A P2P future
Note: back in 2006, I interviewed Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation for Pantopicon’s blog “a thousand tomorrows”. By popular request, I hereby repost the original interview as the blog meanwhile went offline.
Since the beginning, we wanted ‘a thousand tomorrows‘ not only to point to future-related happenings out there in the world, but also to dig into the minds of people at the forefront of developments which are redefining our future or have the potential to do so. Via interview sessions we would like to share with you a look through their eyes into today’s and tomorrow’s possible world(s). In our first interview, we’ll take a closer look into the fascinating peer-to-peer (r)evolution, together with Michel Bauwens.
Michel is a versatile man: innovator, editor, philosopher, serial entrepreneur, filmmaker (together with Frank Theys he made a 3 hour TV-documentary titled: “Technocalyps: the metaphysics of technology and the end of man” ), … A few years ago he left his home country Belgium and now lives in Chiang Mai, Thailand. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, which researches, documents and promotes p2p practices.
Nik (Baerten — Pantopicon): Michel, for many people P2P (peer to peer) equals software tools such as Napster and Bittorrent. Their view is limited to the world of filesharing, music and film industry related lawsuits, illegality, kids fooling around with technology and ending up in trouble. Yet, then there are people like yourself, who see in the paradigm behind the term, the seeds for a new world. With which terms do you associate P2P? In other words, what does the paradigm signify for you and how does it reach beyond the merely technological?
Michel (Bauwens): P2P filesharing is just one instance of the more general peer to peer dynamic. I define peer to peer as the ‘relational dynamic at work in distributed networks’. As such it can apply to a network of computers, as in filesharing, where all sharers put their computers together so that each can have access to each other’s music, but also, and this is more important, to a network of people.
It is important to notice the difference between a decentralized network, where power is split into a number of large pieces, and where the network is characterized by obligatory hubs; and a true distributed network, where the “agent”, human or computer, is free to undertake his relationships. In the latter we have a bottom-up process without coercion, and this is really what we understand under peer to peer.
This dynamic expresses itself in our new technological infrastructure, the internet as end to end network, the Web 2.0. as read/write medium, where everybody can participate as an autonomous publisher. It expresses itself in our organisational infrastructure, through the new ways of bottom-up collaboration. Both are happening because of deep changes in how people relate to each other, how we learn and know about the world.
All this expresses itself in 3 important and new social processes: peer production, the process of producting things in common; peer governance, the process of managing such common projects; and peer property, the new institutional frameworks we are inventing to protect such commons from private appropriation.
Nik: Indeed, while the online world facilitates p2p action, the effect of it moves beyond the online-offline screen into our daily physical world. When you speak of ‘peer governance’, do you see it as limited to ‘governing’ peer-produced projects or can you also see a new generation of political systems based upon its principles? How would those look like according to you?
Michel: I see peer governance in the narrow sense, as the way that peer groups and peer production projects are governing themselves; these are self-constituted groups that are following a logic of affinity, and they operate as distributed networks. The crucial characteristic of distributed networks is that agents are free to act and create relationships; this also means there is an a priori consensus of what needs to be done, so consensus, i.e. the participants deciding together on what must be done, is more easily achieved. Since there is no outside actor that can coerce them, it is the most logical way to decide. However, in decentralized (as opposed to distributed) networks, central power has been divided up in hubs, and these hubs set the rules, so that agent is much more constrained. My argument is that society as a whole is not a distributed network but a decentralized network, with various groups following a logic of hegemony, and without a priori consensus of what the goal of society is. So, while we have direct self-management in peer groups, this seems quite impossible to achieve for society as a whole; so in society we need forms of representational democracy.
In the future though, I think that the space of autonomy of self-constituted peer groups will increase even further; taking a lot of the political space now taken up by democracy; and secondly, that democracy will be reformed to more peer-informed, that is, partnership-based, forms of governance. I expect democracy to be informed more and more by multistakeholdership (of course it can also evolve in a negative way, towards more authoritarian forms). I think it is no secret to anybody today that democracy itself is in crisis, not just because the system has become so beholden to corporate interests, but even if this were not the case, people need and want more autonomy in their lives. They do not merely want to vote for whom represents them every few years. They wish for autonomy in every field of social life, including production and the economy, not just in politics.
Nik: There is a lot of talk these days of so called ‘fab-labs‘, laboratories where any person can email their design, have it fabricated on demand and shipped back to them. At the same time, an increasing number of people is getting into micro-economic activities, sometimes even based on barter-systems and services-exchange. Examples include small communities of people getting together to grow their own vegetables again or jointly create artworks for each other. Others include communities exchanging information and services/solutions helping them in dealing with everyday troubles ranging from fixing the kitchen sink, finding a babysitter, getting an ad-hoc secretary for a few hours to having a cook for one’s romantic candlelight diner. How do you look at these developments in relationship to p2p?
Michel: The emergence of P2P dynamics depends on two related factors: abundance, and distribution. Our society is characterized by an abundance of intellect, by an abundance of productive resources (computers), and a growing abundance of cooperative resources. In some ways, p2p, which is based on volunteer labor might be seen as wasteful, but because it is an abundant resource, such wastage is not problematic. It allows almost infinite experimentation and forking of processes, which is one of the reasons why many conflicts are unnecessary, since alternatives can be tried out.
Distribution is the other side of the same coin: if a resource is distributed, it can be used in tiny marginal fragments: so a great number of marginal resources still gives abundance. This is the way that Skype can build the largest telecommunication infrastructure of the world, initially without any capital of its own, because every user contributes a fragment of his computing power. Thus, if we can distribute resources such as capital, instead of having it centralized or even decentralized, we’ll have more enablement of P2P.
So your examples, such as the fablabs, I see them as promise for the near-future, but more important is what already exists today in terms of deskop manufacturing, P2P-based exchanges, and the like. They show that in many ways our society is objectively creating such distributed resources. But again, I want to distinguish the pure non-reciprocal, (not based on direct exchange), from the reviving of the gift economy that you are describing in our examples. The trends are related, they are both based on sharing, but still distinct. In a gift economy, I except something rather direct in return, it’s a tit for tat exchange, but in peer production, I contribute freely, and don’t mind about who is using the result of the collective work. Of course, individuals do get value in return for their participation, but it is not a direct exchange.
Nik: As technology and community appear to be two core elements in p2p culture, how central is the ‘human factor’? To which extent do you see it related to efforts to create a more sustainable society (in the broad sense)? While examples as the ones mentioned earlier definitely show an increase in self-organization and autonomy, do you see these new trends as linked to or part of p2p culture?
Michel: P2P could always exist in small communities, in tribal times say, or in the interstices of the later hierarchical civilizations, wherever people could join in small groups, without the presence of an outside coercetive force. But even then, they were constrained by scarcity in the natural and social world. Technology enables this to happen on an unprecedented scale, because the universal web and internet enable the global coordination of a myriad of very small teams. So, we’re not loosing any complexity and gains from hierarchy, there is still global coordination possible, while enabling people to work in small groups where they can decide together without coercion. As for community, I’m not a mystic on community, I see it as the most natural thing to do when there are no constraints. But the new communities, though they may revive some forms of localism as well, are essentially based, not on tradition or interest, but on the logic of affinity, so they are creating a quite different world.
As for sustainability: to the degree that we can achieve real costing in the physical economy (natural capitalism, living economies, real free bottom-up markets instead of distorted anti-markets dependent on corporate welfare), and achieve a throughput economy (we only take as much out as the natural world can regenerate itself); to the degree that we liberate ourselves from survival anxiety (as described in the world values surveys of Ronald Inglehart), people then naturally move to postmaterial expectations and desires. P2P will be the dominant mode to fill those intellectual, cultural, and spiritual needs, and the success of our life will be judged increasingly in those terms, as they already are for many of us.
Nik: This reminds me of something once described by a friend and former colleague of mine, Rishab Ghosh, who studies open source development communities and their economic context and models. To a certain extent, the hierarchy and functioning of that model is based upon reputation: you engage in coding something, spend your time, inventiveness and skills on it (cf. abundance); your peers notice and judge the progress of the project, your contribution and basically give you a ‘reputation’, which propells you up- or downward in the community. One of the effects is that most of these projects are or start out outside of the monetary economic model, but the reputations they generate give people(‘s skillsets) visibility and credibility to the point where they are contacted for industry jobs. As such, they create in fact a shift in the economic chain where money and monetary values enter the value creation system only at a later stage. Hence two essentially economic worlds touch, a non-monetary and a monetary one. (note: Several years ago, in a book titled: ‘The hacker ethic‘, Pekka Himanen, at the time one of Manuel Castells’ collaborators at Berkeley University, described related mechanisms and value systems).
How do you see the economic impact and dependencies of p2p culture and activities in this respect? In which ways are they changing our economic models?
Michel: I agree with this analysis. As I said before, when I call peer production ‘non-reciprocal’, I do not mean there is no exchange, just that there is no tit for tat exchange. All volunteer freely and contribute what they want or can and it is a positively anti-rival process which promotes free usage. But there is a ‘generalized exchange of value’.
First, as Ghosh said, participants gain 3 forms of ‘Capital’: knowledge, relations, and reputation. But on a higher ethical level, passionate production reaches a level where the giving is actually the receiving, so there is a mixture of ‘selfish’ and ‘altruistic’ motivations. There’s a hierarchy of engagement and of different systems which cater to it: from doing something merely for oneself, but profiting from the presence of others (swarming), to systems were post-facto sharing is a value added benefit ( del.icio.us and social bookmarking), to projects explicitly based on sharing (Linux, Wikipedia).
Generally speaking, we have to acknowledge that peer production is both immanent within capitalism, it is part and parcel of cognitive capitalism, though it creates a new model of ‘netarchical capitalism’ which is no longer predicated on copyright and the creation of artificial scarcities to get monopoly rents, but on enabling and exploiting participation. This is in fact the model of most Web 2.0. companies; the creators create the use value, but the companies attempt to gain the a posteriori created monetizable exchange value. This of course creates some issues of equity: should the users, the creators of value, share in the benefits of monetization?
Nik: In light of current discussions (and some ongoing since a long time) concerning the bottom-up and top-down balance-seeking in p2p systems (cf. wikipedia), many people wonder about strengths and weaknesses of the p2p model. What is your view on this? How do you see p2p’s future in this respect?
Michel: I have only a very general comment to make in this: we have yet to discover precisely which mix of hierarchical and participatory elements is the best, and they may differ according to different contexts and phases in projects. James Surowiecki has described the precise conditions for when the Wisdom of Crowds approach is best, i.e. a pure system without experts. In other cases, such approaches will have the same lowest-common-denominator effect that we see with mass media television, and it will crowd out quality, i.e. the Digg effect. The key is that the relation between the modernist concept of the expert, who commands the passive citizen-recipient will be replaced by a model which does not abolish expertise, but distributes it. So that the expert system can enrich themselves through bottom-up collective wisdom, and bottom-up participatory projects, such as Wikipedia, can be enriched by experts, such as attempted by the Citizendium project. The key is the transformation of leadership, from a practice that constrains participation to maintain privilege, to one that sustains participation. Hierarchy still exists, but in order to promote and sustain participation, rather than to undermine it.
Look at the internet, where the centralized DNS system nevertheless promotes and renders possible a billion-citizen participation, or the web, still largely runs as a client-server model, but nevertheless enables autonomous publishing. Important criteria: is the leadership voluntarily chosen or accepted, or not. If it is the case, then the leadership, the maintainer of peer projects, are entirely co-dependent on the participants.
I’d like to add the scheme of my friend John Heron here, who describes the evoluton of hierarchy and participation as follows:
“There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:
autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
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.;
wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;
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.
Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy; Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only; Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres; 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”
Nik: Taking into account a wide variety of perspectives is at the core of Pantopicon’s philosophy. You have travelled a great deal, worked in many different places and contexts, and currently live in Thailand. In which way do people look at, engage in or deal with p2p on that side of the globe? Do you notice cultural differences of perspectives on p2p or is it a ‘flattened/flattening’, global(ized) phenomenon, approached in the same way more or less everywhere? Where do you see it heading in the near and longer term future?
Michel: A very interesting question. My trip to Thailand made me discover a country that is very steeped in ‘authority ranking’, one of the four intersubjective modes described by the anthropologist Alan Page Fiske, and which was also dominant in the European feudal times. The average Thai person will rank you very explicitly according to status, with everbody being a pi or a nong to each other (above or below), according to a complex set of criteria involving age, gender, income, power, etc… Thailand is also still in majority a rural country. Obviously such a different cultural set-up will have both advantages and disadvantages. I really like the extended family, I live with one with my wife, and we have our two mothers and ten people in the home, but personally dislike the patron-client relationships which dominate both politics and even the capitalist system. But at the same time, they are of course more and more influenced both by the formal egalitarian demands of political democracy, and the new ways of being exemplified by creative and digitally-enabled youth.
My prediction is that peer to peer will have a much harder time to penetrate, but that on the other hand, if they accept and act on it, the possibilities for leapfrogging, i.e. starting from the very new without having to pass through a long modernist/industrial period, are substantial as well. Blogging is definitely a very big thing in China, and gaming is a very big thing in Thailand. Both of them are instrumental in co-creating more participative mentalities.
Nik: You have touched upon a wide range of dimensions or facets of p2p, such as the social, technological, economic, ecological, political. What about that other deeply human dimension, i.e. spirituality? Do you see, perhaps further down the line, p2p having an effect upon that or is it already doing so perhaps?
Just a little anecdote on my part: I remember at some point, in one of our FFWD>> events at Pantopicon, where we invite people to project a theme-related situation today 20 years ahead into the future and show us what it looks like, the theme was religion. One of the entries showed the 2005 image of somebody with his head on a book titled ‘the book of truth’, while the 2025 image showed that same setting, only the book was titled: ‘the book of truths’.
Michel: I’m not a technological determinist. This means that though I aspect that technology has a key role in enabling certain social practices, it is also itself already an effect of other changes. I often summarize with a series of difficult words: the P2P revolution is predicated on deep underlying changes in ways of being and relating (ontology), in ways of knowing (epistemology) and value constellations (axiology). These have to do with our fundamental positioning in the world and are therefore spiritual changes. It is these changes, and our particular social interests, which dictates what kind of technology we are choosing to develop, but once developd, the technological practices also change us.
Each of those aspect would warrant a separate development. Your anecdote is absolute significant. It is indeed the move from modernist objectivism, through which we can observe the world objectively, towards an intersubjective multi-perspectival or even a-perspectival epistemology. We now recognize that each of us has his/her own perspective, and that truth is best approached by combining and comparing perspective. There is still room for objectivity, but we have learned to look at ourselves while we look at the world, because the facts that are chosen are themselves the results of perspectives. Many of the new P2P-based tools, such as the Web 2.0 developments, enable precisely that, to look at the world from somebody’s else’s perspective. You see it also in the shift to tagging and folksnomies, which are supplementing hierarchical categorisation imposed by a third party. We are also moving from another modernist presupposition, that we are all separate individuals having to be socialized through institutions, to a recognition that we are eminently relational beings, always already embedded, and needing tools to build and construct our own connections. Purely spiritually, we are now ready for an autonomous search for truth and meaning, no longer based on authoritarian religious interpretations, but on intersubjective searching in peer groups. In terms of learning, and in terms of the search for meaning, we are seeking to confront us with the insights of others.
All of this is already there, and we are moving from the deconstructive phase of postmodernism, to a reconstructive phase in the peer to peer era. To use the metaphor of the mash-up, i.e. the possibility of recombining data and applications from various sources into a new project: this is what we are now doing with ourselves. The Great Cosmic Mash-Up, is not just postmodern fragmentation, but rather recognizing that our multiple facets can be recombined with the potentials of others, into new unities, and it is so that we are building ourselves, through our contributions to the common. That is what is giving us our identities and reputation, as well as meaning, in the new world.
Nik: What are according you the most fascinating examples of p2p’s state of the art?
Michel: I believe that the best way to discover specialized peer to peer applications in a particular sector, is to browse to the del.icio.us tags I have been using to monitor such developments.
For example, in the field of education, one of my latest tags is on the service Note Centric, for collaborative note-taking in class. I would describe the shift in education as ‘learning from each other’, as the ability ‘to know the people who know’ and can help you on the way.
In the field of spirituality, (see also participatory spirituality), I particulary recommend John Heron’s methodology of Cooperative Inquriy and his latest book: Participatory Spirituality, a Farewell to Authoritarian Religion. The basic idea of peer to peer spirituality is that spirituality is co-created, not a thing out there to which only the right authority gives you access. In cooperative inquiry you decide to undertake a particular research methodology together and you report to each other what you have experienced.
In scientific publishing, you may want to look at the Open Access Movement and initiatives such as Open Access Central. Open access insures that scientific knowledge is shared by all humanity, scientists and non-scientists alike.
Nik: Now, when you personally look ahead, could you describe to us how a person’s day would look like in a full p2p world ?
Michel: I’m not so good at concrete imaginings. I would just like to summarize it like this: imagine that you would have a unconditional basic income that would give some freedom to periodically take a sabbatical for learning, or following your passion. Imagine that you could then live from this passion, in cooperation with others, and could work on it on your own rhythm. Imagine that you feel safer in your life, with a much denser networks of friends and relationships, that you can activate to get things done. Imagine that such process would not be hindered by the market or the state, but supported and enabled. Imagine that the poor and the feeble would not just be exploited by those from a position of strength, but treated as partners and that we would develop fair trade practices. Imagine that the market would pay the real value from the things it exctracts from nature, and treat nature as a partner, and not just as a dump, and that we would restore the biosphere to its former glory. These are a few of the better things that would happen to our lives, in a peer to peer informed economy and society.
Nik: With this image in mind, which are according you the main obstacles or threats on the road to the realization of such a p2p future? Where can it go wrong and what would that mean?
Michel: I see three possible scenario’s for the future development of peer to peer.
In the first one, P2P is a subsystem of the market, which continues to dominate, and people would move regularly from the market to the P2P sphere, according to their possibilities, much like in the Middle Ages, people would move to the Church, or in South East Asia, where they could move in and out of the Buddhist Sangha, but supported by the whole community. The problem with this scenario is that the destruction of the biosphere would go on unabated, so I do not believe it is a realistic scenario.
The second scenario, is that the old forces win the game, and prevent the emergence of P2P, by inserting DRM in our machines. In essence, we get some kind of information feudalism, and a significant loss of property rights for the mass of the people. All the goods are only accessible through stringent licenses. I don’t see this scenario as likely, but it is a possibility which is well described in Jeremy Rifkin’s The Age of Access.
Finally, in the third scenario, P2P becomes the core of the system, responsible for the most important postmaterial value creation, in combination with a reformed market (divorced from the destructive aspects of capitalism) and a reformed state. It is the preferred scenario from my perspective.
The second scenario represents a win situation for the rentier class that lives from the artificial scarcity created by copyrights. In the first scenario, the winners are the netarchical capitalists, who live from the value creation of the users. In the third scenario, civil society and its commons emerges as the most important beneficiary of society.
Nik: In which ways are you p2p-ly active in your own on- and offline life?
Michel: I try to practice and experiment that what I study and promote. The P2P Foundation is itself a peer project, which produces a knowledge commons on peer production, with teams of volunteers on which I’m co-dependent. And we gain knowledge, reputation, and relations from our input in the commons, which we can then put to work in our consultancies or lecturing. Passionate production is very rewarding, but at the same time risky. I had to accept a significant downsizing of my income, but it is amply rewarded by the richness of postmaterial values I am receiving from it: spiritual enrichment through sharing, my extended family in thailand, freedom from alienation in work, constant learning, etc.
Nik: Besides p2p, which are the other developments that fascinate you when you think about the future?
Michel: I must admit that I’m pretty obsessed with P2P, but of course, I see it as a trend which encompasses the whole of life, so I actually have to be interested in pretty much every area of society. P2P is not the answer to problems itself, but rather the process through which better answers can be found. So if there are challenges in society, my interest goes to the people trying to find more participatory and open processes so as to find better solutions.
Nik: What a wonderful way to end this interview. In a sense it closes the circle, as it aligns itself beautifully with the way in which we at Pantopicon try to help people and organizations address and assess the long term, their future(s). Thank you so much for this fascinating discussion, Michel!
