P2P and Human Evolution Ch 4

4. P2P in the Political Sphere

Chapter 4 of P2P and Human Evolution

4.1.A The Alterglobalisation Movement

The alterglobalisation movement is a well-known example of the P2P ethos at work in the political field. The movement sees itself as a network of networks that combines players from a wide variety of fields and opinions,who, despite the fact that they do no see eye to eye on every aspect, manage to unite around a common platform of action around certain key events. They are able to mobilize vast numbers of people from every continent, without having at their disposal any of the traditional newsmedia, such as televisions, radios or newspapers. Rather, they rely almost exclusively on the P2P technologies described above. Thus internet media are used for communication and learning on a continuous basis, prior to the mobilizations, but also during the mobilizations, where independent internet media platforms such as Indymedia, as well as the skillful use of mobile phones are used for real-time response management, undertaken by small groups that use buddy-list technologies, sometimes open source programs that have been explicitly designed for political activism such as TextMob. The network model allows for a more fluid organization that does not fix any group in permanent adversarial positions, but various temporary coalitions are created on a ad hoc basis depending on the issues. A key underlying philosophy of the movement is the paradigm of non-representationality. Instead of representation, the movement has been experimenting with a wide variety of new organizational formats such as the social forums themselves. These have to navigate the tension between being a space for dialogue and socialization, and retaining efficiency in action, i.e. uniting around common projects. And this double objective had to be attained while respecting three basic horizontal constraints:

1. the continued ability to extend the network and hence maintenance of diversity;
2. the refusal of representation;
3. decision-making by consensus only.

Contrary to previous movements in the past, who also started operating in a peer-like manner but then either 'institutionalised' themselves to survive or dissolved, the alterglobalisation movement seems to move in a opposite direction: towards a further consolidation of its radical P2P premises.

The appearance of the paradigm of non-representationality is an important social innovation that should not go unnoticed and is at the heart of the philosophical underpinning of the P2P worldview. In classic modern political ideology, participating members elect representatives, and delegate their authority to them. Decisions taken by councils of such representatives then can take binding decisions, and are allowed to speak ‘for the movement’. But such a feature seems to be absent from the alterglobalisation movement. No one, not even the celebrities, can speak for anyone else, though they can speak in their own name. Again, some movements and people have more influence than others, but none can be said to dominate or direct the movement as such. Another distinguishing feature, is that we can no longer speak of ‘permanent organizations’. While unions, political movements, and international environmental and human rights NGO’s do participate, and have an important role, the movement innovates by mobilizing many unaffiliated individuals, as well as all kinds of temporary ad hoc groups created within or without the internet. Thus we can add to the de-formalization and de-institutionalization principles explained above, another one that we could call the process of de-organization, as long as we are clear on its meaning, which refers to the transcendence of ‘fixed’ organizational formats which allows power to consolidate. What we get instead is 'shifting and dynamic structures'. However, it is important to stress that the use of flexible structures does not mean structurelessness. Peer governance uses different formats that share as a common characteristic that it aims for power to be distributed to a maximum extent.

The adherents of such movements are most often post-ideological in their approach; they stress their difference, refuse 'permanent identification' with any particular movement, but at the same time try to overcome their differences through the common action. We have evolved from a 'stamp it' militancy (from the stamps that party members used to put in a membership booklet as proof of payment) which indicated a lifelong ideological commitment, to a 'post-it' neo-militancy, where these new types of organizations do not even propose membership.

A commonly heard criticism is that ‘they have no alternative’, i.e. are not offering a precise and integrated alternative political and social program. This in fact may reflect their new approach to politics. The main demand is indeed not always for specifics, though that can occasionally be part of a consensus platform (such as ‘abandoning the debt for developing countries’), more importantly is the underlying philosophy, that ‘another world is possible’, but that what is most important is not asking for specific alternative, but rather for an open process of world governance that is not governed by the power politics and private interests of the elite, but determined by all the people in an autonomous fashion that recognized the wide diversity of desired futures. Thus, in that sense, the 'aim' of the alterglobalisation movement is nothing else than a demand for a new 'organisation' of the world, based on the P2P principles.

An important aspect of the alterglobalisation movement is the above-mentioned reliance on alternative independent internet media. Despite the overriding influence of corporate-owned mass media, groups such as the alterglobalisation movement have succeeded in created a vast number of alternative news outlets, in written, audio, and audiovisual formats. Those are used for a permanent process of learning and exchange, outside of the sphere of the ‘manufacturing of consent’ (as described by Noam Chomsky, 2002).

Of course, the new method of organisation that we described above, is not limited to movements on the left of the political spectrum, and can be found on the right as well. One often noted example is Al Qaeda, which mixes tribal, corporate but also strong network features; another example is the leaderless resistance model advocated by some on the extreme right.

4.1.B The ‘Coordination’ format

Since the mid-eighties, observers have noticed that social struggles have taken a new format as well, that of the coordination. In France for example, all the important struggles of the recent decade, by nurses, by the educational workers, and most recently by the part-time art workers (the 'intermittents'), have been led by such coordinations. Again, such coordinations are a radical innovation. They are also based on the principle of non-representationality: no one is elected to represent anybody else, anyone can participate, their decisions are based on consensus, while participants retain every freedom in their actions. Note how the coordination thus differs from the earlier hyper-democratic form of worker’s councils, which were still based on the idea of representation.

The latest struggle of the artistic ‘intermittents’ was particularly significant. These are creative knowledge workers who move from artistic project to artistic project, and who are therefore, unlike earlier industrial workers, not in permanent contact with each other. Yet their ‘network sociality’, which means they keep in touch with a variety of subgroups of friends and associates to keep informed of opportunities and for permanent collective learning and exchange, meant that, when confronted with a reform they found intolerable, they were able to mount one of the most effective mass social movements in a very short time, through the use of viral diffusion techniques. Traditional power plays by established left political parties and unions are not tolerated in the coordinations: when they happen, people simply leave and set up shop elsewhere. Thus authoritarian political organizations are seriously restrained by this format.

The coordination format aims to preserve 'difference', does not strive for 'unity' and 'centralisation' of the struggle, but achieves nevertheless 'common' goals and actions. However, in contrast with the earlier forms of 'mass demonstrations' and 'mass strikes', the coordination-led struggles are often organized in a 'just-in-time' fashion of autonomous micro-actions, often geared to the interrupting of the 'machine of the spectacle', i.e. the mass media, transport flows, and the culture industry. It is very similar to the approach of the alterglobalisation movement, which chooses heavily covered summits as focal points of action.

The alterglobalisation movement and the coordination format are not flukes, but representative of a much more general way of doing politics, which has also been called the 'network-advocacy model'.

4.1.C Peer Governance as a third mode of governance

In 3.4.A, we have used the typology of intersubjective relations by Alan Page Fiske. Two points are important here: First, no society or civilization can survive through reliance on any one mode, they have always co-existed. But we can also see that the different modes of civilization are dominated by one particular mode, and this particular mode will put its mark on all others, molding them on its own image. For example, the tribal mode of organization, the gift economy, was based on reciprocity, i.e. Equality Matching. The agrarian mode was mostly based on Authority Ranking, and capitalism is of course the society where Market Pricing becomes dominant. If there is to be a Peer to Peer Era, our hypothesis is that it will be dominated by Communal Shareholding, i.e. the institutional form of the Commons will be what is central. That the dominant form recasts the other forms to its image can be seen for example in how the common property of the Church was embedded in the hierarchical structure of the Church institution. And in capitalist society in how the hierarchical state apparatus is subsumed by the defense of private interests.

We can therefore expect that peer to peer will mold not only autonomous peer production, but also the market and the state. We therefore want to distinguish pure modes of peer governance, from the adaptation of existing governance models to the peer to peer mode.

Following Bob Jessop, we will define peer governance as follows:

"[Peer] Governance is defined as the reflexive self-organisation of independent actors involved in complex relations of reciprocal interdependence, with such self-organisation being based on continuing dialogue and resource-sharing to develop mutually beneficial joint projects and to manage the contradictions and dilemmas inevitably involved in such situations. Governance organised on this basis need not entail a complete symmetry in power relations or complete equality in the distribution of benefits: indeed, it is highly unlikely to do so almost regardless of the object of governance or the ‘stakeholders’ who actually participate in the governance process. All that is involved in this preliminary definition is the commitment on the part of those involved to reflexive self-organisation in the face of complex reciprocal interdependence."

The first aspect is to be found in the increasing amount of peer governance of autonomous groups. Peer production is not just an economic process, it is a political process, as these projects have to be managed, albeit in a distributed way. The principle of self-regulation of peer groups, which by definition create new use value for the commons, should of course not be confused with the self-regulation by the market, where individual agents are only looking out for their own interests, and not for the public good, which is of course not to say that it should be rejected in all cases. Bob Jessop insists on the difference of self-reflexivity amongst participants in peer groups, something absent in the ‘invisible hand’ of the market. Nevertheless, even for P2P groups we can envisage a role of arbitrage by the state, to make sure that P2P groups do not damage the public interests, however defined. There is still a legitimate difference to be made between peer governance as dealing with a subset of interests, and the state as guarantor of the ‘general interest’ of society as a whole .

One of the strengths of the liberal tradition today is that it speaks to the desire for autonomy of democratic subjects, who in many cases, feel this autonomy is more threatened by the bureaucracy of the state, than by the behavior of for-profit companies. Finding alternatives for bureaucratization is therefore an important part of the evolution towards P2P models.

Peer governance also has a second more expanded definition and application, as a mode of governance that can be applied in the real world, as a true alternative to the top-down and hierarchical state form of government, and can be applied whenever there are interdependent and multiple stakeholders involved. He has outlined a consensus among scholars that four conditions are required to make it applicable successfully:

“Studies suggest that there are four conditions for effective reflexive self-organisation: (a) simplifying models and practices, which reduce the complexity of the world but are still congruent with real world processes and relevant to actors' objectives; (b) developing the capacity for dynamic, interactive social learning among autonomous but interdependent agencies about causal processes and forms of interdependence, attributions of responsibility and capacity for actions, and possibilities of co-ordination in a complex, turbulent environment; (c) building methods for co-ordinating actions across social forces with different identities, interests, and meaning systems, over different spatio-temporal horizons, and over different domains of action; and (d) establishing a common world view for individual action and a system of ‘metagovernance’ to stabilise key players' orientations, expectations, and rules of conduct."

How then will the state be molded by peer to peer? Peer governance is characterized by the relational paradigm . Rather than seeing itself as sovereign master, the state must be seen as embedded in relationships, and as in need of respecting these multiple relationships. This is probably best translated by the concept of multistakeholdership. We can probably expect that the nation-state, along with the newly emerging sub- and supra-regional structures will continue to exist, but that their policies will be set through a dialogue with stakeholders. The key will be to disembed the state from its primary reliance of the private sector, and to make it beholden to civil society, i.e. the commons, so that it can act as a center of arbitrage. Despite the recent greater subsumption of the state to private interests (in the neoliberal era) – which of course has never been total since the balance of forces is not based on a complete defeat of the citizenship -- many supra-regional institutes, and in particular non-state governance institutions such as the standards bodies, but also policy-making at the U.N., already exhibit many features of multistakeholdership.

What we describe is of course an ideal state of affairs, requiring a new balance of power in society. Failing such a change, in the asymmetrical world of power relationship that we live in today, any multistakeholdership relation will be marked by such unbalances, and fail to reach the ideal of self-reflexivity in the context of equipotential relations. What can be achieved in peer groups today, cannot be achieved by extending the model to the whole of society. In the text that we are citing, Bob Jessop examines in detail the potential failure points of the interplay between peer governance and the state.

The market will also be greatly influenced (and of course already is), and will change more radically in a P2P-dominated political economy. It is a legitimate expectation, or hope, that the recent evolution from a market economy to a market society, in which every social relationship is in the process of being monetized, could partially or even largely be undone as civil society re-asserts itself. New types of businesses will emerge that embed more clearly P2P principles. It is to be expected that in many areas the authoritarian structures and practices will have to adapt, as the age of participation will want to extend the principle of self-rule to the productive sphere. As the concept of multistakeholdersship will be more strongly asserted, corporate governance will no longer be able to ignore its workers, consumers, and associated communities, including the voices of the natural environment. The increased demands for transparency, and their enablement by technology, will also impose changes in corporate behavior and structures. There are of course many aspects to this question, such as whether an alternative to the current capitalist system is possible or even desirable, but this will be discussed elsewhere.

But peer governance remains a clear alternative. If market allocation and corporate hierarchy are the governance model of the market, associated with private property; and if bureaucracy is associated with the state model of governance, then peer governance is clearly the alternative being forged by civil society. It will emerge in its pure form in P2P groups, but its associated values such as relationality (and transparency) will clearly force an adaptation of both market and the state. This is why we will say elsewhere in the text that one of the key goals of a P2P movement will be, or should be, 'For a Commons-based Society with a reformed market and state'.

The assertion of peer governance as an alternative model, either in the current situation and/or in any future commons-based society, i.e. a society that will still inevitably be marked by a pluralism of governance models consisting of peer governance/ market allocation / and what Jessop calls ‘imperative coordination’, with doses of reciprocity-based gift economies thrown in, creates a problem of ‘meta-governance’, which has also already been discussed by Bob Jessop.

He distinguishes the following levels, which we reproduce in full in the endnotes . What is important is to distinguish meta-heterarchy, i.e. the coordination of different levels of peer governance, from meta-governance as the coordination of the different forms of governance/government.

• Meta-exchange as “the reflexive redesign of individual markets", i.e. how can different types of markets and scales of market be co-ordinated?
• Meta-organisation, as “the reflexive redesign of organisations, the creation of intermediating organisations, the reordering of inter-organisational relations, and the management of organisational ecologies". We could generalize that also to the problematic of meta-hierarchy, how the different levels of local, state, supreregional and global state forms interrelate.
• Meta-heterarchy, “this involves the organisation of the conditions of self-organisation by redefining the framework for heterarchy or reflexive self-organisation."
• Meta-governance, “This involves re-articulating and ‘collibrating’ the different modes of governance… , [i.e.] the judicious mixing of market, hierarchy, and networks to achieve the best possible outcomes from the viewpoint of those engaged in metagovernance."

The respective influence of peer governance on market and state is summarized by Jessop in the following way, and echoes what we have said about it supra:

“On the one hand, market competition will be balanced by co-operation, the invisible hand will be combined with a visible handshake. On the other hand, the state is no longer the sovereign authority. It becomes just one participant among others in the pluralistic guidance system and contributes its own distinctive resources to the negotiation process. As the range of networks, partnerships, and other models of economic and political governance expand, official apparatuses remain at best first among equals.The state's involvement would become less hierarchical, less centralised, and less directive in character. The exchange of information and moral suasion become key sources of legitimation and the state's influence depends as much on its role as a prime source and mediator of collective intelligence as on its command over economic resources or legitimate coercion."

4.1.D Peer governance in peer production?

How does peer governance work in actual peer production processes, in free software/open source projects for example?

Aaron Krowne has done useful work to define the authority models at work in such projects. The models define access and the workflow, and whether there is any quality control. The free-form model, which Wikipedia employs, allows anyone to edit any entry at any time. But in the owner-centric model, entries can only be modified with the permission of a specific ‘owner’ who has to defend the integrity of his module. He concludes that “These two models have different assumptions and effects. The free-form model connotes more of a sense that all users are on the “same level," and that expertise will be universally recognized and deferred to. As a result, the creator of an entry is spared the trouble of reviewing every change before it is integrated, as well as the need to perform the integration. By contrast, the owner-centric authority model assumes the owner is the de facto expert in the topic at hand, above all others, and all others must defer to them. Because of this arrangement, the owner must review all modification proposals, and take the time to integrate the good ones. However, no non-expert will ever be allowed to “damage" an entry, and therefore resorting to administrative powers is vanishingly rare." The owner-centric model is better for quality, but takes more time, while the free-form model increases scope of coverage and is very fast. The choice between the two models can of course be a contentious issue. In the case of the Wikipedia, the adherents of the owner-centric model, active in the pre-Wikipedia "Nupedia" model, lost out, and presumable, the success of Wikipedia has proven them wrong, since the latter totally open process has been proven a success . Similar conflicts are reported in many other projects . Collaborative projects are no utopian scheme were everything is better, but subject to intense human conflict as well. A general problem still associated with FLOSS software is their lack of user-friendliness , they are often made from the biases of a development community, and may have less incentive than corporate entities, to make them customer-friendly, which is why a niche has been created for service companies such as Red Hat.

Another important aspect of FLOSS projects is how they handle 'equipotentiality'. While formal degrees have been abandoned, and open participation is in principle encouraged, most projects will over time produce a number of rules in their selection. The important aspect is that these rules are generated within the community itself, though mostly in the early phases. After a while, they tend to consolidate and they are a given for the new participants who come later . At this point, a process of socialization is crucial to eventual acceptance . The process is akin to the tradition of artisanship, which has been used in the three-degree system of original freemasonry as well: apprentice, companion (fellow craft), master. But it is implied rather than formalized.

Crucial to the success of many collaborative projects is their implementation of the reputation schemes. They differ from previous reputation-based systems, such as academic peer review, because the open process of participation (equipotentiality) precludes a systematic strengthening of reputation so that it could become a factor of conservatism (as it is in science and its dependence on dominant paradigms) and power. In the better P2P systems, reputation is time-sensitive on the degree of recent participation and the possibility of forking and of downgrading reputation grades, introduce an aspect of community control, flexibility and dynamism. See in particular the endnote on this topic, outlining the example of the NoLogo site . Reputation-based schemes are crucial because cooperation is based on trust, and they offer a collaborative scheme to indicate those who are the best contributors to the common value, while motivating everybody to use the more cooperative, and less the more baser sides of human nature."

4.1.E New conceptions of social and political struggle

The change in political practices has been reflected by new thinking in the field of political theory. Among the thinkers that come to mind are Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, with their books Empire and Multitude, Miguel Benasayag with his book “Le Contre-Pouvoir”, and John Holloway with ‘Revolution Without Power’.

Negri/Hardt have (re-)introduced the concept of Multitude. Unlike the earlier concept of People or proletariat, multitudes do not have a synthetic unity. They exist in their differences. What is rejected is abstract human identity in favour of the organization for common goals of concrete humanity in its differences.

Their concept is derived from the Enlightenment debate between Hobbes and Spinoza. Hobbes, pioneering thinker moving away from conceptions of divine order towards those of natural order, said that society consists of multitudes of equals, marked by different and contradictory desires and interests making them unable to constitute a society by themselves. In the state of nature, it’s war of all against all. Thus, to constitute society, they have to give away their power, to a sovereign to whom they give the power to rule and to create social order. This eventually becomes ‘uniting as a people’, in order to create a “nation-state”, with representative democracy. But the unity comes at a price, not only does inclusion in the nation-state imply exclusion of others, but within, those who partake had to give away their power. Thus, political power is transcendent vs. the immanent power of the multitude, it rules ‘over them’. It is this characteristic of modernity which is falling away today: taking his cue from the more positive description of the multitude and their desires by Spinoza, which represents a counter-trend and thus a ‘alternative modernity’, Spinoza and Negri maintain that the multitudes can rule themselves, in a fully immanent way, by themselves, refusing any transcendence of their power. Theirs is a politics without representation, centered around the notion of non-representationality.

Unlike the concept of People, which unifies but also rejects the non-People, the multitude is totally open and global from the outset. In terms of political strategy, they develop concepts like ‘Exodus’, which means no longer facing the enemy directly (in a network configuration of social movements, there is no direct enemy and in Empire ‘there is no there there’, i.e. the enemy cannot be precisely located as it is a network itself), but to route around obstacles and more importantly to refuse to give consent and legitimation by constructing alternatives in real-time, through networks. It is only when the multitudes are under direct attack, through reforms that are experienced as ‘intolerable’, that the network is galvanized into struggle, and that the very format of organizing prefigures already the society to come.

Essential components of the multitude are the knowledge workers, affective ‘service’ workers, and other forms of immaterial labour. Miguel Benasayag similarly argues that ‘to resist is to create’, and that political struggle is essentially about the construction of alternatives, here and now. Current practice has to reflect the desired future, and has to emerge, not from the ‘sad passions’ of hate and anger, but from the joys of producing a commons. The Hacker Manifesto is another important expression of this new ethos.

John Holloway frames a very similar sensibility it into a new conception of temporality. The traditional left used 'capitalist time-frames' he charges. First waiting, for the next reform, for the revolution, and 'then' all will be different. But instead of taking power, which makes 'us' become like 'them', and creates new asymmetries, we should be 'building power', combining two temporarilities: first, the temporality of refusal, the 'exodus' if you like, but simultaneously, build the world you desire 'now'. Capitalism exists not because it was once created, but because we are making it every day. He stresses that what is needed is not 'counter-power', but 'anti-power'.

Though none of these authors explicitly use the peer to peer concept, their own concepts reflect its philosophy and practice, and they are generally in tune with the themes of the peer to peer advocates (such as favouring an information commons, support for free software and open source methodologies, etc…).

A recent explicitely participatory political philosophy is being developed by a group of authors such as Mitch Ratcliffe, and is called Extreme Democracy. It is neither representative nor direct democracy but a proposal to have totally open participation in networks responsible for policymaking. The concept of 'Extreme' in this context, is related to the concept of 'extreme programming', a rapid, small-team like P2P process of producing software.

4.1.F New lines of contention: Information Commons vs. New Enclosures

Next to new forms of political organization, new conceptions regarding the tactics and strategies of struggle, the emergence of peer to peer also generates new conflicts, which are different from those of the industrial age. Just as the industrial mode of relations created the labour movement and the idea that the workers could own the means of production, the new social formation creates a movement that is favouring the common construction of an Information Commons, associated not with state property or “nationalization", but with universal common access property regimes. Positively, what binds many different social and political movements today is their focus on ‘open access’: to software code (open sources), to scientific information (open access to archives, open science), to the traditional knowledge of humanity (the movement against biopiracy), against the privatization of human life (privatization of the genome). One gets the distinct impression that our current political economy, originally designed to manage scarcity in order to overcome it, is changing into a system that seeks to permanently create artificial scarcity, in order to create knowledge monopolies and dependencies.

The key conflict is therefore the one about the freedom to construct the Information Commons, vs. the private appropriation of knowledge by for-profit firms. which encompasses what was traditionally called the ‘public domain’, as against the private appropriation of knowledge by for-profit firms. All these different Commons-related struggle share common characteristics, and Philippe Aigrain has examined, in his book 'Cause Commune' (Aigrain, 2005), how these different forces can unite in common struggle.

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. This same vision of a class struggle between the producers of information and those that want to resell prepackaged bits of it for sale back to consumers, is shared by Joel de Rosnay who speaks of ‘pronetarians vs. infocapitalists’.

The last 30 years have indeed seen an enormous extension of Intellectual Property Rights, resulting in a severe weakening of the Scientific Commons, a variety of detrimental social effects, while new developments threaten the development of a free culture. Cognitive capitalism is centered around the accumulation of knowledge assets, and has altered the classic cycle of consumption and production. In the industrial economy this cycle was described as conception-production-distribution-consumption. In this economy, over time, competition would arise, making the products cheaper, forcing corporations to become either more productive or invent new products. In the new economy, the cycle is better described as conception – reproduction of the informational basis – production – distribution – consumption. The informational basis, whether it is software, cultural content, or material products such as seeds in agribusiness, molecules and gene sequences in the pharmaceutical industry, are protected through information property rights. The aspect of production and distribution is no longer central, and can be easily outsourced. This mechanism has now extended to vast sectors of the 'material economy' with companies such as Nike and Alcatel as companies that are essentially divested of material prodution, but are centered around their knowledge and other immaterial assets (essentially 'branding')

Through this mechanism of IP protection, super-profits can be maintained, common pools of knowledge are destroyed and appropriated, and innovation is slowed down. In agribusiness, seeds lose their productive qualities after a generation, rendering farmers completely dependent, while inflated prices created debt cycles. With GMO's, an era of total dependence of agriculture towards agribusiness is set in motion. In pharmaceuticals, the inflated prices of medication are one of the key factors of the crisis of the welfare state, while millions of patients are excluded from appropriate care, especially in the South. A 2001 study of Doctors Without Borders showed that only one percent of the molecules being studied concerned the most prevalent diseases in the South (malaria, TBC, etc..) The most well-known case is of course the controversy around AIDS treatments, where millions of patients are unnecessarily dying because they are not allowed access to generic drugs. The software patenting which originated in the U.S. and has been copied in Europe makes it now possible to protect ideas and any logical sequence (which includes business processes) and is widely seen as an impediment for further innovation, since it excludes small companies who lack the means of taking the licenses, whileleading to an explosion of litigation. American reforms which have allowed universities to privatize and patent their scientific knowledge and have severely endangered cooperation amongst scientists. Finally, exploding prices of scientific publications have rendered access to scientific knowledge more difficult. At the core of the conflict over IP are also deeply differing ideological conceptions of cultural creation. IP proponents see creation in terms of market, with creators investing time and capital into cultural products destined for the marketplace, and with the motive and incentive being the profit protected by IP rights; proponents of the Information Commons have a more social vision of creation, seeing how every creator is dependent on the community of creators that preceded and exists alongside of them. IP by restricting access to the common pool, impedes creation and innovation.

It is this intensive effort at the private appropriation of knowledge that has created different movements of resistance. The free software movement, the movements of farmers against biopiracy in seeds and animal and vegetal types, where Western corporations are privatizing the fruits of thousands of year of communal cooperation; the movement of patients and developmental organizations for access to reasonably priced medicines and medical knowledge; the movement for free access to scientific publications, are all related reactions to these New Enclosures. Slowly, ever larger segments of the public started to realize that the new forms of Intellectual Property were no longer based on a compromise between the interests of consumers, creators and publishing intermediaries, but had been extended to favour information property monopolies, who were also threatening to own and control life itself.

At the same time as the existing Information and Scientific Commons were threatened, the internet has created an enormous bottom-up movement, through peer production and knowledge collectives, through microcontent and generalized knowledge exchange of millions of people, thereby creating a new Information Commons. It is the merger of the concerns of the already existing resistance groups, and the realization of the meaning of the process of peer to peer content creation, which is at the core of a new political movement associated with the peer to peer social formation, inspired by the vision of a re-invigorated Commons. By extension, this realization has led to connections with those forces protecting the already existing physical commons (water, air, transportation systems), and the surviving common property forms in the South, which are still strong amongst some native peoples. Both type of movements are similarly concerned with resistance against the extension of the movement towards private appropriation and the market.

A crucial development to bring all of this to generalized public consciousness, especially amongst the new generations, was the development of filesharing. A process that always existed amongst groups of friends, that of sharing cultural enjoyment and creation, is now extended in scope by technology. This endangers the intellectual property system which favours large monopolies, much less the authors and content creators which are at a disadvantage in the current IP system. Moreover, the P2P system of music distribution is inherently more productive and versatile, and more pleasing to the listener of music than the older system of physically distributing CD’s. It is around this development that the regressive nature of cognitive capitalism has been most glaring since it has led to an all-out war against its own consumers.

Indeed, instead of building a common pool for the world’s music, and finding an adequate funding mechanism for the artists, the industry is intent to destroy this more productive system, and wants to criminalize sharing by punishing the users, and even by attempting to render the technology illegal. This would have the effect of not stopping so-called illicit usage, but of stopping the general movement of sharing of cultural content, even the autonomously created one. Another strategy is to incorporate control mechanisms either in software (where it can be hacked and circumvented, but that is made illegal as well), or in the hardware (digital rights management schemes). While the users and producers of free culture are battling the attempts at the enclosure of culture by large 'vectoralist' corporations, many are working at offering solutions that both protect the use of culture, and make it possible for creators to make a living.

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 tiny minority of superstar 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 sometimes seen as an impediment, impeding the free use what should be a common resource. But what the Commons movement aims at is not abolishing IP, but restoring it to its original intention, i.e. a social compromise that combines the interests of user communities, creators of content needing to make a living, and the reasonable retribution of intermediaries which serve in production and distribution. It seeks to undo the landgrab that has taken place in the last thirty years, and to remedy the grave social problems that have been created (such as the lack of access to life-saving medications) by this one-sided appropriation. It seeks to avoid that new steps are taken in that process of appropriation, refusing that life can be controlled by private interests, and that cultural life would be the subject of restrictive licensing and built into the technology itself. Lastly, it aims to create the conditions that foster the healty development of a strong Commons.

In the meantime, while this political struggle continues, 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 private appropriaton 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. And it also expressed in the continous technological development of an infrastructure for cooperation and sharing.

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.

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 lose 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-à-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 algorithms 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 Aristotle on this issue: equality is actually present in all types of society, but it is always ‘according to 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.

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 Wallerstein 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 favour of a selective meritocracy and stress the formalized and institutionalized selection criteria; democrats are in favour 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 soloist 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. The fact that P2P recognizes differences in potential, and thus natural hierarchy, does not preclude it from treating participating partners as equal persons. 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 treat their 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 will 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, labour (the corvée system). Rome was rich because it was strong. In modernity, military force eventually loses its primary place and monetary power takes over. Or in other words, the U.S. is strong because it is rich. Its productive capacity is more important than its military might, and the latter derives from the former. 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. 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 reversible to a much larger extent than in the previous systems.

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 therefore, said Foucault: ‘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 into 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). Philippe Zafirian, in his Temps et Modernite, further re-interprets the work of Deleuze by applying it to the workplace and calls the new power, the power of modulation, 'control by modulation'. Instead of tightly describing and dividing jobs, and controlling their debit, as was the case in the 'modern' factory system and in particular in the Fordist/Taylorist period, the focus is now on 'objectives' and 'deadlines'. Both the manager and the work are constantly evaluating and self-evaluating their ability to conform to the high-pressure objectives and deadlines, but are 'free' in how to attain it. Zafirian uses the metaphor of the 'elastic': you can pull it in different directions, within it you are free to go about, but there are indeed limits that cannot be crossed.

In any case, 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 can be considered to be 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 algorithms 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 (as a new form of media literacy and democratic practice), so that it can become an object of conscious development, favouring 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. Important questions then become: 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

From all of the above, we can conclude that hierarchy does not disappear in peer to peer processes, but that it changes its nature. Hierarchy, or authority ranking as it is called by Alan Fiske, takes on new forms such as peer governance, servant leadership, multistakeholdership.

Here is how Joseph Rost defines leadership in the new collaborative era:

“The first is that the activities be influential, that is, non-coercive. The second is that the activities be done by people in a relationship. The third is that the activities involve a real significant change. And the fourth element is that the activities reflect the purposes of the people in the relationship, not just a single person. All of these standards insure collaboration rather than the notion that leadership is a great leader doing great things."

Similarly, another author on leadership, Jeffrey S. Nielsen distinguishes ‘rank thinking’, from ‘peer thinking’:

"I define rank thinking as the belief that only a few in any organization should be given special privilege to monopolize information, control decision-making, and command obedience from the vast majority either through coercive or manipulative power. Peer thinking, on the other hand, is the belief that everyone in the organization should have equal standing to share in information, participate in the decision-making process, and choose to follow through persuasive means. Peer thinking assumes that we each have equal privilege to speak and an obligation to listen. Peer-based organizations create a space—an arena—where we come to recognize and respect one another as equal participants in organizational life."

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