World Alternative Movement 2
The Gathering of the Tribes
“Unity never meant uniformity” — Martin Luther King
So far, local, community-based initiatives have been, by their nature, fragmented, and often have had little contact with or support from outside. There have been some efforts to address this, especially at regional and national level, but the effectiveness of these efforts has been limited.
A key requirement, therefore, is to nurture and support this local dimension, while also facilitating greater inter-connectedness and networking between groups, and with other organizations.
There is a clear need to create a strong common platform that promotes the exchange of ideas, information and positive alternative practices worldwide, and also facilitates the development and implementation of cooperative initiatives and shared standards.
The establishment of this kind of a platform would:
- provide existing alternative communities with access to a p2p support network where they can help each other, share knowledge, exchange goods and organize events and meetups.
- promote a wider dissemination and uptake of alternative lifestyles and community-based approaches, thus becoming a valuable source of inspiration and guidance for society at large.
The newborn World Alternative Movement (W.A.M.) — as it becomes conscious of the trascendent vision that inspires all of its members to seek a better life for themselves and the world — needs to unite around such vision, and lay the groundwork necessary to develop an organizational model able at first to sustain itself, and later to scale and assist the entire humanity as it breaks free from the cage of the old system.
Our aim must be to lead, culturally and practically, a worldwide transition away from the big cities and back towards an essentially rural lifestyle, where modern technology, transportation and commodities will be accessible to everyone through a distributed internet.
As Buckminster Fuller reminded us, we shouldn’t fight the existing reality but focus our efforts on creating a new model.
How will our alternative society work? How will it emerge and evolve? It may be impossible to answer every question today, but we can start by pointing out its three essential features:
- A new Internet
- A new Economy
- A new Currency
A new Internet
The present Internet is a development of the original protocol funded by the US Department of Defence in the 60’s. Still today, the internet protocol features all the characteristics and limitations of a centralized model: a finite 32-Bit IP address, whose distribution and allocation into Domain Names is managed by a centralized authority (IANA, ICANN), thus leaving the door open for potential abuse.
With the Internet Service Industry monopolized at the very source by a few ISP’s and corporations, the recent mass-surveillance scandal that exposed their links with a number of governmental agencies engaged in massive, illegal surveillance on worldwide communications is no surprise.
Instead of fighting back in court, another hopelessly corrupted branch of the old system, a real alternative must involve the creation of a new autonomous p2p internet built around a common mesh-networking protocol and technology that potentially eliminates the dependence on corporate and government server providers altogether.
What is Mesh Networking?
“The concept of mesh networking is simple. Instead of relying on backbones installed and maintained by large ISPs and governments, Mesh networks rely on small off-the-shelf routers to establish a network of interconnected nodes that can communicate together in ad-hoc fashion. Each node (or peer) relies on its neighbors, and on neighbors of neighbors all the way to the destination, to get its messages across. In an honest network, a node expects its neighbors to cooperate by routing its traffic, by returning the favor and routing their traffic. The key here is complete decentralization. As such, mesh networks are usually built and maintained by communities and technology enthusiasts, who are motivated only by their love for the community.”
With a good incentive system in place, such as the one ideated by OpenLiberNet.org, the users would be directly rewarded for installing and maintaining the infrastructure.
A new Economy
As Michel Bauwens — founder of the P2P Foundation — puts it, this is what’s wrong with the old system:
— The old system is based on the belief of infinite growth and the endless availability of resources, despite the fact that we live on a finite planet; let’s call this feature, runaway ‘pseudo-abundance’.
— The old system believes that innovations should be privatized and only available by permission or for a hefty price (the IP regime), making sharing of knowledge and culture a crime; let’s call this feature, enforced ‘artificial scarcity’.
The new economy will be radically different:
1. The primary sector, that which makes direct use of natural resources and thus includes agriculture, forestry, fishing, mining and energy production, must be radically redesigned to promote long-term sustainability and preserve biodiversity.
One of the most interesting concepts that emerged in the last decades is that of permaculture. As co-founder Bill Mollison explains, “permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted and thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single product system.”
Permaculture is a holistic approach in the sense that it doesn’t focus on each separate element, but rather on the relationships created among the elements by the way they are placed together in: the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts. Permaculture design principles aim to minimize waste, human labor, and external energy input while and maximizing beneficial interactions between elements of an eco-system to achieve a high level of overall synergy.
The three core tenets of permaculture are:
- Care for the earth: Provision for all life systems to continue and multiply. This is the first principle, because without a healthy earth, humans cannot flourish.
- Care for the people: Provision for people to access those resources necessary for their existence.
- Return of surplus: Reinvesting surpluses back into the system to provide for the first two ethics. This includes recycling waste back into the system and redistributing the eventual surplus production to those who need it.
A healthy, vibrant and sustainable first sector must revolve around a distributed network of self-sufficient permaculture farms that freely exchange their surplus food and energy in a global-local Alternative Market.
2. The Secondary, or manufacturing sector, which involves the production and construction of artificial objects, must also go through some drastic restructuring. Emerging technologies such as 3d printing and robotics are coming to our aid: soon local cooperatives could be able to supply most of the necessary furniture, tools, household appliances, clothing etc needed within their radius of influence.
Again the key is a completely open access to technology and designs. The new distributed manufacturing sector will enable virtually every community to access the most efficient means of production available and therefore transcend material scarcity altogether.
The new industry, as stated by Marcin Jakubowski, ideator of the Open Source Ecology project, will be “an eco-industry, on a human scale and serving the needs of people, not centralized industries competing for world domination.”
3. The tertiary, or service sector, consists of the “soft” parts of the economy, i.e. activities where people offer their knowledge and time to help others.
In the last century this sector was the fastest growing sector in every industrialized country, and is now the largest economic sector in the West (accounting for 70% of the workforce in the US).
Needless to say, also this sector has grown beyond its sustainable limits and must be integrally redesigned.
We already talked about the priority of developing a new, p2p internet since we believe this is the key to transform the service industry.
The main concept here is Peer production (also known as mass collaboration): a way of producing goods and services that relies on self-organizing communities of individuals. In such communities, the input of a large number of people is coordinated towards a shared outcome.
Peer production networks believe that knowledge is a commons for all to share, and hence, no innovation can be ethically withheld from the human population as a whole.
Peer communities, to quote once again Mr. Bauwens, are post-democratic:
“Democracy, the market, and hierarchy were modes of allocation of scarce resources. In hierarchy, our superiors decide; in the market, prices decide; in a democracy, the majority decides. But where resources are abundant, as they are with immaterial knowledge, code, and design, which can be copied and shared at a marginal cost, decision-making authorities are truly unnecessary.
Such communities are truly poly-archies and the type of power that is held in them is meritocratic, distributed, and flexible.
Everyone can contribute without permission, but such ‘a priori permissionlessness’ is matched with mechanisms for ‘a posteriori’ communal validation, where those with recognized expertise and that are accepted by the community, the so-called “maintainers” and the “editors”, decide which software / design patches are acceptable. These decisions require expertise, not majoritarian consensus.
The tension between inclusiveness of participation and selection for excellence is one that every social system must face, and that peer production has solved in a rather elegant way. The genius of it is not that it avoids conflict, but that it designs away ‘unnecessary’ conflict by allowing for maximum human freedom compatible with the object of cooperation. Indeed, peer production is always a ‘object-oriented’ cooperation, and it is the particular object that will drive the particular form chosen for its “peer governance” mechanisms.
The main allocation mechanism in such project, which replaces the market, hierarchy and democracy, is a distribution of tasks. Unlike in the industrial model, there is no longer a division of labor between jobs, and the mutual coordination works through what scientist call stigmergic signalling.
Because the work environment is designed to be totally open and transparent (this is called holoptism), every participating individual can see what is needed and what isn’t, and decide accordingly whether to undertake his/her particular contribution.
What is remarkable with this new model is that it has achieved capacities both for global coordination and small group dynamics that are characteristic of human tribal forms, and that it does this without “command and control”! In fact, we can say that peer production has enabled the global scaling of small-group dynamics.”
The peer production model can be applied to all fields of the service sector of the economy:
- HealthCare (OpenHealthcare — OpenMed — MutualAid)
- Volunteering (VolunteerNetwork — CommunityProjects — GiftEconomy — Mutual Service)
- Hospitality (CouchSurfing — HomeSharing)
- Transportation (CarPooling — Fleetsharing)
- Environment (EnvironmentalAction — SeedBank)
- Finance (MicroCredit — Crowdfunding)
- Education (OpenEducation — P2PUniversity)
- Governance (Loomio — GlobalGovernance)
A new Currency
One of the biggest problems with the old economy is the inherent inequality built into the system. We can all create value. But only a privileged few can create money, literally from nothing, and they are using that privilege to control the monetary system, secure the highest profits for themselves and carry out their imperialist strategy via financial warfare.
The W.A.M. needs to develop its own currency, one that is decentralized, ethical and secure at the same time, allowing us to make transactions directly within our network, with no segment of that interaction relying on an external authority for authentication or approval.
Let’s call this currency AltCoin. Altcoin is a generic name for all those digital currencies that were launched after the success of Bitcoin, the first p2p currency launched in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto.
Most of this currencies runs on a blockchain, a distributed database of recorded transactions —called blocks — that are internally validated by the network. Blockchain technology makes the whole central-banking system obsolete, and that’s why the banksters are desperate to hijack it.
With some hacks, a blockchain currency may become the perfect tool for the alternative movement to sustain itself and grow without being tied to corporate money.
Ideally such alt-coin would be designed to support the creation of:
- An alternative economic cycle that connects the 3 different productive sectors of the WAM: the permaculture networks generating food and energy, the manufacturing coops for hardware goods, and the P2P freelance community as service providers.
- A distributed incentive mechanism rewarding every network member that actively contributes to the development and expansion of the new economy.
Now that we have broadly defined the structural backbone of the new society, we can zoom into more detail and imagine how it will operate, feel and look like.
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