Peer to Peer Communism
Discussion
From an interview of Dmytri Kleiner by KMO:
"So, let’s start with just the first part. “The Internet started as a network that embodied the relations of peer to peer communism.” Say more about that.
Well, for many of us in activist circles, in hacker circles in the 90s and some even before (that had access), the Internet didn’t just represent a new technology. It represented something that could have very broad social and political implications, in that, when you use the technology, especially the classic platforms of the Internet, – email, IRC, USENET, and the original classic platforms of the Internet – they didn’t mediate between users. All communication between users was based on mutual configurations. So therefore, if your computer and my computer agreed to exchange information with each other, we could do that without the mediation. Every intermediary node operated under the end-to-end principle, and just allowed us to communicate as if we were talking directly to each other. So this was very much a society of equals.
The “classic Internet” had this kind of ethos of sharing, like we really believed at that time that the Internet was uncensorable. We had this idea because of the topology, and because of the peer-to-peer nature of the communication tools we were using. But of course, what we didn’t fully realize back then, is that this Internet was very tiny. It felt big to us, but it was really very tiny. It was mostly developed by universities, by NGOs, by the military, and other organizations, and the people developing it were developing it for use value, which is an important distinction in economics.
The people who were making things like email, make USENET, like IRC and Finger, were not making them so they could sell them for exchange. They were making them in order to use them. So it really embodied a communist ethic of “from each to each.” The people creating technology wanted to use and share it with everyone that needed it.
But of course, this can’t scale very much, in order for a communication system to be used by the billions of people on the planet, it can’t be entirely made by university students, NGOs and some military contractors. When the Internet became commercialized, it became commercialized by venture capital, and venture capital invests money not for use value but for exchange value. This means that when a venture capitalist provides money, he or she does so under the pretext that they will make more money in return. This is different from a use value Internet. It becomes an exchange value Internet. In order to capture exchange value, the network had to become less free. An internet that allows users to do whatever they want presents very limited opportunities for capitalists to earn profit.
In order to charge prices, communications could be centralized through areas where prices can be charged. And so, there you have the re-architecture of the Internet from what it was back then, based on peer-to-peer software like e-mail, IRC, USENET, Finger, and so forth, to what eventually became called social media, or, briefly, Web 2.0, which is where web applications were developed to mimic the kinds of interactions people were having on the real peer-topeer social media platforms of the early Internet, but in a client-server fashion reminiscent of the original capitalist online platforms like CompuServe, and the original AOL, where all users connected through a central point. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and other sorts of things used this same model, and by doing so, they were able to make a profit model based on the capture of user data and control of user interaction." (http://snuproject.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/venture-communism-and-technological-miscommunication-a-conversation-with-dmytri-kleiner/)