ACCOUNTING FOR PLANETARY SURVIVAL
ACKNOWLEDG: THE BACKGROUND
Michel Bauwens (org.)
P2P Foundation
michel@p2pfoundation.net
______________________________
Abstract
The proposal of this paper is to present
a summary of ten years of research at the P2P
Foundation, including by our own P2P Lab but also by our partners in common
research programs, of what we know today about the emerging commons economy. It
includes a basic account of why the ‘invention’ of the blockchain has been
important, but stresses that the needed distributed ledgers may take other
forms in the future. This section may not offer a lot of new elements for those
that are already technologically savvy about the topic, but it does offer a critical
engagement with the qualities and flaws of the current model, and suggests how
it can be tweaked and transformed, to also serve as a basis for a
post-capitalist, commons-centric economy.
Keywords: 1. Emerging Commons Economy. 2. Blockchain Technology. 3. Planetary Survival.
Resumo
A proposta deste trabalho é apresentar um resumo de
dez anos de pesquisa na Fundação P2P, inclusive por nosso próprio Laboratório
P2P, mas também por nossos parceiros em programas de pesquisa comuns, sobre o
que sabemos hoje sobre a economia emergente comum. Ele inclui uma descrição
básica do motivo pelo qual a "invenção" do blockchain tem sido
importante, mas enfatiza que os ledgers distribuídos necessários podem assumir
outras formas no futuro. Esta seção pode não oferecer muitos elementos novos
para aqueles que já são especialistas em tecnologia sobre o tópico, mas oferece
um engajamento crítico com as qualidades e falhas do modelo atual, e sugere
como ele pode ser ajustado e transformado, para também servir de base para uma
economia pós-capitalista e economia centrada em bens comuns.
Palavras-chave: 1. Economia Emergente Comum. 2. Tecnologia de Cadeia de Dados. 3. Sobrevivência Planetária.
1
Introduction
1.1 The P2P
Foundation’s study of the commons and the commons transition.
When we
started working as the P2P Foundation in 2006-2007, we started with a basic
premise of what was wrong with the current political economy of capitalism. We
claimed that the system combined strategies of artificial scarcity and
pseudo-abundance in a way that increased social injustice and inequality.
The idea of
pseudo abundance is based on the mistaken premise of infinite material growth
on a finite planet, where natural resources are actually fundamentally limited.
Artificial scarcity refers to the strategies that prevent the sharing of
technological and scientific progress because of too restrictive intellectual
property rights. A sensible alternative is, of course, to recognize the limits
of what we can use from the world of nature, of which we are an intrinsic part,
and to allow for the sharing of all knowledge that can contribute to living
within the limits of this ‘biocapacity’. Right now, we have a production system
where competitiveness is achieved by externalizing human costs to nature and
society as a whole. Capitalism has become a scarcity-engineering machine that
prohibits the occurrence of natural abundance.
From this
beginning, our theory of change was based on the idea that the seed forms of a
new system grow within the old one, usually embedding an alternative logic to
systemic crises.
We would point out that before capitalism became a
fully dominant system, there were inventions like
·
Double entry accounting which focuses on the rational expansion of
private capital (Gleeson-White, 2013);
·
Ideological innovations like the new Catholic concept of Purgatory,
which allow Christians to lend money, while buying back their sins through
indulgences, and which allowed ‘sinful’ commercial activity (Legoff, 1981);
·
The printing press, which allowed for the rapid production and
distribution of knowledge, bypassing the knowledge monopolies of the Church and
the guilds.
These new
patterns and solutions, which created a proto-capitalist sub-system (dominant
at first in the Italian cities and new medieval city-communes) (SPUFFORD,
2002), were paradoxically first used by forces in the dominant feudal society,
such as the monarchy, for their own ends. However due to this allegiance and
investment the seeds of the new system were allowed to grow under the direction
of the "capitalists" themselves. Seed forms emerge and
slowly find each other to form more coherent subsystems- which eventually
become the new dominant norm. This is not a smooth or conflict free process.
Nevertheless, it is important to pay attention to the emerging forces rather
than merely focussing only on the established power structures and conflicts.
Today, this requires making a priority to analysing and supporting
post-capitalist forms of human activity, rather than only pay attention to the
fights for redistribution within the old system, or mere ‘anti-capitalism’ that
is waiting for a ‘final overthrow’ of the system as a whole. These latter
struggles remain an important part of reality, which must be honoured and
understood, but are not creating the necessarily seed forms, though it is
important that forces of resistance also become prefigurative in their demands.
What we propose is to construct seed forms that concretely solve social
and environmental challenges, and a kind of politics that seeks to initiate
policies that can replicate or scale such solutions.
According to
De Angelis (2017), both the commons and social movements are enabling
environments where individual emancipation takes place. They interrelate
insofar as the commons provide alternatives, for which the social movements may
strive. The process of social revolutions necessitates an alignment of commons
with social movements, synchronizing their respective sequences “to turn the subjects
of movements into commoners and make commoners protestors” (DE ANGELIS, 2017,
p. 371). They thus become mutually reinforcing, through the expansion of the
commons, which in turn forms a new basis for more powerful movements.
Commons-Based Peer Production (CBPP) then serves as a driving force for the
material recomposition of the commons. It enables the conditions to sustain
livelihoods for the commoners and the deployment of social force to reconfigure
their relations to the current social systems, including capital and the state.
We also claim
that the emerging new world-system would be commons-centric, and that the
existing state and capitalist market forms would be transformed under the new
‘dominant’ logic of the commons. What we saw emerging was a new mode of
production and exchange, where communities create shared value through open
contributory systems, govern their common work through participatory practices,
and create shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations. This
cycle of open input, participatory process and commons-oriented output is a
cycle of accumulation of the commons, in contrast to a capital
accumulation. This mode of production, which Benkler (2006), called
"commons-based peer production”, thrives in ecosystems comprising 1)
contributory communities, sharing knowledge and capacities; 2) entrepreneurial
coalitions creating livelihoods around the commons; and 3) for-benefit
infrastructural organizations, which support and guarantee cooperation in the
ecosystem, allowing it to continue over time.
Before this
becomes a new form of civilization, it appears as new hybrid eco-systems in
which post-capitalist seed forms exist within a framework dominated by the old
forces. This understanding imposes a double priority on our work as activist
researchers: first of all to document the emergence of these seed forms, as
they are adapted and used by the current dominant forces, for their own
survival and benefit, but also to look at how we can strengthen and create more
autonomy for these commons-based productive communities. Our strategy is to
identify, understand and promote the commons-centric, post-capitalist logics
present in these emerging new forms. In the commons economy
that we see emerging and want to strengthen, we see value created by open
productive communities, translated into material resources for ‘social
reproduction’ and livelihoods through ethical and generative enterprises, with
the common infrastructures maintained by democratic foundations bringing the various
stakeholders together in dialog, to jointly manage the common infrastructure.
A very
important distinction for us is that between extractive and generative
practices, and the institutional and ownership forms that enable it
(KELLY, 2012). For example, every year a farmer practices industrial and toxic
agriculture, the soil is impoverished, until it becomes exhausted for farming,
but every year an organic and biodiverse farmer works on the land, the land
enriches. The first mode is extractive, the second mode is generative from the point of view
of the soil. Extractive are for example the companies in the most often
mis-named ‘sharing’ economy. While Uber and AirBNB scaled up the necessary
mechanisms for ‘idle-sourcing’ (i.e. allowing the re-use of idle resources),
they are socially extractive, destroying social welfare standards, creating
precarity and insecurity etc. The key issue addressed in this study is how to
change a system which incentivizes and rewards extraction and dispossession, but cannot recognize and reward the wealth created by generative
activities, towards a system which can reward and incentivize generative
practices. Furthermore, we are looking for generative practices that are
embedded inside the productive system itself, and do not have to be imposed on
it from the outside. Our current system is extractive towards nature and human
beings and seeks for corrective measures ‘after the fact’.
What we need are productive systems that are ‘organically’ or
‘institutionally’ generative.
Figure 1 - Value creation in the commons economy
Source: P2P Foudation.
In today’s context, we see on
the one hand that the traditional, natural-resource based commons identified by
Elinor Ostrom are under stress by the development of capitalism, while, on the
other hand, we observe the growth of new types of commons. For example, we have
seen the rapid emergence and growth of open source communities, co-producing
shared knowledge, software and design. After the crisis of 2008, this was
followed by the emergence of the platform economy, which brings supply and
demand together in corporate owned platforms, but also the emergence of
alternative platform cooperatives that are co-owned and/or co-governed by their
stakeholder communities. And as the crisis was felt concretely in the cities
where most people now live, we saw the emergence of urban commons, where
commoners start taking the infrastructures for provisioning into their own
hands. In our study of the city of Ghent, we saw an exponential growth of
urban commons, in every area of human provisioning, i.e. food, mobility,
habitat etc. However, except for the sectors of organic food and distributed
energy, which have highly developed ecosystems with commons-centric forms of
organization, most of these urban commons pertain to a different distribution
of the goods and services, not to the production of them. Nevertheless, the two
latter examples point to a future where physical production itself could become
commons-centric in its organization.
It is important to see what
we are already capable of doing in terms of our techno-social capacities:
1. Open source communities are able to scale small-group dynamics by
interconnecting tens of thousands of individuals and small groups, as well as
larger groups, into large eco-systems for open coordination through
‘stigmergy’, i.e. coordination through signalling, by relying on open and
transparent systems; the creation of shared knowledge (Wikipedia), shared
software (Linux), and shared design (Arduino), already operates that way.
2. Platforms allow for the easy exchange of idle objects and
services, using massive person-to-person interaction on a global basis.
3. Urban commons communities are able to organize access to resources
that are more equitable and ecologically responsible.
The next step in the
evolution of the ongoing transition to commons-centric ways of producing and
distributing value is therefore ‘physical production’ itself. The central
concept of the P2P Foundation in this context is ‘cosmo-local production’
or DGML: design global, manufacture local.
This means that the technical, social and scientific knowledge needed to
organize production is available through global open design communities, but
that a large part of production for human needs can be relocalized through
distributed manufacturing. What we favour is the subsidiarity
of material production, i.e. to produce to minimize the huge costs of
transportation currently necessary under neoliberal globalization. In this new
model, ‘economies of scale’, i.e. bringing down the costs of production per
unit by a massive scaling up of productive capacity through centralization,
which necessitates ever more natural resources and transportation, are replaced
by economies of scope, i.e. making global knowledge and
innovation instantly available to all nodes of the network, which can then
apply circular economies, biodegradable materials, and more, to produce more
directly for local need, as these needs emerge, without necessitating constant
over-production and the constant promotion of over-consumption. With economies
of scope, the object of production becomes, ‘doing more with less’, creating
value through variety, rather than through volume.
Figure 2
- Cosmo-local production
Source: P2P Foundation.
The socio-technical requirements for this shift are essentially
the following:
·
We need open and shared supply chains to instantiate a
perma-circular economy, so that all the players in the
ecosystem can plan and coordinate their production and distribution activities.
The circular economy refers to ‘circular’ production systems, where the output
of one process, becomes the input for another, thereby drastically reducing
waste. The ‘perma’ qualifier refers to the need to stabilize the growth of our
usage of matter and energy so as to to make these processes sustainable over
the long term. The limit to material growth has been calculated to be a
maximally one percent per year;
·
We need shared accounting systems and distributed ‘ecosystemic’
ledgers, so that value streams can be exchanged. These systems need to allow
permissionless contributions and need to reward these contributions in a fair
way. Open and contributive accounting will be discussed in chapter x;
·
The open and shared accounting systems also need to reflect a
integrated or ‘holistic’ knowledge of the actual ‘metabolic streams’, i.e.
thermo-dynamic flows of matter and energy, and create a context-based
sustainability for all the players in the ecosystem. What this means is that
the limits to the usage of resources, should be directly visible in the
ecosystems that create and distribute the particular product and service.
Solutions for this will be discussed in our third chapter. As James Gien Wong
explains: “Here we have the concept of localizing planetary boundaries down to
a granular level. There should be thresholds that signal that a value exchange
is coming close to exceeding a regional boundary. We need to have multi-scale
setpoints that alert us that we are within acceptable ecological footprint
boundaries”.
The aim
of this study is to offer an overview and synthesis of the seed forms that are
emerging to make this a real possibility in the coming decades. The concepts,
prototypes, experimentations and actual practices already exist, i.e. many of
the seed forms have been developed, but they are as yet fragmented, and have
not yet created generative ecosystems, with some exceptions.
The next
step of creating such budding ecosystems requires paying attention to the
technical systems being developed as we speak, for example the extraordinary
developments around the deployment of distributed ledgers for shared accounting
and coordination of production. The key issue that needs to be solved in order
to achieve truly sustainable production for human needs, is whether what we produce
is compatible with the survival of our planet and its beings. Equally
necessary, is to pay attention to the value distribution. Indeed, most models
developed today involve using open source and the commons to develop highly
unequal extractive capitalist market forms, and do not use generative market
forms that would help strengthen the autonomy of the commons and the commoners.
Technology
is of course not neutral, since its design reflects human intentions, material
interests, and a balance of power between developers, funders, users etc. We
have a four-quadrant model to explain this value-driven design of technology.
Figure 3 - P2P socio-technical dynamics and cooperative forms: 2
pictures
Picture 1 Picture
2
A first model involves enabling p2p
behaviours (both commoning and p2p-forms of market exchange) through centrally
owned and controlled corporate platforms, think Facebook/Google,
Uber/AirBNB as models for this. This model, which also includes state actors
that aim to control internet communication and platforms, could be called
Leviathan, since it is about surveillance, the control and nudging of human
behaviour, and the capture of value from commoners.
The second model, which is the one that
will be discussed mostly in this study, is the model of distributed capitalism.
These are formally decentralized systems that aim to create permissionless
usage by avoiding centralized gatekeepers (we will amend this over-simplification
later on). We call this model Mammon, as the aim is, despite the usage of
open source technologies and commons of code, to extract profits.
The third model involves
creating commons for local provisioning, this is the dominant model amongst
urban commons, but that do not aim for profit-maximisation. Enzio Manzini has
characterized these models as ‘SLOC’, for Small, Local, Open, and
Connected. This model can share global knowledge over common platform, but
still aim to operate locally, i.e the global serves the local.
Finally, there is a fourth model, based
on global open design communities that aim to create global common goods and
are organized beyond the local. In this model, the global is recognized as a
priority in its own right. These projects are often managed by non-profit and
democratically run foundations, but as yet to rarely surrounded by
not-for-profit entrepreneurial coalitions.
For the third and fourth model, we often
use the name of Gaia, the Greek Goddess of the Earth, since these projects are
most often geared towards sustainability. The third model is specifically
“generative” in its orientation towards local communities and ecological and
social goals. In the fourth model, the ecosystems are generative towards the
creation of global common goods that are universally available.
This means that we are not merely
discussing competing models and platforms in the name of efficiency or
profitability, but also worldviews, with different social and political
priorities.
In the context of the P2P Foundation’s own views,
this means that we look at how to transform the functions of the central
corporate platforms, into platform cooperatives and open cooperatives that do not merely capture the
value created by their users, but can be co-owned and co-governed by their
stakeholder communities. In the case of the infrastructures of distributed
capitalism, such as the blockchain, this means we will look how to tweak and
transform them, so they can be used to serve for the expansion of a socially
equitable and ecologically regenerative model of production for human needs,
serving the needs and interests of the commoners. In this context, we explore
the concept of ledger coops. The third quadrant
calls for urban provisioning coops and in the fourth, generative global
quadrant, we call for ‘Protocol Cooperatives’. A protocol coop is basically a
governance form for global open design depositories, collectively managed hubs
of software to assist in the deployment of local systems for the mutualization
of provisioning systems. In this scenario, leagues of cities could, with
other allies, cooperate in the setting up of such common infrastructures, say
in order to replace the extractive models of AirBnB, with generative models
such as FairBnB, thereby avoiding duplication of effort. Please note that we
use the concept of ‘cooperative’ in a generic way here, to indicate all institutional forms that are not
geared towards profit-maximisation but to generative purposes.
Figure
4 - City-supported
cosmo-local production infrastructure
The first law, of the conservation of
matter and energy, states that no matter/energy can get lost, only transformed.
This can be linked to the development of the idea of liberalism and the
generalisation of support for growth-oriented capitalism, i.e. an economic
system based on the idea of material abundance and infinite growth, since
indeed, nothing can be lost.
The second law, on the dissipation of
energy from high levels of order to lower levers of order, i.e. entropy,
introduces the idea of scarcity, and a demand that basic needs should be
covered, before they are unequally distributed. This new insight could be seen
as reflected in the socialist aims of the labour movement.
But as Yochai Benkler (BENKLER, 2011),
and others have described, there has been for the last few decades a much deeper
appreciation of how human (and other forms of cooperation by living beings)
cooperation and synergy leads to neg-entropic effects. This means that life and
society create temporal and territorial exceptions to entropy and lead to
domains where order and complexity increase over time. (Some have argued this
should be construed as a third law. The new generations of technology should
reflect this understanding and become eco-systemic and ecological in their
approaches to producing and distributing value. This is only happening
partially, in that our emerging systems apply are becoming eco-systemic but not
yet truly ecological.
The next two sections outline what we
have discovered about value streams in the commons economy and introduce the
issue of externalities.
Figure
5 - The three great spheres of
social life in commons transition
Box 1- The evolution of the commons
Box 2 – The evolution of research in the P2P
Founation
2 VALUE IN
THE COMMONS.
This report
builds on the previous findings from earlier research reports. The P2P Value
research project had shown that a majority of the 300
peer production projects that had been studied were engaged in using,
prototyping or experimenting with contributive accounting, i.e. forms of
accounting not based on hourly labor but recognizing all other manners of
contributions in these open and permissionless production communities.
Our study,
Value in the Commons Economy, based on different case studies of advanced peer
production communities such as Enspiral and Sensorica, outlined the following
concepts and practices:
- The
new peer production communities are directly oriented to the production of
use value, not exchange value, and make claims to ‘value sovereignty’,
i.e. the right to determine context-based value regimes that differ from
the sole recognition of commercial value under capitalism. This allows for
a autonomous flow of value within the communities and for the recognition
of all kinds of contributions, not just paid ‘commodified labour’.
- These
new communities create a membrane between the commons and the market,
which allow them to regulate the flows of value between income from the
market and state-based value models, and the internal flow within the
commons, which can be differentiated from each other, in other words, it
is possible to accept revenue from outside the commons, but to distribute
according to the norms of a particular commons.
- We
recognized three models: one in which the commons and the market are
clearly demarcated, allowing free unpaid contributions and free usage
within the commons, which is thereby protected against contamination by
market exchange logics; a second model in which contributions are rewarded
by a different value equation; which are then funded post-hoc by income
from the market and the state; and finally a third one that more
intimately and directly links commons contributions to market income.
- These
communities practice and experiment with reverse cooptation of market
income and investments, i.e. ‘transvestment’.
While investment concerns using capital to obtain more capital,
transvestment uses market and state investments, but translates them into
the growth of commons assets and infrastructures. For example, capital is
attracted and even remunerated, but increases the common stock of free
software, or commonly-owned land in a land trust, etc. One of the
techniques is to create a wall between investments and the purpose-driven
generative entities creating livelihoods for the commoners.
- A
few are experimenting with new forms of licensing, halfway between the
‘free-for-all’ copyleft licenses and the privatizing copyright licensing
models. In copyfair models, the sharing of knowledge remains entirely
free, but commercialization is conditioned by some forms of required
reciprocity with the commons.
A landmark
study for us has been our research publication about the ‘Thermodynamics of
Peer Production’. In this study, we show the vital
impact of mutualization of infrastructures of production and consumption, to
the lowering of the footprint of humanity, which is already visible in the
local commons-centric food economy for example. Sharing resources, for example
in car-sharing that follows non-profit or cooperative modalities (but NOT using
models like Uber, which augment resource use), every shared car can replace
from 5 to 15 private cars, dramatically reducing the needs for
matter and energy expenditure.
This
advantage were confirmed in our study of the urban commons in Ghent, where we
were able to determine that, for every single provisioning system in the city,
there are now no longer just choices between private and public models (say
private housing vs state-sponsored social housing), but also commons-based
alternatives (such as commons-based cooperative housing modalities). Various
studies have confirmed, at least for car-sharing, that this type of
mutualization effectively overcomes the Jevons Paradox, which states that
lowering cost and efficiency often leads to higher consumption. Our challenge
is to place the advantages of mutualization in lowering the human footprint in
a sufficiently systemic change effort, so that gains in one sector are not
undone by higher consumption in other sectors.
We cannot
stress this enough: putting commons center stage, i.e. shared resources
self-managed by their stakeholder communities, is a vital necessity in any
social and ecological transition. This is confirmed by the HANDY study,
which compares the resource crisis moments of hundreds of past civilizations,
starting from the neolithic period. Far from being exceptional, HANDY
shows that civilizational collapses are a regular occurence in class-based
societies, where ruling classes are perforce engaged in competition with their
peers, and driven by this necessity, over-use their local resource base to the
point of collapse.
The study
shows that inequality is a vital part of accelerating and deepening such
collapses: the more unequal the society, the more egregious the over-use, the
deeper the fall, and the longer it takes to recover. Equality mitigates these crises
and can perhaps even avoid them. Mark Whitaker has produced a comparative study of
more recent collapses and resets in China, Japan, and Europe, and has shown the
vital role of mutualization in the revival of these societies. Notice the
parallel between the role of pan-european exchange of knowledge by christian
monastic communities, the mutualization of their production infrastructures in
the monasteries, and the relocalization of production in the feudal domains, with
the current emerging reactions: the creation of vast open source and open
design communities, new forms of mutualizations of infrastructures in the
models of coworking and makerspaces, as well as the ‘sharing economy’, and the
increasing experimentation with cosmo-local models of distributed
manufacturing.
An important
part of any systemic change are changing class dynamics and structures within
society. The shift from the Roman system, based on conquest and slavery, to the
feudal system, based on local production in local territory, was a shift from
slavery to serfdom and from slave-holding to feudal status. The shift from feudalism to capitalism was a
shift from serfdom to working in factories. From land ownership to ownership of
investment and financial capital.
In our
analysis, the current shift involves a shift towards netarchical capitalism,
i.e. the direct exploitation and capture of value, not from commodity labour in
factories and offices, but from peer to peer exchange in platforms and from participating
in commons-based peer production. In other words, the new capitalism is a
commons-extracting capitalism, which directly enables, but also exploits, human
cooperation. One could say that we have evolved
from a Marxian capitalism, with surplus value directly extracted from labour as
a commodity, to a Proudhonian capitalism, since the latter argued that surplus
value was derived from the extra value generated by human cooperation.
In this
particular conjuncture, we see the increasingly larger parts of the working
class is evolving, at least in western countries, from a subordinate
salariat to a condition of generalized precarity (some call it ‘the precariat’)
(STANDING, 2011), but which also involves the growth
of post-subordinate autonomous workers who are simultaneously involved in
networks, commons, and markets. These workers need to participate
in networks to create connections, expertise and reputational capital, and are
often passionately involved in contribution-based and permissionless digital
commons; but they often operate as freelancers in the market. They often have a
strong desire and demand for autonomy and free cooperation. In many ways, this
‘cognitive working class’ is at the forefront of social change today, becoming
an active agent in the transformation in the system, largely thanks to their
vital place in the knowledge ecosystem. This is evident in the growth of open
source economies tied to the urban commons and other areas beyond what is
usually perceived as "knowledge work". In this report we will
concentrate on the growth of systems of production and distribution of value
using distributed ledgers, or what is now known as the blockchain or crypto
economy.
For the
last year, one of the authors has been closely involved with a large European
platform cooperative, SMart (coop), which is also called a labour mutual. In a
labour mutual, formally independent workers, who in the best of cases have a
passionate life project that allows them to filter their work engagements, are
able to create solidarity, by converting their invoices into salaries, and
thereby gaining access to the social protections of the welfare state.
These autonomous, post-subordinate workers also represent a convergence
model between the precariat and the salariat, and are prime candidates for the
emerging commons economy, they have a big role in the creation of the
post-corporate eco-systems that we will be describing in one of the chapters of
this report. Please note that we do not see these new types of workers as the
sole actors in transformation, but we do believe they play a very important
role in this particular transition. To the degree that the labouring classes
start to see themselves not as merely adversarial to the current system, but as
active commoners in the creation of new life forms, to that degree they are
also joining the new commoner or ‘hacker class’.
Box 3 - The role of labour mutuals, commonfare and
post-subordinate workers
3 THE EMERGING CRYPTO ECONOMY AS A SIGNPOST FOR THE COSMO-LOCAL
TRANSITION.
If
we look at the evolution of contemporary commons, from the emergence of the
immaterial ‘digital’ commons for knowledge, software and design, via the mostly
redistributive provisioning systems of the urban commons, we now see the
emergence of a new phase that involves bringing the use of the open source and
commons models, straight into the physical production processes. For example,
the Economic Space Agency speaks of a shift from open source software
production methodologies, to open source economic spaces, i.e. from the mere
production of knowledge, code and design, to full-scale economic cooperation
around the production and distribution of all kinds of value, so as to secure
livelihoods.
The
emergence of the distributed Bitcoin currency, and most importantly its
underlying infrastructure broadly discussed as blockchain technology, is a very
important signpost for this, as we explain further in this document. In this
chapter, we aim to provide a short explanation of this emergence, critique the
current models from a P2P and commons-based point of view, so that we can
suggest the main tweaks and transformations that are necessary for the support
of a true, solidly commons-oriented mode of production and exchange in the
sphere of physical production. This would combine our priorities for open and
freely shared knowledge, respect for the biocapacity of the planet, and fair
distribution of the rewards for common work.
The aim of
this work is to see how we can ‘internalize’ in our management of the
production and distribution of value what is presently ‘externalized’, i.e. not
accounted for and not cared for.
The design,
emergence and success of Bitcoin was a very important first pivot. Over the
last decade there has been an increasing number
of locally based complementary currencies, but with limited numbers of local
users and turnover. To date, they very rarely achieve scale even in their local
contexts. By contrast, Bitcoin was the first
attempt for a globally scalable currency that was based on social sovereignty,
instead of corporate or state-based sovereignty.
The trust of the community was ensured, not by mediating third party
institutions but by trust in the integrity of cryptographic rules. For
the first time in recent history, we have a currency that was created
autonomously, and gained the trust of a global community, while achieving
tangible and spectacularly recognized levels of market value. Following Bitcoin,
many other cryptocurrencies are also achieving relative success, even amid the
speculative frenzy. We can observe a surge of permissionless creation of
currencies, with a relatively autonomous capacity to allow value flow outside
of the traditional banking channels, which gave rise to the idea of
crypto-assets. These value flows are coordinated in more decentralized ways,
even if new types of intermediaries may be facilitating this. Cryptocurrencies
have thus been envisioned as a store of value, and a kind of global reserve
backing, like gold, but their usability in day-to-day exchanges in real
marketplaces has not been realized, except very marginally. At any rate,
crypto-currencies introduce the idea of pluralist value streams and the
circulation of assets in decentralized P2P networks.
However, even
if the Bitcoin code is open source and supported by a global community, there
are also huge issues that do not make it an appropriate currency for the
commons economy. Essentially, the commons are subsumed here to social and
ecological extraction. Social extraction, because the particular design means
that early entrants can sell bitcoins at a higher price later (because
production is designed to slow down and even stop over time, while demand grows
without set limits, thereby structurally stimulating demand over supply)
and this has made bitcoin into a tool for financial speculation.
And ecological extraction, since its production necessitates exponential energy
usage.
Value in
Bitcoin is created through the monetary mechanism itself, not by the creation
of productive value. In fact, Bitcoins are created through an extremely
resource-intensive process called “mining”, which is very capital and resource
intensive, as it requires huge computational capacity. Bitcoin thus relies
essentially on capitalist mechanisms for its existence. Furthermore, almost the
entirety of Bitcoin mining has gradually been taken over by vast mining plants,
specially designed to afford enormous processing power, making it almost
impossible for single users to engage in any mining themselves.
Hence, Bitcoins for them can only be acquired in exchanges, again via the
capitalist market (or by working for the owners).
Most
cryptocurrencies are traded as financial assets on open markets, i.e. their
price is based on supply and demand, and is denominated in regular fiat
currency. Value flows from one currency into another, but the currency is a
representation, that does not create value by itself any more than a balloon
creates ‘volume’. In other words, Bitcoin owners extract rent from productive
value creators in the rest of the economy, it is a distribution of rent-seeking.
Bitcoin is most certainly a currency of and for the market, more specifically a
currency for decentralized capitalist market dynamics, specifically for market
forms that seek to escape governmental and societal control.
Beyond
Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, a second generation of blockchains
introduced autonomously executed computer processes broadly known as “smart
contracts”. These are software programmes stored on a blockchain and employ a
set of pre-defined rules that may be enforced automatically once certain
conditions are met. Multiple parties in a distributed network can access and
interact with smart contracts, but they are largely autonomous and very
difficult to reverse once deployed.
Ethereum was
the first initiative supporting the deployment of smart contracts on a
blockchain. It envisioned a potential use of blockchains that goes beyond
the storage or reference of transactions, but may include any type of
information that allows users to define the functionality of decentralized
applications (dapps). Ethereum also implements its native crypto-currency
called “Ether” that, much like Bitcoin, is allocated to miners through a
similar process and can be transferred in the network.
Smart
contracts gave rise to an ever-increasing number of potential uses of
blockchains, on every domain where formal agreements have to be encoded and
enacted, including financial transactions, insurance and securities, and
intellectual property rules. Probably the most ambitious deployment of smart
contracts has been new types of decentralised organisations, commonly referred
as “Decentralized Autonomous Organizations” (DAOs), which rely purely on
blockchain code and the distribution of tokens to enforce their rules to
control decision making and operations. The DAOs have stimulated discussions
and experiments around the provisioning of digital services and transactions that
take place with little or no direct human action, while they arguably cede
agency to non-human subjects, including machines, objects or even natural
ecosystems.
It
is especially in this light that the blockchain, or more broadly ‘Distributed
Ledger Technology’ (DLT) has been acknowledged as an even more radical
innovation. We note that accounting and civilization have developed together.
Writing was invented as a by-product of accounting, when temple-state,
class-based civilizations emerged in Mesopotamia, to keep track of the coming
and going of commodities in the temple storage paces, as well to record debts.
These first forms of accounting accompanied the birth of class-based
civilization and the accompanying state forms. When the Franciscan monk Pacioli
standardized ‘double entry’ Venetian bookkeeping in the year 1494,
it announced the birth of capital accumulation which would eventually engulf
the whole world a few centuries later. Today, next-generation accounting
models, such as Resources - Events - Agents abandon double-entry to
favor
ecosystem-
and network-based accounting flows. What we get is something that goes beyond
closed corporate accounting and potentially announces and accompanies a huge
civilizational shift away from atomized institutions that compete with each
other, and instead points towards a more networked structure based on much
higher levels of collaboration over joint platforms.
The
blockchain encodes and shows the viability of open and shared accounting in
representing the multitude of transactions and actions occurring during
physical production.
This is
historic, as this allows us to move from corporate and nation-state accounting,
(which even as they are publicly regulated and accessible to the public,
are ‘privative’ accounting internal to bounded entities, in which
externalities are invisible), to ecosystemic accounting in networks with
multiple participants and in an environment of permissionless contributions. In
other words, it allows for large-scale mutual coordination of physical
production, and makes practical the scaling of circular economies. It is an
extension of the principles of the open source economy, to physical production.
Distributed
ledgers furthermore allow both the recognition of a variety of contributions,
i.e. open and contributive accounting, but also the capacity to integrate
directly the visioning and management of physical flows of matter and energy.
This differs from the previous approaches such as Ecological Economics, that
converted resources in price signals. The
combination of distributed and shared ledgers, as well as the capacity to
integrate externalities, constitute a radical innovation
Presently,
the production of immaterial value, i.e. knowledge, software and design, enables
‘stigmergic coordination’ between permissionless contributors,
who can access open and transparent depositories that represent the flow of
work. With shared accounting, this capacity for mutual coordination moves to
the physical plane. But because physical production requires specific
reciprocity in terms of material capital (which otherwise would get depleted),
and not just the principle of free universal usage, it requires that
distributed ledgers add this layer of value exchange.
To use the
19th century language, for example as used by Marx:
- As far as
immaterial production is concerned, we already have the principle of
‘communism’ at work in the very heart of the capitalist economy (in its
original sense of ‘everyone can freely contribute and everyone can freely
use’), which some authors like Richard Barbrook have called
cyber-communism (or ‘cybernetic communism’, BARBROOK, 2015),
because of the ‘abundance’ of digital knowledge which is easily and
cheaply reproducible, and thereby overwhelms the scarcity dynamics of
supply and demand, moving the market functions to the periphery of open
source production communities, with the commons in the middle.
Paradoxically, this cooperative coordination is largely incorporated in
the corporate economy, inspiring some scholars to speak of the ‘communism
of capital’ (BAUWENS; KOSTAKIS,
2014).
- In
physical production however, we need reciprocal flows, to avoid depletion
of non-renewable resources, either through market exchange (but not
necessarily capitalist exchange) or through contributory recognition (‘to
each according to his/her contribution’, this was defined by Marx as
‘socialism’). Capitalist markets are
nominally based on the idea of equal exchange, but in their actual
practice they are based on the constant extraction of surplus, from nature
and other humans, in order to accumulate capital in private hands.
Ethical and
generative markets use monetary signals, but are not focused on profit
maximisation. Many pre-capitalist markets were socially embedded, as Karl
Polanyi has shown. We will later show that we need to move from pricing
signals, which reflect current supply and demand, but not the necessities of
protecting and maintaining resources in the long term, to monetary signals,
i.e. to currencies that are directly related to the status of the natural
resources we need to maintain and replenish. If such a linkage between the
amount of natural reserves that are sustainably available, and a corresponding
monetary mass could be achieved then the monetary signals themselves would be a
technique for responsible material production. An example of this is the Fishcoin
project, in which the amount of coins that can be spent reflect the stock of
fish that can be used without endangering the reproduction of the fish.
So, the
blockchain, like Bitcoin, has received extensive attention and a huge wave of
investments, viewing it as a new infrastructure layer for a more distributed
economy. And precisely because it is linked to the design philosophy of
Bitcoin, it shares some of its fundamental limitations. The design of Bitcoin
and its infrastructure are based on an individualistic understanding of the
economy, that combines elements from the marginalist traditions, Austrian
Economics’ and an ‘anarcho-capitalist’, ‘propertarian’ philosophy. It is
based on ‘methodological individualism’, the premise that society consists
of individuals seeking maximum advantages in a competitive game. Every human
being is seen as an entrepreneur, which contracts with others in order to
conduct his or her business.
For example,
when blockchain projects talk about governance and ‘consensus’, what they
emphatically don’t mean is collective governance based on democratic
deliberation, but merely the coordination of individual actions with common
intentions. Because liberalism believes that
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 inter-dependence of the market to a whole host of
societal and environmental realities. The commons and open source dynamics are
often appropriated to emphasize individual freedom, mostly restrained to a ‘one
dollar, one vote’ context, disregarding the elements of social fairness and
ecological sustainability.
As Arthur
Brock has argued, there are no people and communities in the blockchain design,
no community governance, ‘only transactions organized in blocks linked to a
chain’; there is no organic connection
between the blockchain and the open source communities and commons that
undergird it.
Furthermore,
bitcoin and blockchain are not truly distributed, i.e. consisting of equipotent
peers that voluntarily create nodes through their free and open cooperation,
but rather decentralized. This means that while it avoids the domination by
vertically integrated oligarchic companies, it is still based on major power
blocks, such as influential ‘miners’, large investors, etc. Bitcoin’s
inequality coefficient, measured by the Gini metric, is
higher than the inequality in the sovereign currencies that it aims to replace.
Blockchain has an oligarchic design, as most mechanisms used to reward
contributions (the ‘proof of work’ mechanism) and resources (the ‘proof of
stake’ mechanism), reward those that can already provide the most.
Sam Pospischil writes:
[…] blockchains are too slow and expensive for
a large variety of use-cases. If you look at something like, say, OriginTrail,
they've built a separate overlay network to store structured graph data and
document attachments. Pretty much everyone has something similar, with varying
levels of "decentralised-ness" ranging from traditional SQL databases
to networks that anyone can spin up and participate in just like a (public)
blockchain.
Different layers of the blockchain ecosystem are routinely dominated by
a small group of dominant players, even if they have to content with the other
layers in the system, miners, developers, users.
What matters in this report therefore, is not necessarily the blockchain
in the narrow sense, but the generic concept of distributed ledgers. Nevertheless,
it would be a mistake to underestimate the innovative features of the
blockchain design, which Sarah Manski has summarized.
Box
4 - The seven tendencies of blockchain technology by Sarah Manski
Sarah Manski has also analyzed the underlying
political visions of the blockchain designs, resulting in five possible futures:
·
The first is the individualist future, based on
anarcho-capitalist visions of the world, in which every individual is seen as a
competitive entrepreneur;
·
the second is the corporate vision, which can
use ledgers for a variety of for-profit and procontrol-base uses;
·
the third is the vision of particular state
forms with a desire for control and surveillance,
·
the fourth is the technocratic future,
expressing the fear that such technologies can become automatic and sovereign,
beyond human control.
·
But the fifth one is the cooperative future, in
which distributed ledgers are used for the commons. This is the vision that animates this report.
Rachel O’Dwyer also provides an extra warning: if we design distributed
ledgers following the values and processes of ‘methodological individualism’,
then we also end up generalizing and socially reproducing these neoliberal
mechanisms. As Salvatore
Iaconesi warned, distributed ledgers may end up transactionalizing our entire
lives (scenario 1 and 2
from Manski).
At the very least though, the new distributed capitalism can create more
capacities for what Adam Arvidsson (Arvidsson, forthcoming 2019), following
Giovanni Arrighi (ARRIGHI, 2009), call ‘industrious capitalism’ (or rather,
‘industrious modernity’, as it can also be non-capitalist).
This is a vision of capitalism and markets seen in the context of a ‘class
struggle’ for markets, whereby workers and a multitude of small firms use
market forms to their own benefit, until today mostly in rather invisible
informal economies. Distributed capitalism may put these forms on steroids.
The
interesting White Paper by Outlier Ventures, a venture capitalist firm founded
by Jamie Burke which exclusively invests in ‘decentralized infrastructures’ is
very illustrative on the proposed relationship between open source commons, in
the form of blockchains and tokens, and how it fits in a new vision for
capitalism. Their paper on Community Token Economies
argues that ‘siloed innovation’ is inherently wasteful, on the one hand because
of its endless duplication in the creation of common infrastructures, but also
because, in case of failure, which is the norm rather than the exception,
valuable innovation is lost each time the Intellectual Property is lost.
Therefore, businesses must massively mutualize their common infrastructures,
and community tokens serve to align the various stakeholders, while also
providing a funding mechanism for open source developments. While there is a
obvious call for more inclusion and fairness in the ecosystem through decentralization,
there is no questioning of the primacy of profit maximisation. Thus, blockchain
capitalism is indeed a new form of capitalism, in which the commons are
embraced, but also to a large degree instrumentalized.
4 OUR VISION
We stand for a different vision.
First, we
want to make these distributed networks truly cooperative, much more
egalitarian, and sustainable, i.e. we want to:
·
Embed different values in the design of the
shared ledgers, such as through replacing the blockchain with the holochain;
·
Replace the principles of trustlessness with a
web of trust, i.e. integrate real human realtionships in trust-scaling
technologies;
·
Replace smart business contracts
with Ostrom contracts, that reflect the principles that govern the commons,
i.e. have smart contracts respect the ethical principles of a sustainable and
more socially just economy;
·
Replace competitive game incentives, based on
purely individual motivation and desire for gain, with cooperative game
mechanics;
·
Diminish the attraction and rewards of
extractive activities by rewarding generative activities, etc.
Figure 6 - Contrasting the
Propertarian Blockchain from Commons-Based Ledger Systems
Our
proposals reflect the conviction that we can tweak and transform the general
idea of the distributed ledger, to make it into a set of tools for production
for the common good. More importantly, even if we also want to use distributed
ledgers, the aim of their use is to recognize all contributions to the common
good and specific projects, not just commercial value recognized by the
capitalist market, and we want to recognize these and make them visible. Just
as importantly we aim to integrate the limits necessary to preserve our planet
and its multitude of beings for a long time, including a future for our
children and the next generations by making visible, in our distributed
accounting systems, the thermo-dynamic flows of matter and energy, creating a
context-based sustainability framework for all
participants in these networks.
Automating
some of these functions may help managing them. Expanding our capacity to
integrate commons-based, permissionless and passionate contributions in our
productive system, however, is equally important. Even as we want to create
ethical and generative livelihoods for all contributions, this does not mean
necessarily directly linking commons activities to market income. As we
explained above, the solution is to create a membrane which regulates the
relation between market and commons. This is of supreme importance if we want
to avoid a hyper-rationalisation of our behaviour and avoid a
transactionalisation of all aspects of life. We don’t want to subsume the
commons to the market and its logic, but to embed and subsume the market to the
necessities of human and non-human commons. By automating some of the aspects
of human cooperation, we want to create more space for non-market commoning.
And thus, despite these
limitations, and our critique of the current blockchain, the qualities and
advantages that the blockchain has brought into the world are of paramount
importance. What
matters is not just the flawed technology, but the patterns of thought and
interaction that it makes possible.
- First
of all, it has enabled the flow and exchange of crypto-assets and forms of
value, outside of the control of the existing and centralized financial
system. It is now possible to finance open source network infrastructures,
in ways that go beyond the prior dependency on the banking, payment, and
financial and venture capital based entities;
- This enabled a different line of thought
on value and money. Alternative value systems can be embedded in
currencies, as money is a social construct: imagined and designed by
humans.
While local complementary currencies have shown the potential for creating
local solutions, the new systems show that socially sovereign currencies
are scalable, and can be used by global virtual communities;
- Blockchain
economies subsume bounded firms to the logic of the network, based on the
use of open source commons and autonomously created monetary tools.
Corporations become co-dependent on multi-stakeholder networks and
commons;
- Token-based blockchain economies have the
potential to shift the balance of power between labor and capital. They
may allow a bigger part of the surplus value to flow to workers and other
stakeholders, avoiding domination by venture capital demand for an equity
stake;
The question is: will these
techniques, which favour a particular fraction of the labour aristocracy of
developers and technical-cognitive labour, also be applied for the wider commons
economy? Our position here is positive: all commoners can and must learn about
how this has been achieved, and whether it can be properly replicated
elsewhere.
The specific
design used in the creation of tokens is also paramount. Tokens allow for the expression
of multiple forms of value, which can eventually allow for the value
sovereignty we call for. The issuing of tokens for use as a medium of exchange
/ store of value within communities can be done in a way that incentivises
preferred behaviours and reinforces preferred values That is creating a direct
break of the dominant perception of money as commodity and opens up the
possibilities for other types of perceptions of value.
Most importantly, blockchains enable and ascribe the general
consensus on such subjective perceptions among communities, while facilitating
the interaction among them. Simply put, when a group of people agree that a
certain activity has merit, they can create a permanent and tamper-proof record
of this agreement. Let’s imagine for instance an energy cooperative building
small-scale wind-turbine. Its members may collaborate and create a set of rules
for the issue of tokens to engage more people in their cause (e.g. energy
engineers, households that want to reduce their dependence on fossil fuel,
etc.), and interact with other groups that may provide resources or support
services (e.g. a group of smart-grid experts, an impact finance firm, etc.).
Moreover,
crypto-tokens allow for crowdfunding or direct crowdsales, either through
utility tokens (a right to purchase the assets created by a blockchain project)
or through market-based tokens which allows stakeholders to partage in the
surplus value realized in the market. This allows founders, developers and
workers to go around the centralized banking and venture capital system,
finding their own funding more directly. These crowdfunding campaigns, based on
the sale of tokens that are open to all types of buyers, are called Initial
Coin Offerings.
Speculative ‘Initial Coin
Offerings’, can also be initial community offerings, as in the crowdfunding
campaign by Holochain. If the crowdfunding is successful, projects can go ahead
outside of the control of Venture Capital, which expects equity, i.e.
co-ownership, in return for its investments. By contrast tokens and Initial
Token Offerings, allows for the direct funding the workers, developers and
other stakeholders. If the project is successful and the token-price moves
upward, the work-related tokens rise in value, directly benefiting the workers,
who partake in the surplus value that was previously captured by the funders.
As Fred Ehrsam (2016), of
Coinbase expressed it:
So how do you get people to join a brand-new network? You give
people partial ownership of the network. Just like equity in a startup, it is
more valuable to join the network early because you get more ownership.
Decentralized applications do this by paying their contributors in their token.
And there is potential for that token (partial ownership of the network) to be
worth more in the future.
We believe that the
organization of a crypto-economy for the common good, based on enabling
commons-based peer production, which combines a recognition of a wider variety
of contributions, and helps achieve biocapacity accountability, will be based
on:
- a better integration of free and cooperative
mutual coordination, exchange and,
- the mobilization of resources through a fair and
generative ethical market, and,
- within a planning framework that reflects a
protection of planetary boundaries, and regulates access to the flows of
matter-energy to determine the bounds of usage through thresholds and
allocations of natural resources, as well as societal priorities.
Box 5 – Alternatives Distributed Ledger Technologies
|
Technology
|
Description
|
Applications
|
Characteristics/
Advantages
|
|
Tangle
|
A network data structure designed to
facilitate a range of secure transactions. To carry out a transaction you
need to validate two random previous ones.
|
IOTA: resource sharing platform for Internet of Things devices
|
+ no miners, no transaction fees
+ consensus mechanism embedded in
transactions
+ faster with more users
+ focused on machine-to-machine
communication
|
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