This issue is mostly dedicated to the general topic of 'cooperation'. I recommend in particular the article by Kevin Kelly in Wired, on ten years of internet, it is very readable. The contribution on 'free cooperation' is important as it sets clear criteria to which cooperation should conform in a contemporary setting. It can be read as a critique of the integral paradigm as expressed by Wilber. We also examine the contemporary cooperative movement and how it differs from P2P.
In the miscellaneous section, check out the new online music service Pandora, which I enjoyed during a trial, why the Facebook is all the rage on American universities. In a new section devoted to books, I repeat my strongest recommendation to read "Caliban and the Witch", one of the best books I have been able to read in the last decade.
ISSUE 88, 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, michelsub2003@yahoo.com ; P/I is an
emanation of the FOUNDATION FOR PEER TO PEER ALTERNATIVES
ISSUE 88: September 25,
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, peer governance, common-property regimes
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, Jaap van Till, and the
Multitudes mailing list for regular suggestions.
Recommended: JamesBurke of Lifesized, http://lifesized.blogspot.com/; Kris
Roose, at http://www.noosphere.cc/ ;
Nicole-Anne Boyer, http://www.fuzzysignals.com/
How to subscribe: Write to compiler Michel
Bauwens at michel@noosphere.cc or at
michelsub2003@yahoo.com.
QUOTES
-
1. Kevin Kelly
on ten years of internet evolution:
"The scope of the Web today is hard to fathom. The
total number of Web pages, including those that are dynamically created upon
request and document files available through links, exceeds 600 billion. That's
100 pages per person alive.
How could we create so much, so fast, so well? In fewer than 4,000 days,
we have encoded half a trillion versions of our collective story and put them
in front of 1 billion people, or one-sixth of the world's population. That
remarkable achievement was not in anyone's 10-year plan."
On eBay: "...we have an open global
flea market that handles 1.4 billion auctions every year and operates from your
bedroom. Users do most of the work; they photograph, catalog, post, and
manage their own auctions. And they police themselves; while eBay and other
auction sites do call in the authorities to arrest serial abusers, the chief
method of ensuring fairness is a system of user-generated ratings. Three
billion feedback comments can work wonders."
The fuel of participation: "The electricity of participation nudges
ordinary folks to invest huge hunks of energy and time into making free
encyclopedias, creating public tutorials for changing a flat tire, or
cataloging the votes in the Senate. More and more of the Web runs in this mode.
One study found that only 40 percent of the Web is commercial. The rest runs on
duty or passion."
(source: http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html?
)
-
2.
Nanotechnology for Warfare
"What we want is something that has
the destructive chemical action of a chemical weapon, which is really easy to
do, combined with sensing and computation, so that when it lands on an object
or on a person it can identify that object or person. If it's a person, [it
can] even read their DNA--and then decide whether to implement the weapon or not."
(source: Ms. Petersen of The National Nanotechnology Initiative: http://www.nano.gov,
cited in Automates Intelligents)
CONTENTS
-
Latest online version of the essay is still located at http://integralvisioning.org/article.php?story=p2ptheory1
-
My entry for the upcoming Re-Activism conference, on the 'political
economy of peer production' in Budapest on mid-October at http://mokk.bme.hu/centre/conferences/reactivism/submissions/bouwens
-
James Burke has written us to inform us about a new P2P-inspired
structure he's been working with, which may be compared to other corporate
commons initiatives we have been monitoring:
The Institute of Collaboration, Creativity and Culture is
set up under dutch law as a 'left-appearing' non-profit, but is in fact a for
profit, dynamically networked organization
of people who have come together through the internet and done significant
emergent discussion individually and as a group to uncover our indivudal values
and group values to bring us all into alignment. It's taken a year in which
time we have uncovered values, goals and new business models.
URL = http://www.ifccc.net/wikka.php?wakka=HomePage
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/george-lakoff/the-postkatrina-era_b_7034.html
The following excerpt by
George Lakoff introduces an important topic. Is peer to peer an expression of
the left, of the right, or neither?
In my view, it is definitely an expression of the left,
but, it has the potential to solve the important contradiction between equality
and liberty, and thus, to encompass sincere liberals in its embrace. Before the
emergence of peer to peer, it really seemed that equality and liberty could not
be realized at the same time, that one could only be developed fully at the
expense of the other. You could either develop equality, using the state for
redistribution but at the expense of inequality-creating individual liberty, or
promote liberty, at the expense of equality, as the neoliberal regime is
currently doing. I think that it is plausible to say, in parallel with the
contrast evoked by George Lakoff below, that the left promoted equality, and
that the contemporary right says it promotes liberty.
With the emergence of P2P however, we now know that there
is a social formation, a way to produce and govern, where both liberty and
equality are integrated, both re-inforcing the other.
The emerging peer to peer left, is different from the old
left in an important respect, something that is missing in George Lakoff's
comparison, and that is the following. The old left relied on the state, for
reforms, or for revolution, as proposed by respectively social-democrats and
Stalinists. That state was either based on the transfer of sovereign rights to
the state, in the democratic polity, or to a authoritarian state, again
respectively for the two political forces above. The 'people', respectively
voluntaritly, or involuntarily, 'delegated' their autonomy to the state.
But the new peer to peer left is, will be, not focused on
the state, but on the Commons. The core of peer to peer is the autonomous
development of civil society, to which the market and the state become
servants. Peer to peer is about 'absolute democracy', i.e. about extending
autonomous and democratic governance (peer governance) to the largest extent
possible, beyond politics, into the realms of production (peer production) ,
co-created culture and participative spirituality. The state, still serves the
common good where necessary, but has to provide at least neutral arbitrage between
the market and civil society.
The peer to peer left is a direct emanation of civil
society, and not of sections of the state apparatus. Unlike the people, the
multitude does not delegate its autonomy, except in the special circumstances
where autonomous peer production and peer governance is unlikely to occur or
difficult to realize. The Commons is primary, the State and the Market are
secondary.
-
George
Lakoff on left vs. right values
"The heart of progressive-liberal values is simple: empathy
(caring about and for people) and responsibility (acting responsibly on that
empathy). These values translate into a simple principle: Use the common wealth
for the common good to better all our lives. In short, promoting the common
good is the central role of government.
The right-wing conservatives now in power have the opposite
values and principles. Their main value is Rely on individual discipline and
initiative. The central principle: Government has no useful role. The only
common good is the sum of individual goods.
It's the difference between We're-all-in-this-together and
You're-on-your-own-buddy. It's the difference between Every citizen is entitled
to protection and You're only entitled to what you can afford. It's the
difference between connection and separation. It is this difference in moral
and political philosophy that lies behind the tragedy of Katrina."
See also: William Greider on the resurgence of the American left after
Katrina, at http://www.thenation.com/doc/20051003/greider
http://www.geo.coop/networksolution.htm
After a sound introduction to the network form of organisation,
with an argument on why cooperatives are better equipped than businesses to do
it, this essay compares the hierarchical structure of the Basque Mondragon
cooperative, with the decentralized structure of the Italian cooperatives of
the Emilia-Romagna region.
Prompted by this article, I've tried to formulate my
own preliminary conclusions about the differences and complementarity between
cooperatives and P2P processes, see part three.
I must share a certain skepticism about the
cooperative movement however. It has existed for over 200 years now, and it has
always remained marginal. The reason is that, however socially more desirable
it may be in terms of creating more cooperative human relations, it is
outcompeted by for-profit firms. And that is the big difference with peer
production: peer production is more productive than its for-profit
alternatives, and socially more desirable.
Another important point is to which degree
cooperatives may require a sacrificial individuality, in which the individual
must somehow curtain himself for the benefit of the community. Isn't this why
many young people have left the Kibbutzim where they grew up? There also, peer
to peer represents a new kind of collective, that is not at all predicated upon
any sacrificial limitation of individuality, but on the contrary on its full
flowering.
1. Mondragon
"Mondragon
Corporation Cooperativa (MCC) is one of the biggest and well known cooperative
groups in the world. Organized in a network, it contains over 150 industrial
enterprises (workers cooperatives and their affiliated companies which can be
conventional businesses). But MCC can also depend on its powerful financial
group made of two units: a very large bank, Caja Laboral Popular, and a
dedicated social security system, Lagun-Aro; The MCC network is completed by a
distribution group which notably holds the Eroski consumer cooperative where
over 32.000 people work today. MCC also operates three R&D centers and
supports the Mondragon University were about 4.000 students are enrolled.
Mondragon
is the first industrial group of the Basque Country and sixth industrial group
of Spain, with total sales of € 9.232 millions and an operating profit of € 380
millions in 2002. MCC's workforce has impressively increased in the ten last
years to reach 68.625 employees in 2003 against 25.317 in 1993, and still grew
by 10.5 % in 2002 despite international recession. But only half of this
workforce is made of cooperative members, although cooperatives keep on joining
the group every year: three did so in 2002. From the day its first cooperative
was founded in 1956, Mondragon has always been a very centralized and
hierarchical business.
2. Emilia-Romagna
In
the industrial districts of Emilia-Romagna, cooperatives and conventional small
and medium size enterprises cooperate with each other. In this region, there
are about 8.000 cooperatives which have built up their own organizations and
solidarities in such a way that one might say they have formed networks of
cooperatives within the Emilia-Rmagna clusters. Consequently, it is difficult
to isolate the network of cooperatives from the rest of the local reticular
structures.
Small
and medium sized enterprises, both cooperative and conventional, have
specialized and formed industrial districts. One can find a knitwear district,
a clothes district and a ceramic tiles district in Modena, an automatic
machinery district, a packaging machinery district and an agricultural
machinery one in Bologna, a wood working machine tools district in Carpi, a
tomato canning district, a ham district an a food processing machinery one in
Parma ... (Brusco, 1982).
3. Book: American Beyond Capitalism. Gar Alperovitz
URL = http://www.geo.coop/interview0705.htm
'His
new book, America Beyond Capitalism, is a roadmap of these pioneering efforts
ones that Gar sees as "likely to establish significant foundations for
what could potentially become far-reaching changeŠ" But towards what? The
book is not just replete with descriptive details of particular projects; it
develops a robust vision of a new and much-improved economic and political
system a "Pluralist Commonwealth". With this vision, according to
Gar, we can begin to weave together and strengthen our all-too-often
disconnected energies.'
4. P2P and the cooperative movement
P2P and the cooperative movement share the desire for
equality and autonomy, but also differ in significant respects.
-
P2P is based on cyber-collectives that are
organized on a global scale; it is strongest in immaterial production;
Cooperatives are mostly local groups; and they are perfectly geared for
physical production
-
P2P is a form of common property that
'belongs to all'; cooperatives belong to the collective of specific producers
-
P2P produces use value, not exchange value;
Cooperatives are geared towards the marketplace and many of their decisions are
dependent on that marketplace; they create exchange value. While P2P is
emerging and growing and is proving to be 'more productive' than for-profit
alternatives, that does not seem to be the case with cooperatives, who have
always been marginalized in a capitalist market.
-
P2P is a form of communal shareholding:
anyone contributes and uses freely; Cooperatives are a form of Equality
Matching: work and income are distributed in a formal way to insure equality.
Cooperatives are based on reciprocity, P2P not.
5. P2P Directory: Grassroots Economic Organizing
URL
= http://www.geo.coop/whatsgeo.htm
"GEO
(Grassroots Economic Organizing) Newsletter is a bimonthly publication that
reports on worker cooperatives and community-based economies in the U.S. and
World wide, and their development through local cooperative action. GEO also
provides a global forum for the cooperative movement."
http://republicart.net/disc/aeas/spehr01_en.htm
Excerpts from a video interview with Christoph Spehr.
This interview sets out very clearly the criteria to which contemporary forms
of cooperation must abide by.
1.
Free Cooperation vs. the Old Utopias
Political
utopia, utopian thinking today has to differ from most of the stuff we are
familiar with as political utopias. I think, the first important thing is that
it has to be non-prescriptive. Most utopian thinking is prescriptive in the
sense that it dictates people what to do. The idea behind it is that if you set
up proper rules, then society will run okay. But these rules have to be
respected, of course, it's like a cage built by the author of the utopia, and
then you can put people in, and they have to follow the rules, and then it will
work. And this, I think, is something that is not acceptable today and can
never be a free utopia. So you have to build your utopia on the fact that
people do what they want, you cannot impose your ideas of the right
consciousness, of right and wrong, you cannot rule out some desires, some
actions as wrong, this is what you have to do. I think this is very important.
I
think it is also necessary that utopian thinking is not elitist in the sense
that you have an elite that has the right consciousness, the right knowledge, a
group of decision-makers, of scientific thinkers that can define for others
what is the real case, but you have to build utopia on an equal community,
where it does not matter what people have read and what theories they are
acquainted with. Yes, it has to work with different people and they have to
have the possibility of participating on an equal basis. They should not be excluded, access
to this utopia should not be restricted by the question where people, where a
person comes from.
I
also think that today political utopias can no longer be hierarchical. By this
I do not want to stress the point of hierarchy and organization, but a
hierarchy of main stuff and minor stuff, of the fields of the social that are
seen as important and others that are seen as not so important - which is
typical of classical utopias. In fact, we know a lot of utopian thinking that
says: "The core business, what we call economy, is what big business does.
Is how tools are made, and other aspects like raising children or doing
creative work, acting together in a modest and proper way are minor stuff and
have to follow the rules of the others. And I think this is illegitimate -
because it is always combined with a hierarchy between different people doing
different stuff in these utopian societies - and a clear case of inequality. So
one could say you have to bring utopia back to the kitchen. It has to work
there and the rules of the kitchen have to be the rules of bigger cooperations
- not the other way round. Everything that people do together is a kind of cooperation
because they share work and they use the work and the experience and the bodily
existence of others - also historical and direct and indirect ways. And though
there are two extremes, free cooperations and forced cooperations, most of what
we know in most societies is forced cooperation.
2. Foundational rules of the new cooperation
There
are three aspects that have to be taken into account if you want to build a
free cooperation. The first is that all rules in this cooperation can be
questioned by everybody, there are no holy rules that people cannot question or
reject or bargain and negotiate about - which is not the case in most of the
cooperations and organizational forms that we know. And the second aspect that
has to be guaranteed for free cooperation is that people can question and
change these rules by using this primary material force of refusing to
cooperate, by restricting their cooperation, by holding back what they do for
these cooperations, making conditions under which they are willing to
cooperate, or leaving cooperations. They must be guaranteed the right to use
these measures to influence the rules and that everybody in the cooperation can
do this. And the third aspect - which is important because otherwise it would
be just a blackmailing of the less powerful ones by the more powerful ones - is
that the price of not cooperating, the price that it costs if you restrict your
cooperation or if the cooperation splits up, should be ...not exactly equal ...but
similar for all participants in this cooperation, and it should be affordable.
That means, it can be done, it's not impossible, it's not a question of sheer
existence to cooperate in this way.
3. Free cooperation and capitalism
Capitalist
markets have some aspects that cannot be transferred to a free cooperation. For
instance, it is unacceptable, that the more successful a participant of the
market is, the more they can exclude every other participant. And it's clear
that in capitalist markets the main aspect of competition is not being better
or having better ideas, but applying more force against others to produce
cheaply. Of course, this cannot be an element of a market in a free
cooperation.
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html
Upon reading the various articles on the occasion of
the ten years of existence of the internet, it struck me how the mainstream
European press completely missed the main story about the social revolution
that took place, i.e. the flowering of sharing and participation that it
enabled in civil society. An article in Le Monde just devoted one or two sentences at the end of the article
devoted to peer to peer. But Wired's Kevin Kelly 'got' it, and gives a
beautiful summary of the meaning of the past decade.
You still encounter some on the left these days
stressing how the whole thing was a corporate plot. But as an internet pioneer
in Belgium, I can tell you, as we were stressing the importance and promise of
the new medium, the whole establishment declared us crazy. Kevin Kelly goes
back to these early days, reminding us of the early skeptical reactions of the
powers that be.
"But
looking back now, after 10 years of living online, what surprises me about the
genesis of the Web is how much was missing from Vannevar Bush's vision,
Nelson's docuverse, and my own expectations. We all missed the big story. The
revolution launched by Netscape's IPO was only marginally about hypertext and
human knowledge. At its heart was a new kind of participation that has since
developed into an emerging culture based on sharing. And the ways of
participating unleashed by hyperlinks are creating a new type of thinking -
part human and part machine - found nowhere else on the planet or in history.
Not
only did we fail to imagine what the Web would become, we still don't see it
today! We are blind to the miracle it has blossomed into. And as a result of
ignoring what the Web really is, we are likely to miss what it will grow into
over the next 10 years. Any hope of discerning the state of the Web in 2015
requires that we own up to how wrong we were 10 years ago.
No
Web phenomenon is more confounding than blogging. Everything media experts knew
about audiences - and they knew a lot - confirmed the focus group belief that
audiences would never get off their butts and start making their own
entertainment. Everyone knew writing and reading were dead; music was too much
trouble to make when you could sit back and listen; video production was simply
out of reach of amateurs. Blogs and other participant media would never happen,
or if they happened they would not draw an audience, or if they drew an
audience they would not matter. What a shock, then, to witness the
near-instantaneous rise of 50 million blogs, with a new one appearing
every two seconds. There - another new blog! One more person doing what AOL and
ABC - and almost everyone else - expected only AOL and ABC to be doing. These
user-created channels make no sense economically. Where are the time, energy,
and resources coming from?
What
happens when the data flow is asymmetrical - but in favor of creators? What
happens when everyone is uploading far more than they download? If everyone is
busy making, altering, mixing, and mashing, who will have time to sit back and
veg out? Who will be a consumer? No one. And that's just fine. A world where
production outpaces consumption should not be sustainable; that's a lesson from
Economics 101. But online, where many ideas that don't work in theory succeed
in practice, the audience increasingly doesn't matter. What matters is the
network of social creation, the community of collaborative interaction that
futurist Alvin Toffler called prosumption. As with blogging and BitTorrent,
prosumers produce and consume at once. The producers are the audience, the act
of making is the act of watching, and every link is both a point of departure
and a destination.
See
also, the following article by Fortune magazine on the 'Contribution Economy',
at http://www.fortune.com/fortune/fastforward/0,15704,1088315,00.html
http://www.savanne.ch/tusovka/en/pilot/sustainability.html
From a new Russian online journal Tusovka.
"Since
the UN conference in Rio, the concept of 'sustainability has played a large
role in parts of the environmental movement. Especially NGOs relying on
corporate funders have been obliged to include the term in their vocabulary at
least for the sake of writing successful grant proposals. We should not forget,
however, that the concept of sustainability in its current usage has not been
introduced by the green movement, but rather by hardline industrialists like
Stephan Schmidheiny, one of the most active sponsors of the Rio summit. In
fact, it can be argued that before Rio, there was a broad radical environmental
movement, and that the main 'success' of Rio has been to destroy this radical
movement and make the demands of environmentalists (now in the name of
sustainability) compatible with the continuation of the capitalist order --
reducing pollution and slowing down the depletion of resources here or there,
but leaving the social relations and power structures intact and thus leaving
the mechanisms which led to an overexploitation of the environment and the
people in place.
We
do not mean to say that there is no positive way to use the term
'sustainability'. We think, however, that we should be aware of its mainstream
usage as an excuse for continuing capitalist exploitation, and discuss the
effects that the concept, and its endorsement by Western funders, have had on
the environmental movement, especially in Eastern Europe, where the dependency
on external funding tends to be larger.
Christoph
Spehr's article is probably not so easy to read for those less familiar with
the discussions that have shaped radical political movements in Western Europe.
We feel, however, that it nicely links together a variety of important
considerations, and hope that it may serve as a starting point for further
discussions."
Recommended
from the same journal:
-
Global Financial Warfare, at http://www.savanne.ch/tusovka/en/pilot/financial-warfare.html
http://www.republicart.net/disc/empire/buden02_en.htm
"We no longer live in an age of emancipation. At least,
this is Ernesto Laclau's thesis. The grand narratives of global emancipation
that have essentially characterized our political life for centuries, are now
dissolving entirely before our eyes. This disappearance of emancipation from
the political horizon of our era coincides with the end of the Cold War,
according to Laclau, which he also regards as the final manifestation of the
Enlightenment, at least in the ideologies of its two protagonists.
"How
should we understand this diagnosis? And what does it mean to reflect on
politics and act politically "beyond emancipation"?
Laclau
principally distinguishes between two dimensions of emancipation, which are
implicit in the traditional concept of emancipation: one radical and the
other non-radical. If emancipation is radical, then it must be grounded
in itself and exclude that which hinders its completion as a radical otherness.
In this case, the moment of emancipation negates an order - let's call it
"repressive" - that is fundamentally alien to it. However, if
emancipation is non-radical, then it has a deeper ground in common with its
Other, which links the old, pre-emancipatory order and the
"emancipated" order. An emancipation results here at the level of the
ground of society, and it influences all spheres of society. The emancipation
inspired by Marxism is also characterized by these two dimensions. The class
struggle between the proletariat and the capitalist class must be taken as a
radical form of political antagonism, which can only be resolved in a total
negation of one of its two sides - in the famous dictatorship of the
proletariat. However, these two antagonistic sides have a common ground, which
lies in the material production of societal life, namely in the fundamental
antagonism between social productive forces and production circumstances. This
ground simultaneously closes the rift torn open between its two dimensions by
emancipation.
What
is crucial - and this is also Laclau's key argument - is that a closure of this
separation immanent to emancipation, is no longer possible today. An
emancipatory act can no longer resolve its logical contradiction, completely
reject one of its incompatible sides - either the dichotomous or the holistic
one. For Laclau, an intrinsic indistinguishability between them has become the conditio
sine qua non of every discourse of emancipation. The rift between the two
dimensions of emancipation, caused by the emancipatory act, remains open, just
as society remains completely opaque to itself. The fact that a society is no
longer transparent to itself means nothing other than that the ground of this
society can no longer be imagined. In this way, the universal also disappears
from the historical terrain, in which the struggle for concrete emancipatory
projects takes place. Struggles like this dissolve into mere particularism.
Today,
instead of the emancipation, we can only speak of a plurality of
emancipations. The fact that we can no longer clearly distinguish and separate
them from one another, is due specifically to their fundamental opacity. In
fact, we can no longer find any unified ground, to which all emancipatory
struggles could be reduced. Without this grounding - without the ground of
society being postulated - there is no exclusion, no outside anymore. The
societies in which we live, can no longer be imagined as radically separable,
and we can draw no clear line of division, through which our emancipatory
interest excludes something in society that should be excluded. Nor can we
identify with a subject that universally represents the ground of society. This
is the reason for the discomfort that constantly accompanies our current
emancipatory engagement.
The
death of the ground, the universal, the subject, grand narratives, etc. is
almost automatically equated with the appearance of post-modernism. I think,
though, that we could also date it earlier, at least as far as the grand
narrative of Marxist-inspired emancipation is concerned: specifically with the
worst historical trauma that shook the socialist and communist workers'
movement - the rise of fascism and its political victory in Italy and Germany.
Politically, the proletariat has never recovered from this shock. The tragedy
was not only that the working class refused to take over the key role in its
own emancipation, but also that it even defected to its class enemy. Instead of
emancipating itself, the working class was suddenly willing to oppress itself.
http://www.eeb.uconn.edu/faculty/turchin/Clio.htm
"Many
historical processes are dynamic. Empires rise and fall, populations and
economies boom and bust, world religions spread or wither. Cliodynamics
(from Clio,
the muse of history, and dynamics, the study of temporally varying processes)
is a branch of historical sociology that investigates such dynamical processes
in history.
Because
nonlinear dynamical systems are capable of very complex behaviors (see the side
bar), explicit mathematical models are a necessary ingredient in any research
program for investigating them. We also need data describing how various
aspects of the studied systems change with time. Fortunately, much quantitative
empirical material on historical systems has been made available over the last
couple of decades by workers in the field of cliometrics, and we can
confidently expect that this process will continue in the future. The proposed
general approach to investigating dynamical systems in history, therefore, is
as follows. We start with verbal theories explaining historical change, either
proposed by previous theorists, or formulated de novo. The verbal
theories are translated into mathematical models, whose predictions can then be
rigorously tested with cliometric data."
(Thanks
to David Spillane for the suggestion)
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.08/tech.html?pg=5&topic=tech&topic_set=
Kevin Kelly closes his
marvellous article on the age of participation, see above, with a conclusion
about the transhuman implications of the internet. The birth of the One
Machine, which we are witnessing today, is not just a technical event, but a
spiritual event.
"By
2015, desktop operating systems will be largely irrelevant. The Web will be the
only OS worth coding for. It won't matter what device you use, as long as it
runs on the Web OS. You will reach the same distributed computer whether you
log on via phone, PDA, laptop, or HDTV.
In
the 1990s, the big players called that convergence. They peddled the image of
multiple kinds of signals entering our lives through one box - a box they hoped
to control. By 2015 this image will be turned inside out. In reality, each
device is a differently shaped window that peers into the global computer.
Nothing converges. The Machine is an unbounded thing that will take a billion
windows to glimpse even part of. It is what you'll see on the other side of any
screen.
And
who will write the software that makes this contraption useful and productive?
We will. In fact, we're already doing it, each of us, every day. When we post
and then tag pictures on the community photo album Flickr, we are teaching the
Machine to give names to images. The thickening links between caption and
picture form a neural net that can learn. Think of the 100 billion times per day humans click on a Web page as a way
of teaching the Machine what we think is important. Each time we forge a link
between words, we teach it an idea. Wikipedia encourages its citizen authors to
link each fact in an article to a reference citation. Over time, a Wikipedia
article becomes totally underlined in blue as ideas are cross-referenced. That
massive cross-referencing is how brains think and remember. It is how neural
nets answer questions. It is how our global skin of neurons will adapt
autonomously and acquire a higher level of knowledge. The human brain has no
department full of programming cells that configure the mind. Rather, brain
cells program themselves simply by being used. Likewise, our questions program
the Machine to answer questions.
We
think we are merely wasting time when we surf mindlessly or blog an item, but
each time we click a link we strengthen a node somewhere in the Web OS, thereby
programming the Machine by using it. What will most surprise us is how
dependent we will be on what the Machine knows - about us and about what we
want to know. We already find it easier to Google something a second or third
time rather than remember it ourselves. The more we teach this megacomputer,
the more it will assume responsibility for our knowing. It will become our
memory. Then it will become our identity. In 2015 many people, when divorced
from the Machine, won't feel like themselves - as if they'd had a lobotomy.
Legend has it that Ted Nelson invented Xanadu as a remedy for his poor memory
and attention deficit disorder. In this light, the Web as memory bank should be
no surprise. Still, the birth of a machine that subsumes all other machines so
that in effect there is only one Machine, which penetrates our lives to such a
degree that it becomes essential to our identity - this will be full of
surprises. Especially since it is only the beginning.
There is only one time in the history of each planet
when its inhabitants first wire up its innumerable parts to make one large
Machine. Later that Machine may run faster, but there is only one time when it
is born.
You
and I are alive at this moment."
http://www.integrativespirituality.org/postnuke/html/
Readers of my P2P manuscript or essays know that the
development of participative spirituality is an important area where P2P
processes are emerging. Amongst the pioneers are usually mention are John Heron
(Sacred Science) and Jorge Ferrer (Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology), and
Douglas Rushkoff's Open Source Judaism project. It is therefore to be expected
that I should rejoice in an initiative which claims to do precisely that, and
offers a well thought out, technologically integrated platform to boot. Yet, my
'gut feeling' tells me to be cautious, so let me explain below (see bullet
points) why I'm unsure about how to react to this new initiative. Bear in mind
that it is just a first reaction, and that I'm open to revise this opinion. If
you know more about this initiative, let me know.
1)
you get a full already existing structure, and organisation, already precluding
many bottom-up processes
2)
you don't know who is behind it and where the funding comes from. It pretty
much sounds like a Wilber/Beck inspired initiative, which is fine, but why not
say so
3)
you have to register to even contact them, which is a classic marketing ploy
usually associated with for-profit companies
4)
it makes many spiritual assumptions, such as the 'common' nature of the ever
present origin, the similarity of the god-buddha principles, etc... In this
sense, the search is already oriented (probably to nondualism), not truly open.
It avoids inter-spiritual conflict by positing an already common ground.
Conclusion:
it may be 'open source' but does not sound like it also 'peer to peer' or
'participative'.
THE DIGITAL REVOLUTION
-
Why cyberspace is a space, at http://fcis.oise.utoronto.ca/~aviseu/eng_place-space_content.html
This is an old debate, taking place in 2000, but still of
interest. In this piece, Ana Viseu argues why it is correct to consider cyberspace
as a space.
-
Worth trying out , Pandora asks for your favorite song or
artist, analyses the 'music genome' of it, and looks for similar music to
create a personalized streaming radio. First ten hours are free, at http://www.pandora.com/ ; review at http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/10/AR2005091000146.html?
"If Internet dating sites can match people by trying to
compute the elements of attraction, why can't songs be matched with people in
the same way? That's the idea behind Pandora ( http://www.pandora.com/
), a new Web service that tries to match music you like with other tunes that
share the same qualities. Pandora Media, the company behind the service, has
been selling music-discovery software for years to big retailers such as Best
Buy. Its Pandora service is the company's first offering based on an unusual
musical study it dubbed the Music Genome Project. Over the past five years, a
team of analysts studied songs played by more than 10,000 artists and attempted
to classify their traits -- not just which instruments are played and what the
rhythm is like, but the melodies, lyrics and hundreds of other variables. Much
as genes shape humans, the analysts theorized that certain describable
qualities shape music and therefore should govern our musical tastes."
-
A defintion of splogs, which is to blogs, what spam is to email,
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Splog
-
Three recommended audioblogs with music, at http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/13.09/play.html?pg=3
-
Forbes on why Skype is the death of
telephony, at http://www.forbes.com/2005/09/08/skype-ebay-merger-cx_de_0908skype.html
"In effect, Skype
has created a worldwide voice network, capable of reaching as many consumers as
the biggest phone companies, but it has done it without laying down a single
fiber-optic wire. The company has proved that there's no such thing as telephony
anymore. There's just data, and anyone who handles data can carry phone
calls."
- The Facebook, http://www.facebook.com/about.php ;
The Facebook is an online directory that connects people through
social networks at schools. It's September and the Back-to-School energy is
buzzing most college campuses. At over 2000 American colleges, students are
obsessively making sense of the collegiate culture using an articulated social
networking service - The Facebook. The
popularity and usage of this tool amongst its niche market far exceeds every
other SNS - 60% of students in supported colleges login daily; 85% weekly; and
93% monthly. Think about that - those are numbers for potential
users not just those with accounts. (source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8941034/site/newsweek/
)
EMPIRE
-
War and resistance today, interview with Howard
Zinn, at http://www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?emx=x&pid=20715
-
The End of Rational Capitalism, good overview of post 1973
developments, at http://www.monthlyreview.org/0305jbf.htm
-
"Capital, Class and the State in the Global Political
Economy", at http://www.networkideas.org/featart/jun2005/fa17_Global_Political_Economy.htm
"This paper discusses the relation of state logic and
capital logic in the contemporary global political economy, a period in which
the use of the term imperialism has come back into fashion along with
discussion of the merits of a presumed benign American Empire. This paper
explores how the strategies of 'rule setting' along with the use of military
force, both engender cooperation and resistance on the part of local elites who
both bend imposed neoliberal norms to their own benefit and organize to bargain
as regional actors against the worlds hyperpower."
-
What the 'Soldiers of Christ' have in store for us, at http://www.harpers.org/FeelingTheHate.html
Former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges claims what
distinguishes pre-millennialism, or Dominionism, as an evangelical
dogma, is the credo that Christian activists must produce a Fundamentalist
Christian political and social order as a necessary precondition for Christ's
return. For more, see "Soldiers of Christ II: Feeling the Hate with
the National Religious Broadcasters," from the May 2005 issues of Harpers'
Magazine.
-
Robert Parsons, "Christian Reconstruction:
A Call for Reformation and Renewal," http://atheism.about.com/od/reconstructionist/
-
Chris Hedges, "The Christian Right and
the Rise of American Fascism." www.theocracywatch.org/chris_hedges_nov24_04.html
KATRINA
-
How online initiatives replaced newspaper initiatives, http://www.editorsweblog.org/2005/09/katrina_hurrica.html
SPIRITUALITY
-
This summary of a Wilber critique reviews
evidence that meditation does not 'accelerate the development of consciousness'
and 'that it has many detrimental effects', at http://www.geoffreyfalk.com/blog/Wilber_Baffle.htm
-
Item 1, Karl
Polany: The Great Transformation // Sylvia Federici:Caliban and the
Witch
URL = http://www.networkideas.org/featart/jul2005/fa12_Development_Regionalism.htm
Some time ago, I mentioned
the book Caliban and the Witch, which has been hailed as 'one of the 3
essentials book on the emergence of capitalism, the other 2 being the ones by
Fernand Braudel and Karl Polanyi. I have read Caliban and the Witch during
my recent travel period, and I can say without hesitation that it is one of the
best and most important books I have read in the last 10 years. It focuses
on the history of 'primitive accumulation', in the 16th and 17th
century, which coincided with the near-genocide of the Indians, the slave
trade, the expulsion of European peasants from their land (the enclosure
movement), and a terrible deterioration of the situation of women, whereby the
witchhunts played a central role as a terror campaign. It is the latter thesis
which is the originality of the book. Concerning Polanyi's major book about
'The Great Transformation', I have only purchased it now. The essay by his
daughter, see URL just above, is a very good introduction to the enduring
legacy of this book.
"Abstract of the essay: On the occasion of the 60th
anniversary of Karl Polanyi's 'The Great Transformation', his daughter takes a
look at the book and the view of political-economic development the book and
its author stood for; a view that has had a continuing relevance in the
politico-economic history of the world over the last 60 years."
-
Item 2, Open Access to Knowledge.
Book:
Libre accès aux saviors. Francis ANDRÉ.
Éditions Futuribles, collection Perspectives, 72 pages, 12 euros. ISBN :
2-84387-319-3
"Si les logiciels libres ont démontré l'intérêt de la
mutualisation des compétences, le problème est plus général : les progrès de la
pensée et donc de la science ont toujours été conditionnés par la possibilité
de communiquer et d'échanger. D'où l'importance du mouvement international en
faveur d'un libre accès aux travaux scientifiques, remettant en question le
système d'éditeurs commerciaux en situation de quasi-monopole. Francis André
est l'un des acteurs de ce mouvement, primordial dans l'immédiat pour les pays
du Sud, et à long terme pour développer la capacité mondiale
d'innovation."
-
Item 3, Google
the next Microsoft
John Battelle's The
Search and Eric Jackson's The
PayPal Wars
"Google's success has been credited to several factors: the
entrepreneurship of founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin; the relentless
technological innovation; the aggressive "outflanking" strategies
against competitors. Now that the Dotcom era has passed, the news pundits have
their own explanations. John Battelle's The
Search and Eric Jackson's The
PayPal Wars are two of the best recent books to detail why
Google and other new Internet services are redefining today's Internet."
-
Item 4,
Marylin Ferguson's 25 year old New Age classic updated
Book: Aquarius Now: Radical Common Sense and
Reclaiming Our Personal Sovereignty (Weiser Books)
URL = http://www.odemagazine.com/article.php?aID=4169
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