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MICHEL BAUWENS
Michel Bauwens [Foundation for P2P
Alternatives]
Not since the times that Marx identified
the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist
society, has there been a deeper transformation taking place of the
fundamentals of our social life. As the political, economic and social systems
are transforming themselves into distributed networks, a new human dynamic is
emerging: peer to peer. As P2P is giving rise to the emergence of a third mode
of production, a third mode of governance, and a third mode of property, it is
poised to overhaul our political economy in unprecedented ways. This essay aims
to develop the beginning of a
conceptual framework, a 'P2P theory', adequate to the understanding of
these new social processes.
Definition of P2P
Peer
to Peer is the name for the the
relational dynamic that occurs in distributed networks. Distributed networks
should be differentiated from
decentralized network: in other words, hubs and passageways must be
voluntary rather than obligatory, making the agents free in their choice of
connections. Moreover, P2P is not just any behavior or process that takes place
in a distributed network: they specifically those that aim to increase the most
widespread participation by equipotential participants P2P processes should be
distinguished from general network sociality, seen as an intentional process
geared towards participation. We will define these terms when we examine the
characteristics of P2P processes, but here are the most general and important
characteristics.
P2P are those processes that are geared:
–
to produce use value through the free cooperation of producers who have
access to distributed capital: this is the P2P production mode, a 'third mode
of production', different from for-profit or public production by state-owned
enterprises. It's product is not exchange value for a market, but use value for
a community of users.
–
whose processes and decision-making are governed by the community of
producers themselves, and not by market allocation or corporate hierarchy: this
is the P2P governance mode, or 'third mode of governance'
–
that make this use value freely accessible on a universal basis, through
new common property regimes: this is its distribution or 'property mode': a
'third mode of ownership', different from private property or public (state)
property.
What has been needed to facilitate the
emergence of such peer to peer processes?
The first requirement is the existence of a
technological infrastructure that operates on peer to peer processes and
enables 'distributed access to 'fixed' capital'.
Individual computers, enabling a universal
machine that can execute any logical task, is a form of distributed 'fixed
capital', that is available at low cost to many producers.
The internet, as a point to point network,
was specifically designed for participation by the edges (computer users),
without the use of obligatory hubs. Though it is not fully in the hands of its
participants, it is controlled through distributed governance, and outside the
complete hegemony of particular private or state actors. Its hierarchical
elements (such as the stacked IP protocols, the decentralized Domain Name
System, etc…) do not deter participation.
Viral communicators, or meshworks, are a logical
extension of the internet. With this methodology, devices create their own
networks, through the use of excess capacity, bypassing the need for a
pre-existing infrastructure. The 'Community Wi-Fi' movement, the Open Spectrum
advocacy, file-serving television, and alternative meshwork-based
telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of this trend.
The second requirement is an alternative
information and communication systems which allows for autonomous communication
between cooperating agents.
The web, in particular the Writeable Web
(and in particular the Web 2.0 that is in the process of being established),
allows for the universal autonomous production, dissemination, and
'consumption', of written material, while the associated podcasting and webcasting
developments, created an 'alternative information and communication
infrastructure' for audio and audiovisual creation as well. The existence of
such an infrastructure enables autonomous content production, that can be
distributed without the intermediary of the classic publishing and broadcasting
media, though new forms of intermediation
may arise.
The third requirement is the existence of a
'software' infrastructure for autonomous global cooperation. A growing number
of collaborative tools, such as blogs and wiki's, embedded in social networking
software, to facilitate linkages, and social accounting tools, to facilitate
the creation of trust and social capital, have made it possible to create
global groups that can create use value without the intermediary of
manufacturing or distribution by for-profit enterprises.
The fourth requirement is a legal
infrastructure, that enables the creation of use value and protects it from
private appropriation. The General Public License, which prohibits the appropriation
of software code, the related Open Source Initiative, and certain versions of
the Creative Commons license for publishing, fulfill this role. It enables the
protection of common use value and uses viral characteristics to spread itself.
GPL and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their
adapted source code in the public domain.
The fifth requirement is cultural. The
diffusion of mass intellectuality, i.e. the distribution of human intelligence,
and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing
(epistemology) and value constellations (axiology), have been instrumental in
creating the type of cooperative individualism needed to sustain an ethos which
can enable P2P projects.
P2P processes occur in distributed
networks. Distributed networks are not just any type of network however: they
are networks where autonomous agents can freely determine their behavior and
linkages, without the intermediary of obligatory hubs. As Alexander Galloway
has insisted in his book about protocollary power, distributed networks are not
the same as decentralized networks, where hubs are obligatory. P2P is based on
distributed power, and distributed access to resources. In a decentralized network
such as the U.S.-based airport system, planes have to go through determined
hubs; however in distributed systems such as the internet or the highway
systems, hubs may exist, but are not obligatory and agents may always route
around it.
P2P projects are characterized by
equipotentiality or 'anti-credentialism'. This means that there is no a priori
selection to participation. The capacity to cooperate is verified in the
process of cooperation itself. Thus, projects are open to all comers provided
they have the necessary skills to contribute to a project. These skills are
verified, and communally validated, in the process of production itself. This
is apparent in open publishing projects such as citizen journalism: everyone
can post, but every one can verify the veracity of the articles, and reputation
systems are used for communal validation. The filtering is a posteriori, not a
priori. Anti-credentialism is therefore to be contrasted to traditional peer
review, where credentials are an essential prerequisite to participate.
P2P projects are characterized by
holoptism. Holoptism is the implied capacity and design of peer to processes
that allows participants free access to all the information about the other
participants (not in terms of privacy, but in terms of their existence and
contributions), i.e. horizontal information; and access to the aims, metrics
and documentation of the project as a whole, i.e. the vertical dimension. This
can be contrasted to the panoptism which is characteristic of hierarchical
projects: here, the processes are designed to reserve such 'total' knowledge to
an elite, while participants only have access on a 'need to know' basis.
Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules,
but feedback is systemic, integrated in the protocol of the cooperative system.
The above does not exhaust the
characteristics of peer production. However, we will continue our investigation of these in the context of a
comparison with the other existing modes of production.
The framework of our comparison is the
Relational Models theory of anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, discussed in his
major work 'The Structure of Social Life'. Since modes of production are
embedded in intersubjective relations, i.e. they are characterized by
particular combinations of them, this will give the necessary framework to
distinguish P2P. According to Fiske, there are four basic types of
intersubjective dynamics, valid across time and space, in his own words:
“People use just four fundamental models for
organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures . These
models are Communal Sharing, Authority Ranking, Equality Matching, and Market
Pricing. Communal Sharing (CS) is a relationship in which people treat some
dyad or group as equivalent and undifferentiated with respect to the social
domain in question. Examples are people using a commons (CS with respect to
utilisation of the particular resource), people intensely in love (CS with
respect to their social selves), people who "ask not for whom the bell
tolls, for it tolls for thee" (CS with respect to shared suffering and
common well-being), or people who kill any member of an enemy group
indiscriminately in retaliation for an attack (CS with respect to collective
responsibility). In Authority Ranking (AR) people have asymmetric positions in
a linear hierarchy in which subordinates defer, respect, and (perhaps) obey,
while superiors take precedence and take pastoral responsibility for subordinates.
Examples are military hierarchies (AR in decisions, control, and many other
matters), ancestor worship (AR in offerings of filial piety and expectations of
protection and enforcement of norms), monotheistic religious moralities (AR for
the definition of right and wrong bycommandments or will of God), social status systems
such as class or ethnic rankings (AR with respect to social value of
identities), and rankings such as sports team standings (AR with respect to
prestige). AR relationships are based on perceptions of legitimate asymmetries,
not coercive power; they are not inherently exploitative (although they may
involve power or cause harm).
In Equality Matching relationships people
keep track of the balance or difference among participants and know what would
be required to restore balance. Common manifestations are turn-taking,
one-person one-vote elections, equal share distributions, and vengeance based
on an-eye-for-an-eye, a-tooth-for-a-tooth. Examples include sports and games
(EM with respect to the rules, procedures, equipment and terrain), baby-sitting
coops (EM with respect to the exchange of child care), and restitution in-kind
(EM with respect to righting a wrong). Market Pricing relationships are
oriented to socially meaningful ratios or rates such as prices, wages,
interest, rents, tithes, or cost-benefit analyses. Money need not be the
medium, and MP relationships need not be selfish, competitive, maximizing, or
materialistic—any of the four models may exhibit any of these features. MP relationships
are not necessarily individualistic; a family may be the CS or AR unit running
a business that operates in an MP mode with respect to other enterprises.
Examples are property that can be bought, sold, or treated as investment
capital (land or objects as MP), marriages organized contractually or
implicitly in terms of costs and benefits to the partners, prostitution (sex as
MP), bureaucratic cost-effectiveness standards (resource allocation as MP),
utilitarian judgments about the greatest good for the greatest number, or
standards of equity in judging entitlements in proportion to contributions (two
forms of morality as MP), considerations of "spending time"
efficiently, and estimates of expected kill ratios (aggression as MP). “ (source:
Fiske website [1][i])
Every type of society or civilisational is
a mixture of these four modes, but it can plausibly be argued that one mode is
dominant, and imprints the other subservient modes. Historically, the first
dominant mode was kinship or lineage based reciprocity, the so-call tribal gift
economies. The key relational aspect was 'belonging'. Gifts created obligations
and relations beyond the next of kin, creating a wider field of exchange.
Agricultural or feudal-type societies were dominated by Authority Ranking, i.e.
they were based on allegiance. Finally, it is not difficult to see that the
capitalist economy is dominated by Market Pricing, which is the dominant mode
today.
P2P is often called a 'gift economy' for
example by Richard Barbrook. However, it is our contention that this is
somewhat misleading. The key reason is that peer to peer is not a form of
equality matching, it is not based on reciprocity. P2P is follows the adage:
each contributes according to his capacities and willingness, each takes
according to his needs. There is no reciprocity involved. In the pure forms of
peer production, producers are not paid, and there is no tit for tat. So, if
there is 'gifting' it is entirely non-reciprocal gifting, the use of peer-produced
use value does not create a contrary obligation. The emergence of peer to peer
is contemporaneous with new forms of the gift economy, such as the Local
Exchange Trading Systems, and the use of reciprocity-based complementary
currencies: these do not qualify as peer production.
This is not to say that they are not
complementary, since both Equality Matching and Communal Shareholding derive
from the same spirit of gifting. Peer production can most easily operate in the
sphere of immaterial goods, where the input are free time and available the
surplus of computing resources. Equality matching, reciprocity-based schemes
and cooperative production are necessary in the material sphere, where the cost
of capital intervenes. At present, peer production offers no solution to the
material survival of its participants. Many people that are inspired by the
egalitarian ethos will therefore resort to cooperative production, the social
economy, and other schemes from which they can derive an income, while at the same
time honor their values. In that sense, these schemes are complementary.
P2P is not hierarchy-less, not
structureless, but usually characterized by flexible ‘voluntary’ hierarchies
and structures based on both the historical origination of the project (the
ideological leaders) and merit (competence), and that are used to enable
participation rather than to deter it. Leaderships is also 'distributed'. Most
often, P2P projects as a whole are led by a core of founders, who embody the original
aims of the project, and who coordinate the vast number of individuals and
microteams working on specific patches. Their authority and leadership derives
from their input in the constitution of the project, and on their continued
engagement. It is true that peer projects are sometimes said to be 'benevolent
dictatorships', but one must not forget that since the cooperation is entirely
voluntary, the continued existence of such voluntary projects are based on the
consent of the community of producers, and 'forking', i.e. the creation of a
new independent project, is always possible.
The relation between authority and
participation, and its historical evolution, has been most usefully outlined by
John Heron:
"There seem to be at least four
degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:
(1) autocratic cultures which define
rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political
participation;
(2) narrow democratic cultures which
practice political participation through representation, but have no or very
limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as
research, religion, education, industry etc.;
(3) wider democratic cultures which
practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of
participation;
(4) commons p2p cultures in a
libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of
participation of everyone in every field of human endeavor."
Heron adds that "These four degrees could be stated in terms of the
relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.
(1) Hierarchy defines, controls and
constrains co-operation and autonomy;
(2) Hierarchy empowers a measure of
co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;
(3) Hierarchy empowers a measure of
co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in
other spheres;
(4) The sole role of hierarchy
is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous
flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor.
What people are doing in P2P is voluntarily and cooperatively
constructing a commons, according to the ‘communist principle’: from each
according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’. The use value created by P2P projects is
done through free cooperation, without coercion towards the producers, and
users are free to use the resulting use value. Through the legal infrastructure
that we have described before, it creates an 'Information Commons'. The new
Commons is related to the older form of the commons (i.e. most notable the
communal lands of the peasantry in the Middle Ages and of the original
mutualities of the workers in the industrial age), but it also differs mostly
through its largely immaterial characteristics: the older Commons were
localized, used and sometimes regulated by specific communities; the new
Commons are universally available and regulated by global cyber-collectives,
usually affinity groups. While the new Commons is centered around non-rival
goods, i.e. in a context of abundance, the older form of physical Commons (air,
water, etc..) is increasingly functioning in context of scarcity, thus becoming
more regulated.
P2P exchange can be considered in market
terms only in the sense that free individuals are free to contribute, or take
what they need, following their individual inclinations, with a invisible hand
bringing it all together, without monetary mechanism. But they are not true markets in any real sense of the word:
market pricing nor managerial command are required to make decisions regarding the
allocation of resources. There are more differences:
– Markets do not function
according to the criteria of collective intelligence and holoptism, but rather,
in the form of insect-like swarming intelligence. Yes, there are autonomous
agents in a distributed environment, but each individual only sees his own
immediate benefit.
– Markets are based on
'neutral' cooperation, and not on synergistic cooperation: no reciprocity is
created.
–
Markets operate for the exchange value and profit, not directly for the
use value.
– Whereas P2P aims at full
participation, markets only fulfill the needs of those with purchasing power.
Amongst the disadvantages of markets are:
–
They do not function well for common needs that do not assure full
payment of the service rendered (national defense, general policing, education
and public health), and do not only fail to take into account negative
externalities (the environment, social costs, future generations), but actively
discourages such behavior.
–
Since open markets tend to lower profit and wages, it always gives rise
to anti-markets, where oligopolies and monopolies use their privileged position
to have the state 'rig' the market to their benefit.
Despite these differences, P2P and the
capitalist market are highly inter-related. P2P is dependent on the market, and
the market is dependent on P2P.
Peer production is highly dependent on the
market. The reason is that peer production produces use value, through mostly
immaterial production, without directly providing an income for its producers.
Participants cannot live from peer production, though they derive meaning and
value from it, and though it may out compete, in efficiency and productivity
terms, the market-based for-profit alternatives. Thus: 1) peer production
covers only a section of production, while the market provides for nearly all
sections; 2) peer producers are dependent on the income provided by the market.
So far, peer production is created through the interstices of the market.
But the market and capitalism is equally
dependent on P2P. Capitalism has become a system relying on distributed
networks, in particular on the P2P infrastructure in computing and
communication. Productivity is highly reliant on cooperative teamwork, most
often organized in ways that are derivative of peer production's governance.
The support given by major IT companies to open source development is a
testimony to the use derived from even the new common property regimes. The
general business model seems to be that business 'surfs' on the P2P infrastructure,
and creates a surplus value through services, which can be packaged for its
exchange value. However, the support of free software and open sources by
business poses an interesting problem. Is corporate-sponsored, and eventually
corporate managed FS/OS software still 'P2P'. The answer is: only partially. If
it uses the GPL/OSI legal structures, it does results in common property
regimes. But if peer producers are made dependent on the income, and even more
so, if the production becomes beholden to the corporate hierarchy, then it
would no longer qualify as peer production. Thus, capitalist forces will mostly
use partial implementations of P2P. The tactical and instrumental use of P2P
infrastructure, collaborative practices, etc.. is only part of the story
however. In fact, contemporary capitalism's dependence on P2P is systemic. As
the whole underlying infrastructure of capitalism becomes distributed, it
generates P2P practices and becomes dependent on them. The French-Italian
school of 'cognitive capitalism' (i.e. those that emit the hypothesis of) in
fact stresses, in my view correctly, that value creation today is no longer
confined to the enterprise, but beholden to the mass intellectuality of
knowledge workers, who through their lifelong learning/experiencing and
systemic connectivity, constantly innovate within and without the enterprise.
This is an important argument, since it would justify what we see as the only
solution for the expansion of the P2P sphere into society at large: the universal
basic income. Only the independence of work and the salary structure, can
guarantee that peer producers can continue to create this sphere of highly
productive use value.
Does all this mean that peer production is
only immanent to the system, productive of capitalism, and not in any way
transcendent to capitalism?
More specific than this generic
relationship that we just described, peer to peer processes are also
contributing to more specific forms of distributed capitalism. The massive use
of open source software in business, enthusiastically supported by venture
capital and large IT companies such as IBM, is created a distributed software
platform that will drastically undercut the monopolistic rents enjoyed by
companies such as Microsoft and Oracle, while Skype and VoIP in general will
drastically distribute the telecom infrastructure. But it also points to a new
business model that is 'beyond' products, but rather focuses on services
associated with the nominally free FS/OS software model. Industries are
gradually transforming themselves to incorporate user-generated innovation, and
a new re-intermediation may occur around user-generated media. Many knowledge
workers are choosing non-corporate paths and becoming minipreneurs, relying on
an increasingly sophisticated participatory infrastructure, a kind of digital
corporate commons.
The for-profit forces that are building and
enabling these new platforms of participation represent a new subclass, which I
call the netarchical class. If cognitive capitalism is to be defined by the
primacy of intellectual assets over fixed capital industrial assets, and thus
on the reliance of an extension of IP rights (which protects the information
core of their products, which can otherwise easilty be replicated) to establish
monopolistic rents, and if the vectoral capitalists described by Mackenzie Wark
derive their power from the control of the media vectors, then these new
netarchical capitalists derive their power from the enablement and exploitation
of the participatory networks. Think how Amazon build itself around user
reviews, how eBay lives from a platform for worldwide distributed auctions, or
how Google lives off user-generated content. Though these companies may still
rely on IP rights for the occasional extra buck, it is not in any sense the
core of their power, which relies in their ownership of the platform. The
evolution towards open knowledge, open source and open access, a result of the
easy replication at marginal cost of information and even of physical products,
undermines the basis of cognitive capitalism; while the distribution of media
into ‘post-media’, undermines the power base of vectoral capitalism whose mass
media are losing ground relative to the post-media.
But netarchical capitalism embraces the
peer to peer revolution, and ideologically, all those forces for whom
capitalism is the ultimate horizon of human possibility. It is the force behind
the immanence of peer to peer. Opposed to it, though linked to it in a temporary
alliance, are the forces of Common-ism, those that put their faith in the
transcendence of peer to peer, in a reform of the political economy beyond the
domination of the market. Commons forces and the netarchists find common ground
in their opposition to the old models of vectoralism and the private
appropriation of common knowledge, but the for-profit nature of the netarchists
pushes them to ‘exploit’ the common knowledge for their own benefit, not by
privatizing them through IP, but through the control of the platforms and the
selling of the attention generated by the ‘wisdom of crowds’. The new class
issues that emerge concern 1) the ownership of the physical layer, such as ‘who
owns the servers’; 2) the control of the code layer and what is enables and
disables as well as interoperability issues that restricts the freedom to
control one’s own information production; 3) the ownership of the commonly
regulated content: to what degree is their an equitable revenuesharing, rather
than the revenue being appropriated by
the platforms.
Indeed, our review of the immanent aspects
of peer to peer, on how it is both dependent and productive of capitalism, does
not exhaust the subject. P2P has important transcendent aspects which go beyond
the limitations set by the for-profit economy:
–
peer production effectively enables the free cooperation of producers,
who have access to their own means of production, and the resulting use value
of the projects out competes for-profit alternatives
Historically, when such germs of higher
productivity have been present in society, though they were first embedded in
the old productive system, they have led to deep upheavals and reconstitutions
of the political economy. The emergence of capitalist modes with the feudal
system is a case in point. The fact that leading sectors of the for-profit
economy are deliberately slowing down productive growth (in music, through
patents) and trying to outlaw P2P production and sharing practices, is
particularly significant.
–
peer governance transcends both the authority of the market and the
state
–
the new forms of universal common property, transcend the limitations of
both private and public property models and are reconstituting a dynamic field
of the Commons.
At the time where the very success of the
capitalist mode of production, actually endangers the biosphere and causes
increasing psychic (and physical) damage in the population, the emergence of
such an alternative is particularly appealing, and corresponds to the new
cultural needs of large numbers of the population. The emergence and growth of
peer to peer is therefore accompanied by a new work ethic (Pekka Himanen's
'Hacker Ethic'), by new cultural practices such as peer circles in spiritual
research (John Heron's cooperative inquiry), but most of all by a new political
and social movement which is intent on promoting its expansion. This still
nascent P2P movement (which includes the Free Software and Open Source
movement, the open access movement, the free culture movement and others) which
is also echoed in the very means of organisation and aims of the
alterglobalisation movement, is fast becoming the equivalent of what was the
socialist movement in the industrial age: a permanent alternative to the status
quo, and the expression of the growth of a new social force, i.e. the knowledge
workers.
In fact the aim of peer to peer theory is
to give a theoretical underpinning to the transformative practices of these
movements, an attempt to create a radical understanding that a new kind of
society, based on the centrality of the Commons, and within a reformed market
and state, is in the realm of human possibility.
Such a theory would have to explain not
only the dynamic of peer to peer processes proper, but also its fit with the
other intersubjective dynamics, i.e. how it molds reciprocity modes, market
modes and hierarchy modes; on what ontological, epistemological and axiological
transformations this evolution is resting; and what a possible positive P2P
ethos can be.
A crucial element of such a peer to peer
theory would be the development of tactics and strategy for such transformative
practice. The key question is: can peer to peer be expanded beyond the
immaterial sphere where it was born?
Given the dependence of P2P on the existing
market mode, what are its chances to expand beyond the existing sphere of
non-rival immaterial goods?
Here are a number of theses about this
potential:
–
P2P can arise not only in the immaterial sphere of intellectual and
software production, but wherever there is access to distributed technology:
spare computing cycles, distributed telecommunications and any kind of viral
communicator meshwork
–
P2P can arise wherever other forms of distributed fixed capital is
available: such is the case for carpooling, which is the second mode of
transportation in the U.S.
–
P2P can arise wherever the process of design, can be separated from the
process of physical production. Huge capital outlays for production can
co-exist with a reliance on P2P processes for design and conception
–
P2P can arise wherever financial capital can be distributed. Initiatives
such as the ZOPA bank point in that direction. Cooperative purchase and use of
large capital goods are a possibility. State support and funding of open source
development is another example.
–
P2P could be expanded and sustained through the introduction of the
universal basic income.
The latter, which creates an income
independent of salaried work, has the potential to sustain a further
development of P2P-generated use value. Through the 'full activity' ethos
(rather than full employment) of P2P, the basic income receives a powerful new
argument: not only as efficacious in terms of poverty and unemployment, but as
creating important new use value for the human community.
However, as it is difficult to see how the
use value production and exchange could be the only form of production, it is
more realistic to see peer to peer as part of a process of change. In such a
scenario, peer to peer would co-exist with the other intersubjective modes, but
which it would profoundly transform.
A Commons-based political economy would be
centered around peer to peer, but it would co-exist with:
– a
powerful and re-invigorated sphere of reciprocity (gift-economy), centered
around the introduction of time-based complementary currencies
– a
reformed sphere for market exchange, the kind of 'natural capitalism' described
by Paul Hawken, David Korten and Hazel Henderson, where the costs for natural
and social reproduction are no longer externalized, and which abandons the growth imperative for a
throughput economy as described by Herman Daly
– a
reformed state, that operates within a context of multistakeholdership, and
which is no longer subsumed to corporate interests, but act as a fair arbiter
between the Commons, the market and the gift economy
Such a goal could be the inspiration for a
powerful alternative to neoliberal dominance, and create a kaleidoscope of
'Common-ist' movements broadly inspired by such goals.
The weekly newsletter P2P News, is archived
at: http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
The Foundation for P2P Alternatives has
a Wiki at: http://p2pfoundation.net/index.php/Manifesto
The P2P Foundation blog is at http://blog.p2pfoundation.com/
Contact the Foundation at [email protected]
NOTES
1. URL = http://www.sscnet.ucla.edu/anthro/faculty/fiske/relmodov.htm
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Skolimowski, Henryk., The Participatory
Mind, Penguin USA, New York, 1995.
Stallman, Richard, Free Software, Free
Society, GNU Press, Boston, Mass.,
2002.
Surowiecki, James, The Wisdom of Crowds,
Anchor, New York, 2005.
Wark, McKenzie, A Hacker Manifesto,
Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 2004.
Weber, Steve. The Success of Open Source,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
The author, Michel Bauwens, has played a
major role in the digital revolution of his home country Belgium, where he is
known as an internet pioneer. He created two dot.com companies, was (eBusiness)
strategic director for the telecommunications company Belgacom, and 'European
Manager of Thought Leadership' for the U.S. webconsultancy MarchFIRST. He
co-produced the 3-hour TV documentary 'TechnoCalyps: the metaphysics of
technology and the end of man', and co-edited two French-language books on the
'Anthropology of Digital Society', and was editor in chief of the Flemish
digital magazine Wave. He now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he created
the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. He taught the Anthropology of Digital
Society for postgraduate students at ICHEC/St. Louis in Brussels, Belgium and
related courses to Payap University and Chiang Mai University in Thailand.