Dear readers,
I hope you agree that this is an interesting issue.
First of all, on the insistence of james burke, and inspired by the
Rheingold map on technologies of cooperation, I have produced a first
synthetic P2P Meme Map which summarises an extraordinary amount of key
information, including my take on what the P2P Civilisational movement
is all about: 1) achieving Absolute Democracy, i.e. participation in
all areas of life, not just politics; 2) achieving a Pluralist Economy
with a strong Commons along with reformed markets and state functions;
3) a Participatory Universe based on a new partnership-based relation
with all beings. Caution: you have to read it 'bottom up' for it to
make sense!
Second, I reprint my issue 75 editorial on the emergence of the
netarchical class, since many wrote that they missed that issue. I
believe it is an important contribution and urge you to read it.
Third, read the arguments of Clay Shirky of why freeloading ISN'T a
problem for P2P, see the update on the P2P information infrastructure,
and how magical consciousness is not just something of a bygone era to
be superseded, but another form of participative consciouness that can
exist alongside the rational, and which will be an important
ingredient of a integral and participative way of feeling/being. An
interesting essay also from the field of information science on the
changing epistemologies of the current era.
ISSUE 77, Table of Contents
P/I:
PLURALITIES/INTEGRATION
A newsletter about participation in multiple worlds, multiple visions,
but one humanity ; a monitor of P2P developments
-
Archive at http://integralvisioning.org/index.php?topic=p2p
Compiler: Michel Bauwens, michel@noosphere.cc; P/I is an emanation
of the FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO PEER ALTERNATIVES
ISSUE 77:June 30, 2005: Why
this newsletter? Why the title?
The title refers to the enduring tension between a multitude
of worldviews, and their eventual integration. For a full explanation of the
rationale behind the newsletter, see issues 1 and 2. An alternative name could
be "P2P and Empire" because in practice I mostly focus on a analysis of the
crisis of the current system on the one hand, and the emergence of a more
participative worldview, which I call "peer to peer", on the other.
Preferred themes: the
networked society, cognitive capitalism, Empire and its discontents,emancipatory
processes among the `multitudes' and the possible emergence of a peer to peer
civilization, truth-building as a collective and `dialogical' effort, the
challenges posed to traditional religions and humanism by spiritual P2P
experiencing and technological transhumanism.
The P2P meme
map (i.e. related, but not necessarily completely similar terms: peer to peer,
many to many, edge to edge development partnerships, distributed networks,
egalitarian networks, protocollary power, user innovation communities, social
networking, smart mobs, filesharing, grid computing, theWriteable Web (or
Read-Write Web), FLOSS i.e. Free, Libre, Open Source Software, CPBB or
Commons-Based Peer Production, the alterglobalisation movement as a network of
networks, free software and open sources as a 'third mode of production', the
coordination format, non-representationality, the rhizome, parallel and
distributed computing, object oriented programming, object-oriented sociality,
the Information Commons, the GPL Society, the hacker ethic, folksonomies and
tags, the long tail, Napsterization, cooperation studies, collective
intelligence, synergetics, wirearchy
If you like this project, please suggest any
interesting links! We would be very happy to list you as a contributor. Thanks
to John Dermaut, Christophe Lestavel, John L. Petersen, George Dafermos, Jim
Hightower, David Spillane, Larry Penslinger, Nik Baerten, Maurice Nsabimana,
Tattoo Mabonzo, Philippe Van Nedervelde, Pascal Houba and the Multitudes
mailing list for regular suggestions.
Recommended: JamesBurke of Lifesized, http://lifesized.blogspot.com/; Kris
Roose, at http://www.noosphere.cc/
How to subscribe: Write to compiler Michel
Bauwens at michel@noosphere.cc or at
michelsub2003@yahoo.com.
QUOTES
Abram on magic, The Spell of the Sensuous, 1997: 10
"Magic is participating in a world of multiple
intelligences with the intuition that every form one perceives - from swallow
swooping overhead to the fly on a blade of grass, and indeed the blade of grass
itself - is an experiencing form, an entity with its own predilections and
sensations that are very different from our own."
Julie
Cohen on the public domain of culture:
"Attention
to the social parameters of creative practice suggests that the common in
culture is not a separate place, but a distributed property of social space.
The legally constituted common should both mirror and express this
disaggregation. The paper offers a different organizing metaphor for the
relationship between the public and the proprietary that matches the theory and
practice of creativity more accurately: The common in culture is the cultural
landscape within which creative practice takes place."
P2P and TV
"According
to Wired, Warner Bros. Entertainment recently passed on a pilot of a show
called Global Frequency. However, due to a leak on bit-torrent the pilot
episode has reached thousands of viewers who are clamouring for more, and has given the show a
new lease on life. What's more interesting is what the show creator
learned. From the article: "It changes the way I'll do my next
project," said Rogers.
If he owned the full rights, he said, "I would put my pilot out on the
internet in a heartbeat. Want five more? Come buy the boxed set." Frankly,
I'm all for this method of distribution, as I barely watch 'regular' TV
anymore."
(http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/06/28/1412234
)
CONTENTS
-
Alan Kazlev, who is attempting to construct a new integral
theory, recently launched the concept of the 'alterintegrals' in his new Wiki, describing
the work of a number of left-of-center (post-)Wilberians, on his site, http://integralwiki.net/index.php?title=Alterintegral,
explaining the development as related to peer to peer. A short bio of this
newsletter's editor points to the P2P essay, see http://integralwiki.net/index.php?title=Michel_Bauwens
-
Latest version of the essay is still located at http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1
-
Do read in this issue, the first P2P Meme Map as well as the
reprint of the editorial on the emergency of a netarchy (last item of this
issue), which many seem to have missed when it appeared in issue 75.
Inspired by Howard
Rheingold's (et al.) excellent map of Technologies of Cooperation, I have
decided to produce one or several 'meme maps' representing my understanding of
the P2P universe. Here's a first attempt, of which I'm already quite satisfied
as a synthesis of recent research. Comments, additions, criticisms, and above
all, renderings in a more attractive graphical format, would be most
appreciated.
(read the table from the bottom up)
Compiled by Michel Bauwens, June 30, 2005
Level one represents the cultural shift in ways of being,
feeling and knowing, as well as the new core value constellations that underpin
the shift to a peer to peer civilization.
Level two represents the technological distributed computing
infrastructure, the P2P media infrastructure which enables many-to-many
communication, and the collaborative infrastructure which allows autonomous
groups to cooperate on a global scale, outside the bounds of markets and
hierarchies.
Level three represents the legal infrastructure. The General
Public License (and Open Source initiatives), which creates and expands the P2P
technological infrastructure as a public domain Commons; Creative Commons
licenses achieve the same effect for content creation. Technological protocols
such as TCP/IP insure the participative nature of new technologies, while P2P
collectives set their own internally-generated frameworks of cooperation,
within the broader framework of Internet-based civility (netiquette). Taking
together they create a common property regime of public goods outside the
market and the state.
Level 4 represents new social practices that are thoroughly
characterized by P2P principles (as distinguished from non-P2P formats enabled
by P2P infrastructures). The first strand is represented by
'non-representational politics', politics which refuses representation, as
exemplified by the alterglobalisation movement and Social Forums, the
coordination format adopted by social movements. Peer production creates
collective use value in the form of a Commons, and is exemplified by free
software, knowledge collectives such as Wikipedia, collaborative publishing
such as Indymedia. Participative spirituality represents a new way of relating
to religions, the cosmos, and nature and its beings, refusing authoritarian
truths and methods, sometimes practiced in the form of peer circles.
Level 5 are practices that are not full P2P themselves, but
are enabled and strengthened by P2P infrastructures: examples are P2P
marketplaces which do not create a commons and are run by for-profit
enterprises, or who derive substantial value from user-created content
('netarchical' enterprises who enable and exploit participative networks); gift
economies or sharing economies (the latter defined by Yochai Benkler), such as
local exchange trading systems and local currencies;
|
- Empire/cognitive
capitalism rests on distributed networking but instrumentalises it for
domination
- P2P-based
marketplaces and Long Tail economics: eBay, Zopa, self-publishing;
supply and demand meat each other through the internet; creating
millions of sustainable micro-markets
- Netarchical
value creation / for-profit enablement and exploitation of participative
networks: positive externalities of P2P create value for new type of
businesses: Amazon customer evaluations, Google page ranking based on
user linking; user-centric innovation; users create substantial content
for the portals
- Bottom
of the pyramid development schemes (Prahalad); microcredit (collective
credit applications); citizen to citizen (edge to edge) development
schemes (Jock Gill)
- Gift
and sharing economy practices are enabled by P2P infrastructures: open
money and local currency schemes, local exchange trading systems (LETS);
carpooling becomes economical with distributed infrastructures;
nonprofit organizations and social entrepreneurships are enabled. Lower
transactional costs strengthen enable fairer trade and economics
|
|
Level 5: P2P-ENABLED
PRACTICES
|
|
1.A. Non-representational politics: networked
alterglobalism, coordination formats for social struggles, conceptual
innovation of multitudes (Negri), creation as resistance (Benasayag),
revolution without power (Holloway)
=> CREATION OF
ABSOLUTE DEMOCRACY MODELS
1.B. Autonomous social and cultural practices:
internet-based affinity groups, self-help and mutual support groups,
non-expert dominated knowledge creation, validation, and exchange, filesharing;
open science projects and open access to scientific publications
=> CREATION OF
THE INFORMATION COMMONS
2. Peer production (also called, Commons-Based Peer
Production CBPP): Free software and open source software (also called
Free/Libre Open Source Software FLOSS): GNU/Linux; Knowledge collectives:
Wikipedia, Collaborative Media: Indymedia
=> THIRD MODE OF
PRODUCTION CREATES FOR-BENEFIT SECTOR
3. Participatory spirituality: non-representational
dialogue of religion, contributory theology, cooperative inquiry practices
(John Heron), plural mysticism (Jorge Ferrer), peer circles
=> PLURALISTIC
CONTRIBUTORY SPIRITUALITY
|
|
NON-REPRESENTATIONAL POLITICS & AUTONOMOUS
SOCIAL ORGANISATION // PEER PRODUCTION // PARTICIPATORY SPIRITUALITY
|
|
Level 4: DIRECT
P2P PRACTICES
|
|
- New
Common Property Regime: General Public License, Open Source Initiative,
Creative Commons, Art libre License allow for creation that cannot be
privately appropriated
- Participative
Technological Protocols: TCP/IP protocol for P2P communication,
Writeable Web protocols allow self-publishing by everyone, Viral
Communicator Meshwork protocols enable network building without
infrastructures and backbones: Open Spectrum proposal would create
Wireless Commons
- Participative
Social Protocols: netiquette, project constitutions, social accounting
and reputation-based schemes create transparency, participation capture
turns self-interest into common resources
|
|
NEW COMMON PROPERTY REGIME // PARTICIPATIVE
TECHNOLOGICAL PROTOCOLS // PARTICIPATIVE SOCIAL PROTOCOLS
|
|
Level 3: P2P
LEGAL INFRASTRUCTURE
|
|
1.A. Distributed computing
infrastructure (hardware): Internet, Grid Computing, Filesharing, Wireless
Meshwork, Viral Communicators
1.B. Free Software / Open source
software infrastructure: GNU/Linux, OS Desktop applications, OS content
management software, OS communication tools
- Distributed
media infrastructure: Blogging (Writeable Web), Podcasting (audio),
Webcasting (broadband audiovisual)
- Distributed
collaboration infrastructure: Wiki's, social software, groupware
|
|
DISTRIBUTED COMPUTING // DISTRIBUTED MEDIA //
DISTRIBUTED COLLOBARATION
|
|
Level two: P2P
TECHNOLOGICAL INFRASTRUCTURE
|
|
- New
ways of feeling and being: participative cosmologies, the relational
self, cooperative individualism
- New ways
of knowing: connectivist learning, communal (not institutional)
validation of knowledge, transparency (not objectivity)
- Primacy
of Equality/freedom, the hacker ethic of self-unfolding 'passion-based'
cooperation, abundance over scarcity, participation over exclusion,
meritocratic servant leadership by example, coordination instead of
command and control
- Desire
for P2P Civilisation to be defined by: 1) Absolute Democracy:
participation of all extended to all areas of social life, not just
politics; a Pluralist
Economy with a strong Commons sector along with a reformed market and
state; a Participative Universe based on partnership with nature and its
beings
|
|
P2P
ONTOLOGY // P2P EPISTEMOLOGY // P2P AXIOLOGY
(New ways of
feeling and being // New ways of knowing // New core value constellation and
aspirations)
|
|
Level one: P2P
CULTURAL FOUNDATIONS AND VALUE FIELD
|
http://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/200507/commongood.asp
"The
environment isn't just about nature anymore. It has become a metaphor for a
battle against market -- and sometimes governmental -- encroachment that extends
to virtually every corner of our society. Everything is up for grabs.
Everything is for sale. Politicians and the media are essentially oblivious,
just as they were oblivious to the threats to the environment before Rachel
Carson wrote Silent Spring, about the dangers of the pesticide DDT. There isn't
even a word for this encroachment and loss, except for the tendentious
euphemism "growth."
It is significant, then, that an old term is reappearing to
describe what is being threatened. It is "the commons," the realm of
life that is distinct from both the market and the state and is the shared
heritage of us all. Vandana Shiva, an Indian physicist and environmental
activist, writes about the commons of water and seeds. Lawrence Lessig, an
author and lawyer, describes the innovation commons of the Internet and the
public domain of knowledge. Others are talking about the atmospheric commons,
the commons of public squares, and the commons of quiet.
People don't generally connect seeds and bytes, aquifers and
silence. But the concept of the commons shows them to be aspects of the same
thing, with political, legal, and environmental implications that could be
far-reaching. The political drama starts to play out around a new question, in
fact. It is not whether there will be more government or less, but whether
the market will be able to expropriate everything. In an "ownership"
society, what happens to the realms that belong to all of us together, as
opposed to each of us apart? If the atmosphere, say, is a commons, then we
start to see that polluters are trespassing on something that is ours, and that
we hold in trust for future generations. The same goes for the gene pool,
cyberspace, the broadcast spectrum, the world's water, and the still of the
night. If such things are commons, then we have rights regarding them -- common
property rights. And that changes everything.
The preindustrial commons provided livelihood and material
sustenance, and in the developing world, it still plays that role..... But
increasingly the commons today meets a different kind of need: refuge from the
market and its frenzied pace. It provides such things as open space, access to
nature, the conviviality of public squares.... It produces by not producing in
the narrow economic sense. Each new step of market encroachment has increased
the need for counter-production of this kind - for quiet instead of noise, for
open space instead of development, for seed banks instead of genetically
modified organisms."
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=663652
From David Bollier's On
The Commons weblog (highly recommended): an legal essay that shows how
copyright could be reformed to take into account the Commons-related properties
of culture.
"Georgetown
law professor Julie E. Cohen has a path-breaking law review
article on copyright law's failure to recognize the "centrality of
borrowing, collaboration and environment to creative practice of all sorts."
Cohen's paper, "Copyright, Commodification and Culture: Locating the Public
Domain," calls for "a sociology of creative practice" and
analyzes why the "public domain," as traditionally understood in the law, fails
to recognize the actual dynamics of creativity.
Cohen writes: "Although economic modeling can
contribute to the understanding of markets for creative goods,.... by itself it
cannot provide adequate theoretical foundation for understanding the dynamics
that drive the development of artistic culture, and therefore it cannot provide
adequate theoretical foundations for copyright policy....Creativity and creative
practice are social phenomena that are both broader than and antecedent to the
institutions with which both economics and more broadly political economy are
concerned....
If copyright law is to recognize a right of creative access to
the cultural landscape, it is precisely this right that must be limited, yet
that is precisely what copyright law increasingly refuses to do. Instead,
conventional wisdom holds that any curtailment of derivative rights would
reduce "incentives" to invest in works of mass culture."
More articles by Julie Cohen at http://www.law.georgetown.edu/faculty/jec/publications.html
http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2000/12/01/shirky_freeloading.html?page=1
The so-called Tragedy of
the Commons occurs when individuals start using from a common resource without
regard for the interest of the collective and for the survival of the resource
itself. What makes sense individually ends up destroying the common resource.
But does such a process occur in the limitless arena of immaterial assets. I
have already argued that it does not apply to peer to peer processes and that
they are unconcerned about 'freeloading' (taking without giving anything back).
On the contrary, because of the network effect, and through intelligent use of
what I call 'Participation Capture' (turning usage into a resource of the
network). All this is confirmed in a well argued article by Clay Shirky in an
older article that applied to Napster.
"Two key aspects of P2P file-sharing [are responsible for
this]: the economics of digital resources, which are either replicable or replenishable;
and the ways the selfish nature of user participation drives the system.
Start with the nature of consumption. If your sheep takes a
mouthful of grass from the common pasture, the grass exits the common pasture
and enters the sheep, a net decrease in commonly accessible resources. If you
take a copy of the Pink Floyd song "Sheep" from another Napster user,
that song is not deleted from that user's hard drive. Furthermore, since your
copy also exists within the Napster universe, this sort of consumption creates
commonly accessible resources, rather than destroying them. The song is
replicated; it is not consumed. Even if, in the worst scenario, you download
the song and never make it available to any other Napster user, there is no net
loss of available songs, so in any file-sharing system where even some small
percentage of new users makes the files they download subsequently available,
the system will grow in resources, which will in turn attract new users, which
will in turn create new resources, whether the system has freeloaders or not.
But what of bandwidth, the other resource consumed by file
sharing? Here again, the idea of freeloading misconstrues digital economics. If
you saturate a 1 Mb DSL line for 60 seconds while downloading a song, how much
bandwidth do you have available in the 61st second? One meg, of course, just
like every other second. Again, the Tragedy of the Commons is the wrong
comparison, because the notion that freeloading users will somehow eat the
available resources to death doesn't apply. Unlike grass, bandwidth can't be
"used up," any more than CPU cycles or RAM can.
Like a digital horn of plenty, most of the resources that go
into networking computers together are constantly replenished; "Bandwidth
over time is infinite," as the Internet saying goes. By using all the
available bandwidth in any given minute, you have not reduced future bandwidth,
nor have you saved anything on the cost of that bandwidth when it's priced at a
flat rate.
Bandwidth can't be conserved over time either. By not using all
the available bandwidth in any given minute, you have not saved any bandwidth
for the future, because bandwidth is an event, not a conservable resource.
Given this quality of persistently replenished resources, we would expect users
to dislike sharing resources they want to use at that moment, but indifferent
to sharing resources they make no claim on, such as available CPU cycles or
bandwidth when they are away from their desks.
Since the writings of Adam Smith, literature detailing the
workings of free markets has put the selfishness -- or more accurately, the
self-interest -- of the individual actor at the center of the system, and the
situation with P2P networks is no different. Consider an ideal Napster user, with a
10 GB hard drive, a 1 Mb DSL line, and a computer connected to the Net round
the clock. Did this user buy her hard drive in order to host MP3s for the
community? Obviously not -- the size of the drive was selected solely out of
self-interest. Does she store MP3s she feels will be of interest to her fellow
Napster users. No, she stores only the music she wants to listen to,
self-interest again. Bandwidth? Is she shelling out for fast DSL so other users
can download files quickly from her? Again, no. Her check goes to the phone
company every month so she can have fast download times. Likewise, decisions
she makes about leaving her computer on and connected are self-interested
choices. Bandwidth is not metered, and the pennies it costs her to leave her
computer on while she is away from her desk, whether to make a pot of coffee or
get some sleep, is a small price to pay for not having to sit through a
five-minute boot sequence on her return.
Economists call these kinds of valuable side effects
"positive externalities." The canonical example of a positive
externality is a shade tree. If you buy a tree large enough to shade your lawn,
there is a good chance that for at least part of the day it will shade your
neighbor's lawn as well. This free shade for your neighbor is a positive
externality, a benefit to them that costs you nothing more than what you were
willing to spend to shade your own lawn anyway.Napster's single economic genius
is to coordinate such effects. Other than the central database of songs and
user addresses, every resource within the Napster network is a positive
externality. Furthermore, Napster coordinates these externalities in a way that
encourages altruism. The system is resistant to negative effects of
freeloading, because as long as Napster users are able to find the songs they
want, they will continue to participate in the system, even if the people who
download songs from them are not the same people they download songs from. As
long as even a small portion of the users accept this bargain, the system will
grow, bringing in more users, who bring in more songs. In such a system, trying
to figure out who is freeloading and who is not isn't worth the effort of the
self-interested user.
Consider a second user on a 14.4 modem downloading a song from our
user with her 1 Mb DSL. At first glance, this seems unfair, since our user
seems to be providing more resources. This is, however, the most desirable
situation for both users. The 14.4 user is getting files at the fastest rate he
can, a speed that takes such a small fraction of our user's DSL bandwidth that
she may not even notice it happening in the background. Furthermore, reversing
the situation to create "fairness" would be a disaster -- a transfer
from 14.4 to DSL would saturate the 14.4 line and all but paralyze that user's
Internet connection for a file transfer not in that user's self-interest, while
giving the DSL user a less-than-optimum download speed. Asymmetric transfers,
far from being unfair, are the ideal scenario -- as fast as possible on the
downloads, and so slow when other users download from you that you don't even
notice. In any system where the necessary resources like disk space and
bandwidth are priced at a flat rate, these economics will prevail. The question
for Napster and other systems that rely on these economics is whether flat-rate
pricing is likely to disappear.
[Shirky then goes on to show that flat pricing is here to
stay, because they are 'mental transaction costs involved', such as switching
on and off a system that is metered, and this is why consumers reject it ]
http://blog.commonbits.org/2005/06/be_the_media_th.html
We are moving from podcasting
to webcasting, i.e. a generalized ability to distribute broadband audiovisual
content. Even though the recent Grokster Supreme Court opinion is pretty
disastrous for the Information Commons, I believe the following summary shows
how unstoppable the trend has become, corporate sponsored state and judicial
repression notwithstanding.
The following blog entry,
CommonBits and Broadcast Machine: Tools for citizen journalists, is a neat summary of recent developments. Many
links to audiovisual services are provided.
"I originally started CommonBits
as a way to help progressives find and share political multimedia more easily,
but Andrews' article actually forced me to think more deeply about the platform
that I'd built. CommonBits' use of
tagging, RSS generation and BitTorrent hosting makes it possible for citizen
journalists to distribute audio and video to a wider audience than ever before.
"The CommonBits approach turns BitTorrent technology into something resembling
an Internet broadcast network: liberal radio and TV on demand," said Andrews.
Even the lowest-budget citizen journalist or community organization can upload
audio and video to CommonBits and distribute it on their own CommonBits'
channel at virtually no cost. Around the same time, the Participatory Culture Foundation
and Downhill Battle launched an
open source project called Blog Torrent (now Broadcast Machine). Broadcast Machine makes it
easy for organizations to run their own BitTorrent host and generate their own
RSS feeds. CommonBits and Broadcast Machine are both excellent platforms for
delivering the coming wave of citizen media content. And there are others.
Prodigem offers a
BitTorrent hosting service that allows people to sell their content. OurMedia and Archive.org
offer a similar hosting service without BitTorrent but neither service has a
particular community focus e.g. politics or music. Al Gore's new company Current.TV is also making an effort to involve
citizen media producers albeit more commercial. The community aspect of these
sites is important. CommonTunes was
created to support the online music community and CommonFlix to support video sharing.
OurMedia has a lot of community features as well. The importance of BitTorrent as a
distribution vehicle should not be understated. PC Magazine columnist John Dvorak recently
alleged that Microsoft was employing underhanded tactics to discredit
BitTorrent. As I wrote in Citizen
Microsoft, none of this is new for Microsoft, a company literally willing
to censor
democracy in its Chinese blog service while American soldiers fight to
establish democracy in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
I agree with Dvorak's take - these tactics are similar to Microsoft's campaign
against Linux. Microsoft's had five years to put file sharing capabilities into
Windows and has failed to do so. That's left room for people like Bram Cohen to
build BitTorrent.
Just as consumers can now replace their land-line phone service
with Internet-based voice
services (VoIP), the next
generation living room television may be primarily an Internet device.
For example, Griffin Technologies recently announced its iFill software
that downloads multiple Internet radio streams to your iPod nearly replacing
the need for its year-old RadioSHARK
which did the same for broadcast radio. Television will likely be the next
medium moved from broadcast to the Internet. The UKNova
site already offers BitTorrents for a variety of radio and television from the
BBC. People from around the world can now enjoy British content on their
computer. If it weren't for the draconian lobbying efforts of the American
entertainment industry and folks like Microsoft, we might have a similar
service here in the U.S.
already. With a $99 EyeHome from
ElGato.com and you can watch any content you download from the Internet on your
living room television today. New televisions will be network enabled to play
media from any personal computer. Combining the EyeHome with software such as iPodderX a site like CommonBits is pretty
close to this already. (While Apple's
iTunes is about to offer Podcast support, I'm not expecting it to support
video or BitTorrent downloads which makes it entirely less interesting.
Besides, Apple is likely to heavily censor the directory listings.) Although I
don't want to ignore the obvious race, class and economic
issues keeping people from broadband Internet access, the platform for
citizen media distribution is nearly here. We just need more citizen content
providers.
In this week's Seattle Weekly, Knute
Berger writes that it's now time to defend public broadcasting funding cuts
from the Republican's deficit producing militarism despite the mediocre,
watered-down content. "So while much of public television's programming is
lame, we must once again wearily mount the barricades to defend its right to be
lame," says Berger. I worry that fighting public funding battles individually
such as this just plays into Republican strategies. Fighting for CPB further
portrays progressives as intellectuals out of touch with mainstream Americans
and diverts our energy from emerging efforts that have so much promise. Perhaps
independent media is ready for rebirth. If you're a budding citizen journalist,
get out there and get online. CommonBits
would love to share
your content with the world.
If you're a nonprofit organization with multimedia content, consider
hosting it via BitTorrent. Get it out there! What are you waiting for?
Progressive think tanks and funders could take a cue from Participatory Culture and
(humbly) CommonBits to invest in
projects that lead to developing new forms of journalism, new platforms for
distribution and new ways of thinking about the need for accurate information
in our society.
2. Video Production tools
URL = http://journal.planetwork.net/article.php?lab=pantic0704
A similar article on P2P
Home Video looks at the production side of the equation.
"What is still lacking is the aggregation of these
rich media tools into a complete, easy-to-use package. A first effort toward
this kind of this bundling is the CD "dyne:bolic." This disk is a
complete, open source, Linux-based, laptop video production and distribution
suite. It comes with the following software installed: MPEG4IP (live Internet
streaming and capturing clips in QuickTime compatible format); FFMPEG
(transcoding and streaming in Flash, WMF or Real format); Cinelerra and LiVES
(edit and publish video clips); FreeJ (VJ livesets); Audacity and ReZound (edit
audio); and Gimp (image manipulation software). Unfortunately,
"dyne:bolic" is not as user-friendly as one would like. But it is an
important step in the right direction."
The article also
offers a good explanation on the innovative nature of Bittorrent and the kind
of problems it solves:
"The other direction was to coalesce P2P networks so they
can more effectively distribute popular resources. One of the best examples of
this approach is BitTorrent. The biggest problem for any P2P network is the
curse of popularity. The more popular a file becomes, the more bandwidth
required to provide it. Because more people want that file from you, you need
more bandwidth to serve all those requests. For this reason, only high
bandwidth operations could engage in massive P2P distribution of files that are
suddenly in great demand.
BitTorrent was developed to prevent the bottleneck that happens when timely new
video clips become popular. This is especially important for original content
that exists only at one or two locations on the Internet. If only a few people
have a file when it gets attention, the file becomes difficult to access.
BitTorrent addresses this problem through the active sharing of network
resources: when each new person starts to download a file, her computer
automatically becomes a server of the same file, able to supply other requests
from within the BitTorrent network. There is no waiting for the file to
completely download before the computer can begin serving. So the more popular
a file is, the more upstream bandwidth it immediately acquires.
This capability is extremely useful for video. Audio files, of
course, are smaller. The network distribution of video requires better logic
and sharing of bandwidth. BitTorrent treats bandwidth in a way that makes it
much easier for individual households to serve video. Typically, home networks
use much more bandwidth for downloading than uploading. Most home DSL and cable
networks are architected to handle a large amount of downloads, and they assume
you will send up very little. BitTorrent, and similarly designed P2P networks,
coalesce all of the upstream capacity for the households in the network,
creating an aggregate that is not only large, but efficient. Without a protocol
like BitTorrent, it becomes far less practical to serve video files to more
than one downloader at a time. But with this capacity, the serving of
independently produced video to large audiences from regular broadband
household networks can become a popular practice."
**
The author is "collaborating with a
group of people to build an IT infrastructure and the conceptual criteria that
will support broad participation in video production and distribution using
blogging technology. Our blog for the project is at http://www.unmediated.org
. We also have a video blog, DV Guide, with examples of past video shows, as
well as material collected for future shows. Visit us at
http://dv.open4all.info .
An overview article on P2P 'streaming'
infrastructure at http://open4all.info/up2speed.pdf It mentions the Open Source Streaming Alliance and the Direct
Video Network.
http://www.philhine.org.uk/writings/ess_naturemagic.html
Though written for an
in-crowd of people interested in magickal practices, this is a very good
introduction to the role of magical consciousness today. It is not seen as
something from a bygone age, but as an essential participatory process, an
essential adjunct to rational causal reasoning. Notice the strong link between
magic and participation, which is an essential component of P2P epistemology
and ontology. It is written by the anthropologist Susan Greenwood.
"Magical consciousness, as I've defined it:
-
above all it's an experience
-
an aspect, dimension, strand of
consciousness that allows for creative participation - through the imagination
- between human beings and spirit - of deities, ancestors, and all manner of
other-than-human people - from hedgehogs to prawns.
Magical consciousness works through connections. How? Through
seeing things in terms of patterns of communication (and this is an important
clue to the question I asked at the beginning...).
If we see 'consciousness' as something wider than just our own
minds; as something that enables us to connect with other beings through our
imaginations - there are no limits: we can change shape, shape-shift, with all
manner of beings - and thereby gain knowledge. We can experience what it's like
to be an owl, for example. We can feel what it's like to have feathers and to
feel the air moving through our feathers when we fly. Magical consciousness is
a source of knowledge that has been devalued and trivialized in Western
societies. Connections are made through our personal minds linking with other
minds in a wider consciousness or consciousnesses.
-
through participation, an ancient
concept in philosophy which means that things 'take part' in something bigger...
The term was developed by philosopher Lucien Levy-Bruhl to refer
to mystical thinking - a unity of thinking that made associations between
things based on the idea that energy suffuses everything. Levy-Bruhl initially
said that this was how non-western peoples thought. This started something of
an aggravated debate in anthropology in the early 20th century with various
celebrated anthropologists claiming that Levy-Bruhl made native peoples more
mystical than they really were. Levy-Bruhl then modified his position but what
he said about participation still remains relevant.
Anthropologist Stanley Tambiah developed Levy-Bruhl's notion of
participation to argue that people everywhere have two co-existing orientations
to the world:
-
causality
(logical thinking: abstract, separated, focused)
-
participation
(analogical, holistic thinking: works with patterns and connection, though
myths, ritual, and symbols) - basis of magical consciousness.
Causality and participation do not form a dualism but rather an
'entwining' - we use both, probably slipping in and out of each with ease
without really realizing. We're looking at magical consciousnesss so we're
interested in participation rather than causality. How to examine participation?
Lots of examples in the book, but I'll talk about one: The trance-dance of
Gordon the Toad It's hard to write about this kind of experience because
writing is the wrong code (in Bateson's terminology) of expression. The written
language, and the spoken language are the wrong codes for expression - it's
incommunicable in words.
What is the message of the dance? Bateson would say that it's
about communication. The dance is a participatory communication between shaman
and spirits whereby Gordon invokes the spirits he works with; he moves over and
lets them in and in the process both Gordon and the spirits are set free
(Gordon's words). Gordon says that he feels a world that thinks and its
presence humbles him and sets him free'.
- he is 'bringing through' and giving corporeal expression to
the non-corporeal. The dance is an expression of magical consciousness;
an experience. And this is why it is so difficult to write about.
but the communication with spirits enable Gordon to do the work
that he does in environmental education; it enables him to be a shaman in a
practical sense as performing a social role.
Magical consciousness is about recognizing the subjective
patterns that come to us through our engagement with our everyday here and now
world as well as the cosmos.
- it isn't something inherently mystical (although it can be
interpreted in this way)
- it's a part of being human, a part that has been denied by
Western societies.
Magical consciousness is about reconnecting with souls as psyche
- the life principle - the souls of everyday lived experience.
BOOKS: Susan
Greenwood. 1) Magic, Witchcraft and the Otherworld. Berg
in 2000).
2) The Nature of Magic.Palgrave, 2005
"This book examines how and why practitioners
of nature religion--Western witches, druids, shamans--seek to relate
spiritually with nature through "magical consciousness". Greenwood develops a new
theory of magical consciousness by arguing that magic ultimately has more to do
with the workings of the human mind in terms of an expanded awareness than with
socio-cultural explanations. She combines her own subjective insights gained
from magical practice with practitioners' in-depth accounts and sustained academic
theory on the process of magic. She also tracks magical consciousness in
philosophy, myth, folklore and story-telling, and the hi-tech discourse of
postmodernity."
http://biblio-fr.info.unicaen.fr/bnum/jelec/Solaris/d05/5link-pezet.html
This text is an attempt to present the evolution from the
representational paradigm to the knowledge production paradigm through the
organization of electronic memories, as external protheses to the human mind.
The study of cognitive searching modes and of the use of information for
knowledge acquisition as the internalisation/externalisation process leads us to
present the network as an interactive cognitive structure extended through the
others'presence and knowledge. The concepts of self organization and emergence
invite to consider as a true innovation the cooperative aspects of a
belief-based hypertextual organization of knowledge.
La mise en réseau des mondes technologiques et des dispositifs
cognitifs nous permet de faire un saut de géant. La relation qui existe
entre l'organisation des mémoires électroniques et l'organisation mentale de
l'individu montre que la connaissance apparaît à l'issue d'un processus de
conversion des niveaux informationnels en connaissances avant de s'incarner à
nouveau dans une nouvelle information avant de devenir connaissance. Le rôle de
l'information dans la constitution des connaissances repose sur l'intention
d'action (stratégie) et la compréhension qu'il a du phénomène (culture).
Dorénavant, la communauté scientifique intègre, dans un même espace, réseaux
humains et réseaux de communication, avec leurs capacités respectives à
produire de l'information, à communiquer et à coordonner en temps réel de
l'intelligence distribuée dans un flux constant d'informations nouvelles.
Le changement de forme de l'information, sa virtualisation,
induisent de nouveaux rapports à l'information, et un nouveau rapport à la
connaissance. Mais, phénomène plus important encore, l'ingénierie simultanée
des fonctions invariantes de l'organisation d'un système d'information
(mémorisation, traitement, communication, ...) donne lieu à la création d'une mémoire
collective dont les caractéristiques majeures sont l'hétérogénéité et la
distribution.
Son hétérogénéité vient de :
- la
numérisation qui facilite l'intégration des différentes formes textuelles
multimédia (image, son, etc.) ;
- l'intégration
de sources différentes ;
- la
présence d'utilisateurs aux motivations variées ;
- l'offre
de services différents (du culturel et du scientifiques au commercial).
La connexion des différents réseaux
d'information entraînent une rupture radicale des repères cognitifs
antérieurs causée par la mise en circulation accélérée des informations.
L'organisation de cet espace échappe à tout contrôle centralisé. Par contre
l'individu se trouve au centre d'un dispositif virtuel dont il n'a ni maîtrise,
ni perception globales. Les processus sociaux et les échanges en cours
introduisent une forme d'organisation venant de l'intérieur. L'environnement et
le réseau constituent un espace de travail intellectuel collectif où les êtres,
les signes, les choses trouvent une " dynamique de participation
mutuelle et échappent aux séparations des territoires " [Noyer 1994].
Ainsi, la notion de mémoire collective est liée à un système
d'inscriptions matérielles externes collectivement produites, interprétées ou
modifiées suivant les histoires personnelles des individus et la structure des
organisations dans lesquelles ils évoluent. Le réseau permet d'entrer dans un
processus de mémoire collective, de mutualisation des savoirs à travers la
création, la mise en place et la distribution de l'information sur les supports
de mémoire. D'après C. Lenay, l'incarnation de la mémoire d'un groupe
repose sur trois composantes : la mémoire externe des inscriptions
dans un contexte partagé, la mémoire des individus, la mémoire
organisationnelle liée à la structure de leurs relations interindividuelles. La
mémoire de la connaissance collective se crée à travers tous les acteurs et le
réseau des communications interpersonnelles. L'enchevêtrement des structures
organisationnelles et des diverses techniques rend difficile la distinction
entre connaissances individuelles et connaissances collectives au regard de
l'inscription, de la répétition, du transport de l'information.
Ces alliances complexes reflètent de nombreuses communautés de
pensée, des traces intellectuelles en train de se construire qui nous rappelle
qu'il s'agit de l'invention de l'homme, de sa création dont il est question
ici. Mais " la différentiation du cortex est déterminé par l'outil
autant que l'outil est déterminé par l'homme " [Stiegler 1994]. La mémoire
collective se comporte donc comme une trace incomplète en cours de production
et suppose à la fois des principes non plus simplement organisateurs, mais
aussi auto-organisateurs grâce à la construction de collaborations à travers
les notions d'intégration de buts, d'enseignement réciproque, de conscience
mutuelle.
The authors cite the distributed cognition theory of Hutchins:
"Hutchins fait de l'homme le site de l'information et
propose le concept de cognition distribuée dans le cadre de l'étude de
tâches réelles complexes [Hutchins 1995]. La cognition et
les connaissances n'existent pas dans la "tête" des individus mais
sont situées au niveau des interactions entre les membres d'une communauté
d'agents qui doivent effectuer une tâche ou interagir dans un environnement
donné. Pour lui, la communication n'est pas un simple processus de transfert de
connaissance d'un agent à un agent, mais renvoie à la création d'une nouvelle
connaissance collective qui n'est pas forcement intégrée en totalité par chacun
des membres du groupe. C'est à partir de ce qu'il appelle locus of knowledge
ou site de la connaissance mémorisée, incarnée, qui appartient à chaque
individu et ce qu'il appelle des systèmes de connaissances socialement
distribués, qu'apparaissent des propriétés cognitives non prédictibles. L'unité
des propriétés cognitives se déplace du niveau individuel à un niveau d'analyse
plus global afin de décrire et expliquer les propriétés cognitives d'un
système. On ne fait pas d'hypothèses sur les processus cognitifs en jeu, on
situe l'analyse au niveau des interactions entre agents dans un contexte
donné qui lui-même n'est pas un ensemble stable. Le sens se construit et
se transmet par ces interactions."
Hutchins E. (1995). - Cognition in the Wild. Cambridge (MA) : MIT
Press.
Characterics
of internet-based knowledge processes:
|
Fonctionnalité
|
Type
|
Caractéristiques
|
|
Communication
|
Réseau, micro, numérique la
station de travail
Logiciels
Multimédia, sollicitation de systèmes perceptifs différents
|
Les activités intellectuelles
sont médiées par l'ordinateur.
|
|
Production : écriture en
dynamique
|
Archivage
Marquage de texte pour mise en mémoire
|
Communication immédiate
|
|
Ressources diverses
|
Tous les catalogues et fichiers pour
la recherche d'information
Objets de lecture en texte
intégral : livres, périodiques
Cours
Applicatifs et illustrations
pédagogiques
|
Associés à des logiciels de
recherche documentaire et de traitement de texte
|
|
Traitement
|
Hypertexte
- Liens
- Localisation
- Possibilités de recherche mot-clé
- Association de plusieurs types de logiciels :
indexation et traitement de textes, dessin, animation, son, statistiques
|
URL (Uniform Research
Locator) : on peut localiser tout document
HTML (Hypertext Markup Language
|
|
Nature de l'information
|
Multiple et hétérogène
|
La notion de nature et
d' "ensembles"de l'information n'est plus une priorité
|
|
Mise à jour
|
Changement permanent
|
Vitesse de la pensée
|
|
Changement de statut de
l'utilisateur
|
Participant et impliqué
|
Ressource d'information
Créateur d'information confronté à la masse d'informations
|
Tableau 1 :
Les caractéristiques des environnements Internet
EMPIRE
-
The Saoudi oil bombshell, at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=3832
"from an unexpected
source, comes a devastating challenge to this powerful dogma: In a
newly-released book, investment banker Matthew R. Simmons convincingly
demonstrates that, far from being capable of increasing its output, Saudi Arabia is
about to face the exhaustion of its giant fields and, in the relatively near
future, will probably experience a sharp decline in output. "There is only
a small probability that Saudi Arabia will ever deliver the quantities of
petroleum that are assigned to it in all the major forecasts of world oil
production and consumption," he writes in Twilight
in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy. "Saudi
Arabian production," he adds, italicizing his claims to drive home his
point, "is at or very near its peak sustainable volume . . . and it
is likely to go into decline in the very foreseeable future."
-
Good overview of recent trends in advertising and how they deal
with the fragmentation of the market; the article mentions trends in
participatory advertising, at http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/050328fa_fact
MISCELLANEOUS
-
A blog by a former student of mine from Mongolia, a
very bright young girl with the soul of a reformer, at http://mongoliaoverview.blogspot.com/
P2P
-
Richard Stallman in an important editorial
against European software patents, in the Guardian, at http://www.guardian.co.uk/online/comment/story/0,12449,1510566,00.html
-
Open source shoes???, at http://www.fluevog.com/index2.html
-
Important essay by Chantal Mouffe on
'deliberative democracy', at http://mion.usu.ru:88/readings/Chantal_Mouffe_Deliberative_Democracy_or_Agonistic_Pluralism.pdf
-
good introduction to the import of the
Creative Commons license, at http://www.ojr.org/ojr/stories/050120seebach/
-
An extensive bibliography on the evolution
of cooperation, it contains elements like the following, see at http://pscs.physics.lsa.umich.edu/RESEARCH/Evol_of_Coop_Bibliography.html
Caporael,
Linnda R., Robyn M. Dawes, John M. Orbell and Alphons J.C. van de Kragt. 1989.
"Selfishness Examined: Cooperation in the Absence of Egoistic
Incentives." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 12:683-739.
Social
dilemmas occur when the pursuit of self-interest by individuals in a group
leads to less than optimal collective outcomes for everyone in the group. A
critical assumption in the human sciences is that people's choices in such
dilemmas are individualistic, selfish, and rational. Hence, cooperation in the
support of group welfare will only occur if there are selfish incentives that
convert the social dilemma into a nondilemma. In recent years, inclusive
fitness theories have lent weight to such traditional views of rational
selfishness on Darwinian grounds. To show that cooperation is based on selfish
incentives, however, one must provide evidence that people do not cooperate
without such incentives. In a series of experimental social dilemmas, subjects
were instructed to make single, anonymous choices about whether or not to
contribute money for a shared "bonus" that would be provided only if
enough other people in the group also contributed their money. Noncontributors
cited selfish reasons for their choices; contributors did not. If people are
allowed to engage in discussion, they will contribute resources at high rates,
frequently on irrational grounds, to promote group welfare. These findings are
consistent with previous research on ingroup biasing effects that cannot be
explained by "economic man" or "selfish gene" theories. An
alternative explanation is that sociality was a primary factor shaping the
evolution of Homo sapiens. The cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying
such choices evolved under selection pressures on small groups for developing
and maintaining group membership and for predicting and controlling the
behavior of other group members. This sociality hypothesis organized previously
inexplicable and disparate phenomena in a Darwinian framework and makes novel
predictions about human choice. Peer responses and commentaries follow.
-
An overview of open source content
management systems for autonomous cooperative publishing, at http://www.la-grange.net/cms
-
Very interesting overview and history of
hyperindividualised mediacontrol and self-publishing, i.e. EGOCASTING, at http://www.thenewatlantis.com/archive/7/rosen.htm
. The New Atlantis is an excellent 'technology and society' journal
I am still updating and
expanding the essay, and I have recently decided that the thesis of both
cognitive capitalism (the Multitudes authors), or the vectoralist hypothesis of
MacKenzie Wark, need updating. I'm positing a new subclass that is not
dependent on accumulating knowledge assets, nor of controlling the vectors of
information and communication, but on enabling and/or exploiting the networks
of participative culture.
"Recall the following: the thesis of cognitive
capitalism says that we have entered a new phase of capitalism based on the
accumalation of knowledge assets, rather than physical production tools. The
vectoralist thesis says that a new class has arisen which controls the vectors
of information, i.e. the means through which information and creative products
have to pass, for them to realize their exchange value. They both describe the
processes of the last 40 years, say the post-1968 period, which saw a furious
competition through knowledge-based competition and for the acquisition of
knowledge assets, which led to the extraordinary weakening of the scientific
and technical commons. And they do this rather well, though in the case of
MacKenzie Wark, I still do not understand the relationship between the power of
the vectoralist, and the system of financial capitalism, which is equally
dominating in the current period.
But in my opinion, both thesis fail to account for the
newest of the new, i.e. to take into account the emergence of peer to peer as
social format. What is happening?
In terms of knowledge creation, a vast new information
commons is being created, which is increasingly out of control of cognitive
capitalism. And the new information infrastructure, cannot be said to 'belong'
in any real sense to the vectoralist class.
Therefore, my hypothesis is that a new capitalist
class is emerging, which I propose to call the netarchists (since netocracy 'is
already taken' by Alexander Bard). These are the forces which both 'enable' and
exploit the participatory networks arising in the peer to peer era. Examples
abound:
1)
Red Hat: it makes a living through
associated services around open source and free software which, and this is
crucial, it doesn't own, and doesn't need to own. We now have not only the
spectacle of firms divesting their physical capital (the famous example of
Alcatel), but also of their intellectual capital, witness the recent gift of
IBM of many patents to the open source 'patents commons'
2)
Amazon: yes, it does sell books,
but its force comes from being the intermediary between the publishers and the
consumers of books. But crucially, it success comes from enabling knowledge
exchange between these customers. Without it, Amazon wouldn't quite be Amazon.
3)
Google: yes, it does own the
search algorhythms and the vast machinery of distributed computers. BUT, just
as crucially, its value lies in the vast content created by users on the
internet. Without it, Google would be nothing substantial, just another firm
selling search engines to corporations.
4)
EBay: it sells nothing, it just
enables, and expoits, the myriad interactions between users creating markets.
5)
Yahoo: gets its value for being a
portal
Search
Tools: