The emergence of the peer to peer relational dynamic depends on either an abundance of resources (immaterial production), or a distribution of limited means of production so that they are under control of the individual. So a good summary of this positioning is that we favor the ‘distribution of everything’.

Including the distribution of energy. Solar energy seems to be inherently distributed, and could be placed at individual houses, and surpluses could be either shared or resold on an open market.

So it is with some excitement that we read about an amazing initiative in France.

Indeed, Thierry Lepercq has created a company, Solaire Direct, which offers to install both individuals and communities with photovoltaic solar panels, at no cost whatsover, not for the installment, and not for the first 20 years of usage. The business model seems to be that SD will resell the surplus electricity to the national electricity provider EDF.

For more info, see this French-language video.

John Clippinger has a landmark book out, A Crowd of One: The Future of Individual Identity, which examines what kind of institutions would be appropriate for the new era of cooperative individuals.

As he himself explains the rationale for his book:

“In contrast to well-entrenched economic and organizational models that operate on the assumption that human beings are selfish, individualistic, rational actors, the new sciences are showing the human beings are also innately cooperative, with highly evolved and highly adaptive strategies of collaboration, trust and reciprocity. By understanding how such innate human social competencies function, it becomes possible to design and implement the next generation of post-Enlightenment institutions.”

It is getting lots of positive reviews, such as the one by Mike Neuenschwander at the Burton Group Identity blog:

The book, he writes, is:

“an eloquently written, ambitious, and timely work relating social theory to digital identity. John masterfully draws on intellectual insights from a wide range of disciplines (including social science, political science, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and history) to weave a narrative that’s accessible to a general audience. The message is simple: highly evolved trust frameworks are wired into the biology of all living things; so why do we persist in reinventing primitive (aka authoritarian) strategies for cooperation? John argues that it’s mostly our collective lack of appreciation for natural trust mechanisms—even though we’re all familiar with them from everyday experience. Signals of health, wealth, and competence are extant in human society, but are usually exchanged subconsciously. John points to the Enlightenment as the era of emergent self-awareness that established many of our existing presumptions on the nature of identity. Now, with recent advancements in the fields of evolutionary biology and neuroscience, science is beginning to unravel the relation between self-awareness and social-awareness. John is among the writers constructing a new narrative on trust and cooperation based on this scientific evidence.”

David Bollier is enthusiastic on the book because one of its main focuses is on the relationship between Identity and the Commons:

“In many respects, how we form our identities is a critical ingredient in how we form commons. A commons is not a venue for impersonal transactions, as the market is, but rather a site for actualizing ourselves while managing shared resources. A commons is a social system that integrates our personal needs and identities with a larger community of people. It is a social structure that honors that complex interdependence of individuals and a larger collective.

Drawing upon leading anthropologists, evolutionary scientists and linguists, Clippinger argues that language is an important tool by which we form ourselves into communities. Language enables us to build and leverage trust among members of a group. It is a “signaling system” for describing and enforcing social reputations, which in turn helps us construct social and political institutions. By having a group means of establishing a person’s reputation and identity, we can socially pressure people to live up to consensus standards and expectations. We can also identify “free riders” and cheaters, and punish or ostracize them. These capacities are all critical to forming functional commons.”

This is a good starting point to find out more about Identity developments.

In our own writings on peer to peer, we are aware of the following polarity. There is the emergence of bottom up processes by communities of sharing of desiring to produce value in common. And there is the desire by existing institutions to incorporate participative processes in their own value chain. And of course, there will be variants in between.

The key question then becomes this: how genuine can peer to peer dynamics be, even if they are embedded in horizontal organizational networks (say, based on project teams), when the overall power structure is in fact not peer to peer at all? How should we interpret the interplay between such partial p2p dynamics, for example in the context of the power structure of a for profit entity beholden to shareholders?

Most authors gloss over this difference. For example, from the essays I’ve read of Jeffrey Nielsen, author of the Myth of Leadership, in which he explains the difference between rank and peer-based management, and calls for establishing peer councils in corporations, does not seem to face this issue.

But one author who does explicitely is Rune Kvist Olsen, from whom you can ask the full essay at rukvol at online dot no. Though I’m generally speaking very comfortable to claims at exclusivity, the author’s provocative points are well worth pondering.

Here are his two main points:

“Other approaches lack the main connections between these interconnected and reciprocal elements presented in my concept through the published papers; 1. The relation between “power-structure” and organizational-structure” and 2. The relation between “leader-ship” and “leading-ship”. Neither Jeffrey Nielsen nor others have developed this type of terminology and methodology because the lack of focus, awareness and consciousness to the interconnection and relationship between these significant elements.

The KEY is as I have mentioned two main connections:

1. The interconnected relationship between “Power-structure” and “Organizational-structure”.

For instance the power-structure is the shaper of the organizational-structure and the organizational-structure is the reflector of the power-structure. So when the power-structure is vertical (with superiors and subordinates) the organizational-structure is vertical (f.ex with team-leaders and team-workers). When the power-structure is horizontal (with equals and peers) the organizational-structure is horizontal. There is therefore impossible to create horizontal organizational structures as long as the power-structure remains vertical with someone above to decide and someone below to be decided upon. I have not found that any others have dealt with this topic in this way before in regard to this specific terminology and methodology.

2. The interconnected relationship between “Leader-ship” and “Leading-ship”.

Leader-ship is connected to the person in charge as the superior person above. Leader-ship is based on the position and rank to the person in the vertical system. Leader-ship exists in the Vertical Power-Structure and in the Authoritarian and Hierarchical Organizational-Structure. Leading-ship is connected to the function of leading where everyone are operating as persons on the same level. Leading-ship exists in the Horizontal Power-Structure and in the Egalitarian and Humanitarian Organizational-Structure.
(note that whereas I say that at least partial p2p dynamics can exist within non-p2p power structures, creating a field of contradiction or conflict, Rune seems to be explicitely ruling this out; this difference may be one of semantics however)

Here’s an abstract of the paper:

The paper “A change from leadership to leadingship” is most likely the first presentation in the world history of organizational working life that describes an alternative concept to the vertical and hierarchical structuring of power since Fredric Taylor (Scientific Management, 1911) industrialized the ideas from Max Weber in the beginning of the 1900-century. There are however numerous concepts in this field forcusing on humanizing organization and work, developed during the last century, but all of these later concepts ( f.ex. “Human Relation” and “Sociotechnical Systems”) nevertheless based their powerstructure on vertical and hierarchical principles (with superiors and subordinates). The spesific focus in this paper on the coherence and connection between “powerstructure” and “organizational structure” in shaping organizational life and in creating working environments, is definitely an orginal and unique invention in this context of organizational history. So in a way this presentation through this paper represent a world event in the history of organizational theory so to say. Therefore new terms ( f.ex. leadingship) and new terminologies (f.ex. leadingship strategy) can be discovered through this conseptualizion of the New Workplace Reality.

Of special note this week is this recent release from Autonomedia / Institute for Distributed Creativity. Contributors Howard Rheingold, Christoph Spehr, Brian Holmes, Geert Lovink and Trbor Scholz link the debates about web-based, cooperation-enhancing technologies to the broader world of political activism.

Note: Support the P2P Foundation not only by buying books in our Bookstore, but also by entering Amazon.com via our Bookstore before making any Amazon purchase. The P2P Foundation will then receive much needed support from your purchases. (Please bookmark our Bookstore now! Thank you.)

I participated in a very stimulating exchange between the tradition of thought and practice of Assotiative Economics, linked to Anthroposophy, and the ideas around peer to peer networks.

Hans van Willenswaard, who together with his wife Willapa operates an indepedent publishing house in Bangkok, recently sent me the following report, which captures very well the open atmosphere of this encounter, and the yearning of Asia to find its own particular adaptation to modernity, in a way that safeguards its own historical identity and focus on community.

Here is most of the report, with the conclusion highlighted in bold.

Hans van Willenswaard reporting on the Economics and Threefolding workshop – The importance of ‘community spirit’, held on 29 April – 1 May 2007, Thailand

A first Economics and Threefolding workshop was held in the hilly landscape near Khao Jai National Park, Thailand, and brought 24 participants from Asia and other regions of the world together for two days.

The workshop was convened by Suan Nguen Mee Ma publishing house, a small-scale social enterprise that also re-vitalized a 40-years old bookshop in the inner center of Bangkok, where it has its office in a traditional Thai book distribution company.

The communication in the workshop started from an analysis of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programme co-facilitated from the bookshop in Bangkok. A family farm near the border with Burma, North-West of Bangkok, organizes weekly deliveries of organic vegetables to subscribers in the city. The family coordinates a network of small-scale farmers, belonging to the ethnic group of Karen. The farmers gradually dedicate vegetable production, away from ‘the market’, to the growing membership in Bangkok resulting in a pattern of trust, security and customized production.

The workshop exchanges then continued with mapping in concentric circles ‘alternative’ economic initiatives in South-East Asia and beyond, via the personal stories of the participants. Rural and micro-enterprise development in Burma/Myanmar by a Christian NGO; government driven organic agriculture practices in China and gardening connected to Waldorf school initiatives; consultancy on marketing and certification according to IFOAM standards in agriculture , and social standards upheld by Fair Trade, undertaken in the South-East Asia region from Penang, Malaysia; organic vegetable production to support health care in Singapore and Australia; and the economic success story of organic agriculture in New Zealand with a pioneering role of the bio-dynamic movement.

Participants from the Eastern shore of the Pacific, USA, described the meaning of organic agriculture in therapeutic Camphill communities; and the need to strengthen the role of the consumers in changing economic paradigms.

Paul Mackay and Cornelius Pietzner, members of the Executive Board of the Anthroposophical Society, based at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, facilitated continued in-depth analysis, in the light of spiritual research. A perspective from an angle quite different from organic agriculture was offered by Michel Bauwens, Belgian entrepreneur based in Chiang Mai, the North of Thailand. His career and its disappointments led him to fundamental reflections on the global economic system and consequent penetration into the world of ICT (information and communication technology). We still live in the illusion of a world with infinite material resources while we impose more and more restrictions on the abundant spiritual world and give it a finite character through intellectual property legislation. The answer of the future can be found in peer-to-peer or ‘P2P’ patterns of economic cooperation as pioneered in open computer networks. Participants in these open networks keep a balance between using the facilities, and adding to / improving them with their specific skills. Individual interest becomes congruent with common interest.

This stream towards merging scopes of interest resonates with the core message of the book Economics. The World as One Economy based on lectures given by Rudolf Steiner in 1922 : breakthrough of economic change will not occur because of morality but as result of economic logic, if all factors are to be taken in fully by human awareness.

This new logic can already be recognized in fair trade where markets become subjective to ‘peer arbitration’.

Cornelius Pietzner referred to the principle of ‘six degrees of separation’ which implies that via six layers of personal acquaintance each individual virtually has a relationship with all individuals in the world. Human relationships may not follow exact mathematical patterns, the insight of inter-connectedness among all sentient beings has always been a cornerstone of Buddhist philosophy. However translated as inter-connectedness, inter-dependence or ‘inter-being’ , it makes a difference whether the principle is intellectually known from traditional teaching at one hand as well as from contemporary reasoning, or experienced as a spiritual and social fact.

An intriguing element of the workshop was the unexpected contribution of Venerable Samanalakkhano who gave an overview of the Santi Ashoke movement founded in Thailand and branching out to other Asian countries. Members of the movement follow the monastic discipline characteristic for Therevada Buddhism, but – contrary to traditional practice where monks live solely on donated food – are fully in charge of their own livelihood through organic agriculture and small-scale enterprises. Growing communities of lay people shape themselves around this alternatively styled monkhood. The Santi Ashoke movement practices an outspoken ‘engaged’ or socially responsible Buddhism, including the mobilization of consumers away from a consumerist life-style. Together with the Sufficiency economy philosophy as proclaimed by H.M. the King of Thailand, and Thai grass-root movements like the Assembly of the Poor, the Santi Ashoke stream represents an important impulse towards economic change in Thailand. Renewed reference is made to ‘Buddhist economics’ in line with the book Small is Beautiful. Economics as if People Mattered by E.F. Schumacher (who himself was not a Buddhist). The often reprinted book (1973) is based on Schumacher’s experiences as an economic advisor in Burma.

The broader perspective of a transformed economic system in the future does not immediately release practitioners from taking all the dilemma’s to be decided on in daily business life, within the cultural, political, economic realities of today, including in Asia. Important issues here are: the role of the ‘middle man’ or trader as the trait d’union between rural producers and urban consumers. Effective responses to the trend of ‘economies of scale’ which in general always means enlarging the scale of economic operations towards mass production, loss of identity and human interest. The complex legal and financial mechanisms surrounding certification and standards, whether by self-regulation or government rule, often implying enormous burdens for producers; the need (or not) for ‘localization’. The dynamics of ‘branding’ in conventional terms and opportunities for manifestations of spiritual identity in economic performance, and the danger of abuse. And the forced dumping of chemical fertilizers and pesticides by business without a conscience and military oppressors in ‘virgin areas’ like in Burma that were not touched by modernization until recently.

Many of these questions were formulated in the closing session moderated by Christopher Houghton Budd, historian of economics, as a long list to be dealt with in future gatherings.

In terms of ‘threefolding’ one might conclude that a special mission of Asia could be the revitalization of ‘community spirit’ as a guiding principle for economic activity of the future. Compared to western countries Asia by and large lags behind in maturity of democratic structures and the appropriate regulation of social and environmental responsibility in the business sector. However, the continued relevance of the extended family; the influence of monastic communities (in Buddhist terms the Sangha); persisting traditional indigenous communities though under serious threat, and emerging new ‘intentional’ communities; decision making by consensus; and eagerness towards modern open sourcing (often perceived as illegal in the west) may ultimately result in an opportunity to ‘leapfrog’ societies where industrial revolution originated. This may manifest itself as the spirit of Sangha in its broadest sense ; community spirit in economic life. A creative factor embedded in Buddhist culture is the experiential concept of freedom transcending the divide between the individual and the collective. In the same time an often puzzling contrast between proclaimed self-denial and simultaneous un-restrained ego-centrism raises questions about cultural integrity.

Reflections after the Economics and Threefolding workshop lead to the formulation of a great diversity of research questions and impulses for change. Several more exploratory meetings will be needed for the questions to further crystallize.

Anthroposophy and Buddhism are similarly growing towards universal streams of awareness that can come to fruition in specific cultural or professional situations.

A small-scale Community Supported Agriculture initiative in Bangkok may be too small to be a significant factor of change. By initiating and nurturing networks that inter-connect economic transformative activity – be it within the mainstream and gradually replacing it, by converting the mainstream, or by realizing alternatives – the spiritual strength of wholeness can manifest itself.”

Here is the last part of the response to Adam Arvidsson’s essay on the Crisis of Value.

The Ethical Economy, Power, and Common Norms

I may disagree with Adam Arvidsson that this emerging ethical economy, a concept that I consider analogous to what I call the emerging sphere of peer production, is not ‘necessarily better’ than the older monetary production. Of course, peer production will create its own problems and contradictions, and will indeed create a rather rocky transition time. But I believe that there are strong reasons that this new mode will win out.

First of all, the new mode is more productive. More value, more innovation, more usefulness is created for its participants and society and general. For profit companies that rely on proprietary strategies, and where innovation is dependent and limited by competition, will tend to loose out, over time, due to this asymmetric competition, to the for benefit institutions and their associated communities of peer producers which constantly innovate. Second, the process is more participative in the political sense. It provides more meaning, and autonomy in all spheres of human life. Intrinsic motivation is inherently more productive than the extrinsic motivation and neutral exchange on the market. Finally, the new forms of peer property are inherently more distributive. All this means that in the second form of competition, between for profit companies relying on closed proprietary strategies and for profit companies using open/free, participatory and commons-oriented extensions, the former will tend to loose out against the latter. So companies will increasingly choose for their insertion in the new logics. The corollary is that individuals will choose to engage in passionate production whenever they can, and will tend to choose for those companies that have integrated these logics in their own processes. Nations that choose to adopt such strategies, becoming Partner States that enable and empower such processes, will tend to develop faster than those refusing this path. Just as importantly, the same process of miniaturization which changed the structural position of knowledge workers vis a vis capital, as they own their own means of production, their brains and computers, tend to be replicated in the physical economy as well. Trends in desktop manufacturing, in rapid manufacturing and tooling, in easy to localize multi-purpose machinery, in personal fabricators that move from plastic to metals, will tend to distribute physical productive capacity and undermine the industrial model of capitalism. The problem is that as physical production will become more distributed, and associated with financial trends such as social lending and the direct social production of money and wealth acknowledgement systems, any strategy that aims to replace lower rates of physical profit with higher rates of immaterial profit, will tend to be undermined by the generalization of open designs. Here again we have the same crisis of accumulation of capital on the horizon.

Where is the power in this changing world? In the world of immaterial near-zero reproduction costs, neither market pricing, nor hierarchies, nor democratic negotiation, are needed to allocate scarce resources (but they still will be needed wherever there is scarcity). In the distributed production networks, bottom up peer governance processes will emerge more and more. In the sharing networks, their will be a balance of power, and associated conflicts, between the creative users and the platform owners, whereby the former are not powerless. Where there are no overt hierarchies, power becomes expressed in invisible architectures that enable or discourge certain types of social relationships over others. However, as commons-oriented communities become stronger, we expect the literacy of such power to increase. Of course, the platform enablers have power too, as do the commons-oriented businesses and the crowdsourcing operators, and we may expect conflicts over protocols. It is possible that communities with strong business involvement and ecologies, will perform better than communities without such support, a fact which plays in favour of the commercial players. Similarly, Partner State efforts to enable and empower social value creation, may select certain social production processes over others. The conclusion is therefore that this is an open process, and that the process of mutual accommodation, between private and public institutions, versus sharing and commons communities, will be a co-created reality. The future is truly open.

Scenarios for the future

The existing market model is clearly in trouble. It cannot continue to treat nature as both a positive externality from which it can endlessly profit, and in which it can dump the negative externalities of its own operations. A system of infinite growth in a finite environment is a logical impossibility.

At the same time, a simple transfer of its core operations towards the immaterial economy is not a simple proposition. A reliance on intellectual property rents is deeply challenged by the new non-proprietary forms which point to a future of open designs.
The current system which combines pseudo-abundance in the material sphere, thereby destroying the biosphere, and pseudo-scarcity in the immaterial sphere, thereby holding up social innovation, is deeply flawed and not sustainable in the long term.
In terms of value creation, it is now competing with a third mode of production, governance and property, where it is beaten at its own game.

In the first emerging stage of peer production, market forces will embed it in their own operations, just as the imperial slaveholders freed their slaves to become feudal colini (serfs), and as the feudal kings and lords started investing in capitalist merchants and manufacturers, so for profit companies are adapting and investing in the new modes, which they hope to subjugate and integrate. In this they will be partially successful.

But precisely because they are successful, they are also strengthening the new mode and logic. At some point, a parity of influence between the logic of the commodity and the peer to peer logic may be achieved.

Past experience suggests however, that such a transitional period is not sustainable on the long term, and that one logic can and should be the dominant logic of value creation.

In the tribal economy, it was the gift and the attendant symmetrical social relations and processes which dominant. In the hierarchical imperial/feudal systems, it was the tribute of the weak to the strong. In industrial capitalism, and in the first phases of the information economy, it was the commodity.

We therefore strongly suggest that the third phase or scenario will develop around the dominance of the peer to peer logic. This means that most immaterial value creation, i.e. what really matters to a postmaterial civilization, which will produced by value communities, competing for allegiance. They will use non-proprietary formats. For exchange, they will use different kinds of wealth acknowledgement systems.

The physical sphere will be managed by post-capitalist markets for scarce goods. Note how the newest forms of market trading are already being informed by the P2P or partnership principle: the for-benefit institutions enabling peer production communities, the social entrepreneurs using profit as a means only, the fair trade models which put the power-based market relations under the arbitrage of the partnership principle, etc… Methods of ‘markets without capitalism’, ‘natural capitalism’, cradle to cradle production systems and a steady state economy will have to become the format of the market, if the biosphere is not to be further harmed. But clearly, such market mechanisms are already subsumed under the higher logic of partnership with other humans and nature.

There is of course another scenario, whereby the P2P logic is subsumed to the continued dominance of the capitalist market, based on some kind of rent-based proprietary models where nobody really owns anything; this would be an information feudalism kept in place by repressive IP laws and DRM technology. But such a dominance would imply also that the nature-destroying logic remains in place, and hence, points to the dark scenario of a generalized fight for scarce natural resources. This is simply put a recipe for generalized disaster, and hopefully, it is unlikely that humanity will choose for this static and regressive path.

I read a fair amount of essays during the year, and none struck me as important as Adam Arvidsson’s analysis of the emerging crisis of value in our society and economy. More and more social value is created, but less and less of it is being monetized. It creates a situation whereby our current model does not have a return flow for the positive externalities created by civil society, creating a crisis of precarity, but eventually in the long run also maybe a crisis of accumulation for capital.

Read Adam’s essay, The Crisis of Value and the Ethical Economy, of which we have published 3 excerpts last week, here at our wiki.

My own response is also online here under the title of the Dornbin Manifesto.

This title has been chosen in honour of OSAlliance.com, perhaps the first free software cooperative, and which convinced Telecom Austria to open up two Net Culture Labs in Austria, so that social innovators and creatives have a least a decent place to work.

While we eagerly await Russ Volckman’s review of the book in the Integral Leadership Review, here is already a summary of what promises to be a landmark book by Riane Eisler:

“An economy is more than the market, the government, and the military, says Eisler, eventually citing chapter and verse from a long list of other scholars to create a very persuasive case. A complete picture of a national and global economy must include the whole range of vital caring and caregiving activities—mostly undervalued, undercounted, and either severely underpaid or totally unpaid; and mostly performed (surprise!) by women—that take place in the community and in the home.

Eisler, a meticulous cross-disciplinary researcher, presents a good deal of cheering evidence to fortify her recommendations. What we spend to maximize the value of so-called human capital, for example (i.e., caring for and educating our children and youth), should be considered not a burdensome expense but a capital investment, insists the author; and as such, it should be amortizable over twenty years—the time frame for nurturing a generation of healthy, high-performing human beings. To back that up, she presents research outcomes showing that, e.g., early childhood educational interventions produce a 200 percent return on investment, and that actual companies that have adopted a comprehensively caring orientation to their workforce more than recoup their considerable investment in health care, exercise facilities, onsite child care, parental leave, and so forth, with better motivated employees, lower turnover and training costs, and higher productivity.”

We are restating Adam Arvidsson’s analysis of the Crisis of Value, in our own words, also thinking on how it may be eventually solved.

1. The Crisis of Value

It is now possible to create all kinds of use value without, or with only a minimal, intervention of capital. We are dealing with post-monetary, post-capitalist modes of value creation and exchange, that are both immanent, i.e. embedded, to the market, but also transcendent to it, i.e. operating outside its boundaries. Two, capital is increasingly dependent, and profiting in all kinds of ways, from the positive externalities of such social innovation. Three, the full , partial, or hybrid peer production models that we discuss above, may be collectively sustainable as value creation processes, but do not offer a direct solution for the income and survivability of the participants.

So the challenge can be described as follows: 1) we have a process of social innovation which creates mostly non-monetary value for the participants; 2) we may have an increasingly huge gap between the possibility of creating post-monetary value, and the derivative exchange values that are realized by enterprise; 3) the participants engaged in such passionate production and innovation, mostly cannot find in such processes an answer to their own sustainability.

Hence, the impossibility to realize more than just a small partial monetary value, from the point of view of most commercial players. Increasing precarity for the participants of social innovation. In other words, the current market model does not have a reverse process of redistribution for the value that is being created.

This might of course be a temporary crisis, but we do not believe it is. The reason is that the market can only indirectly and partially provide monetary compensation for processes which are not motivated by such compensation. What we need therefore are more general redistributive processes that allow society and the market to give back part of the value that is being so created. One possibility is the further development of transitional labour market measures (protect the worker, not the job), which recognize the flexibility and mobility of contemporary careers. But this needs an important add-on development: the realization that contemporary workers are moving not just from job to job, but also from jobs to non-jobs, and that in fact, what is most useful and meaningful for them (and the market, and society) are not the paid jobs for the market, but the episodes of passionate production. It seems to me therefore that a more general measure, not linked to the job, but conceived as a repayment for, and enabler of, social innovation, is needed. The name of that general measure is most probably some form of basic income.

2. Different value systems, different economies, different measurement systems

Whether or not such measures materialize, peer production and social innovation are there to stay. We will in all likelyhood have at least two competing economies, or even three.

The first one is the market economy for scarce physical goods. It is likely that this part of the economy will have to cope with the increasing presence of open designs, and therefore, will be more and more a form of built-only capitalism, based on commons-derivate business models. Note that in this sector, the property rents (copyright, etc…) might dramatically decline, and hence the associated profit rates as well.

The second part of the market economy will be the market for attention, that will realize part of the value of the sharing economy, and can provide some kind of return to the peer producers.

Then there will be the non-market, non-monetary part of the economy. It will increase in value and scope, but not create additional monetary streams. In other words, no matter how many reputation schemes, wealth acknowledgement systems, or collective quality-control schemes might be developed, this is not directly linked to any monetization by the market economy. It will feed it indirectly, but will never be fully monetized. This is a fact we have to learn to deal with, and have to reorganize our political economy around. As I argue above, I expect that communities will develop various forms of gifting, sharing and exchange, as well as a number of affinity or community based currencies to measure such value. And in addition to that, some general form of redistribution or monetary repayment may have to be created.