Michel Bauwens: The P2P Revolution

I'm actually working with productive communities that are constructing this new society, these new economics.

P2P is really about relational dynamic. It's the capacity that people now have to permissionally communicate with each other, peer to peer, but more importantly to organize themselves, right? To create huge transnational common goods, open knowledge, free software, open design. And you can combine that with distributed funding, social landing, crowdfunding. You can combine that with distributed machinery, 3D printing. You can combine that with new governance and ownership models. So basically you arrive at a vision that is completely different from the mainstream, let's call it capitalist system where values are created by private people for pure selfish reasons in theory, right? And then companies capture the value and they pay the workers, and there is no civil society really in that picture. In the new picture citizens are contributing to commons. These commons are abundantly available because mostly at this stage they are immaterial commons ... knowledge, design. And they are building economies around it. So they are trying to combine their capacity to contribute to something useful with creating livelihoods. And it's not easy but it's happening, and it's happening more and more, and I would say now we actually are arriving at this stage where instead of having just isolated projects they are more and more finding each other. So we have kind of a metasystem emerging. Just in the last three weeks I visited Madison Wisconsin where they have a mutual aid network that combines time banks, trade unions, food coops, and they are really making a system out of it, not just individual projects. In Lille they have something called encommuns.org and they are identifying commons organisations, there are physical commons, there are immaterial commons but also the streams of value, you know, how that works, right? I have other examples in Barcelona, there is a Spiral in New Zealand. So we are arriving at a level now where you already see ecosystems emerging, not just doing Linux or Wikipedia but actually real economic networks that share their knowledge that where entrepreneurs operating transparency to each other, you know, open book accounting, open supply chains has nothing to do with the industrial way of looking at how you produce value, it's really something different.

The way it works is you have the commons at the core. That's where the value is contributed. And it's use value, something useful to people. But you still need to make a living, and that's where you create the economy around it, so you have abundant goods. Abundant goods are not economic goods because you don't have a tension between supply and demand, right? Why would you pay for Linux if you can just download it? Or even for music. Why would you pay for music if ou can just download it? You could say: You should. But a lot of people would just pragmatically share it with each other. But musicians, you still want to hear them. We want to hear them live. You pay them for their presence, you pay them for their performance. And there have been studies like in Norway showing that today more music is produced, more music is listened to, and the musicians are making more money than ten years ago. They are still complaning because there is still a lot of precarity, but you know compared to situations where a few monopolies take all the income and produce winner-take-all-musicians who take all the money but leave everybody out. There is actually despite public perception, there is improvement in the lifes of many people who are engaged in that.

Big industries are choice, right? You say cars, we need big factories like in Germany. We need to massproduce cars. But that's a choice, that's not a necessity. You can say, let's make a Wikispeed which is globally designed by an open design community of car engineers that is five times fuel-efficient as any car that's sold from Germany, so much better for the environment. And you can produce it in a microfactory locally. So the rule is: If it's heavy, it's local. If it's light, it's global. Now why is this important? Because three quarters of the expenditure of matter and energy in our society is transport, not production. So if you think about it, these little parts in the car today they go around the world 24 times sometimes. It's insane. Why not make a car locally in a distributed way? It's a choice, it's not like you have to do it in the old way. You know, technology allows us to reimagine how production works and value distribution works. Of course I'm not saying this is mainstream yet, but imagine in 10, 15 years when oil could be 400 dollars, you know, are you still going to buy cheap cars from China? Probably not. You know, you gonna have to do it much more locally. A lot of people are redesigning production chains, value chains. Food, you know, we want to eat healthy, untoxic, organic food. Business is not doing it, so we'll do it ourselves, right? Consumer-supported agriculture. Now these things existed before, but because of technology allows them to organzie themselves in a much cheaper way than 15 years ago they are rising exponentionally.

I'm observing grassroot initiatives and try to have a role as a catalyst which means identifying patterns that work and connecting them to each other. So imagine you're living in the 15th century, and there is a printing press. It completely changes the way how knowledge is diffusing in society. It made, you know, the religous reforms possible, right? Then the Templers invented double book accounting which completely changed the way people think about value. You know, it has to be in balance, input and output. You have Kelvin who says that being rich is actually a good thing and not sinful. So these are all patterns emerging at that time, and nobody knows what it really meant. But two centuries later or three centuries later that was capitalism basically, right? These patterns found each other. And the patterns became actually an organic ecosystem. The same thing is happening today. We have crowdfunding there, social landing there, 3D printing here, new governance models there, new ownership models there, and people say: Oh, things are changing. But they don't know how they are changing. And I'm making this bald claim that we can actually already see the underlying structure of society that is coming. I'm not saying: It will be absolutely like that. It's society, you know, it's about powers, struggle, it's about innovation. But I make scenarios, different scenarios but the one I hope is this scenario of global commons with open communities, collaborating and sharing innovation, and then local, more cooperative forms of economy producing it in a sustainable way closer to the people. And these three things need to come together: the open economy, the sustainable economy and the solidary economy, right? Sonow we have for example open source circle economy. That's the first conversion within the open model, and the sustainably model. And we have something called open cooperativism. It's the first conversion between the open model and the cooperative model. So I'm saying because I'm seeing it happening I'm saying: It's happening! You know, it's not utopia, it's actually happening. It doesn't mean everything will be perfect but people are responding to real crisis, right? And some people have an anticipatory consciousness. They just see earlier than others. The problems are being created by this type of economy, and they say we need to do something about it. It's very important they do this now because when there is a big crisis people will look for solutions. And if we don't have these healthy solutions people will look for unhealthy solutions. As you know in Germany this can happen in history, right? So we are basically trying to create conditions that when there is a need for a bigger shift that there are already models there, that people can be inspired by and copy and innovate on.

I was in Madison Wisconsin, you know, like mainstream USA which is there called state street. Every third shop on that street says "organic", "zero mile", "sweat shop free" etc. etc. That means that behind every store there is a network, right? If youz say fair trade that means they have a connection with Ecuadorian coffee makers. There is a supply chain, it is not just a name on the window, right? That's one thing. The next thing is that there are already people there and it is called "mutual aid network" project. They are putting together things, for example there is a very successful time bank in Madison, and there is a credit union. What people couldn't do is take their time dollars and use them for the credit union and use them for the food coop. So what they are doing now is creating an ecosystem, trying to create value streams in the common good economy, so that people doing food coop can connect with people doing health care. And there is lots of new models of health care like solidaritry coops for social care. There are so many things happening, it's really unbelieveable. You just have to want to see it. I think the big problem is the media just doesn't talk about it, it is not exciting, people are not killing each other, actually constructing something. And it's slow going, it's like the boiling frog in a good way, right? And that's why they don't see it. And it is also challenging for mainstream media because it challenges the vision of man, the idea that we are only motivated by selfish behaviour, and I'm not denying that people can be selfish and are selfish. I'm just denying that this is the only thing they are, right? That people are complex beings and if you create good social systems they can express different parts of their being more easily, and then have social systems that are, you know, more rich in their motivation than people do things for more than one reason, not just, you know, the selfish reason to get money for something, right?