Michel Bauwens on the Launch of the Cosmo-Local Initiative

Video via https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9RID8x9F7hY

Text

Edited transcript via Claude:

Title: We are coming back. Remarks announcing the Cosmo-Local Initiative.

Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation:

(Edited from the talk given at the Commons Hub — video here. Lightly reworked from the spoken transcript; the words are as delivered, the sentences tidied.)

'We live in a system that believes that scarce things are abundant, and that the abundant things are scarce. We are literally walking on our heads.

I want to give a little background on why this matters so much to us. As you know, something not so good happened to me in 2018 — the cancellation business. I am not the centre of the world, I know that. But I do think it was symbolic of what happened to the whole movement. We had a really big wave in the 2010s around the commons; it was becoming political, it was becoming theoretical, people were talking about it. And at about the same time as my own troubles, something happened to the movement too. It didn't disappear, but it fragmented into many sub-movements — platform cooperativism and all of that — and they stopped talking to each other. The binding element went underground.

So I retreated, in a way. I started studying macro-history in a very systematic way, and I spent some time in Web3 to understand how it worked and what it brought to the table. Then — I can't explain this — after some years of silence, all these invitations suddenly started coming in this year. Unfortunately I had to cancel five of them because of the war in Iran. That was annoying: the first five invitations in quite a while, and then I couldn't go. But I deeply feel, and maybe I'm just dreaming this, that I'm back.

And I'm not back alone. These are just words, but when Jeff tells me "I have your back," that really counts for me. Other people have been saying it too.

Toynbee wrote a study of history in twelve volumes — I don't recommend reading all twelve, but there is a very good two-volume synthesis — and he says there is a pattern of people who leave the world and come back to change it. He gives several examples. St Benedict, whose monasteries changed the whole history of Europe: he put Europe back on its feet after the fall of the Roman Empire, restoring the food supply chain and all the rest. So this is not the first time that people leave the system, do something — the dark night of the soul, maybe, I don't know exactly what it is — and then come back. I think that pattern fits.

Regenerative acceleration

There is an acceleration going on, and I hope you feel it. On the one hand, things are getting really, really bad. We have more wars. We have the disintegration of the international legal system. We have supply chain crises. We had Covid. I think many people will agree that the world system crafted in 1945 and reformed in 1989–91 is done. It's finished. It doesn't work any more, and people feel this in their lives. It dampens their expectations. Our young people don't want to have children any more — the curve was already going down, and now it is a steep fall in the willingness to have children. That looks like a pretty suicidal civilisation to me.

But the paradox is that this makes more and more people say: we need to do something about it. It creates an exodus out of the old system. And this is what we have been doing with the P2P Foundation for twenty years — observing what these people are doing, and what kind of seed forms they are creating for the future.

Benjamin Life, who is in Boulder, has been writing really good things over the last year, and he calls this regenerative accelerationism. You may have heard of accelerationism, which is a very nihilistic theory: things are going badly, so let's make them even worse so that they can change. No, I'm sorry, that's not good. What we are saying is that while things get worse and worse, there are also many people doing absolutely great things — and that is what we need to accelerate. I really like the formulation.

Two inversions

There are two elements in our general reasoning. The first is the one I began with: we live in a system that believes scarce things are abundant and abundant things are scarce. The things in the ground that are clearly limited, we believe we can use forever, more and more and more. And the bits that flow at marginal cost, which are genuinely abundant — oh no, those we have to keep and control and put strong IP on, and certainly not share. This is the actual design of our system today, and we need to flip it.

The second is that we use three times more matter and energy on transporting things than on making them. Think about it: if we can change that, it is about 75% of the energy we use. That is the rationale for relocalisation.

Obviously, if we only localise, we lose an enormous amount of complexity, and I don't think most people are ready to live without penicillin, to die at 35, to lose half of their children. I don't think so. But the good news is that we can combine localisation — which is a real desire, to live a good life with people you know and trust; it's in our genes, we want it very deeply — with the best of our technologies, adapted to this new need. Combining those elements is how you create a new civilisation.

And sharing is really good. How do you create abundance? One way is to use everything and not think about it. But another way is by sharing. Take car sharing — I'm not talking about Uber, I mean real associative or cooperative car sharing, a neighbourhood that decides to get rid of some private cars and builds a system to share them. One shared car can replace something like thirteen private ones. Imagine doing that systematically.

So: we relocalise production, we use global sharing of knowledge so that every innovation anywhere in the network becomes available at every node of the network, and then we start sharing resources. Public transport is great, but it doesn't bring you point to point. If we only do public transport, we lose a lot. If we do public transport with car sharing, we have the best of both worlds — the collective, and still the ability to go point to point when we need it.

I think I mentioned a Factor 20 Reduction somewhere. This has been tried in several cities, and it really is possible to keep a complex service running at the same level with a fraction of the energy and substantially less material, without losing anything. But of course it requires a lot of thinking and experimentation.

Mode A and Mode D

Mode A is reciprocity, commoning, sharing, gifting. Then we go to civilisation: markets and states, classes, institutions. And what we see is that humanity always wants to get back to Mode A. We love it. We want conviviality, and civilisation makes that very difficult.

Mode D — this is Kojin Karatani's language — is our permanent attempt to recreate Mode A at a higher level of complexity. That is what we want, at least what I want and what the people who work with me want. We don't want a mere regression to a localised civilisation. We want a localised civilisation that retains the high level of capacity we have accrued over time through technological and organisational innovation. That is the key thing.

What cosmo-localism is

Cosmo-localism is an approach that aims to combine, first, resilient and regenerative forms of localised production; second, access to a globally shared knowledge commons with translocal protocols of cooperation; and third, access to forms of capital that are compatible with commons-oriented local production.

That third one I sometimes call reverse co-optation. You have a lot of genuine, feeling people on the left who always ask: is it going to be recuperated? Yes. And that's not the end of the story. Engineer it the other way round, so that you can take access to capital and transform it into commons. That is what we want. We have to be clever about this — these are questions of design.

Look at the Traditional Dream Factory. Great project: use global crowdfunding, buy land, take the land out of the market and preserve it in a commons forever, and then mix it with all the modern technologies that lift it up to being a global player. That is what cosmo-localism is about.

Breaking the third information barrier

I have a very long article that I actually recommend, called "Breaking the Third Information Barrier." You'll find it on my wiki, and I can also send you the PDF — it appeared in a weird book called Rosy Cross, which you probably won't buy, so just ask me for the PDF instead.

The first information barrier was hunting and gathering. Then you have a breakthrough, which is civilisational coordination. My contention, and that of my collaborators, is that this is now ending. Markets and states are not able to solve our fundamental thermodynamic crisis — climate change, resource depletion. We can see that they are not able to solve it, so we need something else. We need a breakthrough through civilisation to something else.

What do we have to work with? Three things.

The first is stigmergy: our capacity for mutual signalling. How do you know what to do on Wikipedia, or in Arduino? Because it is visible to you. The whole thing is holoptical. Holoptical means you can see everything from any perspective — you see the whole system. Panoptic means you only see when you are above. In these new systems, everybody can see what is going on, and so everybody can adhere to a common project.

The second is shared digital commons. We can now pool knowledge easily, and it cannot be monopolised by the state or by corporations. We can create our own shared knowledge commons, and everyone can learn from the shared pool all the time and advance very rapidly.

The third I take from Michael Haupt, who says there is always a node of coordination. Before capitalism the node might have been the monarchy, where all the elements of society came together and a king decided what to grow and where to fight. Then it became market institutions — Wall Street and the rest — deciding where capital goes. And he claims, and I agree, that the new node of coordination is the bioregional hub. This is where you can <not> go no further down. It is the place where you can no longer have externalities, because you cannot destroy your own bioregion — or you're dead. This is where stigmergy and the digital commons hit the ground, and where people have to decide what can be done in their region.

Which is why I think the shift in wealth creation is going to be towards bio-capacity. Now it works like this: we extract, we take it out of the account, we call that value, we make profit, we tax the profit, we redistribute. Which means that regeneration is always the minor brother. It always follows extraction and is never good enough, because there is more extraction than regeneration. Cosmo-localism is about breaking through to what some people have called a type-one civilisation, in which extraction and regeneration are in balance.

That is our task, and that is what I invite you to do: to organise society and production at a planetary level using these new categories. What is heavy should be local; what is light should be global and shared. That is the short definition we use.

Why the P2P Foundation is well placed to do this

Since 2005 we have been documenting this systematically, every single day. My wife might not be happy about it, but I work every day — unless I'm having a stroke, and I've had three. A week after my stroke I was at it again. I can't help it. You need monomaniacs to change the world.

What I do as a librarian / cybrarian is use my brain to absorb a lot of things, synthesise, integrate, understand, and then make it available to other people.

And I have to say I think AI is going to be important here. The way I see it, we had a scarcity of knowledge until twenty years ago; it was really hard to find things. Then we created a technology that produces an overflow of knowledge we can no longer cope with. We needed to invent a universal synthetic enzyme, and that is what we did. Like everything, it has good aspects and bad aspects, but this is vital. So a lot of what we are going to do is take our record of twenty years of activity, of seed forms, of all these people doing all these things, and turn it into a state-of-the-art record.

And believe me, my friends, this is a big issue. I was at Funding the Commons in Bangkok, and people said: why don't we make software to connect organic producers and organic consumers? Great idea. Except that I went to Tuscany twelve years ago and they had twenty-five of them — just for the solidarity economy, just for Tuscany. This is the drama we want to address. Everybody is reinventing the wheel. And if we keep reinventing the wheel while capitalism is learning, and learning faster and faster, we are never going to get anywhere.

Until now the wiki has been almost handicraft: an encyclopedia, with section pages I make myself. But who is going to read five hundred items about the commons in transportation, or the commons in housing? That's the problem, and that is where I think AI will really help. So: before you do anything, check the wiki. Because you are not as much of a genius as you think you are. Other people have done it before you — sometimes a lot of people have done it before you — and we don't learn from each other.

What we have been building is integrative capacity: looking at all the stuff that is happening, seeing the underlying patterns, and then binding the patterns together. I lack self-confidence in many ways, on many days, but this is the thing I'm actually pretty sure of. It is a unique contribution, and it's why we are well placed to do this.

If you know the history of the P2P Foundation, we had a really good run until 2018. Then we had issues around identity politics, and some splits, and things were a bit on hold. Now we are coming back, and this is going to be our priority.

Where does value come from?

This is my big critique of Web3, and of technology people in general: they talk to each other and they look at each other, but they don't go down to the nitty-gritty, to production. And here I'll be frank with you — in that sense I'm still the kind of Marxist I was forty years ago, before I gave it up. Where is value coming from, and who keeps the surplus? I'm sorry to say it, but that is still a very valid insight. If we don't keep the surplus, if we don't redistribute the surplus and invest the surplus ourselves, we are nothing.

We have to accrue knowledge, and we have to accrue means. So, sorry to the hippies: no, we can't redistribute everything all the time. We need to put things aside to invest in the future, and we have to be strategic about it. I think this is very, very important.

An archipelago of regenerative villages

This is the strategy. You are local, and you actually regenerate your locality — you improve the soil, the water, the air, whatever it is that you're doing. That is the basis. You work with your mayor if you can, with your governor, with the local authorities if you can.

But what if you can't? You don't wait. We can't wait. At that moment, what you do is connect with other people doing the same thing elsewhere, and your money and your capital come to your locality from everywhere. That is the important change: we don't wait for the market, we don't wait for the state, we just do it.

Maybe it isn't easy in the beginning. Think about the beginning of the monasteries — a few crazy people going out into the desert, and two or three hundred years later they are everywhere in Europe, the richest institution on the continent. That is what we want to do. It's very ambitious. We don't want to be marginal. We don't want to be an alternative. We want to build a new civilisation on these new principles.

Local people know what they are doing; we don't. If you are doing something regenerative, you are rooted, and we are not. But we may know better than you what other people are doing. That is the integrative role — do you know that these people have been doing the same thing, and this is what works and this is what doesn't? That is what we want to bring to the table: collective knowledge, to accelerate the learning.

Making nature visible again

I want to mention Austin Wade Smith, whose work I really love — his book on ecological institutions. One of the characteristics of the new era is making nature visible to the human. Since the Neolithic we have made nature invisible to the human. We don't care; it's externalities. And by doing this we have destroyed the planet — we are in the process of destroying our own planet. So we have to bring these signals into our view, and we have to make decisions knowing our impact on the web of life, on the state of resources, on the climate.

He has a very good idea: bioregional guilds. Some people are locally rooted and want to stay local — you can go on holiday, don't worry, but this is your thing, you're local. And we also want people who travel around, absorbing lessons from different places and sharing them. Don't think this is a luxury. There are studies about this: most innovations come from people who do not belong to the region. Local people are set in their ways — we're fine the way we do it. The real innovations, even new crops and the like, come from people who come from outside. Think about priests and bishops: they're local. Then think about prophets and apostles: they move around. You need both.

What these guilds connect is the geosphere — hard matter — and the biosphere, and then, inside the skull, the noosphere. When I talk with Jeff on a call, we're in the noosphere. The challenge of our civilisation is binding together the functional differences in the geosphere, because we don't grow the same things in different places, and the functional differences in the noosphere, where we have different skills that we can impart to each other. It is the combination of the two that is the condition for success.

We already have the tools

Seriously — and this is for the tech people — we have it already. We have everything we need. We need some adaptations for this and for that, but this is where I think Web3 is useful. We now have universally programmable currencies that we can design for ourselves. We can declare value sovereignty: this is how my community thinks about what value is. We can communicate and interact with other communities and decide how value is distributed. We have accounting — REA. We have three-dimensional ecosystemic accounting. We have a universal ledger. There is nothing more that we need today.

It is a matter of designing these things integratively, together, for the benefit of a local community, and of fitting them at the different scales: bioregional, national — which I think will continue to exist for a while — and planetary. Cosmo-local is how we integrate all the levels together in a way that makes sense and that makes them reinforce each other. Planetary is not the same as cosmo-local.

Consider Europe. Right now the Chinese are having a very good run: they have planning, they have markets, they have cybernetics, and they engineer it in such a way that it is really working. Europe is in a terrible mess. We are disintegrating; we are not going forward. So the question I'm asking is: can we compete with the Chinese on that terrain, with that kind of technology? No. It's too late, and we don't have those capacities. So we are going to need to transition to a new form of industrialisation, and it is going to be cosmo-local industrialisation — distributed manufacturing.

I'll give you an example of something that didn't actually work out, but which is a very good example of what can happen: Arrival. They looked at car manufacturing and reduced it from around 750 processes to about fifty. Then you have a place like this one, with some robots, and they can make any van, any truck, any bus that you need, on demand.

Think about the contrast. In mass manufacturing we make everything in big places, then we have overproduction, and then we need to mass-market it — push you and push you to consume and consume. We are moving to a different mode, which is on-demand production. We make it when you need it. We make it with biodegradable material, so that if you take off the chassis of the car, it's biodegradable and you replace it. Every part is modular and interoperable, so you don't have to throw away your car; you just change a piece of it.

Imagine this model for everything — and particularly, since we are out here in the countryside, for rural reindustrialisation. This is going to be very important. And think about what it solves. Why do we have migration? Because people can't live well in their locality. If they have local production capacity, they can stay. Most people want to stay where they are — they're happy in their culture, their family, their way of life. They don't want to move, but they have to. So this is also going to be interesting for a new kind of geopolitics, one that is not based on core-periphery extraction. And if it is open source, every region in the world can potentially use that technology and adapt it in its own way. Think about all the waste material in a region like this one: these are all industries we can create in the new model.

Research, road-mapping, convening

So we are doing research, and we are going to do more research. We want to strategise — what we call road-mapping. And convening is very important.

Before 2018 I worked with David Bollier and Silke Helfrich in the Commons Strategies Group, and we did this about a dozen times. What did we do every six months? We invited people from two or three different groups. Open hardware and free software — you would think it's the same thing. No, these people don't talk to each other. The commons and the cooperative movement — you would think they were related. They don't talk to each other. The commons and finance, the same. So we would bring them together, and here is the secret sauce, very simple: oh yes, that makes sense.

This is the future, by the way, because with the new media I can no longer assume that we come from the same world. Even if we are born in the same village, we don't have mass media any more. We don't watch the same TV programmes, we don't listen to the same radio. We are becoming highly differentiated through social media. And the solution is of course not to make everybody think the same again — that is not going to work. It is worldview negotiation and discovery. This is what I call multi-scale universalism.

What happened when we convened like this is that eighteen months later there were always collective projects combining those groups. I can tell you, it really works. And this is something I really hate in our current culture: you have to do something, you have to be productive, where are the KPIs? No. Talk to each other, and create the conditions for all these projects to emerge out of that.

You know why we have rock and roll? Because in the sixties there were a lot of young people with no jobs and unemployment money. They didn't have to work right away, so they became creative, and they created rock and roll. That is called a scenius: a scenius creates the conditions for genius. If you have a genius, it's because there was a scenius. So we have to design sceniuses, and we will create a lot of geniuses. Some people don't need the scenius — they're just genius from the start. And after that come pilot projects and incubation.

Technologies at the service of the people who produce

On one side there are the people on the ground, and on the other the people we want to mobilise to help them. This is really different from Web3.

I'm old, so my references are old: barefoot doctors. It's a Maoist reference, I'm sorry. There were a lot of poor people and not enough doctors, so they trained millions of people with basic medical information and sent them out into the villages. What I mean by this is that we need technologies at the service of the people who do the production and the creation of value, instead of staying in a separate sphere, only talking to each other and then saying: we have this solution, please use it.

We need to turn that around. We need to talk to eco-villages and permaculturists, and ask them what they need in order to scale, to do better, to get more social and political power. That is the kind of reversal we have in mind.

Beyond our own layer, we also work on Reticulum, a new meshwork that can continue to exist when the internet stops existing, and we are building on top of that. We don't have expertise in, say, car supply chains. We work at a higher level of abstraction that can be used across these different specialised technologies.

On the word itself

From the floor: I also move in quite conservative circles, where everyone now knows the term "glocal" — everyone is aware that their car has parts from all over the world in it. If I dropped "cosmo-local" there, I imagine the reaction would be that it's an esoteric thing, and it would shut down. How can we bridge between glocal and cosmo-local? Can I keep using glocal as a step towards it?

Generally speaking, I think we have to use our language and explain to people what we mean. You always get the objection that people won't understand it, or that it will be recuperated. Yes, it will always be recuperated — already now people are using "cosmo-local" in very weak definitions.

What we mean is this global layer of shared knowledge. That's what the cosmo means. "Glocal" is much more just saying that we make things everywhere. What upsets me is Web3 people typing on their computer and saying "I'm cosmo-local." No. It's not enough. It's about production, about creating value and learning together on a global scale.

So if you want to call it glocal and explain it that way, I'm fine with it — I'm not controlling your language use. But at some point we also have to teach people. Think about the Qur'an, or the Bible, or Marx's Capital. They changed the world, and they did not speak to eight-year-olds. They are extremely complex; you barely understand what they are saying, and yet they conquered the world. When I was young, newspapers in the West said you had to write for a sixteen-year-old. Now you have to write for an eight-year-old. We are making people stupid. They have to make an effort too. That's my view.

Knights of the commons

What we don't talk about publicly, but talk about a lot privately, is the medieval material. Seriously: if you want to look at a distributed society, the European Middle Ages were one. Decentralised, everything based on contracts and mutual agreements, with very distributed methods of governance.

And here's the nice part. How do you keep a society like that working, with these brutal warriors? You need to transmute that negative energy into something positive. They did it in Japan with the samurai, through Zen. We did it in Europe with the knights, who had to defend the orphans and the widows. It is in that spirit that we talk about knights of the commons: we need to create a group of people who are really committed to changing the world for a higher purpose, and not just out of selfishness.

What we need, and what we can offer

I have to tell you a secret, which is that I cannot ask for money. By some miracle I have survived the seven years since 2018 — money came to me, and then it stopped coming to me. So we need people who are better at this than I am, and that is what Zachary Marlow is doing.

As you can see, my morale is good anyway. But if you have beautiful software that makes it easy for people to see how we get and how we spend our money, come and find us — we are open to that kind of solution. Basically we are going to pay ourselves wages when we can, and everything else goes into the movement.

And if you have funds but don't want to give them to us — if you want an advisor to redirect some of your funding into productive projects — I would be happy to do that too. We don't need to control anything.

There are other ways in. I give pretty good courses on civilisational transition, alone or with people I work with: a week somewhere, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, so that people have time to digest, because it's fairly intense. I'm also talking to people about a publications programme — a little pamphlet every four months. We need to get these ideas out; that's very important too.

A big part of the convening is that we need to learn from existing mutual-aid and redistribution networks about exactly how we should be structured to fit with your existing grant flows. And people have already asked us: if I want to present cosmo-localism to my municipality, for potential projects, what can I say practically? We need you to come and talk to us, and to help us serve the network better.

And if you are a powerful person: I've done a lot of policy work — with Pope Benedict twice, with the mayor of Ghent, and of Seoul, with the president of Ecuador — so we advise on policy transition and commons transition policies. Our work is very wide. There's a publications page on the wiki I should look up; we've even worked on the evolution of accounting. The body of knowledge we have is really broad and deep at the same time. The universe is big and the opportunities are numerous, so come and find us, and let's see how we can advance this agenda together. We would love to work with the people who are here.

One last thing

A lot of intellectuals do research, have ideas, and then produce a utopia. Everything I have done has been to listen to people. My wiki has 25,000 articles, and I didn't invent any of these concepts. They come from people like you, who have done things. I think that is a new way of working, and it is really important.

Look at the wiki, too: I don't write my articles. I construct articles out of the contributions of various people. We are the only multi-perspectival wiki in the world — I have never seen anything like it. "Neutral point of view" means there is one point of view. On our wiki you see people for and against the blockchain, for and against Bitcoin, and you make up your own mind. I think that is the way to go.

I also want to thank Felix Fritsch and the Commons Hub of Austria for creating this atmosphere, with so many bright people in it. I really hope you succeed in continuing here. I told somebody that if I were young today, I would buy a house here just to be around these people. In my view this is very much part of the ecosystem.

I am very heartened by your enthusiastic response, and very honoured to be among people who have been working, like me, on changing the world. Keep it going, connect with us, and maybe we can converge and do something together. Thank you.