New section on community-centered approaches, both physical and virtual, with special attention towards strategies for resilient communities.

Key Quotes

The historical pivot for the P2P Mode of Production

"We’re seeing something that is historically shocking—the reduction to zero of the cost of an especially valuable part of capital, which materializes directly knowledge (free software, free designs, etc.). And above all we see, almost day by day, how the optimum size of production, sector by sector, approaches or reaches the community dimension.

The possibility for the real community, the one based on interpersonal relationships and affections, to be an efficient productive unit is something radically new, and its potential to empower is far from having been developed. This means that we are lucky enough to live in a historical moment when it would seem that the whole history of technology, with all its social and political challenges, has coalesced to put us within reach of the possibility of developing ourselves in a new way and contributing autonomy to our community.

Today we have an opportunity that previous generations did not: to transform production into something done, and enjoyed, among peers. We can make work a time that is not walled off from life itself, which capitalism revealingly calls “time off.” That’s the ultimate meaning of producing in common today. That’s the immediate course of every emancipatory action. The starting point."

- David de Ugarte [1]

Benjamin Life on Functionally Sovereign Communities

Benjamin Life:

"If the self is an eddy rather than a fortress, then sovereignty cannot mean what we usually take it to mean. When most people hear it, they imagine the rugged individual: a self walled off from the world, defended against intrusion, owing nothing to anyone. Or they imagine the state, with its monopoly on violence, drawing borders and enforcing them with armies. Neither is the kind of sovereignty I am interested in, because neither reflects the reality of interbeing.

The sovereignty I mean is functional sovereignty, which is, by definition, community sovereignty: the capacity of a community to delineate and enforce its own boundaries, not through force, but through the alignment of incentives and agreements. This is a different relationship to power and authority altogether. It is not the power to dominate but the power to cohere. It is the kind of power wielded by the relational self: the ability of a pattern to hold its own shape while the current keeps moving through it.

Here we run into one of the most persistent misunderstandings about the commons and anarchy. People imagine commons or anarchist governance as something totally open-ended, a free-for-all in which anyone can take whatever they want, Mad Max violence or the proverbial tragedy of the commons waiting to happen. But this gets it exactly wrong. Anarchist or commons governance is all about boundaries. It’s about creating boundaries that are enforced through peer agreements rather than through the monopoly of violence. The whole project is to build positive-sum relationships through shared agreements, where the cost of not upholding those agreements is precisely what keeps the system coherent. Enforcement does not come from above. It emerges from the relationships themselves.

A Functionally Sovereign Community enforces its boundaries by governing access to shared pools of resources. Increasingly, that access can be programmatically insured, through blockchain smart contracts, for instance, where if the community revokes your privileges, you simply lose access to the resource. In the digital realm this is nearly frictionless. In the physical realm you still need other forms of enforcement, which is why community self-defense is a real part of this picture and not one we should be squeamish about. But an enormous amount can be accomplished simply by aligning incentives so that staying in good standing is more valuable than defecting. The commons is not the absence of boundaries. It is boundaries enforced by relationship instead of by the gun."

(https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/sovereignty-is-solidarity)

Issues encountered by decentralized governance

"Hierarchy: From domination hierarchy, where power is clear but oppressive, to shadow hierarchy, where power is invisible and potentially manipulative.

Communication: From aggressive communication and direct confrontation to passive-aggressiveness and conflict avoidance.

Boundaries: From explicit but rigid to flexible but ambiguous boundaries leading to collaboration chaos, role confusion and lack of individual accountability.

Decision Making: From autocratic decision-making that may be efficient but authoritarian, to participative decision making, where the desire for unanimous agreement can lead to decision paralysis.

Competition: From the shadows of competition, where predatory practices lead to burn out, extraction and negative externalities, to the shadows of collaboration, where competition becomes implicit and groupthink limits the diversity of perspectives.

Responsibilities: From clear but rigid roles that may stifle autonomy & creativity to the dilution of responsibility, where individual contributions become less visible resulting in a lack of clear direction and diffuse personal accountability."

- Timothee Bres [2]

The Directory