Peer to Peer and the Future
Peer to peer social processes are bottom-up processes whereby agents in a distributed network can freely engage in common pursuits, without external coercion, i.e. permissionlessly undertake actions and relations. This requires not just ‘decentralized’ systems, but ‘distributed’ systems, through which individuals can cooperate. Distributed networks do have constraints, forms of internal coercion, that are the conditions for the group to operate, and they may be embedded in the technical infrastructure, the social norms, or legal rules. Despite these caveats, we have here a remarkable social dynamic, which is based both on voluntary participation in the creation of common goods, which are made universally available to all.
Peer to peer processes are emerging in literally every cranny of social life, and have been extensively documented in the 9,000+ pages of documentation at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, and many other places on the Web.
P2P social processes more precisely engender:
1) peer production: wherever a group of peers decided to engage in the production of a common resource
2) peer governance: the means they choose to govern themselves while they engage in such pursuit
3) peer property: the institutional and legal framework they choose to guard against the private appropriation of this common work; this usually takes the form of non-exclusionary forms of universal common property, as defined through the General Public License, (and a less stringent, individually focused ‘sharing’ mode, as seen in Creative Commons licenses, or similar derivatives).
Peer governance combines the free self-aggregation between individual skills and universally broadcast tasks, processes for communal validation of excellence within the broader pool of input, and defense mechanisms against private appropriation and sabotage. Peer governance differs from hierarchical allocation of resources, from allocation through the market, and even from democracy, as these are all mechanisms for dealing with scarce resources. Peer governance essentially aims, and often succeeds, in making sure that no formal ‘representative group’ can take decisions separate from the community of peer producers. Its social reproduction mode, the circulation of the common, combines the open and free availability of raw material, participatory non-exclusionary processes of production, and universal availability of the result, creating a new layer of open and free material for the next iteration.
Peer production is hyperproductive compared to the for-profit mode, 1) because it deselects both negative (fear) and positive (pure self-interest based on exchange of equivalent value) extrinsic motivation, relying solely on intrinsic motivation; 2) it strives for absolute quality while for-profit companies can only strive for relative quality. Hence the birth of a model of commons-based peer production, which combines relatively autonomous communities, for-benefit associations (usually Foundations) managing the infrastructure of cooperation, and an ecology of businesses cooperating with the commons, and through their benefit-sharing practices, maintaining the viability of the infrastructure of cooperation.
For society to change, as we’ve seen in the two previous meta-transitions from slavery to feudalism and from feudalism to capitalism, it is necessary that there is a congruent change from both the top and the base of the social pyramid, with at least a sizeable section of the former ruling structure morphing to the new mode. This is happening in peer production, through the engagement of netarchical capitalists, who invest in sharing platforms and associate themselves with knowledge, software, and design commons.
(design commons, because peer production is presently moving from free software to open hardware, and creating new alliances with more localized producers of physical goods)
While peer production is being accommodated by capitalists, capitalism is also being accommodated by peer producing communities, causing a mutual adaptation into hybrid modes, that insure that peer production is not just collectively sustainable, but also for the core individuals involved. Far from disarming peer production, this is the very condition of its success. The new social conflict is the one between peer producing and sharing communities, vs. commons-based businesses and corporate-owned sharing platforms, into the precise nature of that adaptation in the micro-scale of projects.
The weakness of socialism is that it could not point to a proven superior mode of production, and could not offer any interest to any section of the ruling classes. This weakness of 19th and 20th century social movements has now been overcome.
At the moment when no social alternative is yet strong enough to offer a roadmap to ‘total’ change, the social forces behind peer production form the basis of a new social compact which can, along with new technologies, create the possible basis for a new, but probably the last, growth phase of capitalism, which will have to substantially compose with the new structure of desire based on open and free, participatory, and commons-oriented value systems. This creates the condition for a macro adaptation of capitalism with peer production, moving it from seed form to parity, and preparing the ground for a meta phase transition that will create a post-capitalist economy, using peer to peer processes as its core way of producing value.
Peer production is therefore a great opportunity for workers, to create strong commons, and demand adaptations from their corporate partners, while nothing stops them from creating their own productive structures, such as parecon based cooperatives. Social movements need to understand the historical opportunity of peer production, and add to their defensive social actions and reform-aimed political aims, a practical engagement with the dynamic forces of peer production, which represent the template of the future political economy and civilization.
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Re: Peer to Peer and the Future
By Polson, Rufus at May 17, 2009 19:51 PM
There is a lot of bafflegab here, IMO, but there is a core bit of substance that just isn't being conveyed that well. My take on what he's getting at:
This "peer production" gig is things like wikis, for instance wikipedia, and open source software projects, where lots of people all over submit patches and code, and other stuff like that. It works really well for information in a big network. Every time one person contributes, everyone gets the benefits of that contribution, and with modern software for managing such contributions it's easy to remove mistakes and generally manage the complex patchwork of contributions. There has been some work lately on open-source design work, for instance on computer chips and fabbers (A fabber is a thingie like a printer that can "print" three-dimensional objects. It's an exciting technology. There is at least one fabber project where the design for the fabber itself is released under an open source license and people are both building them at home and collaborating on improving the design. It's cool, but there are limitations)
So this is all pretty neat, where it's applicable. But--
1. There are a lot of areas where it isn't. It's primarily useful for information, and only certain kinds of information at that. You can't do this kind of distributed production of, say, a movie. Nobody can submit a patch that slightly improves the performance of the Joker during a five-second stretch in minute 31 of The Dark Knight. On the other hand, I *have* thought that you could have an open source restaurant franchise, where all the information on setup, ingredients and practices--the whole set of three-ring binder stuff--was publicly available on the web using a Creative Commons-type license and people could submit improvements, like streamlining work procedures or improvements to recipes and so on, wiki style. Then if you want to start a restaurant you can use that information base . . . I digress. There's things that can be done this way, and other things that can make some use of this kind of thing in terms of their information base. But there's lots and lots of things that really can't be done this way. Also
2. I'm not sure it represents an *alternative* to either capitalism or parecon. I don't think it represents an economic system in itself. Arguably, it's a new kind of commons. It's a kind of labour done largely outside the market, much like foraging, home gardening, home cooking and so on. Under capitalism, that basically means that it's something which will exist until capital gets around to stealing most of it and making a profit from it, and outlawing what's left. Marx called this stealing process "primitive accumulation" and it's still happening. Mr. Bauwens argues that it is as it were the next evolutionary step because it is decisively more productive than more controlled approaches, and due to being so productive it will triumph. This strikes me as naive. Having a commons was more productive than having enclosed land; those responsible for the enclosures didn't care about that. They cared about controlling land, and leaving those who previously had access to the commons without the choice to avoid wage labour. The question isn't what's productive, the question is who gets the fruits of production. We can see in open source software that some capitalists (particularly Microsoft) approve of licenses which explicitly allow capitalist appropriation, and disapprove of ones (such as the GPL) which try to block such appropriation. But other approaches for extracting rents from open source software are being attempted, such as using patents. All in all, this peer-to-peer stuff is a new kind of component in a mixed economy, and I don't see a lot that can stop capital from harvesting it or, where it's any kind of threat to capitalist property relations (e.g. music filesharing) banning it and using it as an excuse for increased social control.
On the other hand, it certainly doesn't strike me as something incompatible with a parecon, either. Parecon says you get paid for the time you spend doing socially useful work. It seems reasonable that contributions to these peer-to-peer socially networked knowledge bases and so on should often be considered socially useful. So OK, these networks exist, and where it's a good idea people contribute to them, and maybe that's part of the work they get paid for, as long as they still contribute to the harsher stuff that needs doing. Since nobody in a parecon has a vested interest in controlling information or is allowed to charge rents for it, such networks could reasonably be expected to flourish in a parecon, rather better than under capitalism. Similarly, under capitalist allocation it's often difficult for these networks to get resources for things like e.g. webhosting. They perform a socially useful function but to the extent that you successfully "monetize" them you've generally injured the characteristics that make them socially useful. Pareconish allocation would deal with this issue much better--to the extent that people liked and used the results of a p2p thingie, they'd tend to agree to its representatives' reasonable requests for funding and incorporate them into their allocation requests. There's a market failure involved in the production of this kind of knowledge base, but I don't think it would be a failure for pareconish allocation. Rather than an alternative to parecon, it would just represent one of the things people did in a parecon.
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I can't understand this article
By Grinder, Matt at May 07, 2009 12:08 PM
I have read this article three times quite carefully and still have no idea what peer to peer production is. My complaint is that the language used is not only very vague, but full of big words in weird combinations. I find it typical of "post modernist" (whatever that is) literature, where the same type of language is used. For instance what is "self-aggregation"? What are "universally broadcast tasks"? "Infrastructure of cooperation" and so on. In my humble opinion, the use of big words in a setting like this is usually to make the author sound smart, and to hide the fact that they are not really saying anything of value.
Big words aside, it's really vague. "peer production: wherever a group of peers decided to engage in in the production of a common resource" This happens all the time in many workplaces! What is revolutionary about it? I suppose it's supposed to be revolutionary, but how so? I mean, are you using markets? Central planning? Is the workplace democratic? Nothing about these topics is mentioned, just stuff about "peers".
These types of articles make me angry. It's not that I'm not smart enough to understand this article, it's the fact that it's not really saying much.
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Re: I can't understand this article
By McGehee, Michael at May 08, 2009 13:25 PM
matt, i find it to be obfuscation as well. his reply to albert's reply is even worse, and his critique of bjc's was an interesting one because i swear he advocated coercion.
from what i have been able to discern from his obscurity is that he feels classlessness cant happen and that a corporate division of labor must be maintained through coercion. which begs the question: who gets to be defined as "peer" if others are in castes that are coerced?
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