michel on mutual coord econ
michel bauwens on mutual coord econ (michel on alt forms of coord)
via 1st half of this tweet [https://x.com/mbauwens/status/1853308725219758452]:
ok everyone, after some back and forth with the local organizers of 4seas, i.e. Zik and Sam Chua (cc @devlewis18), here is the final announcement on tomorrow’s event:
Speakers: Michel Bauwens, Adam Arvidsson, ..
Part 1: Who’s changing the world in the Digital Anthropocene? Discussion by two authors, Adam Arvidsson and Michel Bauwens, on two book projects that were largely written in Thailand. Books:
* The Digital Anthropocene by Adam Arvidsson & Vincenzo Luise
* Mutual Coordination Economics… by Michel Bauwens
What will the next civilizational order look like? Will the transition be ordered or chaotic? What are the most important challenges we face in the Anthropocene? What could the politics of the Anthropocene look like? What role will digital technologies play in this transition?
Michel Bauwens, founder of the Peer to Peer Foundation, along with sociologists Adam Arvidsson and Vincenzo Luise, address these questions in two books stemming from different but converging intellectual paths — macrohistory and sociological research. Both books share a common goal: to move beyond established models and ‘political correctness’ to discover new pragmatic and realistic ways to engage with these issues.
notes/quotes from this page on p2p foundation wiki [https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Towards_Mutual_Coordination_Economics]:
Towards Mutual Coordination Economics
I would first like to introduce the basic concept of relational grammar, which was introduced by sociologist Alan Page Fiske in Structures of Social Life. This understanding is crucial to understand the value logic of how a society allocates resources. So basically, for Fiske, there are four fundamental ways, for value to be distributed:
need to try sabbatical ish transition to see the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
First is the process of ‘Communal Shareholding’. This applies whenever an individual exchanges with a whole or a totality, and gets the benefits from that totality, so if a hunter or gatherer brings back food to the family, he gets the benefits of the mutual support of the family; and when an open source developer adds code to Linux, he gets the benefit of a better Linux. These are the practices that we now understand under the name of commoning, and the institution of the ‘commons’.
as long as it’s sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
The second process of value exchange is called Equality Matching, better known as the Gift Economy. This is all about giving, from one entity to another, from individual to individual, from family to family, clan to clan. Paradoxically, and this is why it is called Equality Matching, giving creates inequality; the person who gives accrues prestige and ‘credit’, and the person who receives feels in debt. Thus, the cycles of gifting.
The third way is called Authority Ranking. This is when resources are distributed according to a status hierarchy, and thus, this modality already implies some type of class society.
The fourth modality is market pricing, the exchange of commodities according to criteria of equal value, exchanged at the precise moment of transaction, rather than open-ended, as in the gift economy.
Michael Hudson,.. organic model oriented around ‘harmony’, and kept the merchant classes, but especially the rentier classes, as a more minor part of their societies. This was done through redistribution techniques such as Clean Slate legislation and the Jubilee, which would periodically eliminate debt. But in Classical Greece, the rentier class took power, created a social counter-revolution, which created democracy and for example the Tribunate in Rome, permanent self-defense institutions for the people, to keep the rentier power in check. Hence, the West was marked by maritime power, the dominance of merchant property, and more democratic forms of social compromise.
In this context, it is important to understand that most often, wars are actually systemic struggles between the various elites associated with particular modes of wealth allocation, since the control of the surplus is paramount. Civilizations depend on a surplus that extract the surplus value from the farmers and the land, creating the managerial elites and funding the cities, while in modernity, the derivative surplus of industry, creates the technological and scientific class.
It is in this context that mutual coordination economics emerges as a potential ‘solution’. What do we mean? So remember, 5,000 years ago, a great bifurcation occurred from kinship-based tribal organization, to market and state-based civilizational models. *My argument is that we are reaching a similar bifurcation point, in which neither market nor state based logics and institutions are sufficient. Instead, **we need massive cosmo-local coordination mechanisms that can operate in a distributed fashion.
*were they ever good/sufficient?
**rather.. need massive cosmo local coord mech to connect us .. if we focus on augmenting our legit interconnectedness (ie: nonjudgmental expo labeling).. the allocation ness will take care of itself..
What is emerging now however, *is entirely different. With the invention of digital networks, which were democratized by the browser and the Web in 1993, we created a global infrastructure for mutual signaling. While this is of course not a return to kin-ship based gifting and commoning, it has created first of all an open source economy, in which knowledge commons create new economic sectors, which represented one-sixth of the US workforce in 2011 already. That open source economy was quickly used to create the new dominance of what I have called netarchical capital, and what Yanis Varoufakis has called cloud capital, and a model of rentier-based techno-feudalism. Then, in 2008, as a response to the crisis, we saw a tenfold increase in urban commons in just a decade, creating new urban provisioning systems that are **centered around commons-based infrastructures. Finally, we have seen the emergence of a trans-local crypto-economy.
*not new.. rather.. same song if any form of m\a\p
**don’t think we’ve seen/tried a legit common ing infra to date.. because haven’t yet tried/seen the unconditional part of left to own devices ness
All these forces have been building an infrastructure of mutual signaling, open ecosystems that are based on *holoptism, i.e. the visibility of all transactions from anywhere in the network. While incorporating market incentives and practices, and taking into account the state-based jurisdictional order, this emergence can not be reduced to the simple dichotomy of market and state, because they function around a commons of common code, and a commons of joint cooperation protocols, that are independent of any single commercial or state player.
*1\ visibility makes no diff if allocating non legit needs/wants 2\ if people are observing transactions.. then that’s a form of m\a\p
So what if the 21st century was actually a century not of state or market dominance, but of distributed global infrastructures, and translocal or transnational ‘cosmo-local principles’ of human organization. *What if, distributed infrastructures are gradually developing practices that are ‘functionally equivalent’ to the practices and institutions formerly carried out by markets and states? I will explain this in the next article, but here I want to speculate on potential class dynamics that are behind such a potential transition.
*then again.. same song
Consider this:Five thousand years ago..creating a writing elite that would become the managerial class for craft-agrarian civilization, creating the conditions for imperial domination.
Five hundred years ago, after the invention of print,..the capitalist world of capital-nation-state
Today, a new elite based on the language of code, which possesses their own means of production (digital computers) and powerful digital commons, but NOT the networks needed to link them together, and behaving much as the craft guilds of yore, are attempting to create a world in their image, creating independent infrastructures of mutual coordination, independent of the control of Big State and Big Capital.
At the same time, the crisis of the global system is such, that powerful movements of relocalization have emerged. What if a merger of these Somewheres and Everywheres, where the jurisdictional alliance needed to obtain systemic change, and a new 5,000 year bifurcation ? Stay tuned for my next article explaining more in detail the cosmo-local hypothesis.
and again.. won’t be systemic change unless sans any form of measuring, accounting, people telling other people what to do
michel on cosmo localism et al
_______
______
_______
_______
______
_______
be you. 