Related: diary
Dec-31-2010: [BTS Contact] Ownership and Governance Details
Kosta -- A Human Right wrote:
> over time even the most well intentioned committee can lose it's values
Yes, this is because ownership is slowly but continuously concentrated
into the hands of the current owners.
That Ownership is concentrated because Profit (Price above Cost) is
treated as a *reward* for those current owners, further increasing
their holdings.
The solution to this problem is: the organization must treat all
Profit (Price above Cost) as though it were an *investment* from the
consumer who paid it.
To reiterate: Control can be continuously auto-distributed to those
who are willing to pay for it by treating Profit as Payer investment.
Handling Profit as an investment from the payer is a negative-feedback
loop that solves the long-standing issue of overaccumulation.
Notice this creates a "User Owned" organization described at
http://P2PFoundation.net/User_Owned
Dec-31-2010: [p2p-research] Information sector: a qualitative different mode of production?
Roberto Verzola wrote:
> today's ICTs represent a qualitatively different *mode* of production
>
> the Internet requires a tangible infrastructure, such as a
> network of servers, routers, satellites, undersea cables, modems,
> transceivers, computers, CD readers/burners, etc. etc.
Would you say it matters who owns and therefore controls these Means
of Production?
If so, then, in your opinion, who would, ideally, those owners be?
1.) Should it be the Workers who manufacture, install, maintain and
improve them?
2.) Should it be the End-Users who want them enough to pay for them?
3.) Should it be some combination of those?
4.) Should it be the currently corrupt governments?
5.) Should it be the fuedalists that already own them, and we should
just beg them to do the right thing?
Dec-28-2010: [p2p-research]
On Thu, Dec 30, 2010 at 6:40 AM, j.martin.pedersen
<m.pedersen@lancaster.ac.uk> wrote:
>
> On 30/12/10 03:28, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>>
>> My own view in this is that peer production, in the context of abundance of
>> digital reproduction
>
> I don't understand "abundance logic" without a denial of resource,
> labour and energy use. So when you say that you don't disregard those
> important and very high overlapping social and environmental costs of
> digital commons, how does a philosophy and architecture of commons that
> turn on the concept of abundance actually work?
>
Keep in mind everything from Avocados to Zucchini can also be "copied
for zero marginal cost" once the are established.
In fact, that type of production is even *less* environmentally costly than
the industrialization required to produce, connect, power, maintain and
recycle computers.
It also requires less labor when these "manufacturing plants" are local.
My friend in California owns an Avocado tree for which he does nothing
except to occasionally pluck the fruit.
Sincerely,
Patrick Anderson
Social Sufficiency Coalition
http://SourceFreedom.BlogSpot.com
j.martin.pedersen wrote:
> Does the tree not drink water, does it not grow in soil that was stolen
> from the native people, does your friend not labour to care for it at all?
Yes, that is why I used the term "Zero *MARGINAL* Cost" just as those
who talk about the "abundance of digital reproduction".
In other words, the "abundance of *organic* reproduction" is no different
in terms of real costs to our planet and as to the labor required.
I am trying to point out, as I think you are, there is no such thing as
"Immaterial Production", no matter which sphere is being considered.
Now I expect someone will say
"Of course there are real costs, nobody is denying that!".
But terms like "Zero Marginal Cost" and "Immaterial Production" and
even "Free" confuse the conversation and lead many to believe the
implied claim is that those costs are simply not important.
Another very common theme in these discussions is that the
economics of this production is now very different from the
past - as though the underlying Mode of Production and ownership
of the Means of Production is no longer an issue.
This mixes-in with the dreamy visions of self-replicating robots that
will save us from ourselves, even though organisms (used to be)
self-replicating, solar-powered, food manufacturing plants (Monsanto
is putting an end to this, of course, since Profit requires Scarcity).
Dec-28-2010: To: nettime-l email list
Jacob Appelbaum said:
> "I'll be using Tor a lot more than I ever did -- and I used it a lot,"
Tor may seem a solution, but is more likely a 'honeypot' designed by
the modern Gulag to attract and track dissidents.
Dec-28-2010: To: FeedingAmerica.org
Hello "Feeding America",
I wonder, if instead of simply purchasing finished products from mega
corporations, why not organize all this value and effort toward owning
some farms for ourselves?
When we pay massive corporations such as ConAgra and, indirectly,
Monsanto to supply us with that which we need, we are sending the
signal that they should continue on their vicious warpath of lowering
the biodiversity of the planet.
Have you watched http://FoodInc.org ?
Since Feeding America is such a large organization, let's switch gears
and get more vertically integrated into real production.
Let's use some of the funds gathered each year to begin buying the
Physical Sources of food production such as the Land, Water rights,
Tools, Trees, Seeds, Animals, etc. needed to gain some real control
for our own, mutual benefit.
This will also drastically lower the Price we must pay to this food -
since we then will have those products at Cost and no longer be paying
Profit.
Is there any reason Feeding America should not move in this direction?
We should be growing Trees full of Olives, Avocados, Almonds, Pecans, Walnuts.
For our land to flow with Milk and Honey,
We will need to own the Cattle and Bees.
Dec-28-2010: [Metacurrency_Project] Some thoughts...
Uriah Zebadiah wrote:
> I will say that your platform needs to be compatible with investment capital, or your growth curve will be way too slow, and more investor-friendly competition will blow past you on the way to google or facebook-like market dominance (for a market that barely exists yet :-P).
That mindset may not apply to a true OSV.
Nearly all Open Source projects you might call 'successful' were grown
very slowly in comparison to their rivals.
The GNU project - which forms the basis of what is now called 'Linux'
- was started by Richard Stallman in 1983.
I think "market dominance" is unnecessary if the goal of the venture
is Use-Value. We only need enough funds to begin.
But a goal of Use-Value is difficult if all the investors are only
interested in keeping Price above Cost.
An alternate funding scheme would have some % of the startup costs
come from potential End-Users "prepaying" for those results.
These User-Investors would receive a payout of Product instead of Profit.
They would not buy the outputs, but would own them already as a
side-effect of their co-owning the Physical Sources.
> Food (local permaculture food systems, plus processing and distribution)
Yes, let's attract middle-to-high income households to *prepay* for
organic foods.
These prepayments will be treated as real investments so those
End-Users become real co-owners.
And the ROI for their risk is paid to them as at-cost Product instead
of trying to sell the outputs at the market with the hope of keeping
Price above Cost (which requires scarcity).
> Technology companies (particularly ones that harness the crowd)
Crowd funded and Crowd *OWNED* so each sub-venture can concentrate on
use-value, since the Product will no longer need to be sold, but will
instead be ROI itself.
> Transportation (car culture isn't sustainable-- yet rail will require government-level investment)
Community-Owned buses and/or cabs where the potential customers are
also the sole co-owners means the rides are not sold for
exchange-value, but are already under the control of those who need
those services as a result of their paying those costs early.
> do people have any fresh ideas on particular advances in these fields that can be made without major capital input first
Let's think of the mundane yet unsolved issue of food.
Growing individually owned gardens is a distraction at best.
When working alone, few if any of us can grow and process/store all
that we need for the entire year.
But even the most well-intentioned "Community Supported Agriculture"
(CSA) is still caught in the Capitalist mindset of keeping Price above
Cost because the *OWNERSHIP* of those Physical Sources is not in the
hands of the End-Users.
We must organize "Community Owned Agriculture" (COA) where those that
can prepay for their food will commit funds to purchase the Land,
Water rights, Tools, Seeds, etc. - and those that are in need of
employment can prepay by committing their labor to that endeavor.
A COA would not sell the results at the end of the season, but divides
it among those co-owners in accordance with the amount each had
invested.
These User-Owned [ http://P2PFoundation.net/User_Owned ] ventures do
not suffer when others succeed (they do not rely upon scarcity),
because they use the directly and so never "play the game" of
attempting to keep Price above Cost.
Dec-27-2010: [fcf_discussion] US net neutrality law: What is wrong with it?
mp wrote:
> Alternatively, from that perspective, a "better" way to achieve net
> neutrality would be through an expropriation of the infrastructure and a
> handing it over to community groups to manage and maintain according to
> the visions of freedom and neutrality that have developed over the years
> of digital commoning.
1.) Corporations would never "hand it over" voluntarily.
2.) Using government power to force a hand-over would be wrong in it's own way.
3.) Communities can simply *buy* the infrastructure away from these corporations - since those communities eventually pay for all those costs anyway *and* pay profit.
...
We pay Profit because of our lack of ownership.
Profit measures our dependence upon the current owners.
When we finally awake and begin to buy the Physical Sources of all of
our goods and services, then we, the Users, will be free from the
feudalists who subjugate us through artificial scarcity in their drive
to keep price above cost.
User Freedom in the Physical Realm will be based on Property Rights
held under a "Property Left" trade-agreement that guarantees access to
Physical Sources by treating any Profit collected (because of
late-comers paying for goods and services) as an investment from the
user who paid it.
This creates a negative-feedback loop that allows us to grow while
auto-distributing that ownership to those who were willing to pay for
it.
Dec-26-2010: [Metacurrency_Project] My Vision of an Open (Physical) Source, Use-Value Venture
John Robb wrote:
> think in terms of a venture a couple of hundred thousand people could help build,
> in their spare time, that would generate significant income for them in perpetuity.
Let's think of 'outcome' instead of 'income'.
Imagine 200,000 customers pool resources to pre-pay for some "Physical
Sources" of production.
It almost doesn't matter what the industry is, as long as those
funders can use those Objectives directly.
The ROI for this type of investment is at-cost Product instead of
price-above-cost Profit. It is truly a use-value venture.
For example, say a group of customers of raw-milk pool their $ and/or
labor to purchase and/or build a dairy.
Each person invests (whether with money or with labor) the amount
required for them to receive the amount of Product they intend to
consume.
The Product is never sold since it already belongs to those who will use it.
When each consumer/owner arrives at the dairy to get milk, they do not
buy it from the group, but are simply receiving the % that they
already own as a result of their ownership in those Physical Sources
(the Physical Sources in this case is the Land, Water-rights, Cattle,
feedlot, milking machines, etc.).
As another example: imagine co-owing the material assets of a
cell-phone network.
Attract 1/2 million potential phone/internet customers to pre-pay for
such services.
Use those funds to buy, build and operate those Physical Sources.
The payoff is that we "avoid paying profit" instead of trying to
collect profit from others.
This explains the 'static' case.
The 'dynamic' case - where customers are entering and leaving the
group - will be explained later.
Dec-20-2010: Title idea: Carrier, Provider,
Dec-20-2010: To P2PNetwork mailing list
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> if we are creating the value, why is it that
> neither governance nor financial benefits flow to us ...
Because we won't own the physical infrastructure, of course.
> such resources have both a commodity aspect (selling attention), a
> governance aspect (who controls the platform), and a knowledge commons
> aspect (the community of participants creating universally available shared
> knowledge).
The "community of participants" could easily control the platform if
they would take the burden of ownership upon their collective
selves...
>
> to shortly answer the public/commons aspect: my feeling is that commons
> really means, belongs to all, as opposed to the public, which means, belongs
> to a separate entity that claims to represent all ..
I agree this is a delicate and difficult to describe differentiation.
How about a small group that buys Physical Sources needed to host such
production, but has a policy which guarantees all late-comers also
gain real (divisible) co-ownership?
Dec-17-2010: Title idea: Culture Host, Hosting Culture
Dec-17-2010: To P2PNetwork mailing list
M. Fioretti wrote:
> Patrick Anderson wrote:
>> But instead of facing the problem of co-owing Physical Sources, we
>> are told by Eben Moglen, Richard Stallman and many others that each
>> of us must own these things in *absolute isolation* to retain
>> Freedom.
>
> at least Moglen says we should "in isolation" as you say, our own
> physical servers, but I really don't think or got the impression that
> he tought we could do without a common, centralized, physical telecom
> infrastructure.
Ok, so we need a "physical telecom infrastructure", but then *WHO* should have control of those Material Means of Production?
Should it be some Wall-Street moguls who intend to subjugate us?
Should it be the Workers who build, install, maintain and improve them?
Should it be the Users who, in the end, pay for all of those costs - and usually more (when they pay Profit)?
>
>> We, the Users, will need collectively purchase and/or build and then
>> co-own the material infrastructure that our ISPs and Cell-Phone
>> providers hold against us before we can finally have any real say in
>> how those networks are governed.
>
> Personally, JUST BECAUSE the material infrastructure is very material,
> very big, very expensive and very polluting to duplicate, in general I
> really don't like proposals of building complete, alternative
> networks. Much better, much more efficient and much more
> environmentally sound to reform control of what already exist, IMO.
>
We can reform and gain control through OWNERSHIP. Owners have absolute dominion!
We, the Users, *already* pay all the Costs of those networks. And we also pay the burden of Profit.
So let us gather together to purchase those Physical Sources *away* from the tyrants that currently subjugate us in their drive to keep Price above Cost.
Could you tell me any disadvantages to such an approach?
Are we just frightened?
Is it simply that we lack the skills to organize?
If we, the Users could organize to own the Physical Sources of all Objectives we seek, would it be a better way, or would there be no difference?
Does it not seem profound that we could then *ignore* those who want to stop us from achieving our goals?
Dec-17-2010: To P2PNetwork mailing list
Software is only one half of the equation.
What about the Hardware needed to run the Software and to Store the data?
How can Peers cluster around shared Hardware to Host the network services we need and want?
Of course you can say "No problem, I'll just host it on my server and you can all use it.".
But then what assurance do we have that those services will continue into the future?
How do we know you won't slowly run out of money and the care needed to maintain those Physical Sources?
How do we know you won't become 'evil' as Google claimed it never would?
How can we collectively fund and own those Material Means of Production so we can protect ourselves from any single individual or subgroup?
Dec-16-2010: To P2PNetwork mailing list
Samuel Rose wrote:
> It seems to me that a good long-term option for people that cannot do
> their own system administration would be to create a cooperative-run
> datacenter (or datacenters).
Who would (optimally) be the owners of such a datacenter?
Should the customers gather together to fund and own it themselves?
Or should the workers who install and maintain it pay for that property?
I'm just talking strategically - what is the best arrangement?
Or maybe ownership doesn't matter at all?
Dec-15-2010: To Info@UrbanEco.org
Green is not enough.
We must install *manufacturing* plants that produce the raw materials
needed for the production of food, soap, clothing, etc.
Concentrate on Trees, but make them *gifting* trees. Especially
valuable would be Avocado, Olive, and Nut trees.
Also think of the price for herbs and spices in the local market.
Many such small plants grow very easily.
Plant that which we NEED, not just ornamentals!
Dec-12-2010: To a private list
I like this kind of sarcastic humour (6 minutes)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=peX4dBEF0Vg
A somewhat related movie (2 hours)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U71-KsDArFM
Dec-11-2010: To P2PNetwork mailing list
If the Users are the Owners, how will TheConnective.net avoid worker exploitation?
Many would say the Workers should own the Means of Production, or at least have partial ownership.
Does that mean private ownership of devices such as the PlugComputer must be shared with those who manufacture, configure and/or maintain those devices?
I'm talking about strategy.
We need to discover a better road so we show others that direction.
We can't just continue waiting on the sidelines observing others as they ignorantly destroy our planet.
It *DOES* matter what we think they should do.
They (the collective We) need guidance because we are currently doing it very, very WRONG.
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> I only have a problem with posing user-ownership,
> which excludes workers, as universal solution,
Ok, so the question is: Will creating a Citizen-Owned Internet
exclude workers in the way you imagine, or maybe it just doesn't apply
in this situation?
I'm sincerely not sure what this means nor how to solve this exact issue.
Dec-07-2010: COTW.cc >>Coalition of the Willing
Dec-03-2010:
CSPP.Oekonux.org >>Critical Studies in Peer Production (CSPP) seeks high-quality contributions from researchers and practitioners of peer production. We understand peer production as a mode of commons-based and oriented production in which participation is voluntary and predicated on the self-selection of tasks. Notable examples are the collaborative development of Free Software projects and of the Wikipedia online encyclopedia. Through the analysis of the forms, operations, and contradictions of peer producing communities in contemporary capitalist society, the journal aims to open up new perspectives on the implications of peer production for social change.
Dec-03-2010: Response to Ben
Subject: "Garden A Feedin"
My ideas complement and extend yours in these ways:
* Allow you to target businesses and governments that are interested in the landscaping and an appearance of goodness (helping the needy), but otherwise have no use of those outputs.
* Help insure a more continued employment through Service Contracts.
* Help you and your business avoid government interference and lower your tax liability by receiving a portion of your income as the outputs themselves which you would then use directly. This is a form of Imputed Production that makes you appear less wealthy than you really are - since there are then no numbers to report.
===Target Markets
Businesses should not be overlooked, as they have large budgets and are always looking for a way to improve the (mostly false) notion that they care about something besides themselves.
You can take advantage of those Public Relations (PR) funds by helping to expose their contribution to the Greater-Good when they allow you to use their land and water to help Feed the Hungry through Local Production.
This similarly applies to mid and high income households that would like to appear more 'green' to their neighbors, but do not have the time or will to deal with those 'manufacturing' plants themselves.
Here is the approach in rough form:
A.) We will install beautiful yet productive plants for approximately the same price as non-productive plants.
B.) We will optionally contract with you to tend those plants and harvest the products in perpetutity at NO COST to you except we will retain some % of that harvest as payment.
C.) We will optionally process and store your % at NO COST to you except we will retain some further % of that harvest as payment.
D.) We will optionally prepare your % into advanced solutions, even fully prepared meals at NO COST to you except we will retain some % further of that harvest as payment.
===Vertical Integration
As you gain more of these Product-as-Payment Service Contracts, you will finally have more output than you or your employees can use directly.
At that point, you can begin using these raw materials as the inputs of other businesses such as creating Olive-oil, Almond-milk, Nut-based nutrition bars, etc.
Later, you can even open restaurants supplied by those outputs.
===Business Orientation
Because of the nature of your endeavor, a carefully written "Mission Statement" will qualify you as non-profit.
This would have NO EFFECT on the amount of money you or your workers can keep as reward, it only requires you call those rewards *Wages* instead of *Profit* - it is a simple matter of book-keeping.
===General Ideas
For trees, concentrate on high-oil products such as Avacado, Olive, Nut - as they are much more valuable (both nutritionally and monetarily) than fruit.
For small plants, don't forget spices and herbs, which are usually easy to grow, yet very expensive at the market.
Off-the-shelf dog houses might be a simple basis for small Chicken shelters.
Don't forget Bee Hives - informing potential customers of http://Wikipedia.org/wiki/Colony_collapse_disorder to increase their moral imperative.
===Advertising and Online Presence
Don't spend any money on a website unless you are sure you cannot meet your needs for free.
BlogSpot.com and Blogger.com are likely sufficient for your blogging needs, and are free.
GooglePages.com can be used if you need more control over the page layout.
LinkedIn.com is also free and will add to your credibility.
You might be able to advertise online for free if you qualify as a non-profit.
===Minor Details
The name is fun, but the word "Garden" may do more harm than good, as it conjures the all-too-familiar picture of labor-intense, messy, and mostly unproductive plots that must be hidden from view.
Dec-03-2010: Following the development of Las Indias' Phyle and the P2P-CoOp
LasIndias.net/indianopedia/Community
Pad.TeleComix.org/p2pconstitution
Lists.OurProject.org/pipermail/p2p-coop
FrancoIacomella.org/p2p/doku.php user: patrick_anderson
Dec-01-2010: Noticed MuniNetworks.org/content/community-broadband-preemption-map
"'Eighteen states in the U.S. have enacted barriers to either make it difficult or impossible for communities to build publicly-owned networks. The map below displays states with barriers based on our analysis of whether they have an outright ban, a de facto ban, or various barriers to communities owning this essential infrastructure.'"