P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival

* P2P Accounting for Planetary Survival: Towards a P2P Infrastructure for a Socially Just Circular Society. By Michel Bauwens and Alex Pazaites. P2P Foundation, 2019.

URL = Draft text ; draft illustrations

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.

Status

This report has a final text, but will not be published officially in a lay-outed text before May 2019, due to a parallel book launch.

Contents

Chapter 1: The Background to this Study

• The P2P Foundation’s study of the commons and the commons transition
• Value in the Commons
• The emerging crypto economy as a signpost for the cosmo-local transition
• Our Vision

Chapter 2: Tools and technologies for integrated, fair, and sustainable ecosystems of production

• Introduction

Tools for Mutual integration

• Economic Space Agency (ECSA): an environment for inter-connected economic spaces and commons-based Distributed Programmable Organizations
• Holochain: an alternative to a global distributed ledger, based on biomimicry
• DAOstack: integrated mechanisms for large-scale governance

Tools for Circulation and exchange

• FairCoin and FairCoop: tools for a cosmo-local, open cooperative ecosystem
• Trustlines: mutual credit for common good
• Circles: a decentralized basic income
• Envienta: an integrated environment for open source manufacturing
• FabChain: linking advanced research to urban metabolisms and mainstream production and manufacturing
• Terra0: giving DAO agency to natural resources
• Sustans: replacing Smart Contracts with Ostrom Contracts

Chapter 3: Evolution of Accounting

New Accounting and Planning Frameworks

• Guerrilla Translation as an example of contributive accounting
• Resources - Events - Agents (REA): an accounting system for networked cooperation and shared supply chains
• Reporting 3.0 : direct access to a representation of matter and energy flows in interconnected supply chains
• MusiASEM , accounting for material/energy flows and their limits

Accounting for Impact and Externalities

• Regen Network: ‘ecological state protocols’ to verify advances in sustainability and regenerativity
• The Common Good Accounting System: competing for positive impact

Multi-layer integration: how the new technologies fit together

• Production for social needs within planetary boundaries

Executive Summary

Michel Bauwens:

"How to read this report ? If you are not an expert but interested in future infrastructures, then chapter 1 is the most readable ‘visionary’ chapter, which will give you the broad background about what we want to achieve with this report. Chapter 2 and 3 are aimed for the more motivated experts that are specifically interested in a number of technical tools that are becoming available to enable this vision. Each of these chapters also has its contextual introductions, which might be useful for the less technical reader.

The key issue addressed in this study is how to change a system which incentivizes and rewards extraction, but cannot recognize and reward the wealth created by generative activities, towards a system which can reward and incentivize generative practices.

This report is based on the understanding that one of the main weaknesses of the current political economy is its inability to recognize and deal with ‘externalities’, i.e. costs and benefits received or caused by economic actors that are not accounted for and that they are not paying for. Under capitalism, a firm becomes competitive in a large part because of its ability, and that of the system as a whole, to not ‘pay’ for positive social and environmental contributions, and to leave the reparations of social and environmental damages, to other actors, i.e. mainly the citizenry or the state. There is no structural solution to fund (re)generative activities except mostly ‘after the fact’ or through ‘regulations’ that are imposed ‘from the outside’, by the coercive force of the state. This report looks at efforts underway, even in prototypal and experimental forms, to remedy this situation, i.e. to have a productive systems that can fulfill human needs without violating external boundaries, i.e. pretty much like Kate Raworth has explained it in Doughnut Economics. These solutions would be located much more ‘internally’, within the system of production itself. This way of thinking is analogous to thinking about more socially just ‘predistribution’ of wealth, rather than mere ‘redistribution’. These would not replace external regulation, which still has a role, but complement it.

We believe that a significant number of these necessary ingredients for such a structural change are available through some of the emerging techno-social systems that are co-evolving with distributed networks.

The first structural element is a shared supply chains for a perma-circular economy. At the P2P Foundation, we believe a circular economy cannot be achieved without sharing the logistical knowledge that is presently locked up in the walled gardens of private logistics. Only by sharing each other’s input and outputs can partners in a open ecosystem adapt towards a real circular economy. In this report, we pay some attention to a shift to eco-systemic collaboration, but without going into the details of supply chains themselves. The concept of ‘perma-circularity’ refers to the necessity for the growth of our material and energy usage to remain under one percent a year, in order to avoid the exponential increase in resources we need from our planet.

We do pay attention to a number of technologies that will allow us to shift towards ecosystems of collaboration, specifically open and shared distributed ledgers, mostly coming from the so-called ‘blockchain’ space of technical development. But we focus in part on ‘post-blockchain’ developments, which avoid a number of systemic problems associated with the first generation of blockchain technologies, for example, issues of scaling, exponential energy usage, etc.. Protocol cooperatives are global open source depositories of knowledge, code and design, that allow humanity to create infrastructures for the mutualization of the main provisioning systems (i.e. food, habitat, mobility), and that are governed by the various stakeholders involved, including the affected citizenry.

With distributed ledgers, three new forms of collaborative accounting can be introduced, which will allow economic actors to manage their production while recognizing positive and negative social and ecological externalities. Contributive accounting, which we discussed in our previous report, Values in the Commons Economy, allows for the recognition of all types of contributions, not just waged labor. REA accounting, i..e accounting for Resources, Events, Actions, allows actors to see their transactions as part of an eco-system of collaboration, i.e. this is ‘flow accounting’ rather than a vision based on the accumulation of assets in a single firm. Finally, we need direct access to the real ‘thermo-dynamic flows’, necessitated by production, i.e. the amounts of matter and energy needed, in the context of planetary boundaries.

Chapter 1 of this report is a summary of ten years of research at the P2P Foundation, including by our own P2P Lab but also by our partners in common research programs, of what we know today about the emerging commons economy. It includes a basic account of why the ‘invention’ of the blockchain has been important, but stresses that the needed distributed ledgers may take other forms in the future. This section may not offer a lot of new elements for those that are already technologically savvy about the topic, but it does offer a critical engagement with the qualities and flaws of the current model, and suggests how it can be tweaked and transformed, to also serve as a basis for a post-capitalist, commons-centric economy.

Chapter 2 of this report goes into the details of various technological projects that could be used as tools to develop ecosystems of collaborations, based on distributed ledgers. The aim of that report is to show that solutions are being worked on, but remain fragmented to date, so our aim is to show that an alignment in a higher integration, would lead to significant advances towards sustainable production.

Finally, chapter 3 focuses on the accounting innovations that we will need, and will need to be integrated in the new practices based on shared supply chains using shared ledgers. This includes, as explained above, tools for contributive, flow-based, and thermo-dynamic accounting.

This report focuses not on the innovations within mainstream industrial players striving towards more sustainability, but to seed forms that have the advantage of not having legacy systems to deal with, and therefore can re-organize themselves much more in direct harmony with the possibilities offered by the new tools reflecting the new paradigm. Of course, this means they have much less resources, but they offer more clear pointers to a possible future.

The aim of this report is therefore to open the minds towards new possibilities of integration, so that we can transition to a regenerative economy, and to show that emerging tools are available to implement these necessary changes."