phyle
intro’d to term via Kevin Carson‘s desktop regulated state.. esp ch4 – via David de Ugarte and las indias..
pic above fitting for now – as essence of phyle is stigmergic, distributed.. (image links to las indais’ book it is in)
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p. 4 – phyles: las indias and David de Ugarte
.. the phyle itself could be consensually defined as a networked, distributed, small sized, hacker ethic empowered, internet born organism with high productivity and great resilience (which) has its own universe of myths, narratives and tools…
p. 5 – the las indias cooperative arose from the cyberpunk milieu in europe, centered in berlin, and more particularly spanish circles affiliated with it:
a time ago, in the far, far days of the falling of communism some cyberpunk young people started in berlin a kind of small virtual community trying to understand what was happening in the world. with the years it developed into an ezine and a civil rights’ cyberactivist group )de Ugarte, from my ninja please interview).
las indias is the result of the spanish-speaking cyberpunk movement. originally a civil rights group, during the late 90’s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia’s “economics of abundance” theory. very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks. we are very clear on this point: it is not the internet by itself, it is the distributed p2p architecture that allows the new commons (de Ugarte, from shareable interview).
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p. 6 – the business would be the economic structure of the community we were creating, and as such, would have all the sources of wealth and income; we would not have – and still don’t have – savings, properties, or personal clients. the cooperative is our community savings and he only owner of all that we enjoy. with the passage of time and the growth of the indies’ community and economy, the first indies headquarters appeared with the same spirit: wide[open common facilities, with accommodations and offices, personal and common spaces all as property shared among everyone. in short: economically, we’re closer to a kibbutz that to the big cooperatives at mondragon
p. 7 – las indias is a phyle based largely in the spanish-speaking world, with it s tow primary physical bases in madrid and montevideo. as the members of the phyle explained in the my ninja please interview:
David de Ugarte: they are the first two dots of a distributed network of places, offices, business and social infrastructures e are dedicated to build. probably the third one will be in africa.. or maybe in ohter part of america. more dots: more security for our way of living more welfare for us, more social action in our everyday’s social environment.. more phyle we will be
p. 8 – the term platform probably gives too weak an idea of the relation between the phyle and its enterprises. as de Ugarte’s reference to the phyle as “owner” of the cooperatives suggests, it is not just a secondary network built on member oops as primary units; the cooperative enterprises bear the same intimate relationship to the phyle that their counterparts to in the mondragon system or kibbutzim
indianos are communities that are similar to kibbutzim )no individual savings, collective and democratic control of their own coops, etc.)..
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when it is time to make decisions about the common structure and its resources, the indianos act as freely associated people, each one speaks,contributes, and participates in decisionmaking for him/herself. the demos for the indiano economic structure is made up exclusively of indianos, and not groups, projects, or structures
p. 10 – the distributed network architecture is intended to achieve maximum freedom and autonomy for the participating communities, by avoiding dependence on some single node (which would generate “control and dependence”).
as a result of the evolution from a virtual community (cyberpunk movement), we never had a unique location or a national identity.
p. 11 – talking about obstacle – just as ip, then says: the alternative will not be build through govt regulations, but inside our own networks. it will not defeat the corporate organization through courts or elections, but through competition.
i don’t get that. i don’t see anything enduring coming through competition. what am i missing?
Natalia Fernandez: the cooperative group is the legal form that orders our economic activity. in our organization, people are above companies, this means we organize ourselves according to out needs. the happiness and welfare of each of us is above the economic benefit. this allows us to decline those well-paid jobs that do not satisfy us and this also allows us to build together a free and full life.
the lifestyle combines a much lower material footprint and cost of living with a high quality of life, largely through ephemeralization and informalization. that means, in particular, a shift toward low-rent housing and a quality of life based mainly on immaterial goods. a large share of the things they consider indispensable for a high quality of life are free, abundant, non-rival goods.
p. 12 – the hacker ethic represents the values of a distributed network world and forms our way to understand cooperativism. we would sum it up as: […] 3) the freedom of doing as fundamental value: against the existing institutions we don’t demand things to be done, we do it by ourselves and if there is a claim, it would be to eliminate the obstacles of any kind that stop us from building the necessary skills to develop freedom and well-being in our environment.
of the obstacle Rodriguez mentions, “probably one of the most important is the existence of artificial monopolies established by law, like intellectual property and copyrights. it’s another way to create artificial shortage that benefits a few, using the repressive power of the state. accordingly, las indias advocates a progressive reduction in patent and copyright laws to the point of “their complete extinction.”
the internal democracy of the phyle is based on principles of distributed intelligence and deliberation.
David de Ugarte: i believe in deliberation as the way to develop a common open source intelligence by a community.
deliberation means long term discussion without the urgency of taking a decision.
a permanent and open deliberation – what you can see in our chat rooms, blogs and newsgroups – leads, in time, to consensus, but also to a great diversity of personal positions and points of view.
we try to build from these consensus a guide for decisions on scarcity (economy_ but we also know that our most precious treasure is diversity.
Maria Rodriguez: i believe distributed intelligence. ants or bees use to be associated with collective intelligence, but we are non hierarchical, we are plurispecialists, we are multifunctionals.
Jose F. Alcantara: if there’s a way of improving the intelligence we all own as single persons, it is not to aggregate them as they used to toll us on “the wisdom of crowds”. no, if there’s something that really makes a difference is the intelligence you give birth when different people put their efforts on a distributed way. under this architecture, when yo let people work and coordinate their efforts freely, synergies emerge. whether it is or not something higher, the only think i’ll admit is that its..
success is not based on collective efforts, but on the way you let them interact:
..the distributed architecture is the key.
Natalia Fernandez: the key word would be “distributed” instead of collective. connect all nodes, eliminate the hierarchy and you’ll be allowing that ll knowledge to flow through the members of the network.
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Michel on phyle as an answer:
How can we do this ?
Las Indias, a trans-national hispanic community, has introduced, inspired by cyberpunk literature and specifically from the book The Diamond Age from Neal Stephenson, the notion of ‘phyles’.
Phyles are trans-national business eco-systems that sustain a community and its commons, and they are already successful for certain ethnic and religious communities that operate on the global level, such as the soufi ‘mourabite’ communities from Senegal, and the indigenous communities of Otovallo in Ecuador, where the trans-migrant income-generating systems are said to represent one third of GDP. These globally operating networks are described in the book by Alain Tarrius, entitled, “Etrangers de passage. Poor to poor, peer to peer” (Editions de l’Aube, 2015).
So my argument is that we need to construct phyles for peer production communities. Remember the structure of commons-based peer production most commonly consists of three institutions.
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These generative trans-local and trans-nationally operating coalitions already exist. Amongst the best known are Enspiral, originally based in New Zealand ; Sensorica, originally based in Montreal, Canada …….
We believe this new type of trans-local organizations are the seed form of future global coalitions of generative entrepreneurs, sustaining global open design communities. Our working for this trend is the eventual creation of a United Phyles Organization, which is represented at the local level by the territorial Chambers of Commons.
We also believe that global civic organizations from the commons sphere should do the same. Our working name for these are the United Transnational Republics.
We are fully aware that these are at present science-fictional notions, but if we don’t build them, it will be the extractive multi-national organizations of capital that will rule our world, destroy our planet, and reduce the world population to generalized precarity.
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At the political level, this means building territorial assemblies for citizens, the Assemblies of the Commons, and assemblies for generative entrepreneurial entities, the Chambers of the Commons, and to scale them at the national, regional and global levels. This continuous meshworking at all levels, is what will create the basis to create systemic change, i.e. power to change, at the level where the destructive force of global capital and its predation of the planet and its people can be countered.
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Commoners exist, there’s three billion of us in digital commons, and likely just as much relying on physical commons, and they have to follow the same multi-modal strategy, i.e. prefiguratively build their power and influence at all levels, trans-vesting state and market forces to strengthen the commons. For this of course, just as laborers did, we have to develop a consciousness that we are commoners. Anyone participating and co-constructing shared resources without exploiting them, is in fact a commoner.
perhaps this partial commons ness is what we need to leap over.. in order to see the dance dance.
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from David Wengrow‘s what makes civilization:
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‘pyramid town’ as they have come to be known were centrally administered settlements of considerable scale, established adjacent to he royal tombs and mortuary temples they served..
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central facilities were present for admin, food production, sleeping and other mundane activities.. such a totalizing scheme for communal life was not designed to foster the growth of a permanent population. it was geared, rather, towards the rapid socialization of incoming groups, who took up residence there for part of the year to provide skilled labour for monumental construction projects, or to otherwise serve the royal cult. these specialized groups are often referred to by the greek term phyle (brotherhood) which connotes both their restricted membership and their adoption of corporate male id’s, loosely modeled on the org of ships’ crews..
as w most such experiment sin social engineering, the institutional ideal of the pyramid town was quickly undermined by the complexities of social life.. w/in a few generations, new neighbourhoods sprang up along their intended perimeter walls.. this twofold patter of urban growth – centrally planned spaces giving way to less formally org’d, but more durable communities – repeated itself throughout the history of dynastic egypt
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be you. 