Sustainable Technologies Acceleration Network Blog

Vinay Gupta and Smari have invited me to participate, so in this first item, I would like to present the work of the P2P Foundation, and how it is related to your movement’s efforts.

The short answer is that I believe the aims are largely congruent.

I believe that distributed networks, the result of cheap and networked computers, lead to the emergence, and eventual dominance, of non-reciprocal peer production for anything that is immaterial and non-rival. This means: voluntary engagement to directly create social value that is put in a commons.

But this solution can’t work in the world of scarce physical goods, where we need to replenish the resources. So physical production can still use market exchange or other reciprocal schemes.

A preferred solution is therefore: combining open designs with localized digital production, the result of an inevitable lowering of the cost of physical capital, while the cost of transport, raw materials will likely increase. This is concretely what I believe you are working on here.

We have assembled a growing body of material at P2Pfoundation.net, 5,000 pages and growing, on how open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented approaches are emerging and growing in every human field of activity.

The key ideas are explained in this foundational essay here at CTheory.

If you really want original, but more controversial insights, on how peer to peer fits in with the trend to localized digital production efforts, then this is a good reference.

I’m basically arguing that our current system is both hitting limits in ‘extensive’ growth, because of the ecological crisis, but cannot convert simply to intensive market growth in the immaterial sphere. This situation is very similar to the situation of Rome, and led to a reconfiguration to the feudal system, which was very different from their slaveholding empire. Our current system has it backwards, it believes nature is infinite (pseudo-abundance), and that non-rival goods should be made artifcially scarce (pseudo-scarcity), thereby both destroying the biosphere and slowing down the necessary social innovation needed to solve the challenges. We must therefore simply overturn this mad logic into recognizing both the natural limits, and the natural free flow of digital information.

I try to explain that the market can only grow on the periphery of an immaterial and abundant digital commons, here .

But, as such profound shift takes time, I attempt to give a timeline for this transition, here .

What this all means for politics is explained here .

How do our projects ‘fit’ together:

- your movement/network represents a key player in terms of the concrete realization of the potential for globa-localized digital fabrication, while the p2pfoundation attempts to be the knowledge gardener of all the congruent attempts in all social fields. In other words, we attempt to build bridges, first through knowledge linking, then through internetworking individuals, later hopefully with some more powerful means, i.e. creating mechanisms for permanent dialogue.

As a person, I try to do two things: 1) be the librarian of the movement(s); 2) attempting to permanently synthetise all that this happening into a coherent vision of social change. Of course, we are no longer in a period where individual ‘intellectuals’ can understand complex realities of their own, in other words, the ‘next buddha will be a collective’, but, I hope to use my skills as best as I can, together with a global cyber-collective which may construct such understanding together.

Of course, I/we will not be the only people doing this, and that is fine.
Again, in terms of complementarity, I will not and cannot compete with your work in organizing a global network of people invested primarily in open AT and personal fabrication, BUT, I hope I can create a platform that can draw people in other fields to your specialized resources, and to integrate the real and concrete progress (and learning from difficulties) that you are making, into an overall vision that also looks at what other movements are achieving.

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