Introductory Material

For the Bio of Michel Bauwens, see the Michel Bauwens page.

Following here is a list of pages on this wiki directly related to personal writings and work about peer to peer and commons topics.

• See also the bibliography page here: Michel Bauwens' English Language Bibliography ; Some articles translated into spanish: [1]

• Evaluation: Prophets and Advocates of Peer Production. By George Dafermos. Chapter 7: The Handbook of Peer Production. Wiley, 2020

[2]

• I have produced a autobiography which is for the moment only available on a Google doc. William Kelly wrote an introduction: Introduction to the Autobiography of Michel Bauwens

Publications Overview

See also: Publications

Our last 'mandala'presentation graphic

= Content of slides for lecture: “The Role of the Commons in Civilizational Transitions” delivered by Michel Bauwens, P2P Foundation, September 2022, at Uppsala University

With thanks to graphic artist Juliane Höhle; website: julianehoehle.wordpress.com and twitter @JulianeHoehle

Introduction to P2P Theory

See: Introductory Course on P2P and the Commons

This video series was done, with excellent technical conditions, at Lignan University in Hong Kong, at the behest of Prof. Kin Chi Lau and colleagues, during the months of January 2019:

• E-Lecture 1: Introduction to peer to peer and the commons, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=glRE-J9xFbQ

• E-Lecture 2: The interaction between the commons and the market, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BtdftpR-7fA

• E-Lecture 3: Public-commons cooperation, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hIXIwdUJ-1E

• E-Lecture 4: Distributed ledgers and shared supply chains, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suI7e0aNetg

• E-Lecture 5: The spirituality and ethics of peering and commoning, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L7t2-xadpCI

• Michel Bauwens -- Life and Thought, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RgI_TLgqdts

Our Structured Bibliographies

• Sources of P2P Theory: the books that inspired our theorezing about the commons

• What You Should Read To Understand the Commons: recommendations to understand the commons

• Structured Bibliography on P2P and the Commons: selected essays

Video series: O.G. Rose has a series in which I explain in detail why the selected books and authors are important:

Playlist starts here

• (Ep #1) w/ Michel Bauwens: "The Structure of World History" by Kojin Karatani [3]
• (Ep #2) w/ Michel Bauwens: On Karl Polanyi, Peter Pogany & World System Cycles [4]
• (Ep #3) w/ Michel Bauwens: On Macrohistorical Theories [5]
• (Ep #4) w/ Michel Bauwens: Agency and Change in History [6]

This is related to my project on Civilizational Analysis:

• An Annotated Bibliography on the Evolution of Civilization

Our introduction to the 'History of Human Civilization as seen through the eyes of the commons'

Our core curriculum: [7]

Seven-part French video series: Au-delà de la civilisation ? Entretiens avec Michel Bauwens. Episode 1.

Recent Editorials

Editorials written in the Post-Corona period, since March 2020:

• Somewheres, Nowheres, and Everywheres

• Our Next Civilization Will Not Be Based on Unity Without Division, Nor On Division Without Unity, But On Unity With Maximum Differentiation

• Ukraine Conflict as a Competition Between Rival Systems, Pointing to the Need for a Cosmo-Local Civilizational Framework

• Michel Bauwens on the Conflicts Between Commoners, Capitalists and Intersectionalists

• Public Ledgers as the New Institution of the Commons

• When Are We ?

• Understanding the Great Reversal in the Political Field

• Three Spheres of Mark Stahlman vs the Three Spheres of Michel Bauwens

Other recent articles:

• Recovering Our Technological Unconscious

• The Culture of the Commons in a Time of Civilizational Transition‎‎

• Understanding the Role of Polarisation in Times of Transition‎

• Solving the Metacrisis by a New Institutional Trinity That Includes the Commons‎

• Evolution of the Conceptions of Time Across History‎

• Understanding the Role of Polarization in Times of Transition

Post-2023 Substack Editorials

My 'Fourth Civilization' Substack newsletter is at https://4thgenerationcivilization.substack.com/archive

• 1: Towards a Fourth Generation Civilization. Why this substack by Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation.
• 2: Towards Mutual Coordination Economics. Why we should pay attention to mutual coordination as a concept for the next civilization.

• 3: On the Importance of Seed Forms for the Next Civilization: An overview of fifteen years of research by the P2P Foundation.

• 4: Why We Need Real-Time Public Ledger Organizations: RTPLO's might be the 'commons-based' institutions that we need to change the value regime.

• 5: Why We Need 'Crypto for Real': A proposal to link up the open ecosystems for crypto coordination, with the real-life mutualization of provisioning.

• 6: The Fate of Tribes in a Cosmo-Local World: A more personal travelogue that starts in a Lebanese mountain community and ends up in a network nation.

• 7: The Transhumanist Technological Quest Is a Religious Quest: Recovering our technological unconscious.

• 8: 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.

• 9: Three Scenarios for a Turbo-Charged Crypto-Future.

• 10: Shifting from a Commodity-Based Value Regime to a Contributory Value Regime.

• 11: The Age of Trans-Local Self-Organized CoordiNations

• 12: Why Ordo-Communalism is Necessary: on the Ordo-Communal State.

• 13: Getting Ready for the Five Thousand Year Shift in Value Regime: An overview of signposts towards the civilizational shift in the direction of <contribution-based>, <thermodynamically informed> <mutual coordination> economics.

• 14: From the Commons for Capital to Capital for the Commons: How an important book, Assets in Common, introduces the shift towards a Stewardship Economy.

• 15: How Peer Production and Web3 Governance Mechanisms May Prefigure a Isonomic World Order: Is what we are waiting for perhaps not Democracy, but Isonomia ?

• 16: What Kind of Money Do We Need for the Next Value Revolution ?: Beyond fiat money and crypto, how do we measure and reward systemic contributions, i.e. contribution to common infrastructural and care value ?

• 17. Who Can Change the World Today ? Is there a new agent of historical change ? Could it be the commoners ? But if so: allied to who ?

• 18. What Would a Commons-Centric Society or Civilization Look Like ? (Ethical Economy + Partner State + Commons): Adding the commons institutions to the mix: Transforming societies from a national bi-institutional format (market+state) to a cosmo-local tri-institutional format (market-state + commons).

• 19: Why Human Contributive Labor Remains the Creative Principle of Human Society: The salvific and ex-tropic implications of the medieval Christian vision of human work as spiritual activity. (with excerpts from the study: “From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body".

• 20: The Construction of the Post-Civilizational Civium Has Begun: Why the confederation of more than a dozen translocal popup villages in Chiang Mai is a historical pivot

• 21: A Global History of Societal Regulation: Why commons-based institutions now need to regulate the market and state, ‘cosmo-locally’.

• 22: The Cosmo-Local Plan for Our Next Civilization. Towards a convergence of the local bioregional resilient production efforts with the global coordination and 'Capital for the Commons' capacities of Web3.

• 23: The Three Civilizational Priorities of the Next Societal Transition: Can We Truly Change Our Civilizational Model? What we can learn from Peter Pogany's 'Rethinking the World'.

• 24: AI and the Advent of the Age of the Brahmin Workers. The pivot towards P2P AI has just begun.