Another example is biopiracy. The age-old experience and knowledge of tribal groups concerning the herbal and healing properties is studied by pharmaceutical multinationals, who then patent the findings and expropriate the native peoples.

The problem for capitalism is that it has always been dependent on the private appropriation of common resources, as indicated for example by the Enclosures movement (the privatization of common land) that generated the first `primitive accumulation' of capital. In a situation where the extensive 'territorial' growth period typical of imperialism has to be replaced by intensive growth on existing territories, the immaterial field of knowledge exchange and digital creativity is very important. As Mackenzie Wark eloquenty argues: the key to extracting a surplus is to convert information to a commodity. Hence a drive to strengthen the Intellectual Property system, to extend copyrights in time, but also in scope, inventing new areas of application such as software and university-based research. While such a policy can stimulate specific areas through the profit motive, it is also responsible for a structural decay of the scientific commons, that used to be based on the free sharing of scientific findings, and academic peer review. With software and even ideas being patented[cxlix], there are more and more impediments to the free flow of scientific exchange, and it has become a strain on innovation. The strategy is that since knowledge products can be reproduced and distributed at marginal cost, IP protection can create temporary, but extendable monopolies, thereby creating monopolistic rents in the forms of licenses to use. The whole strategy and reason for growth of a company like Microsoft is based on that idea. At the same time, the industry as a whole has an interest in open standards that can be improved upon, seen as a necessary infrastructure for growth and innovation. Hence, the support given by certain sectors of industry for Open Sources and the use of Linux. We see, at the same time, scientists advocating a renewal of the scientific commons, for example in the biotechnology industry. In Europe, a struggle is going on to impeach the advent of software patents, while South Asia and Latin America are concerned about biopiracy. All these different Commons-related struggle share common characteristics, and Philipppe Aigrain has examined, in his book 'Cause Commune', how these different forces can unite in common struggle[cl].

Also the forces arrayed start from diametrically opposed paradigms. For the entertainment industry, IP is essential to promote creativity, even though the current system is a `winner-take-all' system that serves only a minority of artists. For them, without IP protection, there would be no creativity. But as P2P processes demonstrate, which are extraordinarily innovative outside the profit system, creativity is what people do when they can freely cooperate and share, and hence IP is seen as an impediment, impeding the free use what should be a common resource. Between the more radical positions on either side, it is likely that compromise (reform) positions can be found, but in the meantime, in true P2P fashion, the forces using peer to peer are devising their own solutions. It started with a legal infrastructure for the free software movement, the General Public License, which prohibits the commercial exploitation of such software. It continued with the very important Creative Commons initiative initiated by Lawrence Lessig, who also supported the creation of a Free Culture advocacy movement.

Another important line of conflict concerns the nature of the protocols incorporated in the digital systems that can be used for P2P. We will discuss this later, when we examine the evolution of power.

According to the Hacker Manifesto by McKenzie Wark, the deeper reason and underlying common logic between these different struggles is the struggle for control of both information (as intellectual property) and the vectors of information (needed for distribution), between those that produce information, knowledge and innovation (the hacker class, knowledge workers), and the groups that own the vectors (the vector class), through which its exchange value can be realised.

4.2.A. De-Monopolization of Power

How to explain the emergence of such P2P networks in the political field?

It reflects new cultural values, the desire that authority grows from engagement and expertise, and that it is temporary to the task at hand. It reflects the refusal to give away autonomy, i.e. the rejection of the transcendence of power as defined by Toni Negri. It reflects the desire for self-unfolding of creative potential.

Networks are incredibly efficient: they can operate globally in real-time, react and mobilize around events in the very short term, and offers access to alternative civic information that has not been massaged by corporate-owned mega-media. In a political network configuration, the participating individual retains his full autonomy.

Politically, P2P processes reflect a de-monopolization of power. Power, in the form of reputation that generates influence, is given by the community, is time-bound to the participation of the individual (when he no longer participates, influence declines again), and can thus be taken back by the participating individuals. In the case where monopolization should occur, participants simply leave or create a `forking' of the project, a new path is formed to avoid the power grab[cli].

There is an important counter-trend however, and it concerns the scarcity of attention. Because our time and attention are indeed scarce in a context of information abundance, mediating portals are created, who collate and digest this mass of information. Think about Yahoo, Google, Amazon, eBay who exemplify the process of monopolization in the `attention economy'. But the user community is not without power to affect these processes: collective reaction through opinion storms are activated by abusive monopolistic behavior, and can quickly damage the reputation of the perpetrator, thereby forcing a change in behavior in the monopolistic ambitions. Competing resources are almost always available, or can be built by the open source community. But more fundamentally, the blogosphere practice shows that it is possible to route around such problems, by creating mediating processes using the community as a whole. Thus techniques such as folksonomies, i.e. communal tagging, or reputation ranking, such as the `Karma' points used by the Slashdot community, avoid the emergence of autonomous mediating agents. The blogosphere itself, in the form of the Technorati ranking system for example, has found ways to calculate the interlinking done by countless individuals, thereby enabling itself to filter out the most used contributions. Again, monopolization is excluded. What is the mechanism behind this?

For this we have to turn again to the concept of non-representationality, or what Negri calls immanence. In modernity, the concept is that autonomous individuals cannot create a peaceful order, and therefore they defer their power to a sovereign, whether it be the king of the nation. In becoming a people, they become a `collective individual'. They loose out as individuals, while the unified people or nation behaves `as if' it was an individual, i.e. with ambition for power. It is `transcendent' vis a vis its parts. In non-representationality however, nothing of the sort is given away. This means that the collective hereby created, is not a `collective individual', it cannot act with ambition apart from its members. The genius of the protocols devised in peer to peer initiatives, is that they avoid the creation of a collective individual with agency. Instead, it is the communion of the collective which filters value. The ethical implication is important as well. Not having given anything up of their full power, the participants in fact voluntarily take up the concern not only for the whole in terms of the project, but for the social field in which its operates.

Anticipating our `evolutionary' remarks in section 4.3, we can see the above examples as illustrating the new form of protocollary power, which is becoming all-important in a network. The very manner in which we devise our social technologies, implies possible and likely social relationships. The protocols of the blogosphere enable the economy of attention to operate, not through individual actors that can become monopolistic, but by protocols that enable communal filtering. But when used by private firms such as Yahoo and Google, they may have a vested interest in skewing the protocol and the objectivity of the algorythms used. In the blogosphere, protocols are also important since they imply a vision: should everyone be able to judge, and in that case, would that not lead to a lowest common denominator, or should equipotency be defined in such a way that a certain level of expertise is required, to allow higher quality entries to be filtered upwards?

4.2.B. Equality, Hierarchy, Freedom

How do P2P processes integrate `values' and `social relation'-typologies such as equality, hierarchy, and freedom?

Cornelis Castoriadis gives an interpretation of Aristoteles on this issue: equality is actually present in all types of society, but it is always `according to a criteria'. (this is so because a society is implicitly a form of exchange, and thus in need of comparative standards for such exchange). It is over the criteria of exchange that social and political forces are fighting. Is power to be distributed according to the merit accorded to birth, according to military exploits, according to commercial savvy shown in economic life, to intelligence? This distribution then inherently creates a conflict with the egalitarian demands that is equally constitutive of politics and society. The distribution itself creates an exclusion and resulting demands of participation[clii].

In the modern sense, equality is defined mostly as an equal right to participation in the political process, and as an `equality of opportunity', based on merit, in the economic sphere.

Similarly, hierarchy was based in premodern societies based on `authority ranking' which depended on fixed social roles, and on the competition within these narrowly defined spheres (warriors competing amongst themselves, Brahmins competing through their knowledge of sacred scripture). The command and control hierarchy is fixed amongst the levels, somewhat flexible within the levels. In modern society, theoretically, hierarchy in power is derived from electoral choice in case of political power, through economic success in case of economic power. In theory, it is extremely flexible, based on `merit', but in practice various processes of monopolization prohibit the full flowering of such meritocracy.

World-systems theorist Immanuel Walllerstein defines three important political traditions according to their position regarding equality/hierarchy. Conservatives want to conserve existing hierarchical relations, as they were at a certain point in time; liberals are in favor of a selective meritocracy and stress the formalized and institutionalized selection criteria; democrats are in favor of maximum inclusion, without formal testing. Thus, in the early modern system, conservatives were against elections, liberals were for selective census-based elections, democrats for general suffrage.

How does peer to peer fit in this scheme? P2P is a democratic process of full inclusion based on the idea of equipotency. It believes that expertise cannot be located beforehand, and thus general and open participation is the rule. But selection immediately sets in as well, since the equipotency is immediately verified by the work on the project. Thus there is a selection before the project, and a hierarchy of networks is created, where everyone finds his place according to demonstrated potential. Within the project, a hierarchy is also immediately created depending on expertise, engagement, and the capacity to generate trust. But in both cases the hierarchies are fluid, not fixed, and always depend on concrete context, the precise task at hand. It's the model of the improvising jazz band, where everyone can in turn be the solo-ist or the trendsetter. Reputation is generated, but constantly on the move. Peer to peer is not anti-hierarchy or even anti-authority, but it is against fixed hierarchies and `authoritarianism', the latter defined as the tendency to monopolize power, with a will to perpetuate itself and deprive others of resources that it wants for itself. P2P is for equality of participation, for a natural and flexible hierarchy based on real merit and communal consensus. That P2P recognizes differences in potential, and thus natural hierarchy, does not preclude it from treating participating partners as equal persons. In fact research from within the synergistic tradition, which studies the practicalities of cooperation, has verified a remarkable fact. In free and synergistic cooperation, those groups function best, which treats its members `as if' they were equals. Therefore, the recognized hierarchy in reputation, talent, engagement, etc.. does not preclude, but if requires an egalitarian environment to blossom.

Some authors, like David Ronfeldt and John Arquila of the Rand Corporation, claim we are moving to a `cyberocracy', where power is determined by the access to the networks. While there is indeed a digital divide that can exclude participation, it is important to stress the flexibility inherent in P2P networks, which undermines the idea of `fixed and monopolistic cyberocracies'. Another author, Alexander Bard in Netocracy, argues that capitalism is already dead, and that we are already rules by a hierarchy of knowledge-based networks. At this stage, these are not very convincing arguments, but there is one scenario in which they can become possible. It has been described by Jeremy Rifkin in `The Age of Access'. But this scenario of `information feudalism' is predicated on the destruction of P2P networks. Cognitive capitalism in indeed in the process of trying to increase its monopolistic rents on patented digital materials, a strategy which is undermined by the filesharing and information sharing on the P2P networks. If the industry succeeds in its civil war against its consumers, by integrating Digital Rights Management hardware in our very computers, and outlaws sharing through legal attacks and imprisonment, then such a scenario is possible. At that time we would have only private networks for which a license has to be paid, with heavily restrictive usage rules, and no ownership whatsoever for the consumer. This is indeed a scenario of exclusion for all those who will not be able to afford access to the networks. Just as in the feudal structure, where 'serf'-farmers did not own the land they were working on, we will not own any immaterial product anymore, we'll just have severely restricted usage rights, and certainly not the right to share. But we are far from that situation still, and personally, I do not think it is a likely scenario.

At this moment, P2P is `winning' because its solutions are inherently more productive and democratic, and it is hard to see any social force, be it the large corporations, permanently sabotaging the very technological developments that it needs to survive. More likely, barring a scenario of a collapse of civilization and a return to barbarity, it is more likely to see a social system evolve that incorporates this new level of complexity and participation.

One element I have yet to mention is the freedom aspect, which seems obvious. P2P is predicated on the maximum freedom. The freedom to join and participate, to fully express oneself and one's potential, the freedom to change course at any point in time, the freedom to quit. Within the common projects, freedom is constrained through communal validation and consensus (i.e. the freedom of others). But individuals can always leave, fork to a new project, create their own. The challenge is to find affinities, to create a common sphere with at least a few others and to create effective use value. Unlike in representative democracy, it is not a model based on a majority imposing its will on a minority.

Despite the fact that Peer to Peer reverses a number of value hierarchies introduced by the Enlightenment, in particular the epistemologies and ontologies of modernity, it is a continuation and partial realization of the emancipatory project. It is in the definition of Wallerstein, an eminently democratic project. Peer to peer partly reflects postmodernity, and partly transcends it.

4.3. Evolutionary Conceptions of Power and Hierarchy

Japanese scholar Shumpei Kumon has given the following evolutionary account of power. In premodernity, he says, power is derived from military force. The strong conquer the weak and exact tribute, part of the produce of the land, labor (the corvee system). Rome was rich because it was strong. In modernity, military force eventually looses its primary place and monetary power takes over. Or in other words, the U.S. is strong because it is rich. It's productive capacity is more important than its military might. It is commercial and financial power, which is the main criterion. In late modernity, a new form of power is born, through the power of the mass media. The U.S. lost the war, not because the Vietnamese were stronger militarily, or had more financial clout, but because the U.S. lost the war for the hearts and minds, and lost social support for the war effort. With the emergence of the internet and peer to peer processes, yet a new form of power emerges, and Kumon calls it the Wisdom Game[cliii]. In order to have influence, one must give quality knowledge away, and thus build reputation, through the demonstration of one's `Wisdom'. The more one shares, the more this material is used by others, the higher one's reputation, the bigger one's influence. This process is true for individuals within groups, and for the process among groups, thus creating a hierarchy of influence amongst networks. But as I have argued, in a true P2P environment, this process is flexible and permanently reversible.

According to the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, premodern systems, including the early modern classical era of the 18th century, are characterized by the motto `make die or let live': the sovereign has the power of life and death, but does not greatly interfere in the life of his subjects, which is ruled by custom and the divine precepts of the spiritual power. In modernity, Foucault sees two new forms of power arising: disciplinary power and biopower. Disciplinary power starts from the point of view that society consists of autonomous individuals, which are in need of socialization and `discipline', so that they can be integrated in the normative framework of capitalist society. Biopower is the start of the total management of life, from birth to death, of the great mass of the people. The new motto is `make live, let die'.

His contemporary Gilles Deleuze noted a change though. In mass-media dominated postmodern society, which became dominant after 1968, disciplinary institutions enter in crisis. What is used is the internalization of social requirements through the use of the mass media, advertising and PR, with control mechanisms in place, which focus on making sure the right results are attained. But the individual is now himself in charge of making it happen. Power has become more democratic, more social, more immanent to the social field, "distributed throughout the brains and bodies of the citizens" (Negri's Empire, p. 23). At the same time, Deleuze already prefigured, so many years ahead, the emerging dominance of distributed networks (rhizomes). If Foucault was the philosopher and historian of power of modernity, then Deleuze and Guattari have been the early theorizers of power in the network era. However there is a danger in missing important developments, radical innovations even, if we conflate the post-1968 under the one heading of postmodernity, since that would miss the accelerated growth of peer to peer processes, which started only in the 1990's, after the popularization of the internet. Perhaps future historians will date a new era that began in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall indicating the moment when the free flow of information began to destroy the most authoritarian regimes. In the figures below, I explicitly distinguish the postmodern era, from the emerging peer to peer era.

The P2P era indeed adds a new twist, a new form of power, which we have called Protocollary Power, and has first been clearly identified and analysed by Alexander Galloway in his book Protocol. We have already given some examples. One is the fact that the blogosphere has devised mechanisms to avoid the emergence of individual and collective monopolies, through rules that are incorporated in the software itself. Another was whether the entertainment industry would succeed in incorporating software or hardware-based restrictions to enforce their version of copyright. There are many other similarly important evolutions to monitor: Will the internet remain a point to point structure? Will the web evolve to a true P2P medium through Writeable Web developments? The common point is this: social values are incorporated, integrated in the very architecture of our technical systems, either in the software code or the hardwired machinery, and these then enable/allow or prohibit/discourage certain usages, thereby becoming a determinant factor in the type of social relations that are possible. Are the algorhythms that determine search results objective, or manipulated for commercial and ideological reasons? Is parental control software driven by censorship rules that serve a fundamentalist agenda? Many issues are dependent on hidden protocols, which the user community has to learn to see, so that it can become an object of conscious development, favoring peer to peer processes, rather than the restrictive and manipulative command and control systems. In P2P systems, the formal rules governing bureaucratic systems are replaced by the design criteria of our new means of production, and this is where we should focus our attention. Galloway suggests that we make a diagram of the networks we participate in, with dots and lines, nodes and edges. Who decides who can participate, or better, what are the implied rules governing participation (since there is no specific 'who' or command in a distributed environment); what kind of linkages are possible. On the example of the internet, Galloway shows how the net has a peer to peer protocol in the form of TCP/IP, but that the Domain Name System is hierarchical, and that an authorative server could block a domain family from operating. This is how power should be analysed. Such power is not per se negative, since protocol is needed to enable participation (no driving without highway code!), but protocol can also be centralized, proprietary, secret, in that case subverting peer to peer processes. However, the stress on protocol, which concerns what Yochai Benkler calls the 'logical layer' of the networks, should not make us forget the power distribution of the physical layer (who owns the networks), and the content layer (who owns and controls the content).

The key question is: do the centralized and hierarchical elements in the protocol, enable or disable participation? This is shown in the following account of the development of the theory and practice of hierarchy, submitted to us by John Heron in a personal communication. In true peer to peer, the role of hierarchy is to enable the spontaneous emergence of 'autonomy in cooperation':

"There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:

(1) autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;

(2) narrow democratic cultures which practise political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;

(3) wider democratic cultures which practice both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;

(4) commons p2p cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour."

Heron adds that "These four degrees could be stated in terms of the relations between hierarchy, co-operation and autonomy.

(1) Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy;

(2) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only;

(3) Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres;

(4) The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour

Figure - The Evolution of Power

	Nature of Power	Control Method	Monopoly	Power Game
Premodern	Military & Religious	Force & Custom	Land & People	Force Game
Early Modern	Commercial & Industrial	Disciplinary & Biopower	Industrial & Financial Capital	Money Game
Late Modern	Financial & Mediatic	Control Society & Manufactured Consent	Financial & Media	Money & Celebrity Game
P2P Era	P2P Media	Protocollary & Memetic Opinion Storms	Reputation-based De-monopolization vs. Attention Monopolies	Wisdom Game

Compilation by Michel Bauwens

Figure - The Evolution of Hierarchy - John Heron

	Degrees of Moral Insight	Relationship between hierarchy, cooperation, autonomy
Premodern	no rights of political participation	Hierarchy defines, controls and constrains co-operation and autonomy
Early Modern	political participation through representation	Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere only
Late Modern	political representation with varying degrees of wider participation	Hierarchy empowers a measure of co-operation and autonomy in the political sphere and in varying degrees in other spheres
P2P Era	equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field	The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavour

Compiled from a text by John Heron.

5. The Discovery of P2P principles in the Cosmic Sphere

Note the difference in the above section title. Here we are not speaking of emergence, but rather the recognition or discovery of principles within the natural world, which obey P2P principles. They were always-already there, but we have only recently learned to see them. Technology reflects, to a certain extent, humanity's growing knowledge of the natural world. Technological artifacts and processes integrate and embed in their protocols, this growing knowledge. And lately, we have learned to see the natural (physical, biological, cognitive) world quite differently from before. No longer as mechanisms or hierarchies, but as networks. Thus, the fact that engineers, software architects, and social network managers are devising and implementing more and more P2P systems also reflects this new understanding. Studies of distributed intelligence in physical systems, of the swarming behavior of social insects, of the `wisdom of crowds' and collective intelligence in the human field, show that in many situations participative distributed system functions more efficiently than command and control systems which create bottlenecks. In natural systems, true centralized and hierarchic command and control systems seem rather rare.

Though there can be said to exist hierarchies in nature, such as a succession of progressively more enfolding systems, and many pyramidal systems of command and control in human society, the former are better called 'holarchies', as actual command and control systems are actually quite rare. More common is the existing of multiple agents, which through their interaction, create emergent coherent orders and behavior. The brain for example, has been shown to be a rather egalitarian network of neurons, and there is no evidence of a command center[cliv]. And there are of course multiple scientific fields where this is now shown to be the case. Network theory is therefore focused on the interrelationships of equipotent, and distributed agents, and how complex systems arise from them. Network theory is a form of systemic reductionism, which focuses on the interaction of agents, without looking much at their 'personal' characteristics, but is remarkably successful in explaining the behaviour of many systems. Thus, if historians are starting to look at the world in terms of flows, social science in general is increasingly looking at its objects of study in terms of social network analysis[clv].

An important contribution is the work of Alexander R. Galloway, Protocol, because he clearly makes the important distinction between 'decentralised' and 'distributed' networks.

First we had centralized networks. In this format, all links between nodes must go through the center, which has to authorize or enable them. Think about mainframe computers with dumb terminals, or the central switches in telephone systems. In a second phase, networks are decentralized, which means the center is broken up in several subcenters. Here, linkages and actions between nodes must still pass through one of these subcenters. An example is the American airport system, organized around hubs such as Atlanta. To go from one regional city to another, you must pass through such a hub. In distributed networks, such as the network of interstate highways or the internet, this requirement no longer applies. Hubs, i.e. nodes that carry more links than others, may exist, but they are optional, and grow organically, they are not obligatory or designed beforehand. Abstract network theory, seeing hubs in both cases, may miss this important point. Peer to peer is the relational dynamic of distributed networks! A distributed network may or may not be a egalitarian network (see just below).

Nexus, a book by Duncan Watts, who summarises network theory investigations for the lay public, focusing on small world networks. These differ from totally random networks, where it takes many steps to go from one node to another, and are characterized by a relative 'low degree of separation'. Typically, human society is determined by no more than six degrees of separation: it never takes more intermediaries to contact any other person on the planet. Such networks come in two varieties: 1) aristocratic networks, where it is larger hubs and connectors who are responsible for linking the network together as a whole; and egalitarian networks, where the nodes have largely a same number of links, but while the majority has strong links to a few surrounding links with whom they interact a lot, a minority has weak ties with faraway nodes, and it is they who are responsible for holding the network together, and rapidly moving information from one local or affinity group, to another different one. Each forms has its strength and weaknesses: aristocratic networks are very strong in resisting random attacks, but vulnerable when their connectors are attacked, while egalitarian networks are more vulnerable to random disruption.

One of the most interesting findings is the existence of a power law. A power law says that for any x increase in the number of links per node (or specific characteristic per node, such as acreage per kilometer for a river), the number of nodes having that characteristic will decline by a fixed factor. In economics this gives us the famous Pareto principle, i.e. 20% of the people having 80% of the wealth. But the power law is nearly everywhere, suggesting a natural form of concentration and even monopolization as almost inevitable. In fact, it seems that whenever we have many choices and many distributed agents making these choices, inequality of choice is created. It seems to be the natural result of any 'economy of attention'. But that is the point, such distribution is not forced, as in a oligopoly or monopoly, but arises naturally from the freedom of choice, and can be considered a 'fair' result, provided no coercion is used.

In terms of a normative P2P ethos, it is important to note that it is not systematically favoring egalitarian networks. The Internet and the web are both aristocratic networks; the blogosphere is characterized by a power law distribution. The key questions are: 1) is the network efficient; 2) does it enable participation; 3) is the emergence of an aristocratic structure non-coercive and eventually reversible. In many cases, we have to admit that some form of centralization, is necessary and efficient. We all prefer one standard for our operating systems for example.

The power law can possibly mitigated by the development of algorhythms, that can highlight important information and connections from nodes that may not come up 'naturally', but this discipline is still in its infancy at the moment. But the power law is also counteracted by what some network economists have called the 'Long Tail'. This is the phenomena whereby minority groups are not excluded from the distribution of knowledge and exchange, but are on the contrary enable to organize micro-communities. In the business world, this is shown by how online stores like Amazon and eBay, by using affinity matching schemes, have resulted in the creation of many thousands of previously not existing mini-markets. Books, CD's and films which would be destroyed for lack of interest in the mass media system, now have a second and third lease of life, through the continued attention given to them by self-organising minority interests. This is an important guarantee for a vibrand cultural life, that does not destroy difference and cultural heterogeinity.[clvi]

The discovery of the theory of networks in the physical sphere, has therefore a corollary in seeing it in social life, and in particular, in the area of organizational life, including business. The finds its expression in the emerging discipline of social network analysis and cooperation studies generally, and in particular, in coordination theory, as pioneered by Thomas Malone[clvii].

6. P2P in the Sphere of Culture and Self

I am here tackling the remainder of the two quadrants relating to intersubjectivity and subjectivity, considered in their basic linkage: the individual vs. the collective.

6.1.A. A new articulation between the individual and the collective

One of the key insights of psychologist Clare Graves' interpretation of human cultural evolution, is the idea of the changing balance, over time, between the two poles of the individual and the collective. In the popularization of his research by the Spiral Dynamics systems, they see the tribal era as characterized by collective harmony, but also as a culture of stagnation. Out of this harmony, strong individuals are born, heroes and conquerors, which will their people and others into the creation of larger entities. These leaders are considered divinities themselves and thus in certain senses are `beyond the law', which they have themselves constituted through their conquest. It is against this `divine individualism' that a religious reaction is born, very evident in the monotheistic religions, which stresses the existence of a transcendent divine order (rather than the immanent order of paganism), to which even the sovereign must obey. Thus a more communal/collective order is created. But again, this situation is overturned when a new individual ethos arises, which will be reflected in the growth of capitalism. It is based on individuals, and collective individuals, which think strategically in terms of their own interest. In the words of anthropologist Louis Dumont, we moved from a situation of wholism, in which the empirical individuals saw themselves foremost as part of a whole, towards individualism as an ideology[clviii], positing atomistic individuals, in need of socialization. They transferred their powers to collective individuals, such as the king, the people, the nation, which could act in their name, and created a sacrificial unity through the institutions of modernity.

This articulation, based on a autonomous self in a society which he himself creates through the social contract, has been changing in postmodernity. The individual is now seen as always-already part of various social fields, as a singular composite being, no longer in need of socialization, but rather in need of individuation. Atomistic individualism is rejected in favour of the view of a relational self[clix], a new balance between individual agency and collective communion. For a comprehensive view of the collective, it is now customary to distinguish 1) the totality of relations; 2) the field in which these relations operate, up to the macro-field of society itself, which establishes the 'protocol' of what is possible and not; 3) the object of the relationship ("object-oriented sociality"), i.e. the pre-formed ideal which inspires the common action.

In any case, the balance is again moving towards the collective. But the new forms of collective are not individualist in nature, meaning: they are not collective individuals, rather, the new collective expresses itself in the creation of the common. The collective is no longer the local `wholistic' and `oppressive' community, and it is no longer the contractually based society with its institutions, now also seen as oppressive. The new commons is not a unified and transcendent collective individual, but a collection of large number of singular projects, constituting a multitude[clx].

This whole change in ontology and epistemology, in ways of feeling and being, in ways of knowing and apprehending the world, has been prefigured amongst social scientists and philosophers, including the hard sciences such as physics and biology[clxi].

An important change has been the overthrow of the Cartesian subject-object split. No longer is the `individual self' looking at the world as an object. Since postmodernity has established that the individual is composed and traversed by numerous social fields (of power, of the unconscious, class relations, gender, etc... , and since he/she has become aware of this, the subject is now seen (after his death as an `essence' and a historical construct had been announced by Foucault), as a perpetual process of becoming ("subjectivation"). His knowing is now subjective-objective and truth-building has been transformed from objective and mono-perspectival to multiperspectival. This individual operates not in a dead space of objects, but in a network of flows. Space is dynamical, perpetually co-created by the actions of the individuals and in peer to peer processes, where the digital noosphere is an extraordinary medium for generating signals emanating from this dynamical space, the individuals in peer groups, which are thus not `transcendent' collective individuals, are in a constant adaptive behavior. Thus peer to peer is global from the start, it is incorporated in its practice. It is an expression not of globalization, the worldwide system of domination, but of globality, the growing interconnected of human relationships.

Peer to peer is to be regarded as a new form of social exchange, creating its equivalent form of subjectivation, and itself reflecting the new forms of subjectivation. P2P, interpreted here as a positive and normative ethos that is implicit in the logic of its practice, though it rejects the ideology of individualism, does not in any way endanger the achievements of the modern individual, in terms of the desire and achievement of personal autonomy, authenticity, etc.... It is no transcendent power that demands sacrifice of self: in Negrian terms, it is fully immanent, participants are not given anything up, and unlike the contractual vision, which is fictitious in any case, the participation is entirely voluntary. Thus what it reflects is an expansion of ethics: the desire to create and share, to produce something useful. The individual who joins a P2P project, puts his being, unadulterated, in the service of the construction of a common resource. Implicit is not just a concern for the narrow group, not just intersubjective relations, but the whole social field surrounding it.

Imagine a successful meeting of minds: individual ideas are confronted, but also changed in the process, through the free association born of the encounter with other intelligences. Thus eventually a common idea emerges, that has integrated the differences, not subsumed them. The participants do not feel they have made concessions or compromises, but feel that the new common integration is based on their ideas. There has been no minority, which has succumbed to the majority. There has been no `representation', or loss of difference. Such is the true process of peer to peer.[clxii]

An important philosophical change has been the abandonment of the unifying universalism of the Enlightenment project. Universality was to be attained by striving to unity, by the transcendence of representation of political power. But this unity meant sacrifice of difference. Today, the new epistemological and ontological requirement that P2P reflects, is not abstract universalism, but the concrete universality of a commons which has not sacrificed difference. This is the truth that the new concept of multitude, developed by Toni Negri and inspired by Spinoza, expresses. P2P is not predicated on representation and unity, but of the full expression of difference.

6.1.B. Towards `contributory' dialogues of civilizations and religions

One of the more global expressions of the peer to peer ethic, is the equipotency it creates between civilizations and religions. These have to be seen as unique responses, temporally and spatially defined, of specific sections of humanity, but directed towards similar challenges. Thus we arrive at the concept of `contributory worldviews' or `contributory theologies'. Humanity as a whole, or more precisely, its individual members, have now access to the whole of human civilization as a common resource. Individuals, now being considered `composites' made up of various influences, belongings and identities, in constant becoming, are embarked in a meaning-making process that is coupled to an expansion of awareness to the well-being of the planet as a whole, and of its concrete community of inhabitants. In order to become more cosmopolitan they will encounter the various answers given by other civilizations, but since they cannot fully comprehend a totally different historical experience, this is mediated through dialogue. And thus a process of global dialogue is created, not a synthesis or world religion, but a mosaic of millions of personal integrations that grows out of multiple dialogues. Rather than the concept of multiculturalism, which implies fixed social and cultural identities, peer to peer suggests cultural and spiritual hybridity, and which no two members of a community have the same composite understanding and way of thinking.

One of the recent examples that came to my attention are the annual SEED conferences in Albuquerque, New Mexico. They bring together, native elders, quantum physicists, philosophers, and linguists, none of them assuming superiority over one another, but collectively `building truth' through their encounter.

P2P dialogues are not reprensentative dialogues, in which the participants represent their various religions, rather, they are encounters of composite and hybrid experiences, in which each full expresses his different understanding, building a spiritual commons.

6.1.C. Participative Spirituality and the Critique of Spiritual Authoritarianism

Traditional mystical and religious paths are exclusionary, based on strong divisions between the in and the out group. Internally, they reflect the social values and organizational models of the civilizations in which they were born. Thus they are premodern in authoritarian manner, patriarchal, sexist, subsuming the individual to the whole. Or, in their latter manifestations they are run as corporations and bureaucracies, reflecting the early emergence of capitalism as in the case of Protestantism, and in the case of the new age, operating explicitly as a spiritual marketplace reflecting the capitalist monetary ethos. When traditional religions of the East move to the West, they bring with them their authoritarian and feudal formats and mentalities. Epistemologically, in their spiritual methodologies, they are authoritarian as well, far from an open process, traditional paths start from the idea that there is one world, one truth, one divine order, and that some privileged individuals, saints, bishops, sages, gurus, have been privileged to know this truth, and that this can be taught to followers. The seventies and eighties have been characterized by the emergence of new religions and cults with a particularly authoritarian character, and by the appearance of a number of fallen gurus, characterized by abuses in terms of finance, sexuality, and power. If one decides to follow an experiental path, it is always the case that the experience is only validated if it follows the pregiven doctrine of the group in question.

It is clear that such a situation, such a spiritual offering is antithetical to the P2P ethos. Thus, in the emergence of a new participatory spirituality, two moments can be recognized, a critical one, focused on the critique of spiritual authoritarianism, and with books like those of June Campbell, J. Kripal, the Trimondi's, the Kramer's, and many others who have been advocating reform within the Churches and spiritual movements, and the more constructive approaches which aim to construct a new approach to spiritual inquiry altogether, those that explicitly integrate P2P practices in their mode of spiritual inquiry. The two pioneering authors who discuss `participative spirituality' are Jorge Ferrer and John Heron.

Ferrer's book, Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology: Towards a Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality, not only is a strong critique of spiritual authoritarianism, which integrates poststructuralist arguments against absolute knowledge claims, but also a first description of an alternative view[clxiii]. In it, a spiritual practice operates as an open process in which spiritual knowledge is co-created, and thus cannot fully rely on old `maps', which have to be considered as testimonies of earlier creations, not as absolute truths. Spirituality is understood in terms of the present relationship with the Cosmos (the concrete Totality), accessible to everyone here and now[clxiv]. Instead of the perennialist vision of many paths leading to the same truth, Ferrer advocates for an `ocean of emancipation' with the many moving shores representing the different and ever-evolving approaches to spiritual co-creation. In an article on `Integral Transformative Practices'[clxv], Ferrer also records new practices that reflect this participatory turn, such as the ones pioneered by Albareda and Romero in Spain: open processes of self- and group discovery that are no longer cognicentric, but instead fully integral approaches that collaborative engage the instinctual, emotional, mental, and transmental domains as equal partners in the unfolding of spiritual life. J. Kripal, who is very appreciative of Jorge Ferrer's contribution, does conclude that one more lingering illusion about religion and mysticism should be abandoned: that it is somehow quintessentially 'moral' or 'ethical' and essentially emancipatory in character, a claim that he disputes[clxvi].

New Zealand-based John Heron expounds, in the book "Sacred Science", the specific peer to peer practice that he has created, called Cooperative Inquiry. In such a process, individuals agree on a methodology of inquiry, then compare their experiences, adapting their inquiry to their findings, etc... thus creating a collective intelligence, which is totally open and periodically renewed, experimenting both with the `transcendent' practices of eastern nondual religions (transmental `witnessing') as well as with the immanent grounding methods of the nature religions, thus creating a innovative dipolar approach which does not reject any practice, but attempts to integrate them. Peer circles (check the concept in a web search engine) have sprung up worldwide. My friend Remi Sussan stresses that the chaos magick groups on the internet, explicitly see themselves as self-created religions adopting open peer-based processes.

6.1.D. Partnering with nature and the cosmos

Throughout this essay, I have defined P2P as communal shareholding based on participation in a common resource (with the twist that in P2P it is we ourselves who are building that resource, which did not previously exist, i.e. the common is actually the 'object of our cooperation'), whereby other partners are considered as equipotent. We also mentioned the co-existence within P2P groups of both natural hierarchy, and egalitarian treatment. There are very good reasons to believe that we can and should extent this ethos to non-human forces, be they natural or cosmic, and if you have this kind of faith or experience, with spiritual forces as well. What follows is a speculative account of the philosophical and spiritual sources that could be used by our culture to recover such ethos.

Indeed in a sense, spiritually, the P2P or `participative ethos' harks back to premodern animistic attitudes, which can also be found in Chinese Taoism for example. During the annual SEED conferences in Alququerque, New Mexico, Western astrophysicians, and philosophers are undertaking a continued dialogue with native American elders, as one way to mutually enrich their epistemologies, with the explicit aim of recovering participative approaches[clxvii]. Jean Gebser, in his masterwork 'The Ever-present Origin', is probably the one that has best described the process of recovery of such participative worldview, starting with the artists of the beginning of the 20th century and continuing with the development of quantum physics, in recent times, calling it 'integral consciousness'.

Instead of considering nature in a Cartesian fashion as `dead matter' or a collection of objects to be manipulated[clxviii], we recognize that throughout nature there is a scale of consciousness or awareness[clxix], and that natural agents and collectives have their natural propensities, and that, giving up our need for domination in the same way that we are able to practice in P2P processes, we `cooperate', as partners, with such propensities, acting as midwives rather than dominators. French sociologists like Michel Maffesioli[clxx] and Philippe Zafirian have analyzed a change in our culture, particularly in the new generations of young people, which go precisely in that direction, and it is of course specifically reflected in sections of green movement. Again, this is not a regression to an utopian and lost past, but a re-enactment of a potential, but this time, with fully differentiated individuals. While there is undoubtedly a new stress on 'wholism'[clxxi] in many contemporary thinkers, the stress is on interpretations of interdependence that do not return to pre-individual interpretations, but rather on showing on the individual is fully co-dependent on the whole.

An important question is: how do we recover such a tradition of thought and feeling-being, we who are the children of the Enligthenment? Here are some explorations of 'genealogies of thought' which could be used to recreate such participative ethos.

One of the possible paths is the recovery of the cosmobiological tradition of the Renaissance thinkers, who are close to us since they had one foot in the world of tradition and one in the world of modernity-inducing change. Loren Goldner uncovers, in a very interesting essay[clxxii], this `third stream of cosmobiological thought', which he says could be used to reconstruct a post-Enlightenment left. He contrasts it with the Aristotelianism of the Church, and with the `mechanistic' ideas of the Enlightenment (creators of a dead universe and empty space that can be gazed at and manipulated by the autonomous ego). He traces the history of this third stream starts with the Renaissance starting with Bruno and Kepler, and later continued by Baader, Schelling, Oersted, Davy, Faraday, Goethe, W.R. Hamilton, Goerg Cantor, Joseph Needham. For them, the universe is brimming with life, sensuousness, and meaning, and cannot be approached as dead matter. Marx explicitely refers to this tradition, and was imbued by it through his filiation with German 'idealist' philosophy, but, according to Goldner, that has been forgotten by the two dominant streams of the left, i.e. social democracy and Stalinism, who take over the mechanistic Enlightenment tradition. Both Foucauldian postmodernism, and the defense of the Enlightenment tradition by Habermas, miss and obscure this vital link as well, says Goldner[clxxiii]. . In any case, this cosmobiological tradition is an 'alternative strand of modernity', which lost out but could perhaps be retrieved and redeveloped.

Other important genealogies to recreate a participatory worldview appropriate to our age have been undertaken by Smolinowsky and David Skrbna, in their 'ecophilosophy'. Recently there have been important attempts by John Heron and Jorge Ferrer as well, deriving from the tradition of transpersonal psychology. The Nature Institute, inspired by Goethe and others, has been working on developing conceptions of qualitative science that fits this evolution as well.[clxxiv] Toni Negri and others, are similarly trying to redeveloped a similar 'alternative modernity' based on the oeuvre of Spinoza, though the relationship with nature does not seem to be a prominent theme in his writings. Rather, they focus on developing a participative relationship with our machines[clxxv].

In any case, there is a natural progression in scope, from P2P groups, to the global partnership-based dialogues between religions and civilizations, to the new partnership with natural and cosmic forces, that forms a continuum, and that is equally expressive of the deep changes in ontology and epistemology that P2P represents. I do not think it is possible to divorce the P2P ethos as it applies to people and humanity, from our wider relationship with nature, and therefore, it will be impossible to fully retain either the modernist objective gaze or postmodern-inspired nihilism. Instead, we have to reconstruct our worldviews and heal our 'split' with nature.

And at some point, we will start to realize that our very realities are 'always-already participative'[clxxvi], that we are not separate from the world, that our being-in-the-world is subjective-objective. When this happens on a more massive scale, a new civilization will in effect have been borne.

7. P2P and Social Change

7.1.A. Marginal trend or premise of new civilization?

I hope to have convinced the reader of this essay that Peer to Peer is a fundamental trend, a new and emergent form of social exchange, of the same form, an `isomorphism', that is occurring throughout the human lifeworld, in all areas of social and cultural life, where it operates under a set of similar characteristics. In other words, it has coherence.

How important is it, and what are its political implications? Can it really be said, as I claim, that it is the premise of a new civilizational order? I want to bring out a few historical analogies to illustrate my point.

The first concerns the historical development of capitalism. At some point in the Middle Ages, starting in the 11th to 13th cy. period, cities start to appear again, and commerce takes up. A new class of people specialize in that commerce, and finding some aspects of medieval culture antithetic to their pursuits, start inventing new instruments to create trust across great distances: early forms of contracts, early banking systems etc.. In turn, these new forms of social exchange create new processes of subjectivation, which not only influence the people involved, but in fact the whole culture at large, eventually leading to massive cultural changes such as the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment and the great social revolutions (English, French, American, etc..). In this scenario, though the emergent bourgeois class was not directly political, what it did, i.e. its primary business of conducting commerce, inevitably created a political and civilisational chain reaction. This class also had a resource, capital (money), which was greatly needed by the other leading sectors of the population, especially the feudal class and the kings. Even today, for capital, politics is a secondary effect, their enormous power is an effect of what they do in the economic sphere: trading currency and shares, international capital flows, investments of multinational companies, the results of a myriad of small decisions by economic regularity bodies such as the IMF, etc..

Today, I would argue, we witness a similar phenomena. A new class of knowledge workers, in its broad sense already the majority of the working population in the West, and poised to be in the same situation elsewhere in a few decades, are creating new practices and tools that enable them to do what they need to do, i.e. knowledge exchange. As they create these new tools, bringing into being a new format of social exchange, they enable new types of subjectivation, which in turn not only changes themselves, but the world around them. When Marx wrote his Manifesto, there were only 100,000 industrial workers, yet he saw that this new social model was the essence of the new society being born. Similarly, even if today only a few million knowledge workers consciously practice P2P, one can see the birth of a new model of a much larger social consequence. This new model is inherently more productive in creating the new immaterial use value, just as the merchants and capitalists were more effective in the material economy. Thus, they have something of value, i.e. knowledge and innovation, which is needed by the whole society, as even agricultural and industrial production can no longer proceed without their intervention. As this feedback loop is reinforcing itself, the political consequences are equally secondary. By creating new social forms, they, we, are doing politics, in the sense of creating new realities. This does not mean that civil society alone can create a full civilisational change, as, inevitably, political conflicts and new lines of contention arise, that will draw in the adepts of the new modes of being into the political world. We have already seen how it is to a great degree the legal and technical sabotage of the enemies of P2P, which have driven forward its development.

The great issue will be the reform of the state and the global governance system. But they come prepared, with highly efficient modes of organization and knowledge building.

Another analogy I like is the one exposed by Negri in Empire, where he refers to the Christians. The Roman Empire, in a structural course of decline, could not be reformed, but at the same time, within it, the Christians were creating new forms of consciousness and organization, which, when the imperial structure collapsed, was ready to merge with the invading Barbarians and created the new European civilization of the Middle Ages. There are no Barbarians today, only other rising capitalist blocks such as the East Asian one, but they are in the process of creating the very same social configuration, which has created P2P in the West, though it will take a little more time. Civilisational differences will not, in my opinion, preclude the development of cognitive capitalism and the emergence of P2P modes of social exchange.

Finally, let us put our findings in the context of some social scientists.

First, Marcel Mauss, and his notion of `total social fact'[clxxvii]; second, to the notion of Cornelis Castoriadis, that societies are coherent wholes and systems, otherwise they would collapse, animated by a particular kind of `social spirit' that is the result of our social imaginary. Democratic capitalism was prepared by such an imaginary, the result of the religious civil wars and the strong desire to go beyond the feudal adversarial model. But today, even as it is being globalized, its premises are dying at the same time they are being exacerbated. The emergence of P2P is therefore to be considered both as a total social fact, and as the birth of a new social imaginary. P2P is a revolt of the social imaginary about the total functionalization of our society, about its near-total and growing determination by instrumental reason and efficiency thinking, that is now even infecting our social and personal lives. It is a vivid protest, a longing for a different life, not solely dictated by calculation and the overriding concern for profit and productivity. It is not just protest against the intolerable facets of postmodern life, but always already also a construction of alternatives. Not an utopia, but really existing social practice. And a practice founded on a still unconscious, but coherent set of principles, i.e. a new social imaginary. It is totally coherent, a total social fact.

Habermas has another important notion, which is the `principle of organization' of society, and he distinguishes the primitive, traditional and liberal-capitalist principles of organization. He defines it as the innovations that become possible through `new levels of societal learning'. Such a level determines the the learning mechanism on which the development of productive forces depend, the range of variation for the interpretative systems that secure identity, amongst others key factors. It would seem clear that P2P is precisely such a new learning mechanism, described in most detail in the book by Pekka Himanen, as well as in the new rules I have identified in this essay. Thus in Habermassian terms, we would have to conclude that P2P is a fourth principle of organization, emerging at this stage, but which could become dominant at a later stage.

We'll leave the latter open as a hypothesis, since history is an open process, and indeed different logics can co-exist. For example, in democratic capitalism, the two logics of democracy and capitalism are co-existing together, forming a coherent whole, even though its fabric is now in crisis.

My interpretation of P2P is related to the interpretation of Stephan Merten and the Oekonux group in Germany, but whereas they see the principles behind Free Software as indicative as a new mode of social exchange, I have broadened their area of application. Free Software is, in my interpretation, one of the forms of the P2P form of social exchange. While Free Software appears important, especially when taken together with the more liberal Open Source format, it is still more marginal than P2P. When we look at the same phenomena through the P2P lens, the social changes appear much more profound, much more important, than Free Software taking alone. We are much further ahead of the curve if we follow the P2P interpretation.

Nevertheless, when I talk, in such an optimistic and visionary fashion, about the emergence of P2P and it being the premise of a coming fundamental civilisational change, I can of course also see the terrible trends that are affecting our world: fossil energy depletion, global warming, increased inequality inside and between countries, the tearing apart of the social fabric, the increased psychic insecurity affecting the whole world population, the imposition of a permanent war regime that is dismantling civil rights and re-introducing the systematic use of torture and lifelong imprisonment without trial in the heart of the West, the great extinction affecting biodiversity ... All these things are happening, and disheartening, even though counter-trends from civil society are also sometimes hopeful. Certainly, it seems that the power structure of Empire, the new form of global sovereignty, is beyond reform, that it just routs around protest and democracy, making dissent marginal and inconsequential, even as 25 million people were protesting an illegimate war in one single day. Corporate media machines will devote days on end on the trial of a celebrity, but totally ignore massive literacy campaigns in Venezuela, and millions of people demonstrating will deserve just a few seconds of coverage. But historically, it is also when change `inside' the system becomes impossible, that the greatest revolutions occur. The evening before the momentous events of May 68, the columnist Bernard Poirot-Delpech wrote in Le Monde: nothing ever changes, we are bored in this country ...

The question of timing is difficult to answer. Objectively, it could take centuries, if we take the historical examples of the transition from ancient slavery to feudalism, or from feudalism to capitalism. Similar to the current situation, both ancient slavery (in the form of the conatus system of production, which freed slaves but bound them to the land, as of the 2nd and 3rd century), and feudalism, had the germs of the new system already within them. However, the precipitation of climatic, economic, political crises affecting the current world system, as well as the general speeding up of cultural change processes, seem to point towards changes that could proceed on a much more faster scale. If I may allow myself a totally unscientific prediction, then I would say that a culmination of systemic crises, and the resulting reform of the global governance system, is about two to four decades away. But in another sense, such predictions are totally immaterial to the task at hand. We need P2P today, in order to make our lives more fulfilling, to realize our social imaginary in our own lifetime, and to develop the set of methodologies that will be needed, that are needed, to help solve the developing crisis. We do not have the luxury of waiting for a dawn to come. A good example of the maturity of the system for change is what happened in Argentina: when the economy totally collapsed, in a matter of months, the country's population had built a series of P2P-based barter and alternative money systems (the largest in the world to date), and the significant movement of the Piqueteros arose, which, demanded and got from the state a major concession: that state money for the unemployed would not go to individuals, but the movement as a whole to invest in cooperative projects. It all depends on the dialectic between the crises and what the system still can offer. But if the system fails to provide the hope and the realisation of a decent life, such an event precipitates the building of alternatives that have many of the aspects of P2P that we described.

7.1.B. P2P, Postmodernity, Cognitive Capitalism: within and beyond

Peer to peer has clearly a dual nature. As we have showed, it is the very technological infrastructure of cognitive capitalism, the very organizational mode it needs to implement in its global teams. P2P exemplifies many of the flexible and fluid aspects characteristic of fluid modernity (or postmodernity): it disintegrates boundaries and binary oppositions, blurs the inside and the outside. Just as post- or late feudal society and its absolutist kings needed the bourgeoisie, late capitalist society cannot survive without knowledge workers and their P2P practices. It can be argued that the adoption of P2P processes is in fact essential for competitiveness: a strong foundation of P2P technologies, the use of free or open source software, processes for collective intelligence building, free and fluid cooperation, are now all necessary facets of the contemporary corporation. The old format of 'pyramidal intelligence', i.e. a hierarchy of command and control, in its old bureaucratic format, or even as 'management by objectives', based on the assumption of information scarcity, is increasingly counter-productive.

At the same time, it cannot cope with it very well, and often P2P is seen as a threat. The entertainment industry for example, wishes to destroy P2P technology. In general, corporations are in constant tension between the logic of self-unfolding peer groups and the profit-driven logic of the feudally-structured management-by-objectives system, and by the tension between the cooperative production of innovation and its private appropriation. The dot.com crisis of 2001 showed how difficult it is for the present system to convert the new use value into exchange value, and created an important rift between the affected knowledge workers and the financial capital, which had taken them on that ride. After the short-term flourishing of the hope for instant riches in the dotcom economy, many of them turned their energies to the social sphere, where internet-based innovation not only continued, but thrived even more, but now based on explicit P2P modes of cooperation.

Thus, while being part and parcel of the capitalist and postmodern logics, it also already points beyond it. From the point of view of capital, it annoys it, but it also needs it to thrive and survive itself. From the point of view of its practitioners, they like it above all else, they know it is more productive and creates more value, as well as meaning in their life and a dense interconnected social life, but at the same time, they have to make a living and feed their families. The not-for-profit nature of P2P is at the heart of this paradox.

This is the great difficulty, and is why its opponents will not fail to point out the so-called parasitical nature of P2P. P2P creates massive use-value, but no automatic exchange value, and thus, it cannot fund itself. It exists on the basis of the vast material wealth created by the presently existing system. Peer to peer practitioners generally thrive in the interstices of the system: programmers in between jobs, workers in bureaucratic organizations with time on their hand; students and recipients of social aid; private sector professionals during paid for sabbaticals, academics who integrate it into their research projects. However, in terms of open source software, this is increasingly seen as essential for technological infrastrucre, favoured by an increasing numbers of governments who want an open standard, and also by rivals to Microsoft, who see it as a means of decreasing their dependency. It is more and more seen as an efficient means of production, and therefore, increasingly funded by the private sphere.

Apart from being an objective trend in society, it is also becoming a subjective demand, because it reflects a desired mode of working and being. P2P becomes, as it is for this author, part of a positive P2P ethos.

Therefore, a P2P advocacy emerges, which turns the tables around, and it becomes a political and social movement. What is the main message of this emergent movement? I'll try to paraphrase the emerging message, which is being increasingly clearly formulated:

It says: "it is us knowledge workers who are creating the value in the monetary system; the present system privately appropriates the results of a vast cooperative network of value creation (as we argued in our section about the cooperative nature of cognitive capitalism). Most value is not created in the formal procedures of the enterprise, but despite it, because, despite impediments, we remain creative and cooperative, against all odds. We come to the job, no longer as workers just renting our bodies, but as total subjectivities, with all we have learned in our lives, through our myriad social interactions, and solve present problems through our personal social networks. It is not us knowledge workers living off on you, but you `vectoralists' living off on us! We are the ones creating infinite use value, which you want to render scarce to transform it into tradable intellectual property, but you cannot do it without us. Even as we struggle to create a commons of information, in the meantime, while we lack the strength to totally transform the system, perhaps we will be strong enough to impose important transitory demands. Therefore, in your own interest, if you want innovation to continue, instead of ever larger number of us collapsing from stress-related diseases, you have to give us time and money. You cannot just use the information commons as an externality, you have to fund it. Establishing such a system, culminating in the instauration of a universal wage divorced from work, is in fact the very condition of your survival as an economic system, and at the same time, allows us to thrive as knowledge workers, by creating use value, meaning in our lives, time for learning and renewal, that we will bring back to your money-making enterprise."

The demand for a universal wage, increasingly debated, subject of academic research and government reports, and implemented for the first time in Brazil by President Lula, may well be the next great reform of the system, the wise course of action, awaiting its P2P "neo-Keynes", a collective able to translate the needs of the cooperative ethos in a set of political and ethical measures. Paradoxically, through the strengthening of cooperation, it will also re-invigorate cognitive capitalism (much like the welfare system create mass consumers), allowing the two logics to co-exist, in cooperation, and in relative independence from one another, installing a true competition in solving world problems.

The world system undoubtedly needs a number of important reforms. Amongst those I can think of is 1) the shift of the monopoly of violence from the nation-state, to an international cooperative body in charge of protecting human rights and avoid genocides and ethnic cleansings; it is no longer acceptable that any nation-state exerts illegitimate violence; 2) the setting up of regulatory bodies for the world economy, so that a through world society can emerge, in the sense of those proposed by George Soros, David Held and others; 3) changes in the nature of the system of capital in the sense described by Paul Hawken, David Korten, Hazel Henderson, i.e. a form of natural capitalism that can no longer appropriate the commons and externalize its environmental costs; 4) a new integral `international account' systems no longer focused on the endless growth of material production, but on well-being indicators; 5) changes in the structures of corporations so that it no longer exclusively reflects the interests of the shareholders, but of all the stakeholders affected by its operations.

With historical hindsight, such a series of fundamental changes are only to be expected after major structural crises: they are probably still 20 to 50 years away[clxxviii].

7.1.C. Three scenarios of co-existence

In our earlier descriptive essay, we already described three possible scenarios concerning the entanglement of cognitive capitalism with P2P.

The first scenario is peaceful co-existence. There are a lot of historical precedents for that. In the Middle Ages and other agriculture-based systems, the system of authority ranking (feudalism), co-existed with the religious order, organized in a form of Communal Shareholding (the Church and the Sangha), which was the pillar of a redistributive gift economy. In South-East Asia, which accepts temporary spiritual engagement, people would move from one sector to the other. Similarly, we can envision a continuation of the present system, with knowledge workers making money in the private sector, but regularly escaping, as much as they possibly can, to participate in the edification of the Commons. In this scenario, the one we are currently living and that would be poised to continue substantially the same, the current version of capitalism would also remain mostly unchanged, though perhaps eventually to be regulated by bodies of global governance.

The second scenario is the dark one. Cognitive capitalism succeeds in partly incorporating, partly destroying the P2P ethos, and an era of information feudalism ensues, a netocratic oligarchy based on access to resources and networks, living on rent monopolies from intellectual property licenses, as has been described by Jeremy Rifkin in the "Age of Access", (and echoed by Jordan Pollack[clxxix], John Perry Barlow[clxxx] and many others) and dis-appropriating any form of property from the consuming classes (the consumtariat, as Alexander Bard has coined them). It will co-exist with a total control society based on biometric identification, and will use highly advanced cognitive manipulation. But this scenario is predicated on the social defeat of the knowledge workers, and we are not there yet. In this scenario, access to information is predicated on the payment of restrictive licenses, which sharply reduce the freedoms and the creativity of the people who have access, while excluding many others from that access. Because of this loss of freedom, the loss also of the freedom to fully possess goods and to with them as we please, this scenario is often called one of 'information feudalism'.

The third scenario is, from the point of view of P2P advocates, the more hopeful one. After a deep structural crisis, the universal wage[clxxxi] is implemented, and the P2P sphere can operate with increasing autonomy, creating more and more use value, slowly creating a cohesive system within the system, a 'GPL Society', as Stephan Merten would have it[clxxxii]. At such moment, the new civilization is already born. It has to be stressed that P2P is not the same as a totally collectivized system, and that it can co-exist with markets and aspects of capitalism. But it does not need the current monopolistic system, it can reduce `market pricing mechanisms' to their rightful place, as part of the human exchange system, not as its totality. In my opinion, we would have a core of pure P2P processes, surrounded by a gift economy based on shareable goods, a strong social economy run by non-profit companies, and a reformed market sector, where prices reflect more realistically the true cost of production, such as environmental externalities. This form of 'natural capitalism' has been described by Paul Hawken, David Korten, and Hazel Henderson. The main 'inspiring paradigm' would no longer be the competition paradigm based on win-lose scenarios, but the collaborative paradigm, where reformed corporations and other to-be-invented institutional and non-institutional forms, would find

their purpose in creating added value to the commons, and would attract productive means to the degree they are perceived of doing so.

7.1.D. Possible political strategies

In the meantime, while the three scenarios are competing to come into being, and if we are sympathetic to the emergence of P2P and its ethos of cooperation: "What is to be done?"

A first step is to become aware of the isomorphism, the commonality, of peer to peer processes in the various fields. That people devising and using P2P sharing programs, start realizing that they are somehow doing the same thing than the alterglobalisation movement, and that both are related to the production of Linux, and to participative epistemologies. Thus what we must do first is building bridges of cooperation and understanding across the social fields. Amazingly, it has already started, as the last Porto Alegre forum showed an extraordinary enthusiastic reaction to the Open Source event, something that would have been unimaginable even a few years ago. I hope that my own essay plays a role in augmenting that awareness. We should also start to realize our basic commonality with earlier forms of the cooperative ethos: the communal shareholding of the tribal peoples, the solidarity movements of the workers, the environmental and other protectors of our physical commons. Following the analysis of Mckenzie Wark we should say that both knowledge workers (the hacker class for MW), workers, and farmers as producing classes share a similar interest in achieving first, a fairer share of the distribution of the surplus (the reformist agenda), and second, achieving control of the means of production (the more radical agenda). Of course, this can no longer take the form of centralized state control, and awaits innovative social practices and demands[clxxxiii]. Creating the new social reality takes precedence over political demands, the latter having to be a consequence of the former. Today to resist is in the first place 'to create'.

Therefore, the second step is to "furiously" build the commons. When we develop Linux, it is there, cannot be destroyed, and by its very existence and use, builds another reality, based on another social logic, the P2P logic. Adopting a network sociality and building dense interconnections as we participate in knowledge creation and exchange is enormously politically significant. By feeding our immaterial and spiritual needs outside of the consumption system, we can stop the logic which is destroying our ecosphere.. The present system may not like opposition, but even more does it fear indifference, because it can feed on the energy of strife, but starts dying when it is shunted. This is what is being expressed by Toni Negri's concept of Exodus, and what other call 'Desertion'[clxxxiv]. These commentators note that it was 'the refusal of work' in the seventies, with bluecollar workers showing increasing dissatisfaction with the Taylorist/Fordist system of work, that lead to the fundamental re-arrangement of work in the first place. In the past, the labour movement and other social movements mostly shared the same values, and it was mostly about a fairer share of the pie. But the new struggles are mostly about producing a new kind of pie, and producing it in a different way. Or perhaps an even more correct metaphor: it is about the right to produce altogether different kinds of pie.

Today, the new ethic says that 'to resist is in the first place to create'. The world we want is the world we are creating through our cooperative P2P ethos, it is visible in what we do today, not an utopian creation for the future. Building the commons has a crucial ingredient: the building of a dense alternative media network, for permanent and collective self-education in human culture, away from the mass-consumption model promoted by the corporate media.

Thus, if there is an 'offensive' strategy it would look like this: to build the commons, day after day, the process of creating of a society within society. In this context, the emergence of the internet and the web, is a tremendous step forward. Unlike in earlier social formations, knowledge workers and others now have access to an important "vector of information", to a means for creating, producing, and distributing immaterial products that was not available in earlier ages[clxxxv]. Part of the struggle to build the information commons is the struggle for the control of the code (achieving protocollary power) and the creation of a `friendly' legal framework, continuing the efforts pioneered by Richard Stallman and the General Public License and Lawrence Lessig's Copyleft and 'Creative Commons'.

The third step is the defensive strategy. When the commons is attacked, it needs to be defended. We are thinking of the struggle in the EU to avoid software patents[clxxxvi], avoiding the installment of digital rights management encoded in the hardware; the struggle against biopiracy; against the privatization of water.

Above all else what we need is a society that allows the building of the commons, and it is therefore impotant to refuse measures that would foreclose this development. Hence the importance of the intellectual property regime, which needs to be reformed to avoid a `Enclosure of the Digital Commons", and also, we have to develop an awareness of the intricacies of protocollary power. Since we have no idea about the time span needed for a fuller transition to a P2P civilization, what me must do in the meantime is to protect the seed, so that it can grow unimpeded, until such time as it is called for a greater role.

I would guess that an important part of the struggle for decent life for all, important to make space for the development of cooperative practices, will be the instauration of a universal living wage[clxxxvii]. So that no one dies from hunger, poverty and exclusion from the world of culture. So than an increasing number of us can start working on the creation of real use value, instead of catering to the artificial desires concocted by the global advertising system.

We also wish for the creation of democratic peer to peer processes so that they can contribute to solving some of the crucial issues facing the world. This is why the demands of the alterglobalisation movement are sometimes considered vague. It is because, in this complex world, we know that we do not have all the answers. But we also know, that through a community of peers, through open processes, answers and solutions can emerge, in a way that they cannot if private interests and domination structures are not transcended. Thus a reform of the global governance system is very important, so that every human being voice can be heard.. Current global governance institutions, as they are organized today (IMF, World Bank, WTO), often impede the finding of solutions because they are instruments of domination, rather than at the service of the world population. It is thus not just a matter of an alternative political program, but of alternative processes to arrive at the best solutions. I do not personally believe, that change can come from the autonomous processes of civil society, and that attention to the state form is important. Thus politically, peer to peer advocates are interested in the transformation of the nation-state, to new forms open to the processes of globality, to participatory processes, such as the ones practiced with P2P formats.

Peer to peer also demands self-transformation. As we said, P2P is predicated on abundance, on transcending the animal impulse based on win-lose games. But abundance is not just objective, i.e. also, and perhaps most importantly, subjective. This is why tribal economies considered themselves to live in abundance, and were egalitarian in nature. This is why happiness researchers show that it is not poverty that makes us unhappy, but inequality. Thus, the P2P ethos demands a conversion, to a point of view, to a set of skills, which allow us to focus ourselves to fulfilling our immaterial and spiritual needs directly, and not through a perverted mechanism of consumption. As we focus on friendships, connections, love, knowledge exchange, the cooperative search for wisdom, the construction of common resources and use value, we direct our attention away from the artificial needs that are currently promoted, and this time we personally and collectively stop feeding the Beast that we have ourselves created.

8. Launch of The Foundation for P2P Alternatives

We are now reaching the conclusion of our essay. If I have been successful the reader has a descriptive, explanatory, and historical view of its emergence and potential.

Of course my purpose is also political. I believe that a P2P-based civilization, or at least one that has much stronger elements of it compared with today, would be a better civilization, more apt to tackle the global challenges that we are facing. This is why I propose that this essay is not just part of a process of understanding, but that it can be a guide to an active participation in the transformation of our world, into something better, more participative, more free, more creative.

I therefore announce the creation of a Foundation for P2P Alternatives. It would be centered around the following conclusions, the support for which you can find in the essay:

that technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens it

that the networked format, expressed in the specific manner of peer to peer relations, is a new form of political organizing and subjectivity, and an alternative for the political/economic order, which though it does not offer solutions per se, points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organising formats to device different processes for arriving at such solutions; it ushers in a era of `nonrepresentational democracy', where an increasing number of people are able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of networks and peer circles

that it creates a new public domain, an information commons, which should be protected and extended, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation; and that this domain, where the cost of reproducing knowledge is near zero, requires fundamental changes in the intellectual property regime, as reflected by new forms such as the free software movement

that the principles developed by the free software movement, in particular the General Public Licence, provides for models that could be used in other areas of social and productive life

that it reconnects with the older traditions and attempts for a more cooperative social order, but this time obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralization; it has the potential of showing that the new egalitarian digital culture, is connected to the older traditions of cooperation of the workers and peasants, and to the search for an engaged and meaningful life as expressed in one's work, which becomes an expression of individual and collective creativity, rather than as a salaried means of survival

that it offers youth a vision of renewal and hope, to create a world that is more in tune with their values; that it creates a new language and discourse in tune with the new historical phase of `cognitive capitalism'; P2P is a language which every `digital youngster' can understand

it combines subjectivity (new values), intersubjectivity (new relations), objectivity (an enabling technology) and interobjectivity (new forms of organization) that mutually strengthen each other in a positive feedback loop, and it is clearly on the offensive and growing, but lacking `political self-consciousness'.

The Foundation for P2P Alternatives would address the following issues:

P2P currently exists in discrete separate movements and projects but these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them

thus, there is a need for a common initiative, which 1) brings information together; 2) connects people and mutually informs them 3) strives for integrative insights coming from the many subfields; 4) can organize events for reflection and action;5) can educate people about critical and creative tools for world-making

the Foundation would be a matrix or womb which would inspire the creation and linking of other nodes active in the P2P field, organized around topics and common interests, locality, and any form of identity and organization which makes sense for the people involved

the zero node website would have a website with directories, an electronic newsletter and blog, and a magazine.

Reactions to the Essay: Kudo's

A compilation of positive reactions on this essay and its expression of the P2P 'meme':

George Dafermos, at http://radio.weblogs.com/0117128/

"Michel Bauwens is the author of the most visionary piece on peer-to-peer I've ever read, published his much-awaited new essay on P2P, entitled P2P and Human Evolution: p2p as the premise of a new mode of civilization. As expected, his excellent and path-breaking treatise is all-encompassing, critically exploring P2P in all its possible manifestations and linkages, that is, with respect to its political, social, economic, spiritual, cultural, and technological implications. It is at the intersections of all these spheres and their interactions that P2P holds the potential to emerge as the basis of the new civilisation premised on self-realisation, autonomy, creation, eros, and sharing. It's either that or a return to barbarism, writes Bauwens. Read on and marvel at the mental syntheses that this essay invokes."

Peer to Peer weblog / Unmediated at http://p2p.weblogsinc.com/entry/1234000653037158/

"Michel Bauwens has written a phenomenal essay entitled P2P and Human Evolution: Placing Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework. It's long and much of it goes far over my head, but reads like a P2P manifesto" Bauwens even concludes by calling it a guide to an active participation in the transformation of our world, into something better, more participative, more free, more creative. Really quite fascinating."

Integral Foresight Institute, Chris Stewart

"What Michael Bauwens has achieved in a very short space fullfills the same function as the Communist Manifesto once did: a call for a worldwide movement for social and political change, firmly rooted in the objective and subjective changes of contempary society, and articulated as a practical and insightful model of human value and power relations that is ahead of its time. If we listen more carefully to Bauwens than we ever did Marx, however, it just might lead to a smooth evolution for humanity rather than revolution, or at worst, destruction. Bauwens has traced out real contours of hope for Western civilization. His presentation of a P2P perspective includes a clear theory of human power and value relations, a practical appreciation of its relationship to the current orthodoxy, and an inspiring vision for viable, sustainable, and desirable futures. Just as Bauwens notes the limited social acceptance of Marx at the time of his writing, it may well be that in years to come Bauwens's articulate and deeply considered insights will not only be as profoundly influential and valuable but, crucially, a lot more workable."

P2P and Integral Theory - Generation Sit weblog

"I rarely encounter essays addressing Integral Theory in the context of emerging technology. But if there's one thing out there worth reading, this essay is one of them -- P2P and Human Evolution: Placing Peer to Peer Theory in an Integral Framework (via IntegralWorld). This very long essay describes P2P in detail, covering the interior and exterior aspects, and its incompatibilities with Spiral Dynamics and Integral Theory. There are a lot of heady stuff for me to digest in this essay. And I'm still not done reading it."

John Heron, Participatory Spirituality pioneer, author of Sacred Science

"What I appreciate is your clarity with regard to the following: your basic definition of p2p; the way you trace this definition, and any compromises and departures from it, within its many manifestations; and toward the end of your account, forms co-existence and of possible political strategies. All of this is very valuable food for thought and action. You make a most effective and persuasive case for the widespread significance of the p2p phenomenon, in diverse fields, and with due regard for the underlying epistemological shifts involved. This work is indeed a major achievement of scholarship, insight, moral vision and political imagination."

- Victor Lewis-Hansom, by email:

"At first skim reading, I think that the spark you have created in our historical times, will be historically significant and remembered. Thank you for putting so much of yourself into your essay."

- Yves Simon at http://www.social-computing.com/showitem.php?ID=137

Michel Bauwens est un personnage connu du monde de la nouvelle économie. Il a rendu public une dernière mouture de son essai courant mars 2005 : P2P and Human Evolution : Peer to peer as the premise of a new mode of civilization
Un article dans la revue belge Imagine Magazine présente les conclusions de cette étude. Michel Bauwens estime que les technologies peer to peer ne sont que les prémisses de la constitution d'une nouvelle civilisation de pairs qui doit bouleverser les modèles établis. Je cite ci-après qq passages remarquables de l'interview conduit par David Leloup :

"Il s'agit donc d'une grande transformation culturelle qui conduit à un paradigme participatif.

Le P2P est d'abord un concept descriptif. Il permet d'analyser des nouvelles formes d'organisation. Là où le concept de peer-to-peer devient encore plus puissant, c'est quand il passe du statut d'outil descriptif à une utilisation normative. Comment le monde changerait-il, comment ma vie et mon éthique changent-elles, quand je commence à exiger des relations de pairs dans la totalité de mes actes ? Le peer-to-peer acquiert alors une véritable puissance révolutionnaire. C'est par exemple ce que le mouvement féministe a voulu et en partie réalisé : un refus d'accepter encore plus longtemps l'inégalité avec les hommes. Il y a aujourd'hui un véritable exode vers les interstices du système : non seulement il y a les «downshifters» comme moi-même, mais également des pans entiers de la jeunesse qui refusent la féodalité intrinsèque de la structure des entreprises.

Le peer-to-peer est en effet la structure même du troisième capitalisme : le capitalisme cognitif, qui remplace le capitalisme industriel lui-même ayant remplacé le capitalisme marchand.

...liée à la notion de «noosphère» de Teilhard de Chardin, c'est-à-dire la sphère spécifiquement culturelle, humaine. Le peer-to-peer permet une interconnexion de tous les cerveaux au niveau planétaire, et permet donc une action globale afin de répondre aux énormes défis écologiques et autres. Avant l'avènement d'Internet, ce genre de coordination globale était exclusivement réservée aux grandes multinationales.

le P2P permet de créer un contre-pouvoir qui combine l'échange égalitaire et la création d'une nouvelle sphère cognitive commune - ce que Lawrence Lessig appelle les «Creative Commons».

- Marc Dangeard in http://casailor.blogspot.com/2005/04/p2p-et-societe.html

"Je viens de lire l'essai de Michel Bauwens sur le Peer-to-Peer, et c'est extremement interessant. Ca se lit vite, et ca en vaut l'effort: http://noosphere.cc/P2P2bi.htm
La conclusion est qu'il y a dans l'avenement du peer to peer une vraie opportunite de changer le systeme dans lequel nous vivons.

En relation avec cette analyse sur l'evolution des modes de communication vers un modele peer to peer, et sur les modeles de societe qui peuvent en decouler, je suis convaincu que la facon dont on peut ameliorer les choses en matiere de business, d'enrichissement spirituel de l'individu au sein d'une entreprise, et de repartission des richesses en general est de passer par la creation d'entreprises qui seront construites sur des modeles nouveaux, ou les employes pourront participer activement et volontairement aux process et ou la distribution du revenu se fera de facon plus large, un peu sur le modele des stocks options qui sont distribuees aujourd'hui dans les start-ups de la Silicon Valley (mais avec un twist). Rien de radical, pas de revolution, plutot une evolution des modes de fonctionnement existants mais pour des resultats qui seront eux radicalement differents; l'entreprise de demain dont je parle dans un post precedent."

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