Commons Based Peer Production on the Blockchain feat. Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation
This week I spoke to Michel Bauwens, the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property and is known for his work on The Political Economy of Peer Production. Much of his work revolves around exploring peer production as an alternative to currently existing capitalism. For this interview we spoke mostly about his recently published P2P ACCOU...
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Hello again. You're listening to the Blockchain Socialist Podcast. I have, a special guest with me. His name is Michel Bowens. He is the founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. He works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. And he's known for his work on the political economy of peer production. And most recently, he's published a book called Peer to Peer Accounting for Planetary Survival, which is really interesting because, it talks a lot about distributed ledger technologies and Blockchain and how those technologies can be leveraged for, helping us survive climate change and things like that. So hi, Michel. How are you doing?
Hi. I'm happy to talk to you especially around this subject.
Yeah. Thanks for coming. So part of the preparation for this interview of course was going through this book that you wrote and of course all of the mentions of Blockchain were really really interesting for me. But I thought I would ask you maybe to preface the entire conversation. Is what exactly you see as particularly promising about Blockchain or distributed ledger technologies, when it comes to working towards planetary survival?
Right. Well, so if if you're familiar with, you know, the open source world, free software, open design, what's happening in there is that we have an Internet of communication, that allows people to freely connect to each other, communicate, but also to self organize and create value together. And so this is called stigmergy. It's the language of the insects, you know, kinda like signaling. And so what we have is we have this what we call whole optical, so systems that allow you to see everything. And this introduces something new in our in our, society and and and and, way of organizing, the economy because instead of doing, something because you get a command, you know, from a corporate hierarchy or a state bureaucracy, you have individuals who can freely join a collaborative ecosystem, see what everybody else is doing, and then adapt their behavior even in real time and say, okay. I'm gonna do this because that's useful to this collective project. And if you look, you know, as a because you have a socialist background in the in the name of the podcast, the rule the rule is, you know, everybody can contribute and everybody can use. Now the the catch is, that this can only work so far at the level of immaterial production. So writing knowledge, writing codes, making these times. So the question is then, what about the rest, you know, like the main the main part of the economy, which is, you know, exchange producing and exchanging goods and services. And so what I'm seeing in the blockchain is this capacity to create shared distributed ledgers. In other words, moving from an Internet of communication to an Internet of transactions. What I'm what I'm saying is that once we can do this, and we can, then we can actually move to coordinating not just the immaterial, economy, but even the material economy. So we can start imagine, you know, open collaborative ecosystems where people can come in and out as individuals, as corporations, as co ops, and see from each other what they're doing, not just the knowledge, but the physical level. So because what is accounting is the way we see the physical world. Right? It's it's the flows of matter and energy that we then, you know, transcribe into monetary value, and then we can see the flows of these things in the accounting systems. And until now, we have had what I call narcissistic accounting because the double entry book accounting that was invented in the fifteenth century by a Franciscan monk, Lucio Pacio, if I pronounce his name right, was an accounting where you could only see what comes in your entity, what goes out of your entity, and if you, you know, if your capital or profit goes up or down. So in other words, you're seeing the world as isolated individual who is competing with everybody else. You can see the world in terms of corporation. And once you have a distributed ledger, a shared accounting system, which can easily then become a shared logistics system, you're in a totally different world because, for example, this is called flow accounting, r e a, resources, events, and agents. Then there's no double entry anymore. There's just a vision of any transaction of how it fits in the system. So everything you do tells you your place in the ecosystem. It's might not be very sexy for a lot of people, but I think this means we now have a fundamental piece of the puzzle of, you know, of a global cyber physical infrastructure. That allows us to produce for human needs with the knowledge of the ecosystem and that includes the natural limits in which we are living. So we can see the web of life. We can see the bees and the birds and, you know, everything that actually that, you know, parts or partners in interdependence. And we can see that and we can see the limits of our resources, and so we can take decisions in function of that. You know, of course, I'm obstructing the political. I'm not saying this is like an automatic thing, but at the very least I think we can start at grassroots levels, you know, prototyping these types of collaborations even within a dominant political economy, which is not friendly necessarily to these kinds of alternative practices. But I think at the local level or, you know, at the trans local level we can actually set up now these kinds of ecosystems and prototype them and try them and experiment with them. So I think this is a huge advance.
So you think that Blockchain or distributed ledger technology, whichever you want to use, is uniquely able to, record the type of, transactions that happen in the world that are outside of sort of classical, profit driven accounting?
Yeah. Yeah. Yes. So there's different ways to do that. But one of the ways that I've looked at in in this report, I don't really call it a book, but, you know, it's, kind of, like an inquiry and then a report of of what is existing. So I I'm looking at real life projects like, reporting three point zero, r3o.org. I think it's is, or something called even more complicated multi assembly. I forgot what it's what it meant. But, anyway, these are projects that look at flows of matter and energy, and how you present that in an accounting system. And so they use this notion that is called thresholds and allocations. So imagine you have a global council for thresholds and allocations, A kind of global NGO that is mandated with keeping track of the limitations of resources. So you have copper. There's so much copper in the world. We expect, you know, through technological innovation, etcetera, that this amount maybe increases 2% a year or that that we use it more productively 2% a year. You know, there's an average of discoveries of of, you know, new mining and and stuff. So that gives you a ledger, effectively a ledger of all the elements of the chemical table, how much there is, how much there will be, and, you know, you can adapt it when there are new discoveries. And then there's there's a second level, which is some kind of discussion or agreement of, you know, what is a fair distribution of this at the global scale. You can immediately see that, of course, this is partially idealistic. But, you know, this is this is something that eventually will be necessary anyway because otherwise, we won't survive. And so the idea is then to come to some kind of agreement, and then the third phase is to integrate this, you know, at the national, regional, bioregional, corporate, cooperative, whatever level you want. And so then suddenly, you have an accounting system which doesn't only give you information about finance and monetary value, which is, you know, very misleading most of the time. You also have direct access to physical thermodynamic knowledge. Right? And so, ideally, you then have these kind of integrated accounts that that take account of, you know, natural resources of people and of financial capital all at the same time. So you have a context based, you know, information system that allows you to make the right decisions knowing what you should know that, you know, how to produce for human needs without destroying the planet, basically.
I when I when I think about because I've talked to others about sort of alternative value accounting. I sort of think about, some products at the grocery store. They'll have a nutrition score or something like that. If it's bio or if it's ethically sourced, I think it's sort of like taking that concept, it seems, but making it much more comprehensive.
Yeah. It's like you have, you have an object and then you have the aspects of the object. And what we now see is only one distorted aspect of the of the that object. Right? We see its financial value in a spec is in a speculative market. And there's multiple studies that show that that it's not working in ecological terms so that it is the information that we should know, you know, that should influence the price usually doesn't happen and, you know, only thirty years too late, which, you know, is mainly because in in capital in a capital system, you're always looking at, you know, futures, right, and imagining a future, and you're investing because you're expecting profit in the future. And you're hardly ever really looking at what is really, really happening now. And so this gives you the at least, you know, like, this kind of multi contextual way of looking at certain things. Now we could also imagine actually, you know, creating currencies that reflect this. Right? So now we have one monetary system, a global competitive system of national currencies. You know, I don't see why that couldn't coexist with other types of currencies. So we would have at least a four level, currency biodiversity. You'd have you'd have the local currencies, which are designed to stimulate and protect local economies, which they are now in full, you know, there's a Cambrian explosion of of these currencies and a lot of them fail, but a lot, you know, enough of them actually work and and they're growing. Then you have the nation state currencies, and then you would have a layer of virtual currencies. And one example of this would be, the Fishcoin project, which is a coin that would be used in the fishing industry and that would tell the fishermen how much they can fish without endangering the reproduction of the fish. Right? So this would be like multilayered currencies that would have a lot more information than just a price point. They they would have ecosystemic knowledge built in. Right? And the fourth layer, which I'm not an expert in, but that was something that Ben Ali Atar was talking about in his book. So he was a Belgian economist who was involved in the creation of the euro and then became an alternative economist. He wrote a wonderful book called The Mystery of Money. And so he is imagining a kind of a basket of currencies, global currency as well, that, you know, would represent a thermodynamic thermodynamic limitations of the world. Right? So this would be a currency that actually represents energy or some other criteria that so that that type of money, you know yeah. And then you can exchange. Right? You can exchange a nation state currency with that global money. Yeah. And that global money's value would be informed by all these other things that that a pure commodity currency doesn't doesn't have. Yeah. Very interesting, and and I heard you interviewed him, but Jeff Emmett once talked about this, and this is very much what what Bernard Yertai was saying in his books. You know, he looks at the history of of monetary systems as precapitalist systems always had a dual currency modality. There was the money of the king, there was the money of debts, and the money that financed, you know, military campaigns.
Mhmm.
But there was also the commons money and that that so you had the coal currency and the warm currency. And for example, as you know, I live here in Thailand, and not too far away from here, you have Bali and there they have still have this currency system that encourages work on the watershed management. Right? So, the people in this in that region are receiving, an alternative currency which has existed for hundreds of years, which represents their contribution to maintaining this vital commons that is, for their survival. And that exists independently of the nation state money. They they use it specifically in that bioregion to maintain the watershed.
I I think it's really interesting because, I mean, Oh, it's funny the sort of conservative critique of, sort of the left sometimes in general is like, you know, you don't the left doesn't want to work. They don't want to, make money. And if you don't make money, that means that you haven't contributed to society. So it's sort of like it's almost like they are replacing what previous societies have recognized as the need for or knowing that the King's money didn't say anything about what they provided to their community, so they had to create these alternative currencies for their survival almost in a way.
Yeah. I I think exactly that is what happened is, you know, I mean, already Aristotle makes a difference between, oikonomia, which is the management of the household And, you know, the household was like the whole community back then, you know, the the ecosystem. And then he talked about chromatistics, which he condemned, and that was the money of the trader is that we that we're making money with money. And what has happened in our system is that this system has taken over everything. And so instead of being a means to an end, it's the end. Right? I mean, accumulating capital is is the goal, is is everything. And that works as long as we are not in mortal danger of destroying our planet. Once we destroy, you know, we have a global crisis, in terms of climate change, peak resource moments, and, you know, whole biodiversity, loss, all of these things together, then we I don't think we can afford a system which doesn't look at the other goals. Right? And that's that's what the whole debate is about. It's to reintroduce, you know, I I usually make a difference with the marketing capitalism. Right? Market is is a scarcity allocation method, and some things are scarce and can be managed by pricing and markets. Like in the Middle Ages, you know, you had the free medieval communes, the cities that were managed by, collection of guilds. They created economies that worked for them, and there were market economies, but they were not about accumulation. You know, like, for example, the rule was if you're a master, a crafts master, you could only have seven, fellows. Right? So the the goal was not accumulation, but they were still buying and selling. But all the rules were designed so that the community wouldn't starve. No. You know, that that was the goal. And that has changed in the eighteenth century, and it achieved an enormous amount of, you know, physical progress, of, you know, welfare systems and and middle classes and and, medical advances. You know, I I think that's what happened. But it doesn't seem able to solve this crisis moment. So I see very little sign that that we are able to do this within the current, you know, rule set. And so when you say a market doesn't have to be capitalist, that means that you can still have entrepreneurial freedom. Right? But within certain rules. And so what we discussed in the beginning, like, when you have these planetary boundaries in your accounting system, you know, with some kind of coercive mechanism, I think that's necessary, like, US free as you can, but you don't have the right to destroy the conditions of life. Seems reasonable to me. And it's not a planning it's not central planning system, but what you have is that what used to be the planning is integrated in the accounting, right, as kind of limit limiting factors. Right? So we have an orchestration orchestrated planning of the limits of human activity. But within that, you're free. And I think that's a good compromise between planning, markets and what I call the stigmergy of the commons, the capacity for mutual coordination. So it's not either or, it's kind of an attempt to have an integration of the best of the markets, the best of the states, and the best of the commons. Yeah.
So, I wanted to get to this quote in the book because I think, I think we would both agree that the current rendition of, of Blockchain, at least big blockchain projects and popular blockchain projects haven't really considered, these extras, you know, alternative sources of value besides financial and speculative type of value. So, in the report it says, for example, when Blockchain projects talk about governance and consensus, what they emphatically don't mean is collective governance based on democratic deliberation, but they merely mention the coordination of individual actions with common intentions. Because Liberalism believes the common good results from individual and corporate competition, it has no clear concept to articulate it other than the accumulation of individual gains, and it does not see the interdependence between the markets and a whole host of societal and environmental realities. The commons and open source dynamics are often appropriated to emphasize emphasize individual freedom, mostly restrained to a $1 one vote context, disregarding the elements of social fairness and ecological sustainability. I think it was a a spot on, criticism of, of sort of I mean, it's a of sort of I mean, it's similar to what the digital revolution was supposed to be and what the blockchain revolution is is sort of promising at the moment, but hasn't yet really delivered.
Well, I I think one of the things that that they don't see, is that any competition for scarce resource, as an iterative game leads to concentration. Right? So the idea is you have on the one side monopoly capitalism, but if we were all free to trade as individuals, then we're equal and you wouldn't have it. But that's historically simply not provable because once you have a competition for a scarce resource, you know, every iteration of the game, somebody wins, which means that the next iteration, one party is already stronger than the other. Right? And so that's why you get if you like, you start with feudalism, you know, in the in the in the ninth century after the collapse of the Frankish, Kingdom in in Europe, what happens is, you know, they have this kind of peer to peer feudalism where every little baron builds his own, you know, castle. But that doesn't last very long because, you know, one baron, you know, invades the other, and so what you sneeze slowly is just, again, the concentration of land, and you end up with, you know, with kings and and and and stuff like that. Right? So that's what you see with Bitcoin. It has a higher Gini coefficient, you which is a metric for inequality than sovereign money. So what are you talking about? You critique, you know, the old system, but then you are making a new one which is even more unequal. So that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I think that's the basic libertarian mistake. And so one of the things I did in that report, which you might have seen is, you know, I can trust and compare value systems because I think design is never neutral. Right? Let's let's take the Internet, for example. It starts with non commissioned officers telling their, you know, their officers because it was a military project, you know, DARPA project. They tell them, well, you know, if there's a nuclear war, we can't survive because we can't communicate with you. So we have to make it resilient and distribute it. And then you have a bunch of scientists that say, oh, wow. We can use this too. And they actually physically, you know, take the, the lines and put them in their offices. And and so they subvert the military project to be an open science project. That's step two. And then step three is when, what's his name? Tim Berners Lee says, well, everybody should be able to use the Internet, and I am gonna make a browser and and a hypertext so that everybody in the world can use it. And so suddenly, you have a civic Internet, you know, for brief time, the golden age. And then once you have people, well, then business starts getting interested. And he said, no. No. We can't have that peer to peer stuff. Let's reintroduce client server, technological infrastructure so that we can control some of these flows and create scarcity in in that abundance because we can't have a market when everything is abundant. And then in the fifth iteration, the states say, oh my god. Something is happening there. You know, they're trading with money and not paying their taxes and saying things that, we shouldn't allow them to say, and then you have a surveillance on top of it. Right? So what I'm trying to say here is that you have one tech, but it has been influenced by various social layers in conflict, and the result is a mishmash of you know both peer to peer and control mechanisms that you know and profit making and all of that that gives the mess that we have today and with blockchain, it's a bit even actually more monological because if you look at almost all the the founding principles of the blockchain, they are specifically libertarian. They are specifically from a belief in, you know, libertarian free market, ideology, Austrian economics. Yeah. And so this is all coded in the design and, you know, they think this is economics. Right? There's one kind of economics and that's the kind of economics where in fact you have, you know, maybe 80 different schools of economics and they all say different things, and that's not reflected in the blockchain. So the blockchain is very specifically designed, you know, for particular group of people. But what I'm saying is we can design it differently. And so you can have, like, the libertarian version of the blockchain and a commons oriented generative version of blockchain. So you can say, well, instead of individual smart contracts, which start from the point of view that we're all isolated individuals making contracts with each other and that's there's no societies ever existed that works that way. We're always already born in existing social systems and there's there's no real social contract that individuals can make individually, we could say, well, we can have Ostrom contracts, right, which which is like collectively we can make rules and agreements that will manage a particular, you know, virtual sphere. Instead of commodity currencies like Bitcoin, $1, one vote, we can have mutual credit currencies, and so on. So, you know, I I have, like, 10 different things. And I I what I would like to is not, of course, to say it all has to be my way, but to say we need distribution and diversity in the design of our distributed ledger so that we can use it for different purposes and for different value systems.
That's basically the argument. Yeah. I I would agree. I I think what is really interesting about, the work that I've registered you've done in this comparison is indeed you have a lot of, basically trying to mirror what is currently existing to what is possible in a in a more ideal, I guess, economy, in a commons based economy. And so one of the ways that you do it, was in this sort of two by two quadrant framework that you use. So, like you mentioned before, it's this framework for how technology is designed. So you have on the x axis, extracted versus generative, and on the y axis, And in the extract Centralized. Centralized. Sorry. And, in the extractive and centralized corner, you have net archical capitalism, which you call the Leviathan, which is I guess, the currently existing capitalism. And it's sort of like the dominant technological design. This is like Uber. This is like all of the unicorns are all based on this type of design model. But then on the lower left corner, which is extractive but distributed, you have distributed capitalism. So I guess I'm wondering if this is really the corner of the libertarian blockchain ideology sort of technological design?
Yes. I you know, it starts on this idea of creating systems where everybody has equal access, and that's that's good. But then it kind of focus only on market transaction. It sees individual purely as a market actor. And and then it it falls straight to this, you know, false expectation that total freedom maintains equality. And what I'm saying is that, I think we just talked about it, is that every competition for scarce resource actually leads to monopolization eventually. So they, you know, they make a a detour, but they arrive at the same place as what they want to replace. And so the other side of the quadrant has the local and global versions of regenerative work, networks. Right? So the local level, what you have is what I call the urban commons. The the cosmo local, side. What does that mean is you have if you're doing permaculture, you're with your feed in the mud, you're growing, you know, vegetables locally, but you're connected with a global permaculture, community. And there was an Italian sociologist that said, now we all slok, and he meant small, local, open, and connected. Right? So it's this kind of integration and the rule that I that I've read somewhere and I use it, a lot now, but I forgot who said it first, was everything that's light should be global and shared, and everything that's heavy should be as local as possible. So we talk about the material subsidiary, the of of production. So if you can do it in 100 kilometers, you know, why get it from 3,000? That's that's the basic idea. So why import, you know, butter from New Zealand in Patagonia if they already have the best butter in the world? And why is this important? Because we spend three times as much matter energy on transport than on production. Right? So in terms of sustainability of the planet, this is the model that that is very important first, first, of all because it reduces the mileage, of transport. And secondly, mutualization by itself is a huge saver of matter and energy. So for example, there's a study that if you combine cargo bikes with pedelecs, you know, these electric bikes, you can have the same amount of transport of public of of goods in the city, and you can save 98% of the energy. If you have a real car sharing application, like, not Uber, which is competitive and so people, you know, drive even more because they want to have the right place at the right time to have the clients. But let's say a block in a neighborhood that says, okay. We are gonna have only 10% of cars so that everybody can drive when they want to, but we don't need individual cars. Yeah. You know, that's that says 90% of cars. Right? So if we don't want a future where we have this kind of collapse of of complex systems because we can't afford to maintain them, what I'm saying is there is a way and the ways to create these smart cyber physical infrastructures, which allows to mutualize a lot of our provisioning systems, have a much lower footprint, but maintain the complexity that we need for modern society. So it's not just, you know, like, yes, material degrowth in the sense that we have to use less, but that doesn't mean going back to the, you know, early middle ages and and no. It doesn't mean that. It we can use that tech in a really good way to, you know, to save on our usage of matter and energy. Right? And it's a combination of neutralization and this new form of tech which enables it to scale at a global level. And that's something new in our civilization. We didn't have that before.
Yeah. So then it it really goes against the, sort of neoliberal thinking that we should optimize, you know, production in particular sites where it is cheapest because it sort of as well falls along this like Hayekian idea of like price being an information aggregator that has taken in everything and it gives you the best possible, result out of it?
It's because they only integrate certain things. So it it works to us in a certain fashion, but you have all these externalities that they don't count. Right? And the externalities are are born out by either the people or the state. And there's a study of the CAC 40, which is like the stock market in France, that none of these 40 multinationals would be profitable if they would have to pay for the damage that they're doing. Zero. Right? And so that's what we need is we need an accounting system, we need a monetary system that integrates the value of those externalities so that, you know, we don't live in a fake economy. We live in a real in a real economy.
But I guess if you're if you're a liberal listening to this, you would be, like, probably flabbergasted and, appalled by the suggestion if it would make, you know, all these companies go bankrupt, then it's bad for business.
Well, we we can see today. How many companies do you think would survive today without massive state support? Probably a lot. 1010%. Maybe 10% will survive. Right? So, I mean, now what we will see is with with the COVID is a massive amount of bankruptcies in the SME sector because they're they're not really protected. But, you know, at the same time, trillions of dollars have been created, you know, by the central banks that are pumped in the financial system. And they keep these big, you know, banks and multinationals alive. But imagine how many of them would survive without it. So, basically, what's happening is the state is taking upon itself the externalities Yeah. So that they can survive. Right? Yeah. And and and that's that's a fictional economy.
So then what are some strategies for transitioning into the common side of this of this framework? You you've mentioned sort of a couple of examples, but do you what are like something that someone can maybe look up,
as an example? Well, so here's what I'm what I'm dreaming about is that we would have public distributed ledgers. So imagine you know you're in a city and you need to decarbonize now. Everything is done with competitive procurement and the problem with that is that you can only win this kind of competitions, you know, winner take all by externalizing. So you're gonna give the public money to the cheapest, which means the per the entity that was most successful in externalizing costs.
I
would do it differently, and the idea here is, okay, let's decarbonize, and every citizen, every company, every coop is free to lodge its, decarbonization effects on a public ledger, you know, peer reviewed and verified and tokenized. Right? And then you fund it either through you know public money because it's a societal priority or by getting. Input from entities that profit from those positive externalities. So I give you an example. There's a community land trust movement in France, a fairly big one, a €100,000,000 capital. And already in 2016, they calculated in a report that their activities as organic farmers saved the French state €360,000,000 per year. And today there's no mechanism to to give that back. So, you know, they they are doing it with their money and saving the state all that money and they're not getting any support. So if you look at the financial, I think that organic farmers get about 10% of what industrial farmers get from, you know, from various governments. Right? So they're they're usually penalized for doing the good thing and that's why they stay marginal. But imagine that the water pollution agency would agree that say, okay, you know, 50%, 30%, you know, whatever percentage of what we saved thanks to you, we put that in the token in the in financializing the tokens from the system. So that would be revolutionary because nowadays, you cannot be directly funded for generative work. You get rich by extractive activity, and then you need state based taxation for redistribution or philanthropy. And I think with these ledgers, we could actually create systems that directly fund, you know, generative work. But what it requires is a new vision of value. Right? So before capitalism value was in the land, and then value became, you know, labor or commodities, whatever, you know, you you want to say about the current system. But it's by sucking value from labor and natural resources that you become rich. Yeah. And so we need a new, what I call a contributory value regime, you know, which is a social agreement about what is valuable, you know, what what makes our society better. And that needs to be funded.
Hey everyone, if you're enjoying this episode so far and want to be sure that more content like this can be created, you can donate to my efforts through Patreon. So if you go to patreon.com/theblockchainsocialist, you can donate starting at $3 per month or more to help me out and join the newest patrons like Anthony, Vigard, Alexei, and Taco Tex Mex. At the moment, I've spent more on this project than I've ever earned from it due to hosting costs, so any amount really helps. And I've already released the first of the shorter Patreon exclusive episodes where I give my view on certain questions. So for this first one, I've started with giving my thoughts on the question that I've received a lot, which is, is there a socialist blockchain? And of course, I'll still be making free content like this interview to help spread the message that blockchain does not need to be used to further entrench capitalist exploitation. So if that message resonates with you, I hope you'll consider helping out. If you can't help out financially, no worries. One thing you can do is to subscribe to the podcast on whatever your preferred platform is, including iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube. And please leave a five stars and share the episode with someone you think might be interested in the topic. But that's it for me. Let's get back to the interview with Michelle Bowens from the Peer to Peer Foundation. So, in the, in the reports, you you you make the the distinction that there is sort of blockchain world which has some, some of these assumptions that you don't agree with. And then you have what you call this Post Blockchain area. And so I was curious just to hear from you what do you consider to be Post Blockchain? And what are the limitations if if you know of of blockchain as a technology in relation to facilitating an economy based on pure production and the commons?
Right. Well, so so what I'm doing in the report is kind of distinguishing the idea and concept of a shared distributed ledger from the blockchain, which is historically the first mechanism that enabled it. Right? But there's no reason that we cannot find other mechanisms that would, also enable shared distributed ledgers. And, so, an example would be the Holochain project. Right? So if you look at, the blockchain and Ethereum, so their system is where every new transaction has to be verified with all other transactions that already took place. And so that's a recipe for exponential energy usage. And the bit Bitcoin is is is also designed that way. So it it kind of is typical because, you know, it doesn't take into account the externalities. Right? It it just assumes like infinite energy and the whole and and and that's what the whole chain says, and I I kind of agree with that, but it actually create as a world computer. You know, actually, it claims to be peer to peer, but it's creating this one world system where ultra all transactions have to fit in. What Holochain does is it says, you know, every agent should be autonomous. And when you connect with other agents in a collective project, you should be able to create your own little hollow chain. And what you then need is simply interoperability. It's the capacity of every distributed ledger to connect with any other distributed ledger. In this system, the only thing you need is local verification. There is no exponential use of MNG because they need to verify everything, you know, with all other transactions. So that's just one idea that exemplifies that, you know, it's basically the same idea of having a global ledger or global ledger capability, but with a different philosophical background, and so the design of the technology is different. And to go back to the four quadrants that we started discussing in your earlier question, that's what I wanted to show with that is that, you know, these are four ecosystems that are being created right now. They all exist. They're all growing, and they all have fundamentally different value orientations. And, you know, we if you want to live in a pluralistic society, a pluralistic economy, then we should know that because that means we can design things differently. So we just don't have, you know, one system that rules of all, like Facebook, you know, for communication and Uber for car sharing, for ride sharing. We would have open standards interoperability, but the lots of players would be enabled and empowered to to do their thing. And so to come back with your idea of, you know, what's the vision behind the transition, So I still believe in the role of the state as a common good institution because every commons only thinks about itself. Blockchain is a commons, open source, but it only thinks about Blockchain. It doesn't think about the energy it's using. You know, and so we need institutions that take care of the whole. Whether that be a whole territory, you know, like a nation state structure, or whether that be actually virtual infrastructures, you know, common good institutions for virtual organizations. And so I talk about public commons corporation protocol. So instead of having a bureaucratic state, you know, top down that that claims it's sovereign based on representation, we can also have a state form that is community oriented, that is commons oriented that says, we will enable you, the people, to be individually and collectively autonomous as long as you don't destroy the common good. Right? So it's kind of a framework in which our freedom can operate.
Yeah. Sort of a rather than a top down vision, a more bottom up approach to this at least the functions of the states. I think Yeah. Some people may argue or not whether or not that counts as a state.
But Yeah. I mean, the the the, you know, the vocabulary is less important than the idea of something common. Yeah. That because here's where both left libertarians and right libertarians find each other. Right libertarians believe that the the the optimistic individual is the basis of society. And you create society by making contracts individual to individual. You know, left wing libertarians believe that groups create, you know, councils and and whatever, And they collectively decide, and they connect with other collectives and create society that way. You know, that's the the idea of back on in and stuff. Yeah. I I think they're both in error. I I there's never a situation like that. I think we always already in an existing society. We, you know, we can change it, but it doesn't change purely by this atomistic processes. There is a field. That's what I'm saying. We are operating into a field and that field needs its own institutions. Maybe wrong, but that's that's that's my thinking.
We'll have to try and find out. So then So you talk a lot about this commons based peer production, as being an alternative economy to capitalism and being generative versus extractive value. To me, when I read about it, it sounds a lot like some type of Socialism. It sounds socialistic at the very least. Bro, I was curious to hear from you whether or not you would categorize this as, you know, as Socialism within the Socialist, you know, umbrella or would you categorize it as a completely different mode of production?
Well, I worked a few months with Eric Owen Wright in Madison and he had this thing called the Readtopia Project, which was very close to to my thinking as well. And he I think he had the best definitions for socialism, you know, as socialism, which is any type of society which is run with social goals. Like, the goal is not capital accumulation. The goal is social well-being. And so and then within that, you can have a wide variety of options. So what happened is that three types of movements became hegemonic within the Social East tradition, and it was anarchism, no state, reformism, you know, the long march to the institutions and we changed it from within, or radical revolutionary taking of power, you know, the Leninist kind of option. And that has been kind of what we think of as being socialism is these three different, you know, major traditions. But there were a lot of other traditions, like mutualism, cooperativism, associationism, social credit, distributism. We've all forgotten about them. And I actually think that we, should create a genealogy, you know, that is partially continuation of these attempts. The thing is they didn't really have, you know, scaling technology right then. Yeah. And that's that's the difference. I think that, you know, peer to peer dynamics could only work within what is called, you know, the Dunbar number, which is 150 people who know and trust each other. And once you scale as a society, then you have to have hierarchy because of the transactional costs and the coordination and communication costs. And that meant you had to be big to win. So you were very constrained in what you can do locally because, you know, if you're all peace and love and your neighbor is, I'll grab it from you, you're done with. Right? And that promotes more hierarchical, aggressive, types of civilizations. Once you can say, we can globally work together to make a free software, and we can do it without necessarily you telling me what to do. We can create very strong trans local and transnational institutions. And so what I'm thinking is the the current system doesn't work anymore, including democracy and and and, you know, classic socialism because we have nation states, which is capital state and nation. You know, it's like a a triangle that supports each other, then they actually were invented at the same time. But capital has become transnational. And so whatever we do, you know, between state and nation, at the national level doesn't have enough power to change, and and, you know, challenge the power of capital. Mhmm. Once you have trans local, transnational forms of power at the civic level, right, these common spear producers, planetary guilds, I think then we can start challenging at the same level the power of capital. And I think this is what what we are trying to do slowly and not fast enough for sure. But I think this is what humanity is groping for. It's this new level of organization that is beyond the nation. And I think the big challenge for the future is this meshing of both. Right? So we we will still live in territories. So how do we organize at the regional level, bioregional level? And I don't think we're ready to replace nation states anytime soon, even though they are largely losing power and becoming dysfunctional. But then we have what we're doing now is we're building all these translocal and transnational collaborations. And they're also creating their their, you know, their, own institutions. So I look here in Chiang Mai where I live, where before COVID, we had 25,000 remote workers. And they have all kinds of things they are organizing, you know, at a global level. They can go to Medellin, they can go to Tenerife, they can go to Bali, and they meet the same people and they have, you know, the six flag theory. I don't know if you know about that, which is a libertarian, you know. So they kind of look together, like, where's the best way to have an NGO to put our taxes? So they're actually using the nation states for their own neo nomadic ends, You know? But that's, of course, as as libertarians, who are in it for, you know, maximizing their their income.
Yeah. Of course.
But, they're doing it. And and and other people are doing, you know, lots of things like the Impact Hub. I mean, there's a lot and so I think this is what we, you know, will take some time, but this is, I think, what we are working on. Yeah. So I think that it it seems to me that,
the Internet is just such an important resource. This communications network, across national lines and across geography that we have to somehow leverage in a way that we can collectively organize to, you know, go for our own interests and potentially fight back against the interest of capital,
in the long run. K. We we have we have to do like the bourgeoisie did with printing. Right? So we have capitalism because the bourgeoisie, you know, the burgers of the cities use print to organize themselves, and to organize their business networks, and and that created the nation state, you know. And we as commoners have to use the tools at our disposal to create types of market relations and types of state relations that work for us. And, you know, just change our environment so that it works for our company. And I'm not saying it's easy, and I'm saying, you know, it's not conflictual. But so I, you know, I don't wanna give in to Internet pessimism because how bad as you can see things can be on social media and stuff. People are still sort of organizing. You know, you go to Austin, you'll find a community fisheries association where people, you know, order directly from the fishermen, and they use Facebook. Yeah. You know, and that's that's the reality. It is that people are, so the the the problem that we have now, I think, is in terms of, you know, when we had, before printing, right, it was very expensive to make text. So we we had a bit of text, you know, the Bible and the Quran, and everybody was focused on the text, and that created a unified society. Then we had printing, and it started breaking down in nation states and, you know, and blocks of people within nation states. Now we have 32 mimetic tribes in The US alone, you know, according to one study. So so we have that's a problem. We we don't know how to deal with it that we have a real fragmentation of, you know, ideology. Yeah. And I'm using a words, and you are using the word socialist, and we made we might mean totally different things with it, you know. Yeah. Because we no longer in the same space learning from each other. That's one of the issues that we have with, you know, the online fragmentation. So, you know, Stigler, the French philosopher who died a few months ago, he said, the Internet is a pharmacon, which is a Greek word that means both medicine and poison. You can't have one without the other.
Yeah. It's a super complex issue that, yeah. I mean, sometimes people think socialism is just when the government does stuff and other people think it's, you know, something else. And obviously, I have my own thoughts on it.
So I I I avoid the concept to be honest because it's it's so misunderstood that you have to spend so much time explaining what you mean and, you know, and and and a lot of people in the right have these atavistic, you know, especially in The US, they they react, you know, very emotionally to these things. And a lot of what we say would actually be acceptable to them if you say, you know Yeah. If you just talk if you just describe it, they agree with you. This is this is not what we mean, you know, this is, because there's also with within the right wing and I think we should talk to them, to be honest. You know, it's this this notion of community and so the way I see it, this is my critique on both the left and the right. You know, if you're on the right, you're in group oriented. You know, my my team, my company, my nation, and and you're kind of, you know, distrustful or hostile to the outside. But it means that, you know, if you're let's say you're an evangelical and you are sick, they'll come to visit you in the hospital. I am almost sure of it. Right? Now if you're a Trotskyist on the left, and you're sick, there's a lot of chance that nobody will visit you because they're all all busy saving the working class. And they're just just too busy, because so that's the you know, on the left, we're more abstract and we we we we have a circle of care which is, you know, beyond our own team. Right? So it's always about diversity, inclusion, you know, solidarity. So we want to extend the circle. But by this kind of obstruction, we also sometimes lose track of the people around us, the people close to us. Yeah. And yeah. So I I think we should not be too righteous. You know, we should also be able to talk to other people and, you know, not label, but just, like, explain this is, you know
So the next thing I wanted to get to, when you're describing this sort of commons oriented economy, you use now a separate two by two quadrant that I think, is also pretty interesting where you have on the x axis profit versus benefits and on the y axis local versus global. So, this is describing sort of the different types of cooperatives within this type of, potential economy that could, I guess, oppose the sort of net article capitalism that we have today. So on the top left as global and for profit, you have platform cooperatives. And then on the other side of that, on the benefit side, you have what's called protocol cooperatives. And I've read before, you use the example of Occupy, for one, where there is sort of a shared common protocol infrastructure and rules. But so then, to me, it almost sounds like in the human world, we have this sort of shared symbols. And that's sort of like a protocol cooperative. Whereas in the digital world, you sort of have shared data standards, in a certain sense. So it almost seems to me like something like Antifa even could be considered a protocol cooperative just because it's not a it's not an organized, organization. They have certain symbols that they share with each other, certain values.
Yeah. Let me refine that. So this this this, quadrant is actually an answer to the first quadrant. Right? So you have an Antarctica, distributed capitalism, urban commons, and global, open source communities. And so this this what you describe here is is is me as a commoner saying, okay, what can we do to change it? So what can we do to change the target of capitalism is to create our own platforms. So because what they do is, you know, I call them predominant companies because they're not exploiting labor. They're exploiting our corporation. Right? They enable us to do p two p stuff. Yeah. And then they extract value from that. Then, you know, this is not a classic capitalist company which hires workers and then gets surface value. No. They they let us communicate. They let us exchange stuff on eBay and and find the ride sharing on Uber and find a free apartment, but they don't build anything anymore. Right? So I somewhat ironically, I called them Proudhonian capitalists because Proudhon was said said against Marx said, surplus value comes from corporation. And he lost that debate, but I think now he's certainly right. So so platform co ops are saying, okay. Let's let's do what we do because we are it's actually a good thing, you know, to find the ride sharing is a good thing. It saves, if it's well done, it saves a lot of money in terms of transport. If you're, you know, if you're an individual and you have an empty room, you know, you can avoid building new hotels, why not? It's, you know, it's a efficient use of space. Right? So it the thing in itself is not bad. It's bad because it's exploited and extracted. So you do it on your own platform. That means that the whole surplus is reinvested in the ecosystem. Then in in terms of distributed capitalism, ledger co ops, you know, so that what we talked about is all these principles where we would have some kind of organization for these alternative principles. Right? And that would be like a ledger cooperative, which can be, for example, a data co op, maybe. You know, where you decide to put data collectively as a commons and and and there's rules about how, you know, are we ready to sell these data or not? Or or, you know, maybe some individuals can obtain, others can opt out. I mean, there's various ways to do it, but it's our data. Right? So we we put it on the ledger and we manage it ourselves. Then the protocol co ops, yes, so I think and I I think this is a critique that I would now have on occupy and 15 m is we discovered that we could mobilize very rapidly, but that's it. We we're not organized enough. And so it's very rapid mobilization, but it's also very rapid disaggregation. And it's just not working. And so I think now we should actually, focus on capital, which is community land trusts, housing co ops. We have to own things collectively, put it in a trust. And on top of that would be these protocols of cooperation. Right? So one example I give is, okay, we can regulate our Airbnb, which is already done. There's a coalition of 40 cities trying to regulate Airbnb. But why not support Airbnb? You know, which is, like a solidarity economy project, and you you can only have individuals with extra rooms. You can't have, like, fake hotels with 200 rooms on the system. Yeah. And, you know, so they they've changed quite a bit of things. So it's it's it does all the good things of Airbnb without all the bad things. And it doesn't, you know, create gentrification and stuff like that. Well, why not invest as a league of cities, you know, in a global open design co op that makes the the software for all the fair BNBs in the world so they can, you know because now what we're doing is I went to Tuscany, you know, in the food networks of the solidarity economy alone in one province, 13 pieces of different software to organize the production distribution of food in these collective purchasing groups. That's ridiculous. Wow. Wow. You know, what a waste what a waste of energy and talent. Right? So that's where I see mutualization of these efforts where you have where you're cosmo local. You know, you have a global open source community supported by the cities, for example, with money and some physical finance and impact finance. But then you have, you know, you take it locally, you adapt it, and you create a local co op to do fair BNB in Brussels. Right? You don't need a multinational to do that, but you're still working together, everywhere. Yeah. So that's kind of the the thinking is what what what in each case can we do to to push things more towards the commons? And the central idea that I have is that the commons should be in the future the central human institution that to which the state and the market have to adapt. As opposed to now where civil society is like the leftover and that's why we say non profit or, you know, non governmental. Right? Because it's like secondary. Yeah. No. No. No. This is this is not secondary. This is primary. You know, our well-being depends on the commons.
So then the cosmological, it sounds like that it is a basically shared standards, but implemented within a local context and sort of maintaining the collaboration between the different users of the same piece of common architecture, essentially.
So one one one anecdote I'd like to tell you is that you know, I can't remember the reference, but this was something that I found really interesting. So it was a study of the Inca, empire. And, you know, sometimes it expanded, sometimes it contracted. And, you know, I wouldn't call it a socialist, organization. But, you know, in that time period so for example, if as a tribe you join the Incas, you would have access to this kind of, you know, terracing agriculture. So they had, like, 40 levels and 40 different biotopes. So any tribe that would join the Incas would have, like, nine times more food. And when the system collapsed, they had nine times less food. So you had a real collapse of of population. And so why am I telling you this? Because this is an argument for corporation. Right? This is knowledge corporation is really crucial. Innovations don't just come from inside. It comes from everywhere. And if you close yourself off, you're going to get poorer and poorer and poorer. And you're gonna descend to a subsistent level. And is that really what we want? I don't think so. You know, I I'd like to listen to use my headphones in twenty years if I can, you know. Yeah. Although, you know, if I would be happy to live in a village where there is a good library and it has five computers for everyone. You know what I mean? That's, I don't know if you're familiar with the of communities and you know this is like a very it's a conservative, Christian community, but but based on household, it's not monks and nuns. They're Hutterites and Baptist and they're very, very, doing very well. They have 3,000 people in the world. You know, they started with 20, and they can use smartphones individually because they see this undermining their community. But if they need it, they can use them and, you know, they have a place where people can use computers. You know, like, if push comes to shove and we really go in in full retreat, I think this is what mutual mutualization can do is is, you know, we maintain a level, of collective well-being through mutualization.
Yeah. I guess it's the idea that you don't need to use everything that you own all the time. Therefore
Yeah. That's the thing with cars. Right? Why why did I say 10% of cars? Because, cars are only used 5% of the time. So if you have 10% of cars, that's a double buffer. So that means that mathematically, you know, at any time, there will be enough cars in the pool for everybody to have access to the car. You know, probably some rules, you know, like the pool has to be big enough and stuff like that, but that's that's the basic principle. And that's the enormous advantages of mutualization and pooling resources is that it brings down the human footprint. And so there's this movement, it's called factor 20 reduction, which is, you know, people are working on this to look at, like, urban provisioning systems and think, can we do the same thing with only 5% of the energy? And for example, you know, using cargo bikes and Peddleks would do that for public transport of goods in the city. Yeah. Have you heard of the idea of,
the use of wrecked?
Yes. Like usage as opposed to property?
Yeah. It's sort of like this idea that you, technically in life, you know, you only own something for as long as you're alive or as long as you use it and it's sort of like in in reality their ownership isn't a real
thing. Yeah, it used to be actually the way societies worked until maybe the fifteenth century, like, you know, even in Germanic tribes, you know, at the time of Rome, they, you know, in order to own the land, you had to work it. If you didn't work on it, it wasn't yours. So that was that was that principle. I I think even the Romans had it, but even though they had, you know, stronger property regime. But I think, and it's still in civil law, you know, it's, it still exists and and that's indeed. So in France, there's a lot of work and I I, you know, France, French information doesn't really go easily to the English speaking world, but there's enormous amount of commons based innovations in France at the administrative level, you know, that really people are thinking about this and you know, thinking about constitutional amendments and and, regulations for public commons cooperation and call for common. There's 15 of them instead of, you know, competitive procurement. So there's a lot of work being done on on rethinking law. And this is interesting in France because it's the most extreme bourgeois property law in the world because, you know, Napoleon, you know, wiped out everything and and created his own code. So it's the most radical proletarian regime in the world, much more than the Anglo Saxon which has, you know, the common law tradition, which has, you know, quite a few common elements in it still, but in France that was mostly wiped out. And so that's that's that's really important because, you know, law determines a lot of what we can and cannot do, so we have to work on that.
Okay. So then maybe to to finish it off, do you know, well, where can people follow you and read more about your work?
So I have a wiki which has 22,000 article and it's, you know, very finely grained, like, p two p accounting and p two p spirituality and p two p business and post corporate organizational forms. And, you know, it's it's has a lot. And everything in there exists. That's the rule. So I believe in seed forms that exemplify the society we want. Not just, you know, we should do this, we should do that. No. No. These are all things that actually people are doing already. It's small, it's emerging, but it exists. So that way you'll find the wiki, wiki.p2pfoundation.net, wiki.p2pfoundation.net. So maybe you can put that, I'll add that in the description. Yeah. Then we have a more political site that's called commonstransition.org which talks more about, you know, reforms and and and policies and stuff. And that's where the, the report is as well. Yeah. Yeah. Then we have a, I know I get critiques for this, but I think we have to be where the people are. So we use Facebook and we have, an open p two p forum Mhmm. Which, you know, about 7,000 people. And then we have six other forms, but that's probably the entry point. And then I'm on Twitter, mBalance and then also p two b foundation is on Twitter as well. Alright. Cool. Yeah. I'm I'm a I'm a intensive curator. That's, you know, I'm a former librarian, so I I I spent three hours a day, you know, looking at what's happening in the world and then sharing it with my audiences. Nice. Because I, you know, I think the more the more you know what is happening, the more confidence you get yourself. Right? You know, you're not alone. A lot of people are doing this. Learn from each other. Don't reinvent the wheel all the time, you know. Know that you're not alone and that even if you have the the most brilliant idea,
probably you're not the only one to have that. Yeah. So I recommend people to to check out the work and, yeah. Thanks a lot for for coming on and taking the time. Thank you. Big pleasure. Yeah.