Peer to Peer
As a new mode of production, governance,
and property
The P2P ‘Tipping Point’



“The most profound finding of the 2006 Edelman Trust Barometer is that
in six of the 11 countries surveyed, the “person like yourself or your peer”
is seen as the most credible spokesperson about a company and among
the top three spokespeople in every country surveyed. This has advanced
steadily over the past three years.
In the US, for example, the “person like yourself or your peer” was only
trusted by 22% of respondents as recently as 2003, while in this year’s
study, 68% of respondents said they trusted a peer. Contrast that to the
CEO, who ranks in the bottom half of credible sources in all countries, at
28% trust in the US, near the level of lawyers and legislators. In China,
the “person like yourself or your peer” is trusted by 54% of respondents,
compared to the next highest spokesperson, a doctor, at 43%.
"only 13% of consumers say they buy products because of their ads.
Contrast that to 60% of small business owners in North America that say
they use peer recommendations to make their buying decisions and over
70% of 18-35 year olds who report the same for their media purchases."
Understanding P2P

Part 1: Understanding P2P

Part Two:P2P Business Models

Part Three: P2P and the Market

Part Four: Civilizational Politics of
P2P
1. Understanding P2P


P2P is the relational dynamic at work in
distributed networks
Hierarchical, de-centralized networks,
distributed networks
Complexity and Hierarchy
Levy: from the molar to the
molecular
Life
Archaic
Molar
Molecular
Natural
Selection
Artificial
Selection
Genetic
splicing
(natural time) (generationa (real-time)
l time)
Matter
Mechanical Thermo(outside)
Dynamic
Nanotech
(cold)
(Warming)
Information Somatic
Mediatic
(co-presence) (mass)
Human
Groups
Organic
Organizational
Digital
Selforganized
Usage of P2P depends on
consciousness
P2P as technological infrastructure
Web 2.0 Timeline
P2P as Technological Infrastructure



Point to Point infrastructures for P2P
communication: internet, web, IM, filesharing,
grid computing
A Read/Write infrastructure for autonomous
publication and distribution: blogging,
podcasting, webcasting
An infrastructure for glocal cooperation: Wiki’s,
Social Software, Web 2.0., creating the capacity
to GLOBALLY SCALE GRANULAR PRODUCTION
Web 2.0 and P2P



In Web 2.0, the value is created by the
user/participants: The Web 2.0 unlocks the
‘wisdom of crowds’
Web 2.0 tools enable that participation: The Web
2.0 renders data independent of the application;
and applications independent of the program:
mash-ups and open API’s
Web 2.0 business models fund the participation
through an attention economy, BUT, ‘there’s a
price to be paid’ (implicit social contract)
Web 2.0 Participatory Aspects








Must allow for cooperation: blogs, wiki’s,
forum
Must allow for ‘participation capture’ and
automatic archiving
Must allow aggregate rating & reputation
schemes
Must allow affinity searching and
recommendation schemes
Must allow presentiality (buddy lists)
Must allow cooperative contextuality
building: social bookmarking, tagging
Must allow remixing, re-use of content and
services: widgets, mash-ups
Web 2.0’s semi-openness
P2P Social Processes



1. The ability to produce in common: Peer
Production as a third mode of production
2. The ability by participants to manage
distributed projects by themselves: Peer
Governance as a third mode of
governance
3. The ability to protect the common
project from private appropriation: Peer
Property as a third mode of nonexclusionary property
The Revolution of Equipotentiality
“….People would experience others as equals in the sense of their being both superior
and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually,
emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of
those skills being absolutely higher or better than others…”
Jorge Ferrer
Characteristics of Peer Production (1)




No division of labour, but distribution of
labour: equipotentiality
No exclusivity, but inclusivity: anticredentialism
No composite tasks, but granular tasks:
self-selection
No products, but always unfinished
‘artefacts’
Characteristics of Peer Production (2)



No a priori, but a posteriori
distributed control: communal
validation (collective choice systems,
algorithms)
No panoptism, but holoptism:
participation capture, usage is
production
Not owned, but shared content
Conditions for Succes




Benkler: 3 characteristics of successul group efforts:
1) must be modular. That is, they must be divisible into components, or
modules, each of which can be produced independently of the production of
the others. This enables production to be incremental and asynchronous,
pooling the efforts of different people, with different capabilities, who are
available at different times."
2.) “For a peer production process to pool successfully a relatively large
number of contributors, the modules should be predominately fine–grained,
or small size. This allows the project to capture contributions from large
numbers of contributors whose motivation levels will not sustain anything
more than small efforts toward the project ...."
3.) “... a successful peer production enterprise must have low–cost
integration, which includes both quality control over the modules and a
mechanism for integrating the contributions into the finished product, while
defending “itself against incompetent or malicious contributors.
Why is Peer Production Emerging
Now?




Yochai Benkler advances a powerful hypothesis, that
lowering the capital requirements of information production
1. reduces the value of proprietary strategies and makes
public, shared information more important,
2. encourages a wider range of motivations to produce,
thus demoting supply-and-demand from prime motivator to
one-of-many, and
3. allows large-scale, cooperative information production
efforts that were not possible before, from open-source
software, to search engines and encyclopedias, to
massively multi-player online games.
Peer Governance as 3rd modality
Centralized
Decentralized Distributed
Hierarchy
Heterarchy
Autonomy
Economics
Centralized
Planning
Market
Peer Production
Politics
Absolute
monarchy
Separation of
powers
Peer
Governance
Property
Collective State Private
Exclusionary

Common
Inclusionary
Peer Property
Conclusion: P2P is a third mode of production,
governance, and property
The Evolution of Hierarchy (1)
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
endeavor
by John Heron
Evolution of Hierarchy (2): Power




Premodern era: custom and force:
“Make die, and let live”
Early modern era: disciplinary societies
“Make live and let die”
Late modern era: control societies
“control the desire; a posteriori control,
the metaphor of the elastic”
P2P era: reputation societies?
Evolution of Hierarchy (2): Power
Period
Machine
Dates
Diagram
Manager
Consciousness
(Agency of)
Sovereign
Society
(make die,
Let live)
Mechanical
1757
Centralization
Hierarchy
Monarchy
Disciplinary
Society
(let die,
make live)
Thermodyna
-mics
1844
(telegraph)
Decentralization
Bureaucracy
Separation/
balance of powers
Control
Society
Cybernetics
(computers)
1954
Distribution
Protocol
Organized civil
society (NGO)
Collective
Intelligence
Society
Internet/Web
1994
P2P
Transparency
Peer Circles
Evolution of Cooperation
“it’s no longer about incentives, but about
removing impediments”
Time frame
Typology =>
Pre-modern
(feudal,
imperial)
Cooperation &
Motivation
Formats
Game
Typology
Quality of
Cooperation
Adversarial
Zero Sum:
Win-Lose
“Power Game”
Low,
1+1<2
Zero Sum:
Win-win: Draw
“Money Game”
Average,
1+1=2
The 4 wins
“Wisdom Game”
High,
1+1>2
Extrinsic negative
Modern
(market,
industrial)
Neutral
Extrinsic positive
P2P era
Synergistic
Intrinsic positive
P2P as a new way of working
A few people do all
the work
Many people do a
little of the work
You have to pay all of You don’t have to pay
them
most of them
It’s hard to get
involved
It’s easy to get
involved
Support from people
you know
Support from a legion
of strangers
Typology of Peer Governance




1. The forms of peer governance of open/free communities and
peer production groups: adhocracy
2. The forms of governance/ownership/income distribution for the
derived and monetizable service and market-oriented production
models that derive from commons-related projects (formal modes
of capital and IP ownership)
3. Choice from wide selection of governance and institutional
formats for peer projects. Plug-and-play management models
4. Political governance models for the whole of society that are
inspired by peer to peer models or principles: peer governance
supplements and informs/re-forms representative democracy

5. Political theories and movements inspired by the P2P ethos

KEY ISSUE: boundary between peer governance and
‘representational’ democratic rules
Characteristics of P2P Hierarchy

Usually consists of a core leadership embodying the original
aims of the project, sometimes - the ‘benevolent dictator’
• Linux: coders – trusted Lieutenants – Linus Torvalds
• Wikipedia: contributors – core editors – Jimmy Wales

Teams are led by flexible meritocratic leaders: jazz band
logic

Principle of non-dependence or reverse dependence

Large projects are led by a non-profit foundation possibility of corporate spin-offs
How To Spot A Successful Open
Source Project

Community: A handful of lead developers, a large body of contributors, and a substantial--or at
least motivated--user group offering ideas.

Disruptive goals: Does something notably better than commercial code. Free isn't enough.

A benevolent dictator: Leader who can inspire and guide developers, asking the right questions
and letting only the right code in.

Transparency: Decisions are made openly, with threads of discussion, active mailing list, and
negative and positive comments aired.

Civility: Strong forums police against personal attacks or niggling issues, focus on big goals.

Documentation: What good's a project that can't be implemented by those outside its
development?

Employed developers: The key developers need to work on it full time.

A clear license: Some are very business friendly, others clear as mud.

Commercial support: Companies need more than email support from volunteers. Is there a solid
company employing people you can call?
What with the Power Law?

The Power Law
• "In systems where many people are free to choose
between many options, a small subset of the whole will
get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or
income), even if no members of the system actively
work towards such an outcome. The very act of
choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough,
creates a power law distribution."

The Dunbar Number

Counteracting the Power Law?
• It does not always apply (Krebs studies)
• Open communities show better spread
• Knowing networks can be designed to foster diversity,
autonomy, openness
• Towards Value-conscious design
Peer Property
Universal common property regimes
are different from private property
and public collective property
 Individual authorship + share-alike +
free distributed access
 Examples: 1) Creative Commons for
individual expression and sharing; 2)
GPL for creations of ‘Commons’

Physical vs. Information Commons
Scope
Local
Information
Commons
Non-rival &
Anti-rival
Non-local
Actors
Territorial
Groups
Global Affinity
Groups
Governance
Communities
Cyber
Collectives
Type of
Resource
Traditional
Commons
Rival
The Circulation of the Common


Peer production needs open and free access to the raw
material for its production: open/free paradigm and
movements
Peer Governance is the participatory process for the
production of the common: the participatory/cooperation
paradigms and movements
• “when costs of participation are low enough, any
motivation may be sufficient to lead to a
contribution.”


Peer Property uses new legal and institutional formats to
protect its production: the Commons-based paradigms and
movements
The Common Property format creates open/free raw
material: the viral circle spirals onward
Part Two: P2P Business Models
PRECONDITIONS FOR PEER PRODUCTION:
•
•
•
•
Abundance/Surplus/Distribution of intellect
Abundance/Distribution of the means of information
production and sharing
Lowering of ‘need for capital’, which becomes a posteriori,
not a priori condition for success; entrepreneurship is
divorcing from capitalism
Conclusion: the treshold of participation, i.e. the capability
to bypass centralized capital outlays is diminishing in
human, physical and financial capital
Why P2P will grow
Immaterial production
For Profit
For Benefit
Material production
Conditions for expansion of
‘physical’ peer production

The ‘distribution of everything’: further
distributive advances in financial and industrial
capital
• Desktop manufacturing, fabbing, multi-purpose
machinery, implications of nanotech/biotech for
distributed production


Separating the design and material production
phase of the industrial process: open design
communities with built-only markets
Finding integrated processes for the physical,
logical, and digital ‘commons’ (e.g. Semapedia,
German White Bicycle program, Bookcrossings)
Striking a Critical Balance between
Giving It Away and Making Money…
Includes Source Code
Charge for Software
No Source Code Included
Charge for Software
Paid
$$$
Practices
Differentiated
Value
Open
Assets
Closed
Common
Value
Gratis
Source Code Included
No Charge for Software
Free
Portfolio
No Source Code Included
No Charge for Software
…And Utilizing a Sound Business Model to Stay on
User Innovation 1




The Democratization of Innovation means that users of products
and services, both firms and individual users, are increasingly able
to develop what they need for themselves.
Manufactured-Innovation means that firms develop innovations at
private expense, then sell it.
User-Innovation means that lead users develop innovations that
they need, then make it freely available. Lead users foreshadow a
more general demand. But the concept should not obscure the fact
that many users innovate, and that such innovation is distributed
amongst different players offer incremental parts of the solution.
Commercialisation phase should not obscure the fact that user
innovation communities can bypass manufacturers altogether.
Example: Kite-building communities; Some firms are moving to
'build-only' formats, leaving innovation to the user communities.
The User Innovation Cycle





1) individual user develops innovation
• invention, prototyping phase
2) user diffuses innovation through networked media
• information diffusion phase
3) a community forms around it and develops a working prototype
• pre-commercial replication phase
4) a manufacturer may develop a commercial version adding some features
• commercial phase
Examples: Examples: email, mountain bike, sports bra, desktop publishing,
Gatorade, white-out liquid
The Laws of Asymmetric
Competition


1. In a competition between a for-profit
entity with closed proprietary strategies,
and a for-benefit institution working with a
community and a commons, the latter will
tend to win out
2. In a competition between for profit
companies, those using open/free,
participatory, and commons oriented
strategies will tend to win out
Participation as a competitive
advantage





“Free”, as in free beer, as a competitive
advantage
Open source as a competitive advantage
Open participation as a competitive
advantage
Co-evolving with a commons as a
competitive advantage
From Walled Gardens to Community
Switching Costs
Mixing Openness and Closedness



Joe West:
“in standardization, firms face an inherent conflict
between value creation and value capture. A
completely open standard creates lots of value, none
of which can be captured; a completely closed
standard captures 100 percent of no value created.
So a profit–maximizing firm must seek an
intermediate point that partially accomplishes both
goals.
Thus to pay the bills, there has to be value capture
somewhere: everything has some level of openness
and some level of proprietary–ness. Typically,
standards that are open in one area are often not
open in another.”
The role of capital?




The cost of starting an internet company have gone down
by 80% over the last 8 years
“Companies no longer need to raise lots of cash, no longer
need lots of people, no longer need to even directly sell
anything at all to be considered successful. They need
revenue, of course, but that's mainly through advertising.
And they need to create something people want to use. But
Super Bowl ads? Forget those.
So there is plenty of money available -- nearly $1 trillion -but it is coming at a time when, as I have just described, a
whole new class of start-ups has appeared that doesn't
want VC money -- at least not very much of it.”
Conclusion: 1) emergence of ‘non-capitalist’ social
entrepreneurs; 2) capital needed ‘a posteriori’, after prior
success
Modalities of Sharing
Types of individual engagement



1. The classical "prosumer mode", in which
everybody is working basically for themselves in
using and customizing products
2. The Web 2.0 "swarm mode" in which
people are loosely aggregated in doing things :
“the strength of weak ties”
3. The "community mode", production of
common artefacts
These three modes are pretty separated, but there is a "hidden
continuum" structurally connecting them, they become "mutual
enablers".
User vs. corporate typology
Type of Users
Type of Corporation
Prosumer Mode
Crowdsourcing
Swarming Mode
Platform Enablers
Community Mode
Commons-dependent
Types of Corporate Engagement

Externalizers/Crowdsourcers: external
producers are integrated in the corporate
value chain

Participation enablers (Web 2.0 paradigm):

Commons-dependent: corporations monetizing
enable the loose interconnection of individuals; and
monetize the common attention: Ebay
derivative value created by peer communities (FLOSS
companies)
Corporate Co-Creation Strategies
The Direct Economy Model of Xavier Comtesse

Passive consumption: The consumer is getting products or services with no real interaction

Self Service: The consumer is now given the ability to choose between various products or

DIY: Do It Yourself: At this level, the consumer starts getting involved in the value chain. This

Co-design: At this level, the consumer starts adding value by customizing the product and

Co-creation: This is the ultimate level of involvement, where the consumer is actually involved
and no real choice. He has to take whatever is available.
services. This first step is already a huge step forward, as the consumer can go around the vendor
to pick and choose what he wants.
is what IKEA offers, where you are not just buying a product, you are actually also delivering it to
your home and building it yourself. This case is an example of the first disruption from the standard
retail value chain.
therefore defining his needs himself (as opposed to buying a product defined by the product
management team). This is what Dell is asking from customers when they have to pick and choose
options to build a computer.
in the design of the product or service itself. This is what Open Source does for developers, and
what Wikipedia does for knowledge consumers. Similarly Procter and Gamble has a “Connect and
Develop” program that lets innovators define products.
Autonomy in Production (1)
The Direct Economy Model updated for peer production:

Criteria 1: outside, or inside the market?

Criteria 2: production of use value or
production of exchange value

Criteria 3: individually oriented, or
community oriented
Autonomy in Production (2)
The Direct Economy Model updated for peer production:

Direct peer production of use value with no concern for
monetization: the adventure economy of couchsurfing.com

Direct peer production of use value with concern for equitable
monetization: OS Alliance, ecopyleft, user ownership theory

Direct production of use value by groups with commons-oriented
business ecology

Direct production of use value by individuals with monetization of
attention through proprietary platforms

Direct production of exchange value by groups: cooperative
production

Direct production of exchange value by individuals: minipreneurial
ecology, social commerce, social retailing
Media Monetization Strategies

Audience growth (N+1) = Attention
Economy

Metcalfe’s Law (N-square) = Transcational
Multiplication, Social Commerce

Reed’s Law (N-quadrupling) = Long Tail
communities, Group-Forming Networks

Van Till’s Law: what you can <do> in the
groups is beyond measure
Media Monetization Strategies
(2)


Business Models: Advertizing,
Freemium, Market Platform,
Fundraising
Advertizing models: Display
(banners), Matching (Google),
Sponsored Content, Social Media
Presence
What does it mean for
marketing?

Differentiation according to polarity:
emergence of community-oriented
business models

Social commerce, social retailing, affinity
marketing

Network facilitators, vendor relations
management

Zero-advertizing brands
Commons-dependent business
strategies
1.
support seller
•
•
revenue is generated by selling two broad categories of items -- physical
goods and/or services that can be used to justify higher prices
most if not all open source licences would work for this model
2. Loss leader/market positioner
•
•
no charge open source product is used as a loss leader for traditional
commercial software
open source product generates little or no revenue part customers are
attracted for other products sold using the traditional model
3. Widget frosting
•
•
intended for companies in business primarily to sell hardware but use the
open source model for enabling tools distributed at no charge along with the
hardware
most revenue is generated through sales of the hardware
4. Brand/franchise licensing
•
•
a company makes the research tool itself open source but retains the rights
to its product trademarks and related intellectual property and charges other
companies for the right to use those trademarks in creating derivative
products distributed under the same brand name
this requires that the product exist in two different forms with two different
names -- official (trademarked), e.g. Netscape and unofficial, e.g. Mozilla
Crowdsourcing



Jeff Howe: "For the last decade or so, companies have been
looking overseas, to India or China, for cheap labor. But now it
doesn’t matter where the laborers are – they might be down the
block, they might be in Indonesia – as long as they are connected
to the network.
Technological advances in everything from product design
software to digital video cameras are breaking down the cost
barriers that once separated amateurs from professionals.
Hobbyists, part-timers, and dabblers suddenly have a market for
their efforts, as smart companies in industries as disparate as
pharmaceuticals and television discover ways to tap the latent
talent of the crowd. The labor isn’t always free, but it costs a lot
less than paying traditional employees. It’s not outsourcing; it’s
crowdsourcing."
Examples: Innocentive, Crowdspirit, Café Press, stock
photography
Crowdsourcing Players

Creators (core)
•

Critics (inner ring)
•

This is the group of people that is the most enthusiastic about the collaborative
offer, and they go to great lengths in pursuit of creating something unique. They
submit original content and remix each others’ material to produce solutions that
will earn them respect, status, acceptance, reputation, as well as material rewards.
Critics are the people that do not produce original solutions, but are highly involved
in the conversation around them. They criticize, offer development suggestions to
creators and act as evangelists by actively spreading the word about the stuff they
like (or alternatively, stuff they hate) by e.g. blogging.
Crowds (outer ring)
•
The larger crowd is participating but not conversing as intensively as the critics.
They tag, recommend, rate, vote, send e-mail links to friends and sometimes write
an occasional review. The interaction is therefore quite shallow compared to the
previous level. There is however a great wisdom to be gathered from all this
grassroots activity: their input elicited carefully, the crowds through their actions
help organizing the alternative solutions and understanding their worth.
The Flirt model of crowdsourcing

Facilities
•

Language
•

The blood, sweat & tears from your customers don’t come for free. The incentives
required by the different groups vary, and some are willing to work for less than
others, but the issue has to be given extra careful thought in engaging the
community in an exchange meaningful to all participants.
Rules
•

The customers are not stupid. They have to be treated with respect. Fake bloggers
and ‘user-generated content’ crafted by ad agencies are bound for a beating.
Incentives
•

Facilities have to be in place for the participants to have a place for meeting and
interaction. However it doesn’t always mean that the company has to build a social
network service from scratch.
Don’t expect to a swarm of creativity by creating an open environment where
everybody is free to do whatever might occur to them. Naturally, you have to think
about e.g. manufacturing constraints
Tools
•
The people obviously need to have access to the tools necessary to create and
participate. These tools can be provided by the company (like Lego’s Digital
Designer, a piece of software that let’s you design your own lego models) or it may
be assumed that people already have them (digital cameras / cameraphones in the
developed world).
Wisdom of Crowds?

James Surowiecky:

“There are four key qualities that make a crowd smart.

1) It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different
pieces of information to the table.

2) It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is
dictating the crowd’s answer.

3) It needs a way of summarizing people’s opinions into one
collective verdict.

4) And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that
they pay attention mostly to their own information, and not
worrying about what everyone around them thinks."
P2P and Markets
Differences between peer production and the market:

Markets do not function according to the criteria of collective intelligence
and holoptism, but rather, in the form of insect-like swarming intelligence. Yes,
there are autonomous agents in a distributed environment, but each individual only
sees his own immediate benefit.

Markets are based on 'neutral' cooperation, and not on synergistic
cooperation: no reciprocity is created.

Markets operate for the exchange value and profit, not directly for the use
value.

Whereas P2P aims at full participation, markets only fulfill the needs of
those with purchasing power.
Amongst the disadvantages of markets are:


They do not function well for common needs that do not assure full payment
of the service rendered (national defense, general policing, education and public
health), and do not only fail to take into account negative externalities (the
environment, social costs, future generations), but actively discourages such
behavior.
Since open markets tend to lower profit and wages, it always gives rise to
anti-markets, where oligopolies and monopolies use their privileged position to
have the state 'rig' the market to their benefit. The theoretical peer-like qualities of
agents in free markets are absent from capitalism
P2P and the Market: Immanence

P2P is highly dependent on the market

The market is highly dependent on peer production and
social innovation

Many peer production projects rely concretely on a business
ecology – i.e. Linux & IBM

An increasing number of corporations are commonsdependent

Peer production and externalization are part of the value
chain, the production chain, the cost-benefit calculations of
corporations
P2P and the Market:
transcendence




P2P remains a non-reciprocal form of production
No pricing, no corporate hierarchy, no market
allocation of resources
P2P is dependent on the market, but also
restricted by the market: unrealized social value
waiting to be unlocked
P2P can be part of a political project to transcend
the current political economy
P2P and the Market as field of
tension



Who rules: from cognitive capitalists,
via vectoralists to netarchists
From the Second to the Third
Enclosures?
From a crisis of value capture to a
crisis of accumulation?
Institutions vs. Communities
The politics of Web 2.0

Web 2.0 and peer producers, the
dolphin/shark dilemma:
• 1) Who owns the platform (netarchical and
vectoralist strategies)
• 2) Is the infrastructure open/free;
• 3) Participatory design: is true sharing
possible?
• 3) Who owns the content? (third enclosures)
• 4) Monetization strategies (revenue sharing)
What kind of ‘intersubjectivity’?
Alan Page Fiske’s Relational Model




Reciprocity: The Gift Economy (tribalism)
Authority Ranking: The Tributary Economy
(feudalism)
Market Pricing: The Market Economy
(capitalism)
Communal Shareholding: The Sharing
Economy (peer to peer)
Economic Evolution (projection)




The primary economy is based on reciprocity, which derives from common
ancestry or lineage. It is based on families, clans, tribes and exchange mostly
operates through gifts which create further obligation. Wants are defined by the
community. Leadership is in the hands of the lineage leadership. Key issue:
belonging.
The secondary economy arises together with power monopolies which
engender coercion as a means to force cooperation. We enter the domain of
class societies, and production is organized by the elite in power, which holds
together through the symbolic power which transforms power into allegiance.
Respect for power, in the form of tribute, taxes, etc.. is normative. The key question
is: 'to deserve power or to deserve subjection'.
The tertiary economy arises with the entrepreneur and capitalism. It is
based on 'equivalent', i.e. 'fair' exchange, which is normative. Power arises
from relative productivity, relative monopoly over a needed good, and from the wage
relationship which creates dependence. Cooperation is no longer correlated to
belonging. Relationships are impersonal.
The quaternary economy, based on peer to peer processes, is based on
'ideological leaders' which can frame common goals and common belonging
and is based on membership and contribution. Contributing to the best of one's
ability to common goals is normative and the key question becomes: to follow an
existing group or to create one's own, i.e. to convince or be convinced..
A peer-informed economy? (1)

Today: treating scarce goods as if they
were infinite; treating abundant goods as
it there were scarce: the current economy
is based on pseudo-abundance and
pseudo-scarcity

Tomorrow: A steady-state economy
coupled with growing immaterial assets
and a well-being economy: the P2P
political economy is based on real
abundance and scarcity
A peer-informed economy? (2)

Today: the commodification of everything; cognitive and affective

Tomorrow: a pluralist economy combining:
capitalism; the colonization of the life-world in the market state
• A core of non-reciprocal peer production
• A reciprocity-based gift economy for services and traditional
pre-capitalist economies (open money reform)
• A vibrant market based on non-externalization, non-scarce
monies and new corporate formats
• Governance based on multi-stakeholdership
P2P Politics: Strategies
• Three strategies:



Transgressive = ignoring the old:
Filesharing, Piratbyran
Alternative/Constructive = building the
new: Creative Commons, GPL
Reformist = changing/adapting the old:
legislative reforms (DAVDSI France)
Systems of Influence
P2P Politics: Goals

Recognition of true scarcities through true costing
• Reforming the market: natural capitalism, living economies

Impeding artificial scarcities
• IP reform (against illicit monopoly rents from IP)
• Monetary reform

Promoting true abundance
• Sustainability of peer production: p2p to market?
• Universal basic income?
Democracy vs. Self-governance



One vote, binary decicions vs.
Many differentiated decisions
Discontinuous participation and batch processing Vs.
Continuous, real-time bubbling up
Polyphony, with prior perspective, arrested products Vs.
No prior code, permanent evaluation.

Autonomy is about direct expression without representation

Politics is no longer about having/taking power, but about
augmenting the potential for autonomy
P2P = a total social fact
As a new mode of production, governance,
and property
THANK
YOU
Contact Information
Wiki: www.p2pfoundation.net
Blog: blog.p2pfoundation.com
Email: michelsub2004@gmail.com