01
Sep
2012
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » Desktop Regulatory State, Chapter Three: Individual Superempowerment
- he barriers to small contributions from independent actors are lowered. Individuals can make small contributions to a larger project, coordinating their own small efforts with the larger project through the common platform without any central coordinating authority. So stigmergic organization can leverage many, many small contributions that wouldn’t have been worth the transaction costs of coordinating them in the old days.
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The End of the Age of Scalable Efficiency?
Equally importantly, we’re moving from a world of knowledge stocks, where competitive advantage resides in proprietary knowledge of lasting value, to a world of knowledge flows, where competitive advantage can only be attained by participating effectively in a larger and more diverse set of knowledge flows. In a world that’s changing more rapidly with growing uncertainty, knowledge stocks depreciate in value at an accelerating rate. This suggests an alternative rationale for institutions. Rather than pursuing scalable efficiency, perhaps we need a new set of institutions that can drive scalable learning, helping participants to learn faster by working together. While simple to state and intuitively appealing, this requires profound changes to our institutional landscape. Rather than relying on rigid push programs, we need to increasingly develop scalable pull platforms where people can draw out people and resources where they are needed and when they are needed, not just to perform pre-defined tasks, but to engage in creative problem-solving as unanticipated challenges arise. Interestingly, the authors of Race Against the Machine, cite a number of promising entrepreneurial initiatives that all turn out to be examples of scalable pull platforms, but they don’t step back to really develop what is different about these pull platforms or to explore their potential for accelerated learning and performance improvement
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P2P Foundation » Blog Archive » The rapid emergence of a commons-based alternative economy
To me the key moment of class struggle is the struggle over property rights. Those who want an economy that works should focus on property rights. The banking collapse has lead to debt and debt to austerity. The agenda is to use debt to privatise more of the economy so education, health care, water provision are owned by distant owners and swopped around to make profit. A commons based economy puts these and other resources into the hands of local people to manage not for short term greed and the whims of bond markets but for long term need. Politics is essentially about property rights and the often invisible battles must be made visible and won. There is an intellectual task to show that commons, perhaps termed communism, or democratic ownership of society by communities, works. The two towering figures here are Marx and Elinor Ostrom. In many ways they are polar opposites. The late great Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work showing the common pool property was an effective way of managing natural resources. She came from a liberal background and her work is very much about micro economics. Her work was based on detailed studies showing how an economy based on cooperation can be created. I would highly recommend both her Governing the Commons and her final book writing with Amy Potteete and Marco Jannssen ‘Working Together’.
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Those who want an economy that works should focus on property rights. The banking collapse has lead to debt and debt to austerity. The agenda is to use debt to privatise more of the economy so education, health care, water provision are owned by distant owners and swopped around to make profit. A commons based economy puts these and other resources into the hands of local people to manage not for short term greed and the whims of bond markets but for long term need. Politics is essentially about property rights and the often invisible battles must be made visible and won.
There is an intellectual task to show that commons, perhaps termed communism, or democratic ownership of society by communities, works. The two towering figures here are Marx and Elinor Ostrom. In many ways they are polar opposites. The late great Elinor Ostrom won a Nobel Prize for her work showing the common pool property was an effective way of managing natural resources. She came from a liberal background and her work is very much about micro economics. Her work was based on detailed studies showing how an economy based on cooperation can be created. I would highly recommend both her Governing the Commons and her final book writing with Amy Potteete and Marco Jannssen ‘Working Together’.
Marx was, well, Marx! One of his earliest pieces of writing dealt with the removal of commons rights to German peasants — it became illegal for them to pick up fallen wood from forests. In Chapter 27 of Capital One he showed how the English commons had been stolen and enclosed by an elite. His ethnographic notebooks where he focused on indigenous commons were astonishing. For Marx the rational creative society is a self-owned one based on democratic control i.e the recreation of the commons
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