P2P Book of the Year 2011
Planning page.
Book of the Year:
- Money and Slavery, Debt Obligations and Hierarchy
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/money-and-slavery-debt-obligations-and-hierarchy/2011/10/22
Very interesting quotes of a review of David Graeber’s book on Debt, by Matt Cropp:
A debt between two individuals thus creates a temporary hierarchical relationship between them, and in societies in which the alienation of relationships pioneered by slavery has been internalized, such debts can then be transfered to, or even originated by, a creditor with no interest at all in the wellbeing of the debtor as long as the debt continues to be serviced. As a result, debts in such societies can make the status of debtor virtually a form of slavery as they are pushed to do things that would have been unthinkable had the need to pay off their debts not been hanging over their heads.
- Planning with Complexity. An Introduction to Collaborative Rationality for Public Policy. By Judith E. Innes, David E. Booher. Routledge, 2010.
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/from-instrumental-rationality-to-collaborative-rationality/2011/12/16
A review by Larry Susskind:
“In their extraordinary new book, Planning With Complexity (Routledge, 2010), Judith Innes and David Booher make the case for a new way of knowing and deciding. They call this new approach collaborative rationality. Instrumental rationality — the traditional way of making the case for what needs to be done and why in the public arena — has given way to collaborative approaches to generating and justifying decisions.
- Politics
- Book of the Week: Barefoot in Cyberspace
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-barefoot-in-cyberspace/2011/09/26
Will the internet make us more free? Or will the flood of information that courses across its networks only serve to enslave us to powerful interests that are emerging online? How will the institutions of the old world – politics, the media, corporations – affect the hackers’ dream for a new world populated not by passive consumers but by active participants? And can we ever live up to their vision of technology’s, and its users’, potential?
- Book: Barefoot into Cyberspace: Adventures in search of techno-Utopia. by Becky Hogge
(Purchase copies via barefootintocyberspace.com/book/)
To introduce our book of the week, please the publisher’s summary, an excerpt from the introduction, as well as the author’s motivation.
1. The summary:
“Barefoot into Cyberspace is an inside account of radical hacker culture and the forces that shape it, told in the year WikiLeaks took subversive geek politics into the mainstream. Including some of the earliest on-record material with Julian Assange you are likely to read, Barefoot Into Cyberspace is the ultimate guided tour of the hopes and ideals that are increasingly shaping world events.
- Tim Gee on Building Counterpower: are there lessons for #OccupyWallStreet?
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/tim-gee-on-building-counterpower/2011/11/02
- To maintain their dominance, elites need people to accept their ideas, they need a flow of finance and they need instruments of coercion to enforce their will. Demonstrations can help turn opinion against a ruling elite. But it is by undermining the flow of finance and the physical ability to enact laws that a movement really begins to show its might. In the book I call these three categories of resistance ‘Idea Counterpower’, ‘Economic Counterpower’ and ‘Physical Counterpower’. If we use all three we improve our chance of success.
Republished from the New Left Project. The interview is conducted by Ed Lewis.
“Tim Gee is an activist, a blogger and a campaigns trainer. His first book Counterpower: Making Change Happen is published today. It looks at the strategies and tactics that have contributed to the success (or otherwise) of some of the most prominent movements for change, from India’s Independence Movement to the Arab Spring. He discussed the ideas in the book with NLP’s Ed Lewis.
- Labor
- Book of the Week: Labor is not a commodity, but a commons
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-labor-is-not-a-commodity-but-a-commons/2011/08/08
Book: Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line. Tom Walker.
Author Tom Walker explains the motivation in writing this important book, which considers employment as a common pool resource, i.e. advocates a labor commons:
“The issue I grapple with in Jobs, Liberty and the Bottom Line is not so much “what is the best remedy for unemployment” or even “what is the case for shorter working time” but why and how has one particular set of policy options been excluded from the mainstream discourse. Of course that possibly translates into “why is the best remedy the forbidden one?”
Perhaps as much as or even more than problem solving, I am fascinated by the notion of taboo and its functioning as unwritten prohibition. How is the elusive ban transmitted and enforced in the absence of explicit instructions for such transmission and enforcement? The answer is through stock narratives that operate virtually as rituals, ignoring conflicting facts, inassimilable scientific theories and appalling outcomes.
- Grace Boggs on Detroit as the exemplar of the Next Revolution
- Boggs sees Detroit as the forefront of changes sweeping the industrialized world. Once the front line of industrialization, Detroit could be the model of what the future of the deindustrialized world looks like. That thought has led her to work on seemingly small projects in Detroit neighborhoods. For instance, she sees urban gardening as the beginning of a major shift in the way we feed ourselves as well as a way to connect generations in a widely inclusive movement.
Excerpted from a profile in the Metro Times on the occasion of her new book, The Next American Revolution Sustainable Activism for the Twenty-First Century. Grace Boggs is a famous activist, now 95. See also the wonderful video lecture below.
- Sharing and Human Cooperation
- How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/how-cooperation-triumphs-over-self-interest/2011/10/01
Jean Lievens has written an extensive synthesis of Yochai Benkler’s new book:
- Book: The Penguin and the Leviathan. How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. Written by Yochai Benkler. Random House, 2011
Jean Lievens:
“Here’s a quit extensive synthesis of “The Penguin and the Leviathan,” in my opinion a wonderful book for anyone who is interested in improving and transforming our economic and political institutions.
Human motivation is a subject that ‘makes me tick’. I really enjoyed reading “The Penguin and the Leviathan”, not only because it paints a much nicer picture of “human nature” than the one used by the free marketeers, but also because it gives a glimpse of a future, higher form of society that will be much more based on human cooperation. I think it is important to see that the seeds of this future society are very much present today.
- Rethinking Darwin to uncover the Evolutionary Roots of Morality
- Books by David Loye: 1) DARWIN’S LOST THEORY: BRIDGE TO A BETTER WORLD; 2) DARWIN’S 2nd REVOLUTION; Benjamin Franklin Press, 2010
Excerpted from a longer review in Tikkun by Dan Levine:
“When most people think of evolution, the first thing that comes to mind is either survival of the fittest or selfish genes. Yet the psychologist and system theorist David Loye argues this is a misreading of the gist of evolutionary theory and the intent of that theory’s founder. Moreover, misreading Charles Darwin has severe social consequences: it fosters the belief that the worst side of humanity is bound to win.
Darwin’s ultimate interest, Loye argues, was in the evolution of human moral sensitivity. He adds that Darwin’s celebrated principle of natural selection was just the first stage on the way to moral development. Loye founded the Darwin Project, with a council of over sixty natural and social scientists, to promote the view that moral development is at the heart of evolution.
- P2P Practices
- Book of the Week: Share or Die
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/book-of-the-week-share-or-die-1/2011/08/22
Share or Die is the first collection of writing from Generation Y about post-college work and life in the 21st Century. It was recently published by Shareable.net, edited by Malcolm Harris.
A new economy based in collaboration rather than competition is growing, and young people are at the cutting edge. Unsatisfied with their parents’ communities, 20-somethings are using technology to build an entire infrastructure of social entrepreneurship dedicated to using less and sharing more. Share or Die chronicles some of these projects and gives readers the tools they need to join this new economy.
- Radical as a radish: on the politics of urban gardening
http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/radical-as-a-radish-on-the-politics-of-urban-gardening/2011/08/24
Book: Radical Gardening. George McKay. France Lincoln, 2010
Excerpted from the introduction by George McKay in Stir magazine:
“Radical Gardening is about the idea of the ‘plot’, and its alternate but interwoven meanings in the garden. There are three. First there is the plot of the land, the garden space itself, how it is claimed, shaped, planted, and how we might understand some of the politics of flowers. Then there is the plot as narrative or story, whether historical or contemporary. The book draws on a small but persistent tradition of writing which sets itself against the dominant narratives of gardening. I trawled through many old and new anarchist and socialist magazines and leaflets to find some of these. Third, there is the notion of the plot as the act of politicking, sometimes a dark conspiracy but more often a positive, humanising gesture in a moment of change. So the ‘plots’ of Radical Gardening are the land itself, the history of the struggle, and the activism of the political conspiracy.
Older Books Rediscovered in 2011
- When dominator systems can’t respond to the challenges of the time, mutuality-based systems become a necessity
- We are emerging from a long dominator era into one that demands mutuality. The dominator (hierarchical) mode appears strong, but in reality is too slow to respond to the crisis of the time. Mutualism, on the other hand, is liable to be too fragile in the face of dominator pressures: the only way to resist these, based on intricacy, “is for small circles to join hands in a collaborative network that is broader and tighter than anything domination can provide.(p 286)” The keys to doing this, which she works out through many practical examples, are “education, empowerment, infrastructure, support networks, liberation and love.
I only discovered Sally Goerner’s work at the Integral Science Institute now, but it seems hugely important for theorizing p2p systems:
Book: After the Clockwork Universe: The Emerging Science and Culture of Integral Society. S. J. Goerner. 1999
Summary:
“We are in the midst of the most dramatic cultural shift in three hundred years. This book explains why a great change is simmering in all facets of our civilization, from economics and politics to science and spirituality. Our inherited concept of a machine world – the clockwork universe – is giving way and the vision of a web world is rising to take its place.
The author weaves current realities and new scientific insights into a fascinating vision of history and science progressing through upheavals and rebirths up to the present day. Humankind, too, is bound into the patterns and processes of this web world, and Goerner describes the already visible signs of an emerging Integral Society in which head, heart and soul need no longer to be at odds.”
Review from Network magazine:
“This is a revolutionary book for conservatives or rather, for “cultural creatives”: for that group of people, making up a quarter of the US population, who “seek a new society in which science and spirit, technology and community work together for the salvation of all,”(p.10). The science is contemporary but restrained (no quantum theory, no extra dimensions). The spirituality is very discreet (no mysticism, no souls, no feminism). And yet Dr Goerner gently builds up a truly revolutionary, and truly practical, picture of the transformation that humanity can now choose to take, and must take if it is to flourish or even survive. Through this book she dramatically broadens the platform of those seeking this transformation, so that a middle ground of concerned individuals can now work alongside those of us who start from a more radical metaphysics.
Her starting point is the idea, now familiar, that civilisations periodically undergo “Big Changes” which involve changes in the overall view of the nature of the world; and that we are on the cusp of such a change, involving the replacement of the “Clockwork” (Newtonian) view by a “Web” view of a universe marked by interconnected intricacy. She begins with a rather scary high-speed drive through Big Changes of the past (historians of science should take a stiff gin before reading this part), and then expounds the scientific core of her thesis. Her approach is governed by the realisation that “the main reason the new science failed to take root is that it remained arcane. … the only way the new science is going to take root is if it is: firstly, clear; secondly, relevant to everyday life; and thirdly, linked to a deeply felt, motivating vision (spiritual).” (p 112)