Structured Bibliography on P2P and the Commons

Ira Mollay and Michel Bauwens will work on this bibliography during the summer of 2019.

Module 1: The anthropology of peer to peer and the commons

P2P as a relational dynamic: new social relations, then and now

Commoning Against The Crisis. (Chapter 6)

By Angelos Varvarousis and Giorgos Kallis.

URL [1]

The commoning movement in Greece analysed along the lines of liminality as a catalyst following a rhizomatic pattern.

The Commons in History

Blockchain Machines, Earth Beings and the Labour of Trust.

By Larry Lohmann. Corner House

URL [2]

Blockchain, smart contracts etc. in the context of their ecological history and pictures of labour, commons, and capital accumulation seen through different lenses from Marx to Wittgenstein.

Cooperation and morality

Is It Good to Cooperate? Testing the Theory of Morality-as-Cooperation in 60 Societies.

By Oliver Scott Curry, Daniel Austin Mullins, and Harvey Whitehouse. Current Anthropology 60, no. 1 (February 2019): 47-69.

URL [3]

Morality-as-cooperation draws on the theory of non-zero-sum games to identify distinct problems of cooperation and their solutions, and it predicts that specific forms of cooperative behavior will be considered morally good in all cultures. The paper identifies seven cooperative behaviors as plausible candidates for universal moral rules.

Module 2: The Commons as a mode of production / the commons as economic system

Peer production / peer governance / peer property

Italian Community Co-operatives Responding to Economic Crisis and State Withdrawal. A New Model for Socio-Economic Development.

By Michele Bianchi and Marcelo Vieta. United Nations Task Force for Social and Solidarity Economy, 2019

URL [4]

This paper presents findings from an ongoing qualitative research project aiming to better understand the territorial and economic development impacts of Italian community co-operatives and their role in concretising the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The commons and the market

The Wolf and the Caribou: Coexistence of Decentralized Economies and Competitive Markets.

By Andreas Freund and Danielle Stanko. J. Risk Financial Manag. 2018, 11(2), 26

URL [5]

Exponentially growing cryptocurrency returns may push competitive markets at risk of collapsing due to extraction of value. This paper explores novel ways for decentralized economies to protect themselves from, and coexist with, competitive markets at a global scale utilizing decentralized technologies such as Blockchain.

The commons and capitalism

Market and Labour Control in Digital Capitalism.

By Philipp Staab and Oliver Nachtwey. TripleC, Vol. 14, Issue 2, 2016

URL [6]

Based on basic assumptions of monopoly capital theory, the article argues that the expansion of digital control and the organizational structures applied by key corporate players of the digital economy are evidence for the expansion of capitalist labour, not its reduction.

Food as commons. Towards a new relationship between the public, the civic and the private.

By Olivier De Schutter, Ugo Mattei, Jose Luis Vivero Pol et al., December 2018. In Handbook of Food as a Commons, Publisher: Routledge, pp.373-395

URL [7]

The chapter unfolds how a tricentric governing model (an enabling public sector, a private sector not focused on profit maximization and self-regulated civic collective actions) could steer a fairer and more sustainable transition towards food systems that can nourish the entire human population, thrive within planetary boundaries and be regenerative enough to feed the generations to come.

Food as a new old commons. A paradigm shift for human flourishing.

By Jose Luis Vivero-Pol. World Nutrition, Vol 10 No 1 (2019)

URL [8]

Considering food as a commons anchored to the adequate valuation of its multiple dimensions of food to humans, can provide a discourse that embraces urban innovations as well as indigenous practices) food activities and challenges the obsolete industrial food system.

The commons in the context of the ecological crisis

Planning in and for a post-growth and post-carbon economy.

By John Barry. Chapter of the book: Routledge Companion to Environmental Planning and Sustainability, 2019

URL [9]

New ways of planning for a post-growth, post-carbon economy that include social justice ‘floors’ and ecological ‘ceilings’ and a more proactive state.

Module 3: The Institutional, technical and societal logic of the commons

The commons as a technical infrastructure

Introducing the four quadrants

Michiel de Lange , (2019), The Right to the Datafied City: Interfacing the Urban Data Commons

In Paolo Cardullo, Cesare Di Feliciantonio, Rob Kitchin (ed.) The Right to the Smart City, pp.71 - 83

URL [10]

The paper contrasts the cybernetic view versus a humanist view towards the role of data in the smart city. It suggests the commons-as-interface that productively connects urban data to the human-level political agency and allows for more detailed investigations of mediation processes between data, human actors, and urban issues."

Governing the commons

Cooperative Enterprise as an Antimonopoly Strategy

By Sandeep Vaheesan and Nathan Schneider (November 6, 2018).

URL [11]

As part of an agenda to tame corporate monopoly, governments should revisit the idea of ownership design and exemptions from antitrust laws in order to protect and enable the cooperative model across the economy.

Res Publica ex Machina: On Neocybernetic Governance and the End of Politics.

By Felix Maschewski and Anna-Verena Nosthoff. Institute of Network Cultures, October, 2018

URL [12]

The article examines the extent to which neo-cybernetic concepts promote a rather reduced vision of politics and argues that current approaches to ‘smart’ states or cities and their corresponding models of governance mark no entire automation of politics but at least in certain respects, a pragmatic actualization of cybernetic visions of the state against the background of surveillance capitalism.

Case studies

(Smart) Citizens from Data Providers to Decision-Makers? The Case Study of Barcelona. By Igor Calzada. Sustainability 2018, 10(9), 3252

URL [13]

This paper examines how the city of Barcelona is marking a transition from the conventional, hegemonic smart city approach to a new paradigm—the experimental city which increasingly considers (smart) citizens as decision-makers rather than data providers.

Module 4: P2P as transformative emancipatory movement

Alternative Platforms and Societal Horizon: Characterisation and Strategies for Development.

By Guillaume Compain, Philippe Eynaud, Lionel Maurel, and Corinne Vercher-Chaptal, June 2019 Communication to the SASE 31st Annual Meeting; Fathomless Futures: Algorithmic and Imagined; 27- 28 June 2019 - The New School - New York City

URL [14]

A study that systematically looks at how platform coops combine elements of the open source movement (sharing knowledge), with those of the cooperative movement (protecting cooperative property. It highlights the emergent practices of Open Cooperativism

Commons transition as a political process

From choice to collective voice. Foundational economy, local commons and citizenship.

By Filippo Barbera, Nicola Negri, Angelo Salento

URL [15]

Defence and management of local commons in the framework of Foundational Economy (FE) as referring to the «civic infrastructure» serving everyday household needs help reconsider citizenship as «the capacity and desire to act collectively».