apps.

COOK Report: And BT is trying to do the same thing in turning its global IP network into an open services platform.

Bauwens: I think you can see that this is the new thing. It is now becoming more recognized that people collaborate in and out of any entity on a continuous basis. Trying to create closed entities that are hospitable to innovation is a non starter.

COOK Report: how about Umair Haque? http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/

Bauwens: Umair is I think one of the prime expressions of this revolution ongoing within capital. And the P2P Foundation is centered here as well. But I would say that Umair addresses himself to the ‘social entrepreneurial’ community, while the P2P Foundation addresses itself to the peer producing communities. The one approach talks to the entrepreneurial coalitions, we talk to the commons and communities.

COOK Report: How exactly did you transition from Belgacom to P2P?

Bauwens: I wrote an essay on peer to peer in about 2001. I was describing what I was seeing (i.e. the isomorphism of that one form appearing in many different guises in different fields) and decided to take a two year sabbatical to look at it further. I moved to Thailand as a way to last longer on my savings, while figuring out what to do next. This was followed by six months of traveling and six months of intensive learning of Thai culture. Then one year of reading on the long term view of history – Rome, Byzantium, etc ... Why? because when you work for a corporation for too long you have a disease which I would call a short term view of things. I had become very aware that my brain was no longer working as it should. Therefore I took a full year to go back to the long-term view. I was especially interested in phase transitions. In the end of the Roman empire and especially in the transition from feudalism into capitalism. Those are two major phase transitions and I think now that we are facing another one.

This is a MAJOR transition. Feudalism and the end of the Roman Empire involved two entirely different systems. The logic of value creation and the logic of distribution was totally different. You are talking about a fundamentally different logic which of course operated first within the old system. The paradox is that in the first phase the logic change is used by the powers that be to strengthen themselves and their own survival. But by adopting the new practices they also underminethe core logic of the old system and unwittingly prepare the way for their own overthrow by the new logic. This process can take centuries (perhaps 500 years in the case of the Rome to feudalist transition, and half that in the feudal to capitalism tradition).

This is an argument that I have with the left which will say you can see open source being co-opted by capital so this cannot possibly be the answer. I am saying that not necessarily that co-optation is good, but that this is a very positive sign. The fact that it is co-opted by capital is exactly what will make it strong. Feudalism in crisis used capital to survive another 250 years.

COOK Report: It is an admission by capital that it cannot exist without it. Bauwens: Yes. Exactly. It is nurturing that system. Of course largely on its own terms. This is why I am saying that I am on the side of the community. Think about the old industrial system where you have capital on one side and workers on the other and you hire workers to do your stuff.

You protect your copyrights and patents and that is how you make money.

Today you have a community on one side and a platform on the other. My interest is in how a community can maintain its autonomy to the maximum degree knowing that it is partially dependent on these corporate platforms. By the end of my two year schedule I had decided that I would use the internet to maintain a pluralist platform of people researching, documenting, and promoting peer to peer dynamics in every area of social life.

I think this is affecting every aspect of thought, including spirituality and philosophy. I think this is a deep shift in ontology, in value systems, in epistemology – how we know things. It is a restructuring of our social DNA – initially within the old system. What I am seeing as the big shift is that today is we have a dominant system of capital within which things are happening. In this system the core attractor is capital. But now we have competing system of the commons which is adapting in reaction to capital. The circulation of capital is faced with the asymmetric competition of the ‘circulation of the commons’! But eventually it is the market that will be subsumed by the commons. I am not saying that the market will disappear, but I am saying that capitalism will disappear if you define it as unlimited growth in a finite world – that system cannot last.

We must find ways to make the commons compatible with free entrepreneurship, but also at the same time promote new social forms of corporate ownership, -- forms that are no longer solely focused on short-term profit at the expense of the people and the planet.

It may last 30 years or fifty – who knows, but it is logically impossible for this system to continue.

You cannot have capital without growth and accumulation but in a finite universe you cannot have continuous unlimited growth. We have to find another way. The left has said we will replace a dysfunctional capitalist system by a centrally planned system. That clearly did not work substantially better than what it wanted to replace and it had its own systemic issues, beyond also being an exploitative and unfree system itself. I am arguing that today is different. That we have a system that we can see functioning and that functions better than the capitalist system that we now have.

If you want to change things, this is where you have to look. In my view, peer production is hyperproductive economically, peer governance is hyper-productive politically, and peer property is hyper-productive in terms of distribution and equity.

The Gordon Cook Interview (4): the role of the commons

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

COOK Report: Then the commons is an alternative way of enabling people to use capital rather than focus on capital the primary use of which is nothing beyond accumulating more.

This alternative system gives people with capital a large number of choices and strategies about how they will use and invest what they have.

Bauwens: Indeed. One of my research interests is what I call neo-traditionalist economics. If you look at pre-industrial, pre-capitalist society whatever critique we may have of these types of civilizations, the one thing for sure is that their goal was not one of accumulation.

Think about why the Catholic Church owned one third the land of feudal society. The Church owned the land because it was given the land by the feudal lords in search of their salvation. So while the feudal lords were getting the surplus from the farming population they were not into a game of instant accumulation but rather were into a game of being spiritually saved.

COOK Report: So the peer-to-peer commons is the use of capital for earthly salvation or better put for sustainable means?

Bauwens: Yes but I would argue that it is for primarily immaterial means. This is why I try to find a link to pre-capitalist era and study how these people saw the world because today in the capitalist world your identity is linked to having. The more you have the more you are. We have to move again to a situation where the more you are is linking to money only as a means to supporting yourself and a family and as a means to doing good works. Money is a means necessary to our sustaining whatever meaningful pursuit we see as the core of our lives.

The hoped for goal is to rearrange ones life away from constant accumulation of having “things” into an existence characterized more by knowing, being and sharing. This is a shift we have to make as a civilization, in order to survive and thrive.

Why is this world going in the wrong direction? Because of three things and these things were key to me when I created the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. One is an erroneous belief in the infinite abundance of the material world. This worldview takes no externalities into account. It is fixated on what I would call pseudo-abundance or a false sense of abundance that refuses to recognize obvious externality problems. In terms of the physical world we have pseudo-abundance but in terms of innovation and knowledge the dominant point of view is pseudo-scarcity. We need copyright and patents and to enclose innovation. We are thinking that we must overturn this and to make pseudo abundance understood in terms of how the real scarcity is in the physical world. We must recognize that knowledge and science and culture in the digital age are made to flow and to be shared so that any innovation anywhere can be instantly usable by the whole community. These are the two things that need to be changed. If we succeed in doing so, we will have a sustainable world.

Then the third leg of the stool is social justice. If we get the first two legs of the stool right, it becomes difficult to imagine the third leg as being wrong. You don’t want a fascist world where the hierarchy exists for the pleasure of centralized business. We want to change belief in physical abundance and knowledge scarcity but to do so while preserving social justice. When the market fails in the context of a predominant scarcity paradigm, then you need a new allocation mechanism.

COOK Report: If you think the market is not allocating and you depend on hierarchy then you take the course of organizing and rationing the scarcity. On the other hand the more desirable alternative is the grass roots bottom up peer-to-peer allocation?

Bauwens: Exactly but I would make one modification in describing this. Peer production works by bypassing democracy wherever there is abundance. Peer governance is not democracy. Because how the system works in free software for example is that you broadcast tasks that are taken up by contributors. There is no democratic control or discussion over access, no committees deciding where to allocate scare resources! In peer production the domain of scarcity lies in quality control.

Everyone can contribute but not everyone contributes good stuff.

COOK Report: In the commons anyone with innovative ideas can float them and, if they are really good, they get pushed toward the top and more people adopt them.

Bauwens: Exactly. But I would argue that this is where the scarcity is within the commons.

It is in the quality control after the fact. It is post-production. The production itself is self-allocated.

But the acceptance according to quality constraints is usually done by some form either democratic or hierarchical decision making.

In Linux we talk about benevolent dictatorship. There needs to be an element of hierarchy in the control of quality. It is still very significant social progress because if you disagree with the hierarchy, you can fork – that is go off on your own and no one can tell you not to do it. This is contrasted with the fact that all the big political fights in the multinationals are over whether you are allowed to do something or not. There a lot of good ideas just die because they may challenge the entrenched views of those who are higher in the chain of command. Peer production can find itself as much directed against authoritative hierarchy as decision by committee which can also be very disempowering.

I think we are doing similar things with our respective communities. Some sociologists call this object-oriented sociality. “The term 'social networking' makes little sense if we leave out the objects that mediate the ties between people.”

http://p2pfoundation.net/Object-oriented_Sociality

What unites the people in our respective groups is the goal of the meaningful purpose we are trying to achieve. It is that object that disciplines us. Therefore, if your purpose is Wikipedia and you make a mistake, in an article no one will die as a result. The discipline can be lighter. But if you work in software and the purpose of the software is to control a nuclear power pant, it has to work. The object of the social network will determine the governance structure.

The logical problem here is that since I am not paying you to contribute to the commons, how will we discipline ourselves? The way we discipline is by social agreement around the object. We join a network because we share the goal of the network. If the goal changes, we divorce and we seek another one. Since peer to peer networks do not depend on hierarchical relationship we must find other ways to reconcile any differences that arise than we would in a hierarchy or in a market. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010

In my own work at the P2P Foundation, I’m trying to walk the talk and practice what I/we preach.

We are peer producing knowledge about peer production, and I’m not the leader but rather the chief (p)leader. Moreover, because this is our object, we are forced to be very self-reflexive about it. We study peer production and in doing so study the difficulty that we encounter ourselves in the midst of that very same process.

Let’s think about competition and cooperation. I would argue that the capitalist system is one where competition is primary. We compete as companies against each other, but within a company we have to cooperate. In the commons I would argue that the polarity will be reversed. In other words within the commons we are cooperating but that different commons and their respective entrepreneurial coalitions can compete. You have on the one hand Joomla and on the other hand Drupal. But their core is found in a common code base.

In the future I see the free software and open hardware foundation which manages the infrastructure as the kind of institutional vehicles than will determine the line up of productivity within the world. They will be the beacons and around them will flock entrepreneurs, cooperating minds, state aid and so on.

The Gordon Cook Interview (5): the transition towards p2p manufacturing

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

Open Hardware

COOK Report: Tell me more about the transition between open software and open hardware.

Bauwens: Essentially the free software problem is an easy one to solve because what you are creating is immediately usable. You need to bring brains together. You need access to networks and computers with which you can create executable code.

The problem with hardware is that while you can design, the hardware is additional.

Designing hardware is ‘roughly’ the same as software, although there is a more need for contextualized and embedded knowledge that is directly related to the experience with ‘things’. Nevertheless, uniting brains and then drawing together on a Cad Cam system is pretty much similar. But then you need to make and test it. That’s where the money comes in much earlier in the process.

Consequently there is a harder problem to solve. So, if you want to make circuit boards, you have to buy the materials and fabricate something and if it doesn’t work you must do it again. The sustainability issue comes in much earlier in the process than when you would work with software alone.

But the logic is similar, with open design communities on the one hand, and entrepreneurial coalitions on the other. The alignment between more is both more problematic but perhaps also more promising, since solving the cooperation between soft and hard sides is at the same times solving the problem of the reproduction of peer production. I want to see the open design communities align themselves with physical players whose values are in maximum alignment with those of the open design communities.

One of the first concerns is that if you are from a normal capitalist company and you align yourself with an open design process, you are not going to make any money out of intellectual property.

But if you have an open design commons, you will design differently there in than if you had a capitalist based design system. In the first option, design is done to ensure scarcity and the frequent acquisition of new models and rapid obsolescence. Scarcity is engineered into every detail.

It’s anti-sustainable almost by definition.

In the second option, an open design community will be thinking in modular terms and in simplicity of construction so that as much of the product as possible can be made locally.

Instead of having the big multinational the goal is rather to support small local companies but to have them interconnect globally through their common collaborative platforms and open design communities. This is pretty much what is happening with the Arduino platform of circuit boards, where more than 10 companies already making more than one million dollars every year.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arduino and http://p2pfoundation.net/Arduino

Let’s get back then to peer-to-peer dynamics which is any undertaking to which an individual is free to allocate his own resources. If we apply this to the physical world, it would be a process by which the individual can have access to and control over his own physical resources and freely allocate them. This would mean that that instead of having access to computers and their networks, we also need access to distributed machinery. And similarly, the ownership of those companies could have a collective element, i.e. would/could be owned by the worker/peer producers themselves, and not just by shareholders. I’m quite sympathetic to the cooperative and distributist traditions in this context, though I’m open to any solutions which can combines the openness of the immaterial and some sharing at the level of the material.

What we are building now as a global community is types of machinery with very low capital requirements and with no intellectual property protection as we strive for sustainability at the local level

Therefore what we need and what I think we are building now as a global community is types of machinery with very low capital requirements and with no intellectual property protection. Doing things this way becomes much more scalable on the local level.

COOK Report: Can you give me some examples?

Bauwens; I have a list in the p2p wiki called product hacking with between two and three hundred such examples. http://p2pfoundation.net/Product_Hacking. See the screen shot of this URL on the following page.

People are working on things like cheap 3d printing and cheap CNC milling. Apparently any industrial process can be decomposed into six different sub-process. They are working on a universal machine that can be parametricised. Think about it. The capitalist logic is making bigger and bigger machines with ever-higher capital thresholds so that you protect the monopoly of those already in the game. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 A basic open source hardware paradigm is about making as low threshold machine as possible.

One example of how this can work is the alliance between 100kGarages http://www.100kgarages.com/ and a design company that has 30,000 designs. http://p2pfoundation.net/100k_Garages

You go to one of the 100kGarages that are being established in the United States and they will make a design for you. You can see immediately that this is a new paradigm of production, right? Global design which you locally down load and locally make.

COOK Report: And this kind of design is for what kind of goods?

Bauwens: For the moment, most of it is prototyping or for still peripheral ‘maker’ communities, but I think this is just the necessary transition phase. The first crowdsourced car, Local Motors in Detroit, is already in production, and more similar projects are under way. http://www.local-motors.com/

Once we can make cars, the barrier to serious industrial production will be broken. So, wee are moving to from the design design phase to the prototyping design phase and have reached the ‘making’ phase for some advanced but fringe products.

The next step is a discussion of where the making will occur. Will it be only in places like China where they can mass produce these designs? One of my arguments is that the Shanzai system, which makes electronics, is already an illegal version (because the shared designs are reverse engineered proprietary ones) of the system of advocating, and it has been central to the success of the Chinese economy. Historically, new modes of production always arise on the periphery of the previously dominant system. So open production arises in the West, but may well become dominant thanks to the emergence of East Asia!

See http://www.shanzai.com/

The Gordon Cook Interview (6): on peak hierarchy and the 2008 meltdown

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

Impact of Economic Meltdown

COOK Report: How much evidence do you have that the financial crash is motivating a greater interest in what you are doing?

Bauwens: Only indirect evidence such as the number of subscriptions to our blog feeds increased by 300% during the first nine months of 2009. Before 2009 it had been about 50% a year. (In the interest of disclosure, we experience a dip since because of a rather massive blogspamming problem we found difficult to solve). Because I have been closely observing the open hardware open manufacturing field, I can tell you that there are (tens of ?) thousands of people working on it.

This was not the case three years ago. Then the consensus was that it would not work. The feeling was that it was simply too difficult. But now in my community there is no one who doubts that it can be done. We may not know just precisely when. I am assuming now that we are in this era where Linux was two or three years after Linus Torvalds made his announcement on the web asking for help. We are beyond the starting point already.

We are now in the infrastructure phase. If you want to design things you need common tools and a common language. People are working on creating the basic building blocks that will make this possible. It may appear to outsiders to be something very peripheral and only for the hobbyist or do-it-yourserlf crowd. Bt remember that is also what they said about internet. You have to start somewhere and things generally do start at the edges. I am claiming that once it’s is successful at the edges, it takes only one bigger player to go for it by investing to make it real and massively followed. We are not there yet. But we do have a Michigan company called Local Motors http://www.local-motors.com/

that has its first crowd-sourced car where the technical design was done in house by the company but the outside design was done by a community. You don’t want your car to crash. Therefore the company controls essential safety measures. But how the car looks won’t kill anyone so lets get people involved by opening it up.

COOK Report: What are some of the other things going on?

Bauwens: I’ll give you an example in the field of spiritual research. I have an example of one or two people like John Heron in New Zealand (of the South Pacific Center for Human Inquiry). Let’s say you do meditation. You have to choose a lineage from within which to work. If you do it according to the instructions of the lineage, there are certain things you are expected to experience while other experiences may be disqualified. In other words authoritarianism is built into the spiritual practice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Heron

But what if we just agree to get together and practice a certain meditation. Lets say Zen. At the end of the day we get together and exchange our experiences. This then is the open source way to experience things which I personally consider to be real without having to accept the whole hierarchical and institutional context in which this has happened until today. You can see then how peer to peer is not something you apply just in the production of goods or the collection of knowledge.

Perhaps you just apply it to everything.

Every human activity that can be done by peers allocating their resources together can be peer-to-peer. You can therefore have something as unlikely seeming as a peer-to-peer spirituality.

Peak Hierarchy

I want to make an argument here that is a little provocative. I call it peak hierarchy.

http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-peak-oil-to-peak-hierarchy/2008/07/27

Consider what is happening. We used to live in small tribal communities, in fact these communities occupied the most lengthy period of human history. As soon as two tribes make an alliance, or choose a common war chief, they can beat a smaller tribe. This is a tragedy of history. As soon as we reach a certain size which -- according to Dunbar is 150 people -- things become too complex and we simplify through hierarchy which means that bigger defeats smaller. That means if you want to change things through social justice, you can do a little bit but be careful that you don’t do too much otherwise a neighbor will invade and destroy you. You have to remain strong and hierarchical in order to be a player in that game.

Things have changed however in a very interesting way. Today we can scale small group dynamics.

Today a smart coordination of a multitude of small groups united by an object – Wikipedia for example – can defeat a larger centralized effort called Encyclopedia Britannica. Firefox can defeat Internet Explorer. I call this peak hierarchy and this is the first time in history where this big change is happening. It is no longer the big defeating the small. The new reality is that the coordinated small can defeat the command and control paradigm. This is a revolution. It is also what John Robb talks about in Brave New War. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 And for the first time in history, the new game we are playing, let’s call it the anti-monopoly game, is winning from the old game of monopoly. (However, there is an important caveat.

In a capitalist context, a netarchical player will organize infrastructures in such a way that they can keep control as well as master network effects. Think Google and their giant server farms, or Facebook with its 400 million users).

This is the meaning of Peak Hierarchy: horizontality is starting to trump verticality, it is becoming more competitive to be distributed, than to be (de)centralized.

This is the meaning of Peak Hierarchy: horizontality is starting to trump verticality, it is becoming more competitive to be distributed, than to be (de)centralized.

The Gordon Cook Interview (7): open agriculture

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

COOK Report: You mention Vinay Gupta http://vinay.howtolivewiki.com/blog/ who among other things runs Buttered Side Down which he describes as a boutique risk management consultancy focusing on historic risks, defined as the special class of systemic risks that "change everything."

He has a presentation with the following interdependency diagram:

http://butteredsidedown.co.uk/scim.html

Among other things, the diagram calls our attention to food. So let me ask: How does open agriculture come in?

Bauwens: I am in touch with a group of people working in Michigan. These folk are trying to adopt peer-to-peer principals to agricultural production. Traditional farming is fine, but it doesn’t grow in the sense of social innovation because, by definition, rather fixed tradition is followed.

There is therefore no real evolution there. You do what your forefathers did and it may be working mvery well in your isolated environment but as soon as you have competition from a global player in agriculture you are dead.

Today if you are a farmer say in Thailand, whom do you depend on for agriculture that goes beyond subsistence production? You depend on the state and on the politicians who provide funding.

Where do they get their funding from? Big agricultural companies. From both you get the same advice. Centralize. Get bigger, use pesticides and toxic fertilizer. This is the advice you get. What is the alternative? Left with this dependency, there is none.

But what if farmers unite. and what if you have say a video conferencing or what Franz Nahrada of the Global Village movement calls a video bridging facility, a “University of the Villages”. What if you could exchange information and knowledge on a permanent basis? Your possible course of action expand.

(See http://p2pfoundation.net/Category:Agrifood for p2p-influenced agrifood practices).

Your goal may become permaculture. Now permaculture is a vision of agriculture that is permanently sustainable. It suggests that you organize your agriculture and food production so that it can be sustained indefinitely without weakening the soil. But the key for these players now is that they are no longer isolated.

One permaculture farmer can connect with another one and they can share their innovations. If Bill McKibben is to be believed, in Cuba they have institutes of public agriculture where they are doing some very interesting things with science in the service of local farmers organized in coops rather than agribusiness. These coops can function relatively independently on the food market, while they benefit from the national open design community maintained by the Cuban state institutions.

It is of course a flawed model because of the authoritarianism of that model and the many problems that flow from the authoritarianism, but nevertheless, that such a dynamic can happen even there in Cuba shows the strength of an open innovation dynamic. According to people who have studied it, the Cuban agricultural system is very successful. The people are well fed and agricultural workers have high wages -- at least in the Cuban context. This was done with minimal technology. Imagine what could happen if, in a free society, you added in good internet connections.

I can show you studies that determine that organic agriculture is more productive in terms of nutrition than capitalist agriculture. If you take a square mile of crop land and count the cost of all the minerals and other inputs, it becomes higher. THE COOK REPORT ON INTERNET PROTOCOL AUGUST 2010 However, it may not be economically competitive in terms of wage labour inputs and outputs, so it pretty much depends on how you see things. But in terms of feeding people it is absolutely workable.

But then again the only way to compete with Monsanto is to have better R&D than Monsanto.

I haven’t been to Detroit but I have heard interesting stories. Some people would say that Detroit is regressing of course. But the people in Detroit are now growing their own food again. There is a serious food crisis likely in the next 20 to 30 years. Did you know that Singapore has decided to reinvest in local agriculture setting aside 20% of their budget in local acreage that would grow food inside the city? I read that Chinese cities used to be able to produce 60% of the needed food within their city limits, but of course these capacities have been pretty much destroyed in the current model.

Like John Robb, what I’m expecting is a lessening dependence on global streams of capital, goods and labour, and a return to more local resilience.

[ Editor: See Exploring Resilient Communities with John Robb (2): the infrastructure ] Resilience comes in two main parts: food production and industry, supported by two underlying infrastructural elements: smart local information networks and local money systems . . .

The Gordon Cook Interview (8): the role of the P2P Foundation

On March 4 2010, Gordon Cook was able to interview me in Bangkok. This became the basis for the August-September special issue of the Cook Report, a newsletter that is distributed to telecommunication leaders. It’s the most in-depth profile of our work to date and the first 17 pages, which feature a detailed comparison of John Robb’s work with ours, has been serialized separately. This is the interview proper, which starts pp. 18+.

The P2P Community Structure and Goals

COOK Report: How have you structured and developed your community and where do you see it going?

Bauwens: If you have no money and no capital, you plant your flag and say this is what I want.

You mainly start with yourself and show the example.

I started collecting and organizing information around peer production. This then attracts people who are interested in the subject and I simply ask them to collaborate. Organically we have grown by 50% since 2006 when we started our community. We have more than 11,000 pages in our wiki that have been viewed 12.5 million times over the course of almost 4 years. We have almost 3000 daily readers of our blog and according to the Topsy double ranking calculations of Twitter influence, we are a top 2% global blog in terms of retweets and mentions. NOT that we reach a mass audience directly, but we reach the influencers, each in turn have their own audience, and that adds up. The people who read us are pretty sophisticated. For example on my delicious network there is Clay Shirky, Mackenzie Wark (Hacker Manifesto), and Howard Rheingold (Smart Mobs).

These people are read by lots of other people. All this has been achieved without any money and without any marketing. Why? Because we focus on the consistent spreading of quality information.

So out of this came several things. People started buying my presence, i.e. my ‘performance’ as a lecturer, to hear it from the horse’s own mouth as it were. I have about six trips a year where I am gone for about 15 or 20 days. My business model now is that with a free encyclopedic online presence people pay for my scare physical presence. Do I make a sufficient living out of this? No. Do I eke out some living? Yes. I must admit that I pine for a regular income from some kind of neo-patronage, as I feel a commercial orientation would not be compatible with my current goals, even if I was a somewhat successful entrepreneur at times in my previous life. You understand it by understanding that you have different kinds of capital. Financial capital, relational capital. Reputational capital, purpose capital. You may have less of some but if you can compensate and find happiness and freedom in the other, then it is so much easier to endure the hardship of the lack of financial capital.

Traveling around means real life face to face human contact. Once people meet you some of them want to work with you even more. You get a chance to spawn local communities. I have a local chapter in Greece and they get 30,000 visitors on their pages. Now they invite me. I will have an interview in a major newspaper. In Spain, we had at least four TV appearances during our last trip in Barcelona.

The next thing that happens is that once the community is on line, then people want to get together in person. So we have been able to organize 6 conferences of people locally. We generally find a university or a foundation who would say here is $ 20,000 to fund a conference on a particular thematic subject and they let me suggest some of the speakers. This model has worked well though it doesn’t insure institutional continuity. But there is a real community that has the possibility of being self-sustaining. For example, I have a mailing list. Very active. 30 or 40 items per day. But I am not the list master anymore. There are two guys who volunteered for that. There is a NING community and another person takes care of that. When one creates something there can be some interesting ego issues in letting control of it spread to the involved community members.

For more detail see http://p2pfoundation.net/History_of_the_P2P_Foundation .

For me the key to avoiding ego issues is aligning collective efforts with a higher purpose that transcends the individual ego. And not to oppose self and altruism but to find an alignment between them. I try to think of what motivates me and what I am good at. I like to speak and to be in front of an audience, which may be in effect be narcissistic. Therefore, instead of lamenting this fact, I like to think let’s use this for something that transcends my own limitations so that my own proclivities become useful to others. The second thing is, I think, a service orientation. This is where my peer to peer ethos comes in. No matter who you are – if you are a student and you are awkward about it and you don’t know how to express yourself in the community I will help you. I will post your request, and if no one answers I will repeat it. This does not always work, but at least we try. Sometimes people have other things on their mind or just don’t know but I will always have a consistently service oriented approach. We are a knowledge exchange community and are there to help you. As long as it relates to peer to peer, we will try to help and this creates gratitude.

If only one percent give something back, that is fine. One percent out of one hundred is one person.

One percent out of one thousand is ten people. One percent of ten thousand is one hundred. That is a powerful dynamic. People voluntarily contributing to some degree to the further building of your resources. For me the link is important because we are building a cathedral. I use it as a metaphor to focus on building of a massive body of knowledge by volunteer effort. Building cathedral was a community effort which people could see. It could attract people from all over the world and they could be proud of it for the rest of their lives. So our wiki, if you will, is our cathedral. We can continue to improve it and even if I die it will live on, at least this is my hope.