I recently discovered Peter Koenig’s blog, and his work with workshops where people can investigate their ‘money consciousness’.

So I updated our pages on the social production of money, with some of his articles, for example one with his hypotheses on the Future of Money, which are very congruent with our own.

How then, does his work differ from the monetary reform efforts of Bernard Lietaer?

Peter wrote us the following comments and I reply below:

Peter Koenig:

“Bernard Lietaer is also my favourite monetary reformer and our work is linked insofar as we’re acting on two sides of the same coin (his statement). However I find that the concept of “priority” is too little appreciated in general and amongst monetary reformers in particular.

Nature is not arbitrary in evolution or development, some things come before others. (I’d wager that at some point scientists will discover that the egg did indeed come before the chicken!) In terms of the system of money, the social production/system is borne on the conglomerate of individual systems as they relate and act together under prevailing consciousness, not the
other way round.

It would be nice if it would work the other way round this and we could materialise reform ideas simply by thinking them up, suasion and publicity – avoiding the messy business of our relationships. Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. Many new (reform) systems no more than replicate the old ones internally because there has been no movement in consciousness. On the other hand where consciousness is shifted there is an automatic raise in the
intelligence of the wider social system through the relationships of the players – whether this is intended or not. It expresses itself through the medium of altered NEEDS. I see lots of evidence of this in my work.

Systemic development in action invariably starts with an individual somewhere, not with the collective.

This distinction is not intended to discourage or discredit monetary reformers, on the contrary to help them identify how to become (more) effective in achieving their goals – namely through the medium of developing their own individual money relationships.”

Michel Bauwens responds:

“Thanks for your mail Peter. I understand your point, and where you are coming from, as I used to do a lot of consciousness related work once. Not so much anymore, as I choose to do things now with my existing ‘consciousness-toolbox’, while of course still trying to work on awareness as well.

So indeed I think that both you and Bernard work ‘two sides of the same coin’, and that there is no priority to be chosen in that respect, they will mutually reinforce each other.”

If you want to collaborate on the practical implementation of p2p-based exchange infrastructures, then keep the month of July 2007 free, and consider attending the workshops in Germany of the Detmold Collective.

Among the goals cited are the following:

* Trust enabled P2P Value Creation (hospitality, learning, media, activism, finance, production, trade, communication infrastructures, services, research and development, data and knowledge processing , … )

* Open Source Copylefted coding and Software development for Trust enabled P2P Value Creation

A contribution by François Rey, to update our Wiki entry on Augmented Social Networks.

Francois Rey:

There is a plethora of social networking websites, each being like an island on the web, unconnected with the others. The real social networking will happen when all these can connect and integrate with each other. Such idea can be found in the ASN paper. After its publication several identity initiatives have emerged (e.g. identity commons). However I do not believe the whole ASN vision can be reached using current web technology, which is what the authors of this paper suggest when they said in 2003 ”the ASN will not require a decade of intensive R&D at a cutting edge computer science laboratory, because the technology necessary for the ASN already exists, or is being developed. No engineering breakthrough is required. Rather, the challenge facing the ASN is
organizational and political, not technological”‘.

The main reason for this is that current web technology, in the way it works and in the way it is presented to the user, is still tied to the network topology. The user is very much aware of crossing boundaries between machines connected to the internet. However the network architecture and topology is completely out of touch with the reality of social networks and
communities. In order to really create an augmented social network I believe we need to shift our focus one level up and start building an architecture where the network topology is completely transparent. The user should no longer feel like navigating a set of interconnected machines and have to bother with stuff like server names, ports, etc. Instead, what the user
should be aware of when navigating the network are communities, their members, their boundaries, their resources, their connections, and so on. In other words we’re talking about a whole application layer on top of the internet with a distributed and common object model. What a user understands as ‘community’ or ‘network’ should have a clear representative on the net regardless of the computer resources involved. Right now the concept of community does not even have a real representation on the web. All we have are sets of users of certain web sites or web resources. But where do we capture the fact that an individual is part of multiple communities? How do we specify a community by aggregation of other communities (e.g.
neighborhoods aggregate into a whole city)? How do we manage communities with “moving” boundaries, e.g. those that work or have worked at a certain company? Unless we develop a new social layer on top of the web, the social networking ideals will be dead in the water because there is a complete disconnection between the computer network model and the social network reality.

However the authors of the ASN paper are right when they say ”“the challenge facing the ASN is organizational and political, not technological””. Indeed, building the ASN means we need to share more than what we have been used to in our competitive economy. It forces us to really collaborate and start building (innovation) commons that go against our organizational habits and strong property models. P2P technologies and Free-Libre Open Source Software are obviously the most suited models for building this ASN. Technology such as freenet, Netsukuku, and Croquet may prove to be essential in that task.

It’s very common today to realize ICT (Information and Communication Technology) remove the limitations that have contributed to the predominance of hierarchical and centralized models. But most do not realize the consequence of this: ICT will be a key enabler for the new (re)forms of society. Discussions within the political and economic spheres are essential, but by no means should we occult the question on how far do we want to push the limits with technology. I would even say that when you really look at what ICT can enable, you realize we can completely redistribute the locus of power within the political, economical, and financial spheres. This can completely dismay most theories in these domains. To better understand this, one just need to realize what Skype, Napster, and email have respectively done to their respective segment, and imagine the same kind of tools in the domain of economic and financial exchange.

The real limits now are the ones we imagine.”

Collanos is a new groupware tool that is based on P2P content distribution and copying mechanisms.

It’s pro’s and con’s are reviewed here by Techfold.

Please note we keep track of online and offline group facilitation tools here

taking on from where Michel left…

2. (Andrew Keen): The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

Adam: …well, that depends. if you look at the history of taste formation it is true that for first hundred years or so of modern consumer culture (roughtly) ‘good taste’ was mainly dictated by the elites (se Thorstein Veblen’s classic (1899) Theory of the Leisure Class), but form the 1950s and on the creative and consumer industries have restructured to capture the innovation that goes on among non-elite groups. Today ‘good taste’ is largely dictated by trend setting groups like teens our subcultures, or by the participatory judgement of large and complex lifestyle communities (like, for example, in the case of the wine market). And before modern consumer society the there was a radical divide betwen elite and mass markets, with the conesqeuence that elite and popular ‘good tastes’ were largely separate. Popular culture largely following a ‘fashion’ dynamics of its own (see Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe.)

3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.

Well ,every tehcnology has its dystopian implications. Kafka’s writings were inspired by the tehcnological triad of typewriter, telegraph and filing cabinet, which made up the basis for bureaucracy…

8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community, individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.

Probably the old Marx is more adequate as a reference, in particular the thesis on General Intellect. Here Marx points at the secular trend within capitalism to promote society-wide cooperation throught he progressive socialization of capital. This is a better way to understand web 2.0. It has very little to do with human nature, and more to do with the stuctural consequences of the ‘real subsumtion’ of society under capital: This process creates extended networks of productive cooperation that reaches far beyond beyond the control of capital and thus contain a real potential for creating alternatives- wait and see what one-laptop-per -child plus wifi meshworks can do..(see my text on Ethics an General Intellect on this site)

10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his Republic.

..well, Plato’s banning of poets was probably much more related to his struggle to establish the authority of philosophy against the largely oral tradition of the (homeric) poets: to etablish logos against doxa. As Havelock clearly shows in his classic Preface to Plato, homeric poetry was, more than enything else, a moral code, an ethical and practical instruction manual transmitted through (easier to remember) poetry.

I’ve been a big fan of McKenzie Wark’s previous book, The Hacker Manifesto, so it is with pleasure I further distribute this announcement about his very latest book:

Excerpt:

The Institute for the Future of the Book is pleased to announce a new edition of the “networked book” Gamer Theory by McKenzie Wark. Last year, the Institute published a draft of Wark’s path-breaking critical study of video games in an experimental web format designed to bring readers into conversation around a work in progress. In the months that followed, hundreds of comments poured in from gamers, students, scholars, artists and the generally curious, at times turning into a full-blown conversation in the manuscript’s margins. Based on the many thoughtful contributions he received, Wark revised the book and has now published a print edition through Harvard University Press, which contains an edited selection of comments from the original website. In conjunction with the Harvard release, the Institute for the Future of the Book has launched a new Creative Commons-licensed, social web edition of Gamer Theory, along with a gallery of data visualizations of the text submitted by leading interaction designers, artists and hackers. This constellation of formats — read, read/write, visualize — offers the reader multiple ways of discovering and building upon Gamer Theory. A multi-mediated approach to the book in the digital age.

More info at web.futureofthebook.org/mckenziewark/

More about the book:

Ever get the feeling that life’s a game with changing rules and no clear sides, one you are compelled to play yet cannot win? Welcome to gamespace. Gamespace is where and how we live today. It is everywhere and nowhere: the main chance, the best shot, the big leagues, the only game in town. In a world thus configured, McKenzie Wark contends, digital computer games are the emergent cultural form of the times. Where others argue obsessively over violence in games, Wark approaches them as a utopian version of the world in which we actually live. Playing against the machine on a game console, we enjoy the only truly level playing field–where we get ahead on our strengths or not at all.

Gamer Theory uncovers the significance of games in the gap between the near-perfection of actual games and the highly imperfect gamespace of everyday life in the rat race of free-market society. The book depicts a world becoming an inescapable series of less and less perfect games. This world gives rise to a new persona. In place of the subject or citizen stands the gamer. As all previous such personae had their breviaries and manuals, Gamer Theory seeks to offer guidance for thinking within this new character. Neither a strategy guide nor a cheat sheet for improving one’s score or skills, the book is instead a primer in thinking about a world made over as a gamespace, recast as an imperfect copy of the game.

For additional info, contact: ben@futureofthebook.org

Here is some quick commentary to the main points made in Andrew Keen’s Cult of the Amateur. My responses are in italics.

AK-1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology — in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts — will
enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.

MB: I would indeed affirm that and I mean indeed everybody, has something interesting to say, but it depends crucially on what topic, and on the context of exchange. There are processes where we want to select for quality, and others in which we want every participant to have hir or her say, either because they are impacted by a decision, and have a moral right of input, or because “together we know everything”, and we want to design for such a process of collective intelligence. There are many design tools and facilitation processes that can guard against dumbing down and lowest common-denominator results. This is a practical matter, not an objective trend towards lack of quality.

Peer to peer processes are based on the principle of equipotentiality, see the entry here for a full treatment.

Jorge Ferrer expresses beautifully what it is about:

Everybody can be considered …

“equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal.”

Good participatory systems allow this to happen through self-selection first, then through communal validation. A problem can arise with the second process of distributed quality control. Massification of judgment can lead to a bottoming effect, but not necessarily. It can be configured in such a way that either affinity groups or experts can play a privileged role in the validation process. The only difference is that the control is a posteriori instead of a priori. The advantage of a broader participation is that there is a greater quantity to select quality from. Finally, it is based on the idea that “together we know everything”, and that even experts have limited and biased viewpoints.

The key point is that the “danger” that Keen points to is a matter of good design principles and processes, not of the participatory process itself. There are many p2p projects where experts, and pro-ams successfully work together.In fact, Keen simply repeats the arguments that have always been brought against democratization.

AK-3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.

MB: Isn’t this the same old tired argument assuming that the real and the virtual are ‘separate’ realms, where in fact there is just one embodied life, using various tools. This is not to say that there can be various ‘abuses’ and ‘exagerrations’ (people reading all the time, phoning all the time, surfing all the time), but they are not different from physical addictions (gambling, alcohol)

AK-4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo” three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.

MB: Of course, but lets turn his argument around. Not all small media are bad media. Distributed media can aggregate so to achieve scale, and can produce qualitative works as well. I’m thinking of the music in Bali, where every musician has to follow a collective score, and can only change the score through coordination with all other participants. This is just one polarity, the other being the jazzband model of free individual creativity in communal mode. Different production modalities will produce different types of creative possibilities, which have to be judged on their own merit. Big media has clear dumbing down effects, micro media, through wrong design, can have as well. However, big media have a clear self-interest in dumbing us down, and are controlled by financial forces which do not have our best interests at hand. Micromedia, even when mediated through the centralization of sharing that is characteristic of the attention economy, are in our own collective hands, and distributed design can act against the centralisation of sharing. The key is to defend the continued capacity to change hubs, since hubs will always exist through voluntary choices (the power law). But it is possible to design for autonomy and diversity, to offset the protocollary power of invisible architectures.

Conclusion: againt Andrew Keen we must insist that participation (the peer to peer process) and elitism (the selection for quality process), can and will inevitable co-exist. The difference is that elites will be more diversified and flexible. The role of the elite is to sustain a more and greater creativity, not to put themselves as gatekeepers.

To quote John Heron, about leadership:

“The sole role of hierarchy is in its spontaneous emergence in the initiation and continuous flowering of autonomy-in-co-operation in all spheres of human endeavor”

There are many critics, but here James Cascio argues that it will be a boon to participatory culture. Large excerpt from an article on his excellent blog on Open Futures.

Excerpt:

“I’m excited about the OLPC machine’s potential because it’s so clearly a revolutionary device, both in the sense of it having capabilities that nobody has ever before seen in a laptop, and in the sense it being a catalyst for out-of-control social transformation. The OLPC project will drop millions of powerful, deeply networked, information technology devices into the hands of precisely the population (children and teens) most likely to want to figure out the unanticipated uses.

From the startlingly long-range wifi mesh networking to the “Sugar” social interface, these devices were built to treat hierarchies as damage, and route around them.

Bletsas says his design will provide node-to-node connectivity over 600 meters. Over a flat area without buildings and with low radio noise, that connection can stretch to 1.2 km. Students can put their computers on the mesh network simply by flipping the antennas up. This turns on the Wi-Fi subsystem of the machine without waking the CPU, allowing the laptop to route packets while consuming just 350 milliwatts of power. [...]

The mesh network feature lets students in the same classroom share a virtual whiteboard with a teacher, chat (okay, gossip) during class, or collaborate on assignments. [...]

The OLPC team also constructed a completely new user environment, code-named Sugar, designed to break down the isolation that students might experience from staring at laptops all day. It introduces the concept of “presence”—the idea behind instant-messaging buddy lists. The user interface is aware of other students in the classroom, showing their pictures or icons on the screen, allowing students to chat or share work with others in the class.

The system shares with the other students new tasks, like a drawing or a document, by default, though students can choose to make them private. Sugar creates a “blog” for each child—a record of the activities they engaged in during the day—which lets them add public or private diary entries.

This is a participatory culture dream device. Using entirely open source software, the laptops are enormously friendly to “hacking” (in the exploration sense, not the criminal sense), yet can be returned to a safe configuration at the push of a button. Moreover, they’re extraordinarily, wonderfully, energy-efficient: at normal use, a OLPC laptop draws 3 watts, compared to 30 watts for a typical lower-end conventional laptop; and a full charge lasts for over six hours at maximum power use, 25 hours in power conservation mode.

Andrew Keen’s new book,”The Cult of the Amateur” aims to expose the grave consequences of today’s new participatory Web 2.0 and claims it threatens our values. Here’s a summary of his key points. I will respond to some of them in a separate posting. The material is taken from the IDC mailing list.

THE ANTI WEB 2.0 MANIFESTO by Andrew Keen

1. The cult of the amateur is digital utopianism’s most seductive delusion. This cult promises that the latest media technology — in the form of blogs, wikis and podcasts — will enable everyone to become widely read writers, journalists, movie directors and music artists. It suggests, mistakenly, that everyone has something interesting to say.

2. The digital utopian much heralded “democratization” of media will have a destructive impact upon culture, particularly upon criticism. “Good taste” is, as Adorno never tired of telling us, undemocratic. Taste must reside with an elite (“truth makers”) of historically progressive cultural critics able to determine, on behalf of the public, the value of a work-of-art. The digital utopia seeks to flatten this elite into an ochlocracy. The danger, therefore, is that the future will be tasteless.

3. To imagine the dystopian future, we need to reread Adorno, as well as Kafka and Borges (the Web 2.0 dystopia can be mapped to that triangular space between Frankfurt, Prague and Buenos Aires). Unchecked technology threatens to undermine reality and turn media into a rival version of life, a 21st century version of “The Castle” or “The Library of Babel”. This might make a fantastic movie or short piece of fiction. But real life, like art, shouldn’t be fantasy; it shouldn’t be fiction.

4. A particularly unfashionable thought: big media is not bad media. The big media engine of the Hollywood studios, the major record labels and publishing houses has discovered and branded great 20th century popular artists of such as Alfred Hitchcock, Bono and W.G. Sebald (the “Vertigo” three). It is most unlikely that citizen media will have the marketing skills to discover and brand creative artists of equivalent prodigy.

5. Let’s think differently about George Orwell. Apple’s iconic 1984 Super Bowl commercial is true: 1984 will not be like Nineteen Eighty-Four the message went. Yes, the “truth”
about the digital future will be the absence of the Orwellian Big Brother and the Ministry of Truth. Orwell’s dystopia is the dictatorship of the State; the Web 2.0 dystopia is the
dictatorship of the author. In the digital future, everyone will think they are Orwell (the movie might be called: Being George Orwell).

6. Digital utopian economists Chris Anderson have invented a theoretically flattened market that they have christened the “Long Tail”. It is a Hayekian cottage market of small media producers industriously trading with one another. But Anderson’s “Long Tail” is really a long tale. The real economic future is something akin to Google — a vertiginous media world in which content and advertising become so indistinguishable that they become one and the same (more grist to that Frankfurt-Prague-BuenosAires triangle).

7. As always, today’s pornography reveals tomorrow’s media. The future of general media content, the place culture is going, is Voyeurweb.com: the convergence of self-authored shamelessness, narcissism and vulgarity — a self-argument in favor of censorship. As Adorno liked to remind us, we have a responsibility to protect people from their worst impulses. If people aren’t able to censor their worst instincts, then they need to be censored by others wiser and more disciplined than themselves.

8. There is something of the philosophical assumptions of early Marx and Rousseau in the digital utopian movement, particularly in its holy trinity of online community, individual creativity and common intellectual property ownership. Most of all, it’s in the marriage of abstract theory and absolute faith in the virtue of human nature that lends the digital utopians their intellectual debt to intellectual Casanovas like young Marx and Rousseau.

9. How to resist digital utopianism? Orwell’s focus on language is the most effective antidote. The digital utopians needs to be fought word-for-word, phrase-by-phrase, delusion by delusion. As an opening gambit, let’s focus on the meaning of four key words in the digital utopian lexicon: a) author b) audience c) community d) elitism.

10. The cultural consequence of uncontrolled digital development will be social vertigo. Culture will be spinning and whirling and in continual flux. Everything will be in motion; everything will be opinion. This social vertigo of ubiquitous opinion was recognized by Plato. That’s why he was of the opinion that opinionated artists should be banned from his Republic.

We recently reported on the dutch open source car which is expected to be produced in 2011, as was confirmed by our associate George Dafermos, who talked to the designers.

Such open hardware might have the same effect on economics as open source had on software. Instead of price setting based on monopolistic rents, with the production costs only setting a minimum, we might expect a price-setting based on cost plus markup, and more and more models of built-only capitalism, many examples of which are already described in Erik von Hippel’s Democratization of Innovation, available from our bookstore.

Yet the open hardware movement is not nearly as developed as the open source software movement, and can be compared to the situation of the software field in the eighties.

However, we have updated our various entries, thanks to a marvelous summary by Make magazine, which distinguishes several layers in open source hardware.

Check out our entries on Open Hardware and Open Design, as well as the new developments in specific open hardware licenses

Here are a few examples of projects that are close to “pure” open source hardware projects:

Compiled by Makezine at

www.makezine.com/blog/archive/2007/04/open_source_hardware_what.html

Arduino – physical computing platform at

www.arduino.cc/

Chumby – information device at

www.chumby.com/

Daisy MP3 player – An open source MP3 player, at

www.makezine.com/daisy/

RepRap / Fab@Home – Open source 3D printer, at

www.reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

OpenEEG – an EEG design that is OS & available as a kit, at

openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/

x0xb0x – Roland 303 clone MIDI synth at,

www.ladyada.net/make/x0xb0x/

Here’s how Make magazine summarizes the state of the art:

“At MAKE & CRAFT we’re trying to foster this nascent hardware movement by encouraging our kit makers to consider open source hardware and a license that makes sense when developing kits with us. So far it’s worked out, and we’re looking forward to providing not only more open source hardware kits, but electronics that are more “open” than what’s out there now.

Why is this a good thing? The most obvious one for MAKE & CRAFT is the educational benefits, an open source hardware project or kit allows makers to build something completely from scratch (etching boards, etc) or assembling a kit almost IKEA style – but unlike assembling furniture new skills and understanding of how things actually work can be learned. One could say the building of the electronics is the “compiling” portion of the project, similar to software. Events like dorkbot and our Maker Faire is are places for participation – and online, Instructables.

What else? Fixes – new features and the “peer production” of the electronics projects / kits usually lends itself to better kits, communities and for some makers – real businesses selling kits

All this being said, the pace is slow and steady – hardware moves slower than software now: fabbing, which may decrease but is unlikely to fully go away. And – hardware’s seems to be in the same state software was in the 1980s: lots of commercial developers, very few open source developers (or like 1970′s when only a few had computers at all). We’d like to see the world of hardware when there are millions of developers.”