incommunicado

John Michael Greer responds to a critique of his new appropriate technology movement, by Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement (see below):

1. Part One: excerpts from Greer:

“Since the Green Wizards project got under way two months ago, I’ve wondered off and on whether it would field any sort of response from the Transition movement. Thus it was not exactly a huge surprise to read Rob Hopkins’ blog post on the subject yesterday. I admit that the tone of his response took me aback, and so did the number of misrepresentations that found their way into it; I have no objection to criticism – quite the contrary, an idea that can’t stand up to honest criticism isn’t worth having in the first place – but it might have been helpful if Hopkins had taken the time to be sure the ideas he was criticizing were ones I’ve actually proposed.

This leads to the second point that Rob Hopkins got absolutely right, which is that the Green Wizard project isn’t a solution to every problem the future has in store for us. I’m not at all sure where Hopkins got the idea that the project is predicated on an imminent fast collapse, which is very nearly the opposite of my views – the most popular of my peak oil books so far isn’t titled The Short Descent, you know – but he’s quite right to say that I consider peak oil, and more generally the impact of fossil fuel and resource depletion on an economy and society that depends on limitless growth, to be the core driving force of the next century or so of social crisis and disintegration.”

Part Two: Original Response from Rob Hopkins of the Transition Town movement

Excerpt:

“So, first question, what is a ‘green wizard’? Greer defines green wizards thus, “individuals who are willing to take on the responsibility to learn, practice and thoroughly master a set of unpopular but valuable skills – the skills of the old appropriate technology movement – and share them with their neighbours when the day comes that neighbours are willing to learn”. The idea, as I read it, is that any notion of a co-ordinated response, a la Heinberg’s ‘Powerdown’, a scenario where communities self-organise and work with, or without, their local authorities, to start the rebuilding of that settlement’s resilience, reduce its oil dependency and carbon footprint, is now for the bin, condemned as impractical and unrealistic. Greer appears to have given up any notion that such a thing might be possible, stating “a movement is a great thing if you want to hang out with congenial people and do interesting things together. It’s just not usually a good way to make change happen”.

Both Transition and green wizardry are based on the ideas that peak oil, and peak various other things too, will lead to a future of economic contraction and declining net energy availability, where the communities that are most successful are those that have most successfully strengthened and refocused their local economies in advance. Both (as I understand it) believe in the need for stronger local food networks, more back garden production, more local ownership of key utilities such as energy generation, and for a rediscovery of local building materials, seasonal foods and so on. Greer’s latest post, The Care and Feeding of Time Machines, is a fascinating distillation of useful tips and ideas around season extending, which will be of great interest and use to many involved in Transition. Much of the information being unearthed and rediscovered by the green wizards will be very useful for those involved practically in building resilience at a local level, and it is a very valuable and fascinating project. I do, however, have a few concerns about green wizardry.”

Do ‘Green Wizards’ build community resilience?

:This is the ultimate question for me. Would having green wizards in my community make it more resilient? I don’t think so. When talking about resilience, I mean the ability of my community to withstand shock from the outside, to not unravel at the first sign of difficulty, and to be able to reinvent itself, using the shock as an opportunity to reimagine and remake itself in a way more appropriate to a world of energy descent. For me, resilience refers to more than the ability to not fall apart when catastrophe strikes, rather resilience is a desirable state in itself, something to strive for because, if done properly, it stands a higher chance of meeting our needs in uncertain times than business-as-usual does.

Green wizardry also falls short because it fails to acknowledge that a transition on the scale it is presumably designed as a reponse to will be anything more than purely a challenge of an absence of practical know-how. Communities faced with the realities of energy descent, whether rapid onset, stepped descent or rapid unravelling will be faced with much more than simply a need for windmill designs and guides to making good compost. It is not purely an outer process, indeed the practical solutions side of it is the easier side. Ensuring clear communication, dealing with conflict, supporting people through the grief of the future not turning out in the way they had spent their lives so far imagining it would, is equally important. Are the green wizards also dusting off 1970’s self help manuals?”

Technology is always social, and technologies that are participatory will follow distinct logics:

private debt is far higher than Government debt, even after the increase last year due to Rudd’s stimulus package. Government debt is currently 5.5% of GDP, whereas private debt—even though it has fallen slightly due to business deleveraging—is over 150% of GDP: 27 times the size of Government debt. The so-called debate that the major parties are having over the size of Government debt is an embarrassment.

Australian economist Steve Keen has a very good explanation why our economic system is not able to jumpstart itself, it’s a must read to understand the fundamentals of this systemic shock.

The original article has many graphs.

Excerpts from Steve Keen:

1. The role of the level of debt and deleveraging:

“Debt reduction is now the real story of the American economy, just as real story behind the apparent free lunch of the last two decades was rising debt. The secret that has completely eluded Bernanke is that aggregate demand is the sum of GDP plus the change in debt. So when debt is rising demand exceeds what it could be on the basis of earned incomes alone, and when debt is falling the opposite happens.

Ignoring this growth in debt—championing it even in the belief that the financial sector was being clever when in fact it was running a disguised Ponzi Scheme—was the greatest failing of the Federal Reserve and its many counterparts around the world.”

2. The ideological blinders of the neoliberal belief system:

“Though this might beggar belief, there is nothing sinister in Bernanke’s failure to realize this: it’s a failing that he shares in common with the vast majority of economists. His problem is the theory he learnt in high school and university that he thought was simply “economics”—as if it was the only way one could think about how the economy operated. In reality, it was “Neoclassical economics”, which is just one of the many schools of thought within economics. In the same way that Christianity is not the only religion in the world, there are other schools of thought in economics. And just as different religions have different beliefs, so too do schools of thought within economics—only economists tend to call their beliefs “assumptions” because this sounds more scientific than “beliefs”.

We might not be in such a pickle now if economics had started to become more of a science and less of a religion by following Fisher’s lead, and abandoning key beliefs when reality made a mockery of them. But instead neoclassical economics completely rebuilt its belief system after the Great Depression, and here we are again, once more experiencing the disconnect between neoclassical beliefs and economic reality.”

3. The role of the banks and their unsustainable profit levels

“Because of that debt level, bank profits have gone through the roof as a share of GDP. Back before we had a financial crisis—when debt levels were far lower than today—so too were bank profits as a share of GDP. A sustainable level of bank profits appears to be about 1% of GDP. The blowout from this level to virtually six times as much began when bank deregulation.”

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* Article: Computing and the Current Crisis: The Significant Role of New Information Technologies in Our Socio-Economic Meltdown David Hakken, tripleC, Vol. 8. No. 2, pp 205-220

David Hakken has written a very important essay, in a special issue of TripleC dedicated to the crisis, on how the present computing (and IP) regime, is linked to the current meltdown, and therefore, how only a new computing regime can solve the deep-seated issues that have led to it. In the article, David outlines these reasons, then shows how they are linked to both ‘asset unknowability’ and the hyper-restrictive IP regime. Only a new computing regime, based on FLOSS, can transform the causes of the crisis.

This is an original thesis, well argued in its analytical part, but need perhaps a stronger linkage in the ’solution’ part, i.e. how precisely is FLOSSing part of the new economic structure?

Go here for the full essay.

Abstract

“There is good reason to be concerned about the long-term implications of the current crisis for the reproduction of contemporary social formations. Thus there is an urgent need to understand it character, especially its distinctive features. This article identifies profound ambiguities in valuing assets as new and key economic features of this crisis, ambiguities traceable to the dominant, “computationalist” computing used to develop new financial instruments. After some preliminaries, the article identifies four specific ways in which computerization of finance is generative of crisis. It then demonstrates how computationalist computing is linked to other efforts to extend commodification based on the ideology of so-called “intellectual property” (IP). Several other accounts for the crisis are considered and then demonstrated to have less explanatory value. After considering how some commons-oriented (e.g., Free/Libre and/or Opening Source Software development projects) forms of computing also undermine the IP project, the article concludes with a brief discussion of what research on Socially Robust and Enduring Computing might contribute to fostering alternative, non-crisis generative ways to compute.”

Excerpts Part One: Analyzing the Problem

David Hakken:

“In my view, what is distinctive about the current crisis is new and significant ambiguities in valuation, the process by which particular cultural forms are assigned particular values, including but not only their values as commodities. Further, I think one kind of social practice – the way automated information and/or communication technologies have normally been used, or “computing” for short—is central to the creation of these ambiguities, that computing has played a key, insufficiently understood role in bringing them about. Thus, focusing on how we compute, and more generally, the role of technology in the crisis, provides a way to think more inclusively about it. Doing so broadens our focus, so we can attend to general changes in the dynamics of current social formation reproduction.

“At base, the unknowability of the new financial commodities is a consequence of the at base oxymoronic character of Intellectual Property. IP is an oxymoron in that, in order for the intellectual merit of, say, an idea, to be acknowledged and then valued on some quantitative scale of relative merit, it must first be communicated. However valuable I might consider my own ideas, there can be no compelling reason for another to share my evaluation without her first understanding them. For her to do this, I can’t keep them private; I have to say what they are. I can’t even get away with just saying what they are “like.” However, once communicated, it is difficult to control the understander’s use of the idea. Thus, any effort to turn ideas into private property faces a fiendish difficulty: how to keep control over things, like ideas or notions, that by their nature must be shared if they are to be evaluated. This problem is exacerbated by digitalization: once created, digital representations of ideas and notions are reproducible at extremely low cost (think of the cost to the writer of an email).”

Excerpts Part Two: The Solution

David Hakken:

“New, more socially robust forms of computing – deriving from, inter alia, what I call the strong program in social computing – not only must but can be developed and should be implemented as part of a crisis recovery/avoidance strategy. Fortunately, some computer practitioners – whom I like to call informists – have some good ideas about how to pursue socially robust and therefore enduring computing (SREC; Hakken, 2010), ideas incubated within the non-dominant forms of computing that have refused to reduce themselves to formalisms alone. The alternative practices are central to the Social Informatics within which I frame my research and that I teach at the new School of Informatics and Computing at Indiana University in the USA and at Trento University in Italy. Their ability to thrive, however, depends upon reinforcement of property regimes very different from IP and much more like the “commons” oriented regimes of FLOSS. Let us hope that commons-illuminative views, like those resulting in a Nobel Economics Prize for my Indiana University colleague Elinor Ostrom (e.g., 1990), come to provide a clear alternative orientation for professional computing.”

While the Internet’s disruption has made many a billionaire, it’s certainly well on it’s way to destroying some entire industries. And it seems to me, many of the institutions that are popping up to replace them don’t have the same capitalization, if they have capitalization at all. I know the Internet is adding Value, I just don’t know if it’s adding Value in a place where Capital can capture it.

Eric Reasons refines our understanding of the crisis of value, by distinguishing value from capital, and showing that new sectors can add value, while also decapitalize a sector.

He cites the music industry as an example:

“The industry is expanding, but capitalization is definitely shrinking. I know more people making a living from their music than ever before, but only because of a massive disruption of the music industry that has cost billions of dollars.

What I’m really looking for is a way to measure the change in Value vs. the change in Capital. (But traditionally, we measure Value in terms of Capital!)”

Umair Haque thinks there is a Generation M Consensus — the growing consensus of a global movement dedicated to toppling the old order, by doing meaningful stuff that matters the most.

Here’s are the principles. The original article has links and a critique of the old order as well.

Of particular interest, his concept of forcorporations matches my argument about the ethical economy, published last week. At the bottom of this excerpt, I therefore add his earlier explanation of this concept.

1. The Generation M Consensus

* The Empty Vessel Rule.

“Government, Arthur Okun famously argued, is a leaky bucket — one which leaks money at every turn. Yet, though the government may be often a leaky bucket, the corporation is just as often an empty vessel: bereft of any purpose higher than profit. What the private sector offers in terms of efficiency, it subtracts in terms of virtue. So what we really need to do today isn’t merely to privatize what used to be public, or the reverse, nationalization. We need to meld the efficiency of the private sector with the virtues of the public sector — to pioneer the legal, financial, and contractual basis for new corporate forms, like forporations, that balance obligations to shareholders and the many kinds of stakeholders; that exist “for” a higher purpose than mere near-term profit.

So where the last item in the Washington Consensus’s agenda is interest rates, set by markets, to knock governments, people, and communities into shape, the final item in the M Consensus’s agenda is what I call an uninterest rate: the rate at which income isn’t transformed into outcomes. It’s outcomes that count. Though we got a little bit richer, did we actually realize tangible, enduring benefits that mattered? Or did we just get more insecure, obese, unhappy, and disconnected? If the uninterest rate is high, it means income isn’t translating into outcomes; because our economy’s engines and engineers — corporations, CEOs, investors — are uninterested in making stuff that actually makes us better off; they’re just interested in making a quick buck. The higher the uninterest rate, the more corporations are likely to be knocked into shape — by fed-up people, communities, society, and investors alike. If it’s low, incomes equal better outcomes, and the mere paper wealth we may have earned actually matters in human terms.”

2. Towards Forcorporations

Umair Haque:

“Forporations. What, then, might amplify the signal of these new Detroits and Silicon Valleys? Let’s extend our historical analogy. Yesterday, Detroit, Madison Avenue, and Wall Street were powered by companies like…General Motors, General Foods, General Mills, and General Electric. Funny, isn’t it? But perhaps also telling: that’s “general” as in generic, commoditized, mass-made “product.” Today, we’re learning the hard way that “general” is, too often, the polar opposite of “meaningful.” So consider then, a radical idea: that the corporation as we know it just might be past its sell-by date, an obsolete tool that’s outlived its era.

Rebuilding our base of organizational capital means reinventing our most heavily utilized kind of organization, the corporation, to do bigger, better, more enduring things. How might we do it? By creating private-public partnerships to seed and invest new kinds of corporations. Consider the groundswell of states passing legislation for B corporations, a new kind of corporation which balances shareholder value and social returns, instead of prioritizing one over the other. Authentic prosperity depends on what I sometimes call “forporations”: more efficient, effective corporate forms “for” the pursuit of more meaningful, disruptive goals than just near-term financial gain; that exist “for” the benefit of more than just shareholders.”

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What is the connection between the historical tradition of socialism/communism and the contemporary emergence of ideas and practices centered around p2p dynamics and the commons?

1.

Let’s first tackle our understanding and interpretation of communism.

To me it is basically the idea, probably born at the same time as post-tribal class-based society, that an alternative human arrangement based on equal relationships and without the inheritance of wealth and privilege is possible. It is something that appears again and again in human history as an expression of those that are not privileged in the existing social arrangements.

A prominent example is of course the form of the Christian communities as described in the Act of the Apostles, but it is a recurring theme across history.

More importantly and recently, it became a driving idea of the labour movement that was born at the same time as industrial capitalism, and it would take various ideological and social forms, such as the utopian socialist experiments of the 19th century, the social-democratic labour movement that became dominant in Europe in the 20th century, the anarchist movements that flourished before WWII, etc …

Unfortunately, after the social revolution in Russia and its regression through isolation, it also became the ideology of a new ruling strata, which installed a new type of class society based on a managerial elite using state property, which used communism as an ideology to justify its oppression, much as the hierarchical and feudal Church would use the ideas of Christ to justify its own oppressive rule.

Today, the “idea” of communism is terminally contaminated with that historical experience of social oppression.

2.

What about peer to peer?

Peer to peer is born from the generalization of the human experience of voluntary aggregation using the internet.

It is the experience of creating digital commons of knowledge, code and designs, based largely on voluntary contributions, and on making these universally available, has re-introduced the reality of communal shareholding to wide strata of the population.

But is also the particular social expression of the new condition of work under cognitive capitalism, where workers, after the long hiatus of industrial capitalism where they were totally dispossessed of access to productive resources and machinery, could again access a productive resource under their control, through computers, the socialized network that was the internet.

This generalized the experience of social practices that are characterized by open and free input, participatory processes of production, and commons-oriented output.

From the contract between this strong experience of equality and liberty (equaliberty) and the trans-individuality of being connected through affinity, the desire naturally grows to extend this experience to other areas of life.

From this, social movements are emerging that seek to extend the reach of this human experience.

The P2P Foundation, and the P2P Theory that we are trying to develop, is merely one of the expressions of this general trend, but perhaps one of the more ambitious ones since it aims not just to a partial implementation of the new value system and social practice (as the free software or free culture movements would attempt), but to its generalization across the board.

3.

What then, are some of the important differences?

Peer to peer is not necessarily based on the belief of realizing a full classless society, but on the extension of an already existing social practice. Certainly for me, I would be extremely skeptical of any idea that such a society could be realized. Therefore peer to peer politics becomes a more pragmatic effort at extending the reach of this existence practice. This does not mean however, that I do not contemplate that this social logic may become the core of a new social order, but co-existing with a still differentiated class society. However, it is definitely an effort to create a more free, just, and equal world.

Peer to peer is not the expression of the industrial working class, but of the new forms of cognitive labour. But this does not mean it is restricted to full time cognitive workers, rather it is becoming part of the general human condition under cognitive capitalism, and therefore has the potential of becoming the culture and ideology of much wider social strata.

Peer to peer is therefore not a continuation of the socialist/communist tradition, but a re-elaboration of emancipatory practice and theory under new historical and social conditions. It’s a new start and reformulation, that is not bound by the previous historical tradition, though of course it is natural that new emancipatory efforts would look at historical precedents. Peer to peer is not related to socialism as a reformation of it, but is related to it in the same way as Christianity was related to the paganism of the Roman empire, i.e. as a trans-valuation of its major premises. Amongst other things, this frees us from the incessant bickering of left-wing cults.

This of course does not mean that peer to peer can be entirely divorced from the previous historical context, but it is not beholden to it as a continuation of the same tradition.

4.

What about the commons?

It is around the issue of the commons that the differences with the previous emancipatory tradition comes to the fore.

The labour movement became historically associated with the effort to increase the reach of public and state property, and the idea of regulation (social democracy) or planning of the economy (Marxism).

Peer to peer and the commons are about the direct value creation through civil society, and are about new forms of governance and property that apply directly to civil society groups creating this value. The forms of property advocated are not based on private exclusionary property, but also not on an alienation of property through the state. The commons are a form of property where individuals remain direct‘shareholders’, they are not expropriated from their contributions to the value creation, neither by the state nor private corporations. The individual and his/her property does not ‘disappear’ in the collective as represented by the state.

The commons, not the state, becomes the core institution of the new political economy. Both digital and material commons have their own institutional formats, the latter managed by democratically governed trusts.

The p2p/commons approach does not abolish private property, but limits its reach and subsumes it as an auxiliary form for the allocation of rival goods, while also drastically reforming the formats of such private ownership, away from the formats which deny any consideration of social and environmental externalities.

The p2p/commons approach does neither abolish the state nor makes it the sole proprietor in charge of central planning, but limits the role of the state as a institution for the meta-governance of the common good, looking at the equilibrium between public functions, the commons and civil society, and private entrepreneurs. The new Partner State becomes the guarantor of the new commons-based peer production, until that time as it can hypothetically ‘whither away’ as more and more of its functions are taken over by an increasingly egalitarian and autonomous civil society. But, we are not holding our breath that this process can take place in historically close times. However, we do believe that the necessary phase-transition is merely a few decades away, as the urgency of biospheric destruction and social dislocation does not permit the long-range survival of the present destructive social arrangements.

5.

What about p2p/commons as a political approach?

The p2p/commons approach and the social forces representing it, does not seek to replace the labour movement, or other emancipatory political groups, but allies itself with all those protecting the common natural heritage of mankind, and a more just redistribution of social value.

Hence the idea of the triarchical alliance for the commons, consisting of those

- Directly fighting for free culture and the commons
- Directly fighting for the protection of the biosphere
- Directly fighting for social justice

Richard Hames has a long essay on why our system is not addressing its systemic challenges, given a number of intergrated psycho-cultural causes.

Here’s the intro, but go to the full article for the detailed treatent of the individual causes.

Richard David Hames:

“During the coming decade we are likely to face a cascade of massively disruptive crises that will feed on each other both economically and ecologically. Many of these will disable institutional power players, potentially opening up space for new socioeconomic, governance and technological innovations to embed. As that happens, collaboration on an unprecedented scale will be needed to transition the human community into one that is at once more viable, resilient and benign to life.

Very simply stated these factors are (i) the detachment of ideas and social relations; (ii) fears and apprehension, engendered through an apparent lack of control as well as a distrust of others motives; (iii) outdated and invalid mindsets; (iv) competitive conduct; and (v) the fragmentation of endeavours.”

Let us examine each of these in turn.

• Videos tagged 'dividendeuniversel' on Vimeo
• Dividende Universel - Wikipédia
  Le Dividende Universel est un système de création monétaire, qui défend le principe que chaque citoyen d'une zone monétaire est co-propriétaire de cette zone, comme d'une entreprise, et que de ce fait, il est en droit de participer à la création monétaire sous la forme d'un dividende régulier versé sur la base d'un pourcentage de la masse monétaire totale de la zone économique répartie entre tous les citoyens de façon parfaitement égale et symétrique.
• https://nouvellesociete.wordpress.com/
• Jean Zin #solidarite#solidarite#solidarite
  one of the best french social political thinkers
• L'abeille et l'économiste - Jean Zin
  C'est un livre important et très étonnant, surtout dans le contexte actuel, en ce qu'il commence par célébrer le triomphe de la finance, contre l'évidence du présent désastre, mais l'insistance sur sa fabuleuse puissance de création de richesses dans une économie cognitive lui permet de conclure, dans les dernières pages, que c'est donc la finance qu'il faut taxer. La taxation de toutes les transactions bancaires est ici le coeur de la sortie de crise pour le capitalisme cognitif, couplé avec un revenu d'existence, revenu minimum qui peut se cumuler avec un travail. A cela, il faudrait joindre une comptabilité écologique des externalités et une relative extinction de l'Etat qui laisse la plus grande part aux marchés et aux ONG...
• La transition énergétique - Jean Zin
  On n'a rien vu encore. La crise économique s'aggrave en devenant crise politique mais ce n'est pas notre seul problème, ni peut-être le pire car la crise énergétique va rapidement revenir sur le devant de la scène. En effet, le pic de la production pétrolière pourrait bien être atteint en 2014. Oui, dans 4 ans seulement, vous avez bien lu ! Ces annonces sont toujours sujettes à caution, très dépendantes du niveau des cours, mais justement la retombée de ce qu'on a pris pour une bulle du pétrole (à l'origine de l'écroulement financier) a découragé des investissements qui auraient pu exploiter d'autres sources et, c'est un fait, les capacités actuelles sont à leur maximum.
• Transversales - Sciences & culture
  "Locales", "sociales", "solidaires", "virtuelles", "libres", "affectées", "complémentaires", "alternatives", "plurielles"... une floraison de qualificatifs parcourt cette nouvelle lettre de Transversales Science Culture, consacrée aux monnaies non officielles, c’est-à-dire à celles autres que nationales (ou européenne).
• Tikkun Daily Blog » Blog Archive » Elemental: Why We are All Pagan
  “We’ll honor the elements.” A feature of most contemporary pagan rituals. “We all have to breathe. We all need light and warmth. We all stand on the earth that feeds and shelters us. We all need water to stay alive, whatever else we believe or don’t believe.” The word pagan simply means country dweller, though many contemporary neo-pagans are urban dwellers as were many pagans in classical times.
• with alex giordano, rafael mauro, adam arviddson
• Habemus data. cultura digitale e informazione libera - Teresa De Feo
• Custom make electronic products online with Ponoko « Ponoko – Blog
  Ponoko has teamed up with SparkFun Electronics to help make it easy for you to build custom electronics products using your online personal factory.
• Selbstorga-Wiki
  Du befindest dich im Autoorganisations-Wiki, einer Sammlung zu Projekten und Ideen rund um Selbstorganisation und die damit verbundenen Vorstellungen einer anderen Welt – ohne Lohnarbeit und andere von Zwang geprägte Umgangsweisen miteinander.
• amor mundi: Futurology Against Ecology
• amor mundi: Vandana Shiva on Resource Descent and Permaculture Politics
  Advocating for appropriate technology is not "anti-technology," directing our attention to politically pernicious deployments of technodevelopment exploiting the vulnerable and profiting elite-incumbents is not "anti-technology," delineating the catastrophic impacts of false models and marketing hype is not "anti-technology." As I keep on insisting, time and time again, "technology" doesn't exist at a level of generality that properly enables one to affirm a "pro-technology" or "anti-technology" stance in any kind of monolithic way.
• P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The importance of invisible architectures for generating collective wisdom
  Individuals, no matter how highly developed, will not be able to embrace and respond to the challenges humanity is currently facing. It seems now that evolution is seeking the emergence of global wisdom-driven organizations. It is now time for collective Bodhisattvas to emerge.

Jared Hardy’s DataRoads Foundation advocates a radical change in how data are routed on the internet. Instead of a central naming system, Hardy says, we could have user-centric addresses which, combined with a geographic component, could do the job as well as or even better than today’s global IP numbers. The concept is explained in a post titled ‘When Global Agreements Aren’t Necessary’.

In another post – ‘Flipping The Internet Upside-Down’ – the revolutionary impact of such a new addressing and routing system becomes clear. Hardy says we need “a new, bottom-up, “first mile” version of the Internet. This new vision for the Internet can exploit these existing institutions, yet it does not require any of them. I think we can build something even better than Network Neutrality into this new design. Instead, we can build a people-centered network.”

He’s also made an illustration that shows how the net will change. It depicts the internet of today, where we depend on content providers and access providers and shows, in the bottom half of the design, what the relative importances will be in a future net where we the users are the owners of that last mile and its immediate connectivity.

Hardy also says we shouldn’t be talking about lines and pipes when describing the internet. The terminology should be that of a network of nodes that talk to each other. Roads would be a great analogy.

“The top-down nature of the Internet today is reflected and enforced by the analogies we use. Network connections are not like “pipes,” where resources come down from some central reservoir. They are not like electrical “lines” either, where energy is created and distributed from a set of far-away generation plants. Modern networks aren’t even like old telephone connections, where some central switching-station routes all regional calls.”

“Data roads have parallels to transportation roads, but are much more flexible.”

To get a more detailed view of this new conception of the net, please go see the DataRoads Foundation website.

Via Open Culture:

“Above, we have TED’s Chris Anderson interviewing Julian Assange, founder of WikiLeaks, the whistle-blowing website that made headlines last month when it released the Afghan War Diaries, all 92,000 pages worth. During the 19 minute interview, Assange talks a little more about the philosophy behind WikiLeaks, how the organization decides when to release information (or not), how the site has changed world events, and what some more ordinary leaks look like. No matter what stance you take on WikiLeaks, the interview is worth a watch. You’ll only hear more about them down the line.”

Two important updates from John Robb:

- an analysis of Wikileaks as an open source insurgency

- the rape charge as disinformation campaign

Video:

A text by David Bollier:

“FLOSS as Commons: What is the way, what are the actions for having FLOSS acknowledged globally as a strategic and crucial common for knowledge society? Is FLOSS paving the way for bigger initiatives and larger variety of commons?

It can also fortify democracy and the market economy by showing that the FLOSS ethic of participation, transparency, accountability and performance is not an aberration; its values and practices are broadly shared by a diversified and growing Commons Sector. One of the key challenges facing FLOSS – and online communities more generally – is finding new ways to amplify this sensibility by federating and coordinating the energies of the digital commoners.”

Excerpted from Dale Carrico’s longer comment on our previous extract here:

“The unifying thread between the two parts is a critique of the metaphor of “spontaneous order” which figures so prominently in the arguments of so many techno-centric commentators to this day, from both the right (which, contra many of its proponents, is where I properly locate the politics of market libertarian ideology) and the left, enabling in endless variations what amount to superficially anti-political arguments most of which typically function to support elite-incumbent politics in substance. Although the re-posted piece is a rather old one, it seems to me that a lazy recourse to such spontaneist and anarchist figurations has gotten no better in recent years, and fatally suffuses quite a lot of otherwise indispensable work on p2p-networks, activism, net neutrality (so-called), and more general discourse on online sociality, creative expressivity, organization.

By way of conclusion, I am interested that though Mr. Carson affirms that he differs from my assessment of market libertarian ideology (as I already happen to know many scores of people obviously do), he actually doesn’t say much as to why he does or respond to any of the points I made in the piece at hand, which leaves me bereft of his reasoning from which I am sure I and others would benefit enormously. “

• when-global-agreements-arent-necessary: for a p2p namespace beyond ICANN
• Trojan (automobile) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  according to the open manufacturing list, an example of distributed production?
• mil forge = sourceforge for the military
• Pentagon's DARPA Unit Goes Wiki With Crowdsourced Tech Project
  Called vehicleforge.mil, the project will "generate an open-source development collaboration environment and website for the creation of large, complex, cyber-electro-mechanical systems by numerous unaffiliated designers."
• Our civilization feels like its in free fall.
  There appear to be five factors currently hampering civilizational renewal. They have nothing to do with technology, infrastructure and investment capital, and very little to do with politics. In fact all five of these factors are relatively intangible. What they do have in common is an affiliation to the cultural or psychological space within which we typically respond to shifting and uncertain conditions.
• karl-hess-on-alternative-technology
  This clip is a very concise and well-spoken discussion on technology for meeting true human needs by Karl Hess. Its clarity blew me away. The video should be updated to the possibility of creating modern, small scale industrial economies that can be replicated inexpensively around the world – from local resources. That’s our proposed contribution to humanity.
• Lewis Hyde, author of Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership ...
  Poet and scholar Lewis Hyde has been writing about the commons for over thirty years. His first book, The Gift (1983), is regarded as the modern classic on Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World–the 25th anniversary edition’s subtitle. His new book, Common as Air, directly addresses the cultural commons, and could hardly be more relevant to understanding at a deep level the work of Creative Commons. I’ve taken this opportunity to ask the author a series of long-winded questions about the commons.
• Green_desktop_environments

The Austrian documentary filmmaker Stefan Wolf traveled for ten months through Europe in order to explore well established eco-communities and to present a broad spectrum of lifestyle possibilities to many people. Experience ecovillaged and ecological communities in Europe in this two hour long documentary portrait

Video:

fractal sovereignty is where the sovereignty of the individual and the sovereignty of the group are simultaneously fully embraced.

Excerpt from Alan Rosenblith:

“The question about where to place sovereignty has long been one of the core divides in politics. Many who consider themselves conservative favor the sovereignty of the individual over the group, decrying regulations, taxes, etc. Those who may consider themselves liberal tend to believe that taxes are a good thing because they contribute to the common good. In the spirit of “transcend and include” we have been exploring what it would mean to embrace both types of sovereignty fully. And, as is the case with many other topics, the MetaCurrency people don’t all agree. But here are my thoughts.

Fractals are all over the place in nature. Consider a snowflake. Its hypnotizing symmetry is a direct result of the “V” shape of a water molecule. A water molecule is bent at a very specific angle, causing it to be polar. This means one side is positively charged and the other is negatively charged. The collective interaction of billions of these tiny polar molecules is what ultimately leads to the snowflake’s macro crystalline structure. So the larger scale pattern emerges fractally from the smaller scale pattern.

Now apply this to sovereignty. For a group to be truly sovereign as a group, the only possible foundation is full individual sovereignty. So what do I mean by full individual sovereignty? In this case I don’t simply mean that you have a vote. I mean you are fully sovereign to act however you deem best given the information you have. That last part about information is really the key.

As you may already be aware, I consider a currency a method of keeping account of things that happen in the real world. It doesn’t take a big leap to see that my perception of the world largely depends on how I account for events. If I am a teacher who cares how polite the kids are with each other, I might want to keep track of pleases and thank yous. Perhaps I would choose to use a gold star system. If I care about academic performance I would use grades. If I care about athletic performance, I would keep score. All of these are currencies that shape my perception of the students in my class.

When we share methods of accounting, we can better coordinate our actions. For example, it wouldn’t be much of a football game if half the team was paying attention to the score, and the other half was counting the pleases and thank yous on the field. Coherence in the game emerges from shared perception of the events taking place on the field, and our perception emerges from how we account for these events.

So far, so good. But how does this apply to sovereignty? In the Industrial paradigm, we tend to get to cohesion through coercion. There are rules that are usually dictated from on high. Even in a democracy, how much say do you really have over the rules? Not much. What if instead of relying on RULES to create social cohesion, we let cohesion emerge from everyone’s fully sovereign individual actions. Everyone would be fully sovereign to use whatever method of accounting for events they found most useful. In other words, everyone would be fully sovereign to choose how to perceive the world around them. I predict that ultimately, this would produce large scale social coherence without coercion, much like how water molecules produce the coherence of the snowflake without any coercion or rules.

That is the soft claim. The strong claim is that true group sovereignty has as a necessary logical underpinning full individual sovereignty. Groups that cohere otherwise are not actually sovereign in the sense of choosing how to respond to their environment AS A GROUP. Sure they can respond, but not as sovereign entities. They respond based on rules and policies formalized on paper.

Think of it this way. In nature, species exist BECAUSE they work. No one sat down and looked at the ecosystem and said, “You know, I think a small hairy critter would do well here.” If there are small hairy critters, it is because small hairy critters emerged. Similarly, groups that are truly sovereign will exist BECAUSE they work, not because they were designed ahead of time. That is the essence of emergence versus creation from outside.”

Update via the SolaRoofGuy:

“Eric, I appreciate your update on the Open Structure development.

From this date to our 11/11/11 date – the Eleventh Hour campaign – we would like to see DIYFood go viral and build up a huge community of global collaboration and cooperative enterprise network.”

Excerpted form Micah White’s article on the birth of the altermodern, this is summary of Zizek’s critique of network ideology as complicit in neocapitalist efforts:

“According to Slavoj Žižek in the final chapter of his book Organs Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences, the exemplars of Deleuzian philosophy are not the anarchists but the late-capitalists: “In short, and stated even more pointedly, the thought of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, the ultimate philosophers of resistance, of marginal positions crushed by the hegemonic power network, is effectively the ideology of the newly emerging ruling class.” For Žižek, the misapprehension of Deleuze as a philosopher of resistance has led to the awkward situation where major alterglobalization theorists are espousing a suspiciously similar rhetoric to that of the globalizers. Singling out Naomi Klein, Žižek continues, “So, when Naomi Klein writes that ‘[n]eo-liberal economics is biased at every level toward centralization, consolidations, homogenization. It is a war waged on diversity,’ is she not focusing on a figure of capitalism whose days are numbered? Would she not be applauded by contemporary capitalist modernizers? Is not the latest trend in corporate management itself ‘diversify, devolve power, try to mobilize local creativity and self-organization?’ Is not anticentralization the topic of the ‘new’ digitalized capitalism?”

The significance of Žižek’s stinging critique of Klein is that it effectively tars an entire lineage of leftist political theory leading from Deleuzian multiplicities to Hardt and Negri’s multitude. And in light of there having been no compelling response to Žižek’s critique, it is hard not to doubt the postmodern tactics we’ve been using. Could it be that while we’ve been smashing boundaries and crossing borders, consumerism has quickened its global expansion by piggybacking on our identity-blurring efforts?”