The Australian professor Robyn Eckersley has published a very important book on the contours of a green democratic state, which would have legitimate coercive power for environmental protection. As Robyn argues: “To fixate on the coercive power of the state is to fail to grasp the crucial difference between untamed or arbitrary power and democratically directed public power.”

The book’s theme has been introduced by Bill Matheson, see below.

A good introduction is the essay Green Governance in the New Millennium: Towards the Green Democratic State, published in Ecopolitics: Thought and Action, 2002 and available via the author at r.eckersley@unimelb.edu.au. See the second excerpt for a summary of that essay.

In this essay, which I recommend reading in full she identifies three conditions for such a state, implicit in the demands of the green and sustainability movements and for having the potential to defend biospheric integrity in a democratic fashion. This is our third excerpt. We will follow this up by an excerpt summarizing the specific environmental characteristics of such a state.

1. Introduction to the book

“For most of us “the state” is the main source of power and structure in our lives. The state creates and enforces laws, participates on our behalf in issues of global governance, and is subject to a measure of democratic accountability. While more and more people are also getting involved in local and regional governance, big decisions — especially significant environmental decisions — are usually made the state level. For this as well as other reasons the state is often the focus of conversations about green governance.

I want to look at the idea of the state through the lens of a book titled The Green State: Rethinking Democracy and Sovereignty, by Australian academic Robyn Eckersley (2004).

From an environmental perspective the nation-state seems to create a number of problems, as environmental crises do not respect national boundaries. This might be a simple as a polluted river flowing from one country to another, or as complex as global climate change. Because we divide ourselves into nation-states, we end up competing for resources in a process that seems to actively encourage ecological destruction. When the consequences of this present themselves we cannot respond to them effectively because we cannot decide who is responsible.

From a social justice perspective the nation-state also seems to create a number of problems. In many parts of the world national boundaries are legacies of European expansion and conquest during the colonial period. The kind of territorial authority embodied by these borders underpins many of the ethnic conflicts in recent history. Regional and local assertions of independence and self-rule are often suppressed by central state governments, and cultural minorities dispersed within or between nations often struggle to get adequate representation at the national level.

While Eckersley acknowledges both these perspectives, she also pragmatically argues that the state is still the primary political institution we have to address our environmental and social problems. She describes nation-states as key players in maintaining global order.

The Green State explores how we might create a green democratic state as an alternative to the present liberal democratic state.”

2. Introduction to the essay

“My argument will proceed in three parts. First, I address the basic reasons why the green movement has been so wary of the state as a site of concentrated power. Next I argue that these problems make it even more urgent that greens turn to the state for reform as part of their political strategy, since it is impossible substantially to transform the global order behind the backs of states. Finally, I present my vision of the green state and identify the key strategic areas of reform that are necessary if we are to move towards this goal.”

3. Necessary characteristics of a green state

“Here we can identify three basic, interrelated notions about the state implicit in the environmental demands for more/better/stricter environmental regulation and environmental justice.

The first plea is for a ‘good state’, in the sense of an ‘ethical’ and democratically responsible/responsive state that upholds public rather than private interests and values, and acts as a vehicle for justice rather than power, or ‘right’ rather than ‘might’. That the state should be ‘good’ arises from the assumption that the state is the most legitimate (and not just the most powerful) social institution to assume the role of ‘public ecological guardian’, reining in and disciplining investment, production and consumption in order to protect genuinely public goods such as life-support services, public amenity, public transport, biodiversity and so on.

The second plea is for a ‘strong’ or effective state that is able to deploy effective regulatory and fiscal steering mechanisms to ensure that the economy and society respect the integrity of the ecosystems in which they are embedded in order to minimise the consumption of energy and resources, reduce pollution and protect life-support services and biodiversity. The state should also have the capacity to redistribute resources and otherwise influence life opportunities to ensure that the move towards a more sustainable society is not a socially regressive one – a very real prospect if environmental goals are not properly integrated with social justice goals. In short, the appeal of the state is that it stands as the most overarching source of political and legal authority within modern, plural societies. It must be emphasises that this appeal to the ‘strong/effective’ state is not an entirely instrumental appeal – otherwise there would be no reason in principle for environmentalists not to hire private mercenaries to discipline society along more ecologically sustainable lines, assuming the necessary resources could be mustered.

The third plea is for a cosmopolitan state since there is an implicit expectation that a green democratic state would not only act as a ‘good ecological guardian’ over its own people and territory but also act as a good international citizen in the society of states, actively promoting collective action in defence of green values and goals while also taking responsibility (both unilaterally and multilaterally) to avoid the externalization of social and ecological costs beyond its own territory and into the future.”

From the dynamic p2presearch mailing list, created after the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop, another great contribution by Henrik Ingo, who explains why it is impossible to fully implement peer to peer practices in a traditional corporation:

Henrik Ingo:

“From this it follows that a modern enterprise is not well suited for a p2p governance model, because in commercial enterprises aka as companies the power by definition lies solely within its owners (“hegemony of the owner”). Therefore the balance from “community voting with its feet” is lacking. By this logic even if a company was seemingly governed by a p2p process, in reality it would only be at the grace of the owners, who at any time could take back the power they had decided to give to the p2p process. (To be continued below…)

In contrast the problem of an enterprise acting as an agent within a larger p2p system is more easy to approach and as a rule of thumb I would suggest that such a situation is not so different from when individual persons act in a p2p governed system. For instance, a company such as IBM will decide to voluntarily spend its resources on Apache or Linux projects, without any contractual guarantee to receive anything in return. This is completely equivalent to an individual person choosing to participate in such a project. OTOH even this is not an easy task for many companies, for instance internal processes for many companies I know would make it impossible for them to really participate in the blogosphere, because the company culture is such that employees writing uncensored statements in public is unthinkable.

(Even if the company allowed it, many employees would not dare to actually write anything more interesting or useful than the average company press release.)

Also enterprises other than commercial companies (like a non-profit or a chess club, say) could be more easily governed by a p2p process, since they don’t have owners in that sense to begin with. In particular, such an enterprise might incorporate in its bylaws some clauses which would enable easy forking. Yet even then such an enterprise will probably govern some scarce material goods which cannot be forked.

(And now back to our main story of commercial companies…) So to have truly p2p governed commercial companies we must come up with a way to shift the balance of power from “hegemony of the owners” to a more balanced situation where power is distributed with the owners, employees, customers etc… We could start by questioning the hegemony of the owners directly, is it a true view of a commercial company, or is it just something our society is falsely taking for granted? While it is true that the employer has tremendous power of the employee, in practice it would be terrible for the company if a majority of its
employees revolted against the employer. Similarly if even a significant minority of the customers are unhappy with a company. So
maybe there is more balance than we think? On the other hand it is in our society seen ethically ok currently for the employer to restrict the power of its employees, in particular “forking” of a company can be contractually restricted by having employees accept non-competing agreements. (Whereas a Free Software license for instance, enables and almost encourages forking.)

So again, the question is: Could there be a way to start looking at modern commercial companies in a way where the balance of power is radically different from the current hegemony of owners? If not, then the second question is, how should society change its values and legislation on this issue, to better enable such a situation to come by.

Finally of course there is the possibility of a future where commercial companies are not the primary vehicle driving society
forward as they are today.

Red Pepper has an excellent article on how the left should let itself be influenced by the new commons-based practices. We publish excerpts in two parts, but please read the whole article. The author is Hilary Wainwright.

Part One: The Role of the Left: Beyond Representational Democracy

“Our discussions on political representation have been searching for a new model of engagement with the state. Our starting point has been the nature of the autonomy of social movements from political parties and institutions. Given the history of the ideal of the commons in the hands of the state, the question of autonomy, and then of what kind of relationship to build on the basis of autonomy, is central.

I want to suggest that the distinctive contribution of left political parties, or their representatives in political institutions, should be to open up the institutions, to redistribute power outside them so that it can be shared and support new institutions and new relationships of control over state power. Their distinctive position is thus one of straddling the political institutions on the one hand and the conflicts and emergent sources of power in society on the other. The aim must be to both open up and democratise the institutions and, as a necessary part of this process, to encourage and support emerging institutions based on deeper forms of democracy and the principles and practices of the commons. A classic example would be the power-sharing of participatory budgeting in municipalities in Brazil and now in parts of Europe, and its relation to the growing social economy in both continents. But there are many other examples.

What are the conditions and presuppositions of such an understanding of political representation? I will just mention one here: it concerns the emergence of non-state sources of democratic power. It’s a concept that needs further debate on another occasion but the point is this: while radical mass movements have not been sustained 1970s-style or Seattle-style or anti-war-February-15th-style, but what is striking is a need to create lasting sources of sources of democratic power autonomous from the state: democratic institutions that go beyond, but are often an outcome of, movements.

I’m thinking here in the UK of developments like London Citizens; or union branches like those fighting for alternatives to privatisation taking on a responsibility for the public interest that has been vacated by elected politicians; community organisations which similarly take on a public responsibility to propose solutions for estates and neighbourhoods abandoned by the political class; asylum seeker and refugee organisations that go well beyond campaigning to provide an infrastructure of support and defence; the global networks like ‘Our World is Not for Sale’ that provide a force for accountability on global institutions and corporation that have escaped the conventional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability. It’s probably a world-wide phenomenon taking many different forms; certainly I’ve observed it in parts of Latin America and Europe and even in the UK. And this is what convinces me of its distinctive, emergent character – if something innovative happens across so many places, there must be something going on.

We are not talking here about relying only on direct democracy and popular power – these struggles need and want support from within the institutions, hence an opening and democratisation of existing political institutions. But we are talking about phenomena that are more than movements and ephemeral campaigns. They are trying to create different kinds of relationships here and now, based on principles of the commons, and at the same time building democratic power to challenge and transform institutions driven by private profit or bureaucratic self-interest. Any rethinking of public administrations, political economy or political organisation must make these actual experiments in co-operation and democratic power one of its starting points.”

Part Two: Turning Public Services into a Commons

“Two elementary moves should be made towards renewing public services as material commons. A first condition is that public service workers have the dignity, time, the training and the rights of co-management to be able to collaborate meaningfully with service users; the second is a remaking of local government, so that, having become little more than a plethora of partnerships dependent on national funding streams and on complying with nationally imposed targets, it is transformed into a democratically elected body with strategic powers and a budget of its own that can be the subject of participatory power-sharing with local citizens. The first condition involves a rethinking and reasserting of labour as social, co-operative process and itself potentially a commons. (In the present capitalist economy, including the state sector, it could be called a ‘hidden commons’ whereby the co-operative nature of labour is distorted by pressures to maximise profit – or in the state sector by the legacy of hierarchical, military forms of administration). The second requires reflection on the kind of political institutions and forms of democracy that create the conditions for democratic self-management and common access to public resources to flourish.”

Henrik Ingo, in his excellent and supremely easily readable book Open Life, on the open source ethos and life practice, has an interesting page explaining why a benevolent dictator makes sense:

“We’ll leave the values of Linus and his friends for a while and turn to learning something from the organization and hierarchies of the Open Source community. How do you control a programming project that involves tens – or, in the case of Linux, hundreds – of programmers working in different parts of the globe, particularly when the workers are volunteers who have no official status as employees on the project?

Linus is the benevolent dictator of the Linux project. He didn’t coin the expression himself; it comes from Eric Raymond’s essay ‘The Cathedral and the Bazaar’, in which the author studies the various organizational forms of Open Source projects. Although the dictatorship model is not the only way Open Source projects are run, it is by far the most common and the least formal. Guido van Rossum, the creator of the programming language Python, is known publicly in Python circles as BDFL – Benevolent Dictator for Life. Apparently Python programmers have no intention of ever letting poor Guido enjoy a well-earned retirement.

A benevolent dictator is the leader of a project and the person who alone has all the power to make decisions.1 Often this authority is a natural consequence of the leader being the instigator of the project, as Linus is in the case of Linux.

For those of us living in Western democracies, talk of dictatorship could sound suspicious. Although the directness of a dictatorship is sure to be cost-effective and helps to create a light organizational structure, history has taught us something about the problems inherent in such a system. Alas, few monarchs or dictators have ever been known for their benevolence. So, despite the cost, inefficiency and frustration caused by the negotiations, compromises and voting in a democracy, we have learnt the lessons of history and chosen to live under a democratic system of government. Linus Torvalds may score well above average for benevolence, but can we really trust that his successor – when that day comes – isn’t a total disaster?

The answer is yes, because it isn’t as if Linus is the leader of Linux by chance and it’s just a lucky fluke that he is benevolent. Actually, it’s quite the other way around: he’s the leader only – and I repeat – only because he’s as smart as he is.

The principles of Open Source generate a curious dynamic, which directly influences the hierarchy of the project organization and the relationships of its members. What would happen if for some reason Linus decided to screw things up and out of spite started making stupid decisions for Linux? Within twenty-four hours the other Linux developers would leave him to fool around on his own, make a copy of the Linux source code somewhere Linus couldn’t get his hands on it and keep working without him. It’s also extremely likely that the hackers involved would quickly elect – more or less consciously and more or less democratically – a new benevolent dictator.

All that is possible because the code itself is open and freely available for anyone to use. As dictator, Linus has all the authority while at the same time having no power whatsoever. The others see him as their leader only because he is so talented – or benevolent. There is a fascinating equilibrium of power and freedom. The dictator has the power and the others have the freedom to vote with their feet.

But in some other environments the dictator model doesn’t work so well. If your boss isn’t up to his job, it’s a bad thing, but what can you do about it? The army must blindly obey its commander-in-chief, but if he proves to be a sick tyrant what choice do the soldiers have about what they do? Such situations lack the openness that is inseparable from the Open Source process. Without openness there can’t be complete trust in other members of the organization; instead, we are stuck with having to use the unwieldy processes of democracy to protect ourselves against power struggles and a variety of other forms of mean-spiritedness. Openness is so integral to the system of an Open Source project that such precautionary measures aren’t necessary.

As a dictator Linus Torvalds is living evidence of the benefits of the openness principle. Openness leads directly to Open Source projects being free of the usual excess of inhibiting project organization, and to them getting along in a way that is surprisingly lightweight, nimble and cost-effective. Could that mean the dictatorship model might work in a more traditional organization? There is at least one example of it being so.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is a standardizing organ that has created nearly all the technologies that constitute the World Wide Web. Standards published by the W3C are, among others, HTML, CSS Style Sheets, XML, DOM (part of JavaScript), the PNG and SVG image formats and lots of other technologies of which we make daily use by surfing the Web. Some 450 IT businesses and organizations are members of the W3C, beginning with Microsoft and IBM.

Interestingly, the decision-making process of the W3C as it prepares standards resembles that of the Open Source dictatorship model. Preparation of a standard is done in a working group specialized in the field, and it works very openly. Trial versions of the standards are released so that anybody can comment on them. When the working group is ready, the proposal is brought to a vote. All member organizations are eligible to vote and each of them has one vote.

After the vote the W3C leader alone either approves or discards the proposal, no matter what the result of the vote. In practice, the W3C strives to get everybody in agreement, but the decision-making system itself clearly resembles the benevolent dictator model.
Since the W3C was founded, Tim Berners-Lee has been its leader. He is the same guy who developed HTML and other Web technologies while working at CERN in the early nineties. He is the Linus Torvalds of the Web – creator and dictator.

As at the W3C, decisions regarding the development of Linux are usually made after thorough discussion. Linus in particular takes the advice of his closest and longer-term colleagues, who within the community are known as his lieutenants. These lieutenants are like mini-dictators, and each one has their own area of responsibility within the project. Just as for Linus, their authority is based on talent proven over a period of years and the trust that it has generated. The dictatorship is therefore a meritocracy.

There have also been instances where, despite Linus being against a particular solution, he has grudgingly had to accept what is wanted by the majority. If he didn’t, one day he might not be the dictator anymore. The open system works lightly, but is nonetheless democratic.”

How important is it to own things, in the context of a social agenda that favours collaborative production and peer to peer dynamics?

I see roughly two polarities in the debate. On the one hand, there are those who think that nothing is fundamentally changing until we tackle the ownership structure. This is voiced by Dmytri Kleiner but also by Tere Vaden who explicitely proposes a three-pronged strategy to obtain “Triple-Free” peer production which includes the ownership of the means of production. On the other polarity are those who say it largely doesn’t matter, at least not at this stage, because we have already a pseudo-commons (a nicer word would be quasi-commons), such as Christian Siefkes in his book on the Peer Economy. This means that for all practical purposes we can already use distributed networks, using our brains, computers and the ‘usage of the networks’ as our means of production, and so basically rout around the issue of ownership. I would rather say that these approaches are phase-dependent. Today, in the current balance of social forces and with peer to peer as a germ form, we can indeed do as much as we can from the edges, but I don’t think this means that eventually we will have to tackle the control and ownership of the information infrastructure. Can we save the world from biospheric destruction if the mass media remain in the hands of corporations using them to push for ever increased consumption?

I particularly recommend the essay on collaborative production by Mark Cooper, who asks himself what kind of infrastructure we need for collaborative production and what kinds of policies can achieve it. Reading it has allowed me to update our wiki entries on Property and the triarchy common/public/private goods.

So what comes first: the new modes of production or new types of ownership. This was the topic of a debate on the Oekonux list as well, and we’re reprinting Raoul Victor’s reply. I would say that we are already changing the modes of property (this is what the GPL and Creative Commons are about), as a necessary precondition for peer production, but that we are still operating at the margins.

Raoul Victor on the importance of ownership in social change strategies:

Stefan Merten had written:

> (…)A lesson what we can learn from several historical trials is, that we cannot start from the question of ownership: first conquer the ownership, then build a new society — no, this does not work. We can learn, that ownership is a result of the development of the way to produces our lives and of the productive forces, it was always in history in this sequence.

Raoul responds:

I don’t think this is totally correct. It is true that, at least in the French case, it is during the period of political revolution (1790s), long after the bourgeoisie had begun to establish its mode of production, that the question of ownership was broadly posed:

possessions of the Church and the emigrated nobles were confiscated by the State and sold to the “people”… (in fact to the new bourgeoisie, the rich merchants, bankers and manufacturers who had previously developed and were the only ones who could buy them). But if the bourgeoisie had had the capacity to develop the new production relations before that moment, it was because it had since the beginning the ownership of crucial means of production, merchant ships and commodities, banks and manufactures, for example.

If you consider the transition between slavery and the first forms of feudalism, at the end of the Roman Empire (III-V century), the basic change consisted since the beginning in a question of ownership, that of the slaves (who were also the main “means of production”). The “coloni”, the first form of “serves” were emancipated slaves. They ceased to be the property of their old owners. They remained attached to the land (which was sold with its coloni) but a part of their production became their own property.

That is for the past. But it is the same if you consider the present transition. Free Software was also confronted a question of ownership (copyright/copyleft) since the beginning. “Peer production”, and more generally “peer X” has developed using means of production (software like Linux or Apache, for example) which were “non-proprietary” software, the results of fights to prevent any private appropriation of them.

Production needs to have the “possession” (not in the sense of “private ownership” but in the sense of having the control of something, as for example a primitive man needed to “posses” a “non-proprietary” stone to drive a stake into the land). How could new relations of *production* develop without dealing since the beginning with the question of possession of the means of production, even if it is only in an incipient form?

That being said, it is true that the question can be posed in a more global and definitive form when the new relations of production have developed. This is so because it is only *social practice* which can “convince” the majority of society to accept and develop the new forms of ownership/possession. For example, the bourgeoisie could obtain the support of small peasants, artisans and new wage-earners workers when expropriating the Church and the nobles, because the new production relations appeared to bring in practice more liberty and wealth.”

You can read more of Raoul Victor’s interesting essays here.

Bill Matheson at Worldchanging has an interesting approach explaining how the shift from a focus on individuality to a focus on relationality, affects governance models.

Here is his graph on the co-created society, followed by his explanation.

There is much more in the full article, which discusses ‘green sovereignity’ inspired by a book on the Green State.

Bill Matheson:

“On the left hand side of the “U diagram” above are some layers from the past of the idea of sovereignty. These are presented in a linear historical sequence from nature-based or pagan, to Christian, to Monarchy, to Democracy, to the modern ideal of personal autonomy. Down the center of the model is a progression in the idea of sovereignty, which shifts in scale from universal to individual. It also shifts from being “out there” to “in here”, from unknowable, to God”s will, to the King”s word, to State law, to My decision.

Moving across to the right hand side of the U diagram, the model “flips” from linear history-telling to a more generative space. On this side of the model the five levels move back up the scale from small to large. As we do this we are attempting to describe in the simplest terms what bright green governance might involve at each stage. At the individual level it starts by “getting to we.” At the local level we can co-create new cultural forms; at the regional level there is cooperation on larger scale projects; and at the global level there is collaboration for the common good.

Across the bottom of the model the shift is described using a number of polarities. I have also tried to interrupt the linear nature of models like this by suggesting that a move away from “the future” and suggest instead the idea of “presence” might best describe the long now that underpins thinking in terms of integrity and legacy, rather than progress through time and space.

Finally this model describes a journey: from undifferentiated participation in nature, to highly differentiated individualism, to returning to a holistic consciousness. Based on Ken Wilbur”s pre-rational, rational, trans-rational distinction, I have added pre-relational, related, trans-relational to this. The story I am trying to tell here is a cultural journey from society and family of origin (no choice), to isolated individual (no choice), to autonomous individual (chosen), to empowered community, to co-created society.”

We’re forwarding this call for support:

“For seven years, riseup.net has provided secure, movement-run services to thousands of folks like you. We feel that in an era of automated mass surveillance, it is a deeply radical act to provide secure alternatives to the corporate interweb. Although we still have a lot of work to do to improve reliability and expand capacity, lately we have become limited by the available tools.

Like us, you have probably learned to be very creative at using the tools available to you. But organizing and movement building are really different than promoting a band or managing an office. You can certainly limp along with existing tools, until youtube restricts your video for having political content, or facebook closes your account for violating the laws of any jurisdiction on earth (you are most likely breaking the law somewhere!)

Enter Riseup Labs. Where riseup.net provides services for the movement, Riseup Labs exists to promote the development of tools to meet the unique needs of movement organizing. We have already begun this work. In cooperation with others, Riseup Labs is actively developing social networking software that is geared specifically to the needs of network
organizing and democratic collaboration. We are also planning to make riseup.net nearly impossible to shut down, provide new services, and greatly enhance your security and privacy.

But these are just our ideas. We want to hear from you. So here’s our plan. In order to get your input, we are creating a space to allow you to discuss your needs with others, propose your own projects, and vote on proposals from other people. We will work to develop the most desired proposals by providing funding and mentorship. We call this initiative the “Freedom Summer of Code”. We hope to access the vast talent of activist techies worldwide by providing stipends to complete specific
projects.

You probably knew this part was coming: in order to pull this off, we need seed money to get started. Amazingly, we have secured $5,000 matching funds, but these are only available to us if you donate too.

In early 2008, Riseup Labs will be able to accept US tax deductible donations as a 501c3 charitable non-profit. If you live in the US, this means that the more you give to Riseup Labs, the less you will be giving to military conquest. How can you pass that up?”

Please make donations to:

Riseup Labs PO Box 4282 Seattle, WA 98194

If we accept Equipotentiality as the basic worldview and principle explaining peer to peer dynamics, then Coliberation is the active ethical principle derived from it. Coliberation is what could/should drive our actions as conscious peer producers.

It signifies both the shared transcendence of the group, and the practice of designing social processes so each of us can be the condition and enabler of the other participants reaching their highest potential. Coliberation is thus the driving force behind peer production.

The concept was formulated by Bernie DeKoven:

“CoLiberation is what happens when we work extraordinarily well together. Like on a basketball team or in an orchestra, when we actually experience ourselves sharing in something bigger than any one who is present. This is what I call the experience of the “Big WE.” It’s a corollary to the “Big ME” experience of self-transcendence. If the Big ME is the “peak experience,” CoLiberation or the Big WE, is like becoming a whole mountain range.”

If you want to know more about the context for equipotentiality as the new networked sociality, see our section here.

If you want to know more about the active practices for coliberation, see our section here.

Re-public, that most interesting online journal that consistently examines the political implications of the web age, is at it again, with a series of contributions on the Social Web.

The starting article is a vigorous interview/debate by Paul Hartzog and Trebor Scholz, who attempt to outline a critique of the social web organised along five axes: production, expoitation, individuality/collectivity, cultural difference, activism.

It is followed by two contributions of friends of the P2P Foundation. My own mini-essay reviews three distinct social contracts, and the accompanying lines of tension between community and corporation, i.e. the sharing model, the commons model, and the crowdsourcing model.

Our Greek friend Vasilis Kostakis contributes a manifesto on the new amateurs.

Finally, Ned Rossiter, long-standing network theorist who was also present at the Nottingham Peer Production Workshop, presents an examination of intersubjectivity in the new social web, particularly the tension between online and offline life.

Here is my conclusion as to the new social tensions in the social web:

“What then is the true social configuration of antagonistic interests, and the lines of tension that are worth concentrating one’s energy on?

On the macro-level, again the netarchical capitalists can be allies to the degree that they join the agenda for social policies geared to the promotion of sharing and commons production (see the stance of Google on the open spectrum as a positive example of policy convergence); but to the degree they may want to enclose openness the interests are divergent.”

Blogger “Bonecone” is launching an appeal to develop a complementary currency that could be used in sites using user-generated content, such as YouTube.

Such initiatives are part of a global movement towards peer to peer based exchange systems.

I must admit I have a mixed mind about approaches that aim to monetize immaterial sharing. The reason is the following: sharing through voluntary contributions creates a particular dynamic and creativity that may be crowded out by monetization, even if that monetization is alternative. People who produce something for money, will not produce the same type of expression than when monetization is not the aim. I therefore tend to believe that some form of generalized benefit sharing, that benefits the whole community, is better than revenue-sharing, which creates competition for the scarce good.

Of course, I’m also sympathetic to the need for creators to make a living. But, perhaps not at any price, i.e. can we find ways of sustaining creative practice that do not destroy the open peer to peer dynamics, that therefore respect that sharing is an ethical economy, distinct from the monetary economy?

Does the fact that Bonecone proposes an alternative currency, guarantee the continuation of that ethical economy? If so, why?

What are the general solutions to make sharing sustainable, without creating a competition-for-profit which would destroy the sharing economics?

Thanks for intervening in that debate!