Understanding the Emergence of Neo-Venetian Crypto-Networks

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  • Will the Global Chinese Commons save the world ? Understanding the emergence of neo-Venetian crypto-networks. Why the prefigurative self-provisioning of mutual coordination infrastructures by the crypto-nomadic networks has a macro-historical importance. MICHEL BAUWENS, DEC 04, 2023


Text

Michel Bauwens:

If the 19th cy developed market institutions, and the 20th century a regulatory framework centered around the centralizing institution of the nation-state, then, we may speculate, the 21st century could and should be considered the century for the development of the decentralized, productive, p2p-oriented economy and society. Our historical task today, as we prepare for Global System 3, the third iteration of planetarization, is to find out what its benefits and limits are, and this can only be done through experimentation and trial and error, of the networked and self-organized economy and society ITSELF.


Some personal background

In 2014, I crafted a commons transition plan for three governmental institutions in Ecuador, and in 2017, for the city of Ghent, both were public authorities at different scale,, and ‘states’ are obvious agents in human history. Today, I work as research coordinator for a global diasporic network, a CoordiNation of both mainland and diasporic crypto-nomads who speak Chinese. Why do I find these neo-Venetian networks so important ?


Find out more:

Primavera de Filippi on the CoordiNATION as Alternative to the Network State Model; Video via https://www.youtube.com/live/RyObAHv777E?feature=share&t=25565

Neo-Venetianism, i.e. the quest of community by transnational economic networks; David de Ugarte in the book: Phyles, Economic Democracy in the Network Century; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Neo-Venetianism ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Phyles

Mutualizing Urban Provisioning Systems, By Michel Bauwens and Rok Kranjc; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Mutualizing_Urban_Provisioning_Systems

Dutch-language report: Commons Transitie Plan voor de stad Gent. Van Michel Bauwens en Yurek Onzia. Juni 2017. In opdracht van de stad Gent, https://stad.gent/sites/default/files/article/documents/Commons%20Transitie%20Plan%20Gent.pdf (https://stad.gent/ghent-international/city-policy-and-structure/ghent-commons-city/commons-transition-plan-ghent English version)

The Commons Transition Plan for the Government of Ecuador, 2014 (FLOK version) ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commons_Transition_Plan_(FLOK_version)


A Brief Review of the Patterns of Societal History

To understand the importance of the work that the GCC is undertaking, allow me to offer the following framing of historical development since the 19th century, inspired by the important book of Peter Pogany, Rethinking the World.

For Pogany, the first truly planetary system starts only after the defeat of Napoleon in 1815, when a 100-year peace breaks out on the European continent, which allows these countries to direct their attention outward, and colonize, with their newly developed military and industrial power, a huge part of the globe, integrating this emerging totality in one global trade network, dominated, for the next two centuries, by the newly industrialized European powers. He calls this Global System One, and it is a world that is dominated by ‘free markets’, under the adage, ‘laisser faire, laisser aller’. Of course, we would now see this ideology as problematic, since it is accompanied by colonialism, widespread impoverishment at first, but over time, this would lead to an amazing growth of scientific and technological innovation, a fivefold increase in working class wages, and the modernizing of many infrastructures at a global scale. But it also created sufficient social tensions, nation-state competition, and general economic instability, to lead to the conflagration of WWI. At this point in global history, there were no multilateral organizations, only competing alliances. No way to make peace, once war has broken out.

Thus, a chaotic transition would take place, that would take two World Wars before it stabilized in a new ‘relatively stable system’: Global System Two. With so many people having lost confidence in unregulated markets, it led to thinking that the answer was the regulatory state, or even the total state, as advocated by Fascism for example, and the Soviet societal form was even more state-centric. But the core Western countries adopted the format of the welfare state, in which a much more regulated market, characterized by higher taxation to fund redistributive social policies, became the norm. Just as Global System I was interrupted by the massive revolutionary wave of 1848, GS2 was marked by the energy and inflation crisis of 1973, several social revolutions, and the eventual breakdown of the Soviet system in 1989-91, which led to a unipolar and neoliberal world system, with globalized production and trade, but also a stagnation of working class wages in the West, and a slow unraveling (but not complete breakdown) of the welfare state provisions, while the newly independent states tried to catch up, accepting the nation-state and industrialism as the norm to strive for. Just as the previous system, the new relatively stable system eventually reached a crisis stage, with the global systemic crisis of 2008, as the main marker. So think of 1973, as the end of the ‘ascending’ phase of this system, and 2008, as the end of the whole cycle as such. And just as the market was questioned after 1914, the critique of state regulation swelled up as well. People are no longer happy with huge bureaucratic structures, feeling that it hinders their freedom. If the older generations can still remember the benefits of welfare-statism, this is no longer the case for the younger generations, who have experienced the long decay of the system.

(At the end of this era, after the global financial meltdown of 2008, the geopolitical order dominated by the US, also started oscillating, with China now a world power again, and together with Russia and the BRICS countries challenging the unipolar order. We are now in a time of bi-globalization, with emerging splits in the financial system , i.e. ongoing efforts at de-dollarisation of international trade, the split of technological stacks, enforced by mutual sanctions, and supply chains, i.e. the competition with the western maritime system and the continental Belt and Road system built by China as an alternative.)


This dissatisfaction with the dominant role of the state, or similar dissatisfaction by what others consider the failing market-based neoliberal order, may now go into different directions:

  • A dream and desire to restore more market freedom or a contrario restore state sovereignty,, perhaps for some even both at the same time
  • A dream and desire to create a more decentralized networked society
  • A dream to integrate markets and networks
  • A dream to integrate markets, networks, state functions, AND what we could call ‘the Commons’ in an integrated way


The author of this foreword situates himself in that last option, and I only speak for myself in this context, while seeking convergence with other actors even partially moving in such directions. As is normal in distributed network, the various contributors do not share all their views, only a commitment to construct their common infrastructure. And so GCC members may not share the analysis that follows.

The stage is now set, after what will undoubtedly be a very painful transition, towards Global System 3.

(Bear in mind that the GS2 transition was more painful than GS1, and so very likely, the GS3 transition will be harder, though nuclear deterrence may inhibit the worst warfare scenarios.)

According to Pogany, this new system will require an updated social contract that goes beyond the workers of the core countries, a new relationship to nature and non-human beings, and stronger multilateralism able to protect the planet. The task of GS3 is the transition from a immature technosphere that is unable to respect natural limits, to a mature technosphere that can co-exist with the natural world. In my view this requires a globally coordinated cosmo-local modality of production and exchange, in which distributed production and consumption agents, we are all both, can adjust their work and choices through context-based sustainability. The alternative to successful mutual coordination, will be coercive eco-fascism, i.e. centralized and punitive measures to prevent massive ecological damage as we proceed with the current over-consumption models.

Our proposed model, which follows from the already existing practices of productive p2p networks, means that maximum freedom of choice can co-exist with a broad self-awareness of limits, available everywhere in the network, which minimizes coercion. I call this ‘mutual coordination economics’, and it is a new synthesis of markets, states and commons, through a system of decentralized p2p networks.

So what I present here next is an ‘agent’, one of many of course, that, I believe, is taking up an important task in this transitional era.

Find out more:

Rethinking the World. By Peter Pogany. iUniverse, 2006, https://integralpermaculture.wordpress.com/peter-pogany/


The prefigurative self-infrastructuring of the crypto movement

Here we tackle the emergence of technological self-infrastructuring in the context of the history of the digital.

In the 1960s, the computer chip was invented, and gradually networks became available to large institutional and market actors, ushering the neoliberal order of globally integrated supply chains; Then, in 1993, access to digital networks was democratized, through the browser and the world wide web, ushering a new period of human history: the materialization of the noosphere, i..e. the globally interconnected sphere of cooperating (and conflict-engaging <g>) human minds.

It is indeed useful to see the evolution of our universe as a path to ever increased complexity. First came the creation of the material world, presumably at the Big Bang, and this was followed 3.77 billion years ago, with the creation of life on earth; and life evolved to create a complex, self-aware and interconnected life-form, humanity, (300,000 years ago) which established a third sphere, the noosphere, the sphere of interconnected cultural exchange and cooperation, spread by ever more efficient media. Every historical empire was better at using more powerful media to expand its control and maintain its unity, but paradoxically also unifying its territories for greater internal cooperation, and more external trade. But people were still talking ‘to’ each other, based on their geographic location, and sending messages through and fro.

However, once the internet, a genuinely translocal many-to-many meta=medium that creates virtual collaborative spaces, became a global participatory medium, a number of new practices and social movements emerged from it.

The first was the ‘open source’ movement, in its different facets: open and shared knowledge, with open access requirements, free software, but also shared designs for material artifacts. In open source ‘peer production’, open platforms allow for permissionless contributions, verified by a systems of maintainers or editors which protect the integrity of the overall system, and protected by a system of licenses defending the openness against private enclosures and capture. But on top of this shared resource, a ‘commons’, a multitude of entrepreneurs and private actors can add value and conduct economic activities. Just as the craft-agrarian congregations, and the worker guilds created substantial economies around their commons, so do the new digital commons. In fact, the link between digital interconnection on the one hand, and cooperation and innovation on the other hand, is ‘super-linear’ and now competes with physical proximity in its effectiveness. The true new superpower is combining the two forms of cooperation in an integrated fashion: high tech with high touch.

But the open source system was certainly not perfect, it was prone to corporate domination, and once business and governments discovered the huge exponential growth of internet participation, they substantially changed the nature of the original peer to peer infrastructure of the internet, and ushered in, first the client-server based Web2.0 , which re-introduced corporate control, and then, corporate platforms who coordinate central surveillance in cooperation with governments, the Censorship-Industrial Complex.

Open source had an additional problem, which is that not the whole mass of contributors had access to the funds that could sustain their work over the longer term. The more you did for the common network, the less you would be funded. Precisely because of the unconditional openness of the licenses, many open source projects started to be dominated by big corporate participants who had more capital to stimulate business activities around these shared commons.

The development of crypto was therefore at least partially a response to the issue of funding open source development, just as it was an attempt to make markets more distributed and fluid by allowing tokens as micro-shares, and many new forms of ‘fractal ownership’.

As I explained in a 2018 report from the P2P Foundation,” P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival”, open source based peer production models came with this also came three with fundamental innovations that truly qualify as ‘post-capitalist accounting’, representing a ‘post-commodity’, contribution-based value model.

Contributory accounting, which allowed for the recognition of contributions to the network, which cannot directly be funded by the commons-market interface; in crypto, this has been generalized through the public goods funding mechanisms, which continuously fund contributions to the general network infrastructure

Flow accounting, such as Resource-Events-Agents, which places any transactions in the whole network, this is now a given in the open ecosystems of crypto, through the common use of a universal ledger

The one innovation that is still missing at large in the crypto economy is the ecological ‘thermo-dynamic’ accounting, which would allow for context-based sustainability, i.e. any participant in any crypto-economic network would be aware of sustainability limits; however, the ‘Regen’ part of the crypto community is actively working on such solutions.


But let us return to our narrative of technological development.

Once Satoshi Nakamoto published his white paper on Bitcoin on the P2P Foundation Ning forum, and developed the system, the world had access to the first globally scalable ‘socially sovereign’ digital currency; and once its blockchain was understood to be a universal ledger to secure a global ecosystem of trusted transactions, a qualitative new step was reached: a open economic ecosystem could be built that was based on open permissionless contributions, but coupled with a stack of economic solutions, and which allowed massive mutual coordination. For the first time in human history, small group dynamics, the average cooperating group on the network consists of 4-5 people, could scale globally, and the world reached Peak Hierarchy. Of course, this is a potentiality, not yet an actuality, but it is realistic enough to motivate millions of people to collaboratively build the infrastructures for a new decentralized world.

The new system no longer relied on any single agent, giving commands, and neither does it exclusively rely on the command of market pricing, but it was based instead on open network principles and mutual signaling, what the experts call ‘stigmergic collaboration’. Like the social insects, but with human intentionality on top. We now have economic agents that can mutually coordinate their work, and allocate resources, on a global scale, in a transparent, ‘holoptical’ universal account system. Holopictal, seeing everything from every angle in the network, stands in contrast with the ‘panoptical’ structures of the classic hierarchical institutions, but also contrasts to the market, where everyone is blind to impacts and externalities, and only a synthetic price signal is available, which we now know, does not adequately reflect ecological costs and realities.

With this step, the world has become truly translocal, while of course, fully recognizing that we still need the production of a very concrete and material earth, and paradoxically, we believe this trans-localization will also lead to more ‘localization’. Indeed, fortunately, digital technology has also changed material consumption and production. 2008, the global financial crisis which created mass youth unemployment in many different countries and urban areas, saw the emergence and then exponential growth, of what is called the ‘urban commons’. These urban commons are the result of citizens re-organizing themselves to secure certain provisioning systems in challenging times, from access to healthy organic food, shared housing and transport, etc … It affects mostly the consumption and not the production of goods, but the use of digital technologies has made their coordination costs much more marginal, helping them to grow substantially. They grew tenfold in ten years, and probably represent 2-3% of the urban public at this stage. But we must also mention the growth of cosmo-local production efforts, think of village coops investing collectively in renewable energy, or permaculture communities. This has opened the era of ‘cosmo-local production’, to which we have dedicated a book with 40 case studies.

So really, and this is no dream or fancy but daily reality: individuals can now not only communicate and self-organize in a peer to peer way, but they can build entire economies, new types of organizations, such as Distributed Autonomous Organizations. And these technologies and digital means are by no means divorced from the physical world of production and consumption.

Humans however, do not just need bread and butter, they need identity and belonging just as much, if not more, hence the emergence of what I believe we can best call, at this moment of history, ‘CoordiNations’. Some of course, like Balaji Srivanasan, are already dreaming of the next steps, Network Nations, or even Network States, entities with the same level of sovereignty as geographic nation-states. To be continued, and see whether these are realistic expectations at this stage in human history …

But crypto is definitely going ‘somewhere’, just as software is eating the world, and then open source ate software, crypto is now eating open source, and open source crypto is thus also, gradually, moving itself to ‘eat the world’.


Find out more:

  • P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival: Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially Just Circular Society. By Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaitis. Foreword by Kate Raworth. P2P Foundation, June 2019 ; How shared perma-circular supply chains, post-blockchain distributed ledgers, protocol cooperatives, and three new forms of post-capitalist accounting, could very well save the planet.
  • The role of CoordiNations such as the Global Chinese Commons and their role in the production of Public Goods for the Ethereum community


This brings me to the role of the Global Chinese Commons. The GCC is one of the many networks of self-organized crypto-nomads, itself a tiny part still of the now 36 million strong network of digital nomads, and of the five million individuals who have access to crypto wallets. They are motivated to contribute to a decentralized global economy and society, to reformulate their Chinese identity in the context of this new global participatory role, and they strongly support the development of ‘public goods’ for the Ethereum and crypto networks. It may not be a surprise that they are Chinese, as China is now once again at the center of world civilization, taking back its historical place, while it is also the first ‘biophysical civilization’, in which the aim of Ecological Civilization is one of the two central ideals of development. While the distance between dream and practicality is still very very large, it is creating new mentalities amongst Chinese citizens, that we may interpret as being post-consumption, in which the need for meaning surpasses the need to secure bread and butter. This is where the engagement for public goods fit in.

Public goods, in my vision, somewhat misnamed, because ‘public’ suggests either the public sphere of government or merely ‘civil society’, are what Elinor Ostrom would have called ‘common goods’, and what I would call the commons. They are shared resources, produced by a community or a group of stakeholders, and regulated according to their own rules, not the rules of any participating businesses, nor the rules of any of the controlling nation-states, or hypothetical future new international intergovernmental organizations. All of these economic and civic agents can participate in these projects however.

Of course, commons have to be legal, and they are and must be to be accepted in their physical environments, but on top of that, they can develop specialized rules for their own operations, and it is these rules that are collectively determined by their contributors, not by outside agents or purely monetary interests.

This is massively important: commons-based, cooperating communities, consisting of all kinds of contributory agents, that can be individuals, cooperatives, NGO’s, companies, financial or non-financial entities alike, for-profit, non-profit, and not-forprofit (let’s call the latter for-benefit entredonneurial agents) can now cooperate on systems that natively scale at the global level!

So let's get back to our original framing. If the 19th cy developed market institutions, and the 20th century a regulatory framework centered around the role of the centralizing institution of the nation-state, then for sure, the 21st century could and should be considered the century for the development of the decentralized, productive, p2p-oriented economy and society. Our historical task today, as we prepare for GS3. is to find out what its benefits and limits are, and this can only be done through experimentation and trial and error, of the networked and self-organized economy and society ITSELF. 

It is too early to say where this experiment will lead to, how much ‘functional equivalence’ networks can achieve with the state, and if new forms of perhaps even post-capitalist markets can be developed, but what is certain, is that a new world is being constructed, collectively, by collaborative, peer to peer, open source and community-driven communities that use practices of ‘crypto governance’, to self-manage their affairs, with a maximal amount of individual freedom and collective decision-making. And that they do this, not as unpaid volunteers, but as people that can make a living from these contributions. And that they can engage in such productive activities, as individuals that are not subordinated to an employer in contract of submission, which is what current labor law dictates, but as ‘autonomous labor’. Indeed, we have here collectives of freely associating workers, much like the guilds in ancient times, but who can now work directly at the global level.


If kin-ship based tribes, markets and states are the first three institutional models of human civilization,

And if in the modern market-state world, nonprofits are the third sector, then what we are now building is a ‘fourth sector’ model, based on decentralized peer production, and new hybrid forms of organization.

I have my own doubts that we will live in an exclusively network world, after all, the old ‘new’ models did never completely displace the older forms; markets and states coexist with tribes, rather, I see the fourth sector as a hybrid model, in which the commons-based network embraces older models of market pricing and command, in a higher integration.

I choose to call this a cosmo-local model, because the digital is not sufficient on its own. Humanity needs to eat and make, before it can engage in noospheric cooperation and move digital monies around.

The cosmo-local model indicates that under networked conditions, two main models can co-exist:

The first model is the local production model. I suspect that for many different reasons, such as environmental ones and resource constraints, we have momentarily reached ‘Peak Globalization’, and that supply chains and production will be relocalizing, under the adage, ‘what is heavy is local, what is light is global and shared’. What digital networks offer here is the ‘distributed manufacturing’ model. Small factories that can produce ‘on demand’, based on globally available designs, that can be adapted and changed to local circumstances, but can be produced in ‘circular’ fashion using biodegradable materials, thereby achieving ‘perma-circularity. Imagine a local permaculture community, whose members have ‘their feet in the mud’, rooted in the local civic and productive community, embedded in local, bioregional, cultural-ethnic-religious communities of their choice, with supportive national entities that support this type of development.

The second model is the ‘cosmic’ cooperation model, in which all nodes of the network learn from each other permanently, and any innovation anywhere is an innovation everywhere, and they develop the common cooperation patterns and protocols ? This is why I also like to call them ‘protocol cooperatives’. The production is local, but the knowledge is ‘cosmic’.

The third aspect of this will be the intermediaries, whom I’d like to call ‘Everywheres’. If the Somewheres are the locally rooted people, and the Nowheres are digital nomads who have lost their connection to such local communities, then the Everywhere’s are those that are able to connect, and enrich the local through their connection with the global.

The cosmo-local model is paradoxically, both fully local and fully cosmic, local AND universal.

This is, in summary, what I believe crypto-nomadic networks like the Global Chinese Commons 'CoordiNation’ are working on, and this is, how their still modest but fast growing activities can be framed as an important actor in world-historical terms. It is also why I am extremely happy to work with and for them on research-oriented purposes.

But let’s make no mistake, this is not the end of the road, but just the beginning. The public goods that the Ethereum community is producing, on a rather important scale, thanks to players like Gitcoin, and new players like Public Works and GCC, are responsible for redistributing $80m to developers (according to Scott Moore, co-founder of Gitcoin). But these are still public goods that produce commons for Ethereum, and most DAOs and crypto communities are still mostly allocating financial resources for immaterial work on code and design. The next step would be a convergence with the commons of physical production, the cosmo-local urban commons and p2p hardware companies, so that crypto governance becomes a mutual coordination infrastructure for more and more human citizens.


Find out more:

The Cosmo-Local Reader. Ed. José Ramos, Sharon Ede, Michel Bauwens and Gien Wong. P2P Foundation, 2021; https://clreader.net/

Somewheres, Nowheres, and Everywheres, a discussion, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Somewheres,_Nowheres,_and_Everywheres

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