Via Mediacology:

I was at this Paul Hawken talk and it remains one of the most inspiring I’ve seen. Given these troubled days, I thought it would be nice to take a breather and to remember we are the ones we have been waiting for.

Recommended Video by Paul Hawken:

Book of the Week: Biobazaar. The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology. By Janet Hope. Harvard University Press, 2008.

We continue our presentation of Janet Hope’s new book on open source biology.

Janet Hope:

“Another broad social movement with potentially very strong connections to open source biotechnology is the appropriate technology (AT) movement. Adherents believe that the failure of decades of technology transfer from industrialized countries to solve problems of poverty and hunger in the developing world suggests a need for development pathways that de-emphasize growth and technological monoculture. They advocate the development and use of alternative technologies that are appropriate to local user needs. Such technologies are variously called intermediate, progressive, alternative, light-capital, labor-intensive, indigenous, appropriate, low-cost, community, soft, radical, liberatory, and convivial technologies.

Consider the use of agricultural biotechnology to produce technical “locks” such as hybridization and genetic use restriction technologies (“GURTs”) that render seed unsuitable for replanting or suppress the expression of introduced traits in saved seed. These are only the most extreme examples: the use of genetically engineered crops that may contaminate others in the vicinity also restricts the autonomy of those who would prefer to grow traditional crops; even the development of new food crops for developing countries is often a case of tools “acting upon” the intended beneficiaries instead of empowering them to define their own productive future. An Andean potato farmer may be very poor and yet not want a genetically engineered potato that boosts yield so as to generate a cash crop. Such a commercial existence may threaten a way of life that the farmer values more than he or she values the ability to buy industrial goods; yet a closely related technology that improves the taste of a variety the family eats every day may be very welcome. In Chapter 6, I noted that the capital intensiveness of biotechnology research and development is sometimes perceived as an obstacle to the implementation of open source. This view is linked to assumptions about the nature of biotechnology as an essentially industrial—as distinct from convivial—technology. But molecular biotechnology and other advanced technologies need not be anticonvivial. Science can be used, not to replace human initiative with highly programmed tools, but to facilitate autonomous, decentralized production. New possibilities for cognitive and material advance opened up by basic discoveries in biotechnology offer a choice: we can apply our new understanding to develop tools that would propel us into a “hyperindustrial age,” or we can use it to help us develop truly “modern and yet convivial tools” that “enable the layman to shape his immediate environment.” Such a convivial biotechnology need not be inherently expensive, because it would consist of simple tools that work with rather than against the tendency of living things to proliferate of their own accord.

Janet concludes:

“These are the very properties that open source licensing seeks to confer through the guarantee of “technology freedom,” described in Chapter 5. Meanwhile, bazaar governance ties the rewards for knowledge creation to the diffusion of knowledge rather than its exclusive control and restores the patterns of communication through which knowledge goods “come to life in society as public goods.”83 Open source biotechnology would give those who are excluded from the organized interests of science, state and industry the ability not merely to question the trajectory of technology development, but to affect that trajectory directly by participating in the design of the technology itself.”

Naomi Klein in her editorial on the financial crisis:

“It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the right’s ability to use this crisis — created by deregulation and privatization — to demand more of the same. Don’t forget that Newt Gingrich’s 527 organization, American Solutions for Winning the Future, is still riding the wave of success from its offshore drilling campaign, “Drill Here, Drill Now!” Just four months ago, offshore drilling was not even on the political radar and now the U.S. House of Representatives has passed supportive legislation. Gingrich is holding an event this Saturday, September 27 that will be broadcast on satellite television to shore up public support for these controversial policies.

So let’s be absolutely clear: there are no saviors who are going to look out for us in this crisis. Certainly not Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, one of the companies that will benefit most from his proposed bailout (which is actually a stick up). The only hope of preventing another dose of shock politics is loud, organized grassroots pressure on all political parties: they have to know right now that after seven years of Bush, Americans are becoming shock resistant.’

You’ll find the free online magazine mentioned below here.

From the editor’s intro:

“Social Innovation is the theme of the September issue of the Open Source Business Resource. This issue captures important aspects of how open source assets, processes, and values may be used to create social and environmental value. Some of these aspects are new and still blurry, others are clear and familiar. The publication of this issue signals a strong interest in the use of open source to support non-profit and charitable initiatives. Technology company managers, entrepreneurs, academics, contributors to open source projects, and staff of non profit organizations and foundations are encouraged to continue to use open source to enable social innovation.

In this issue, authors from very diverse backgrounds have contributed insightful articles that examine: i) global projects that use open source to benefit society; ii) open source-like approaches to organizing the collaborative efforts that lead to social innovation; iii) challenges and elements of social innovation; and iv) ways to align university capacity with the social innovation agenda.”

Seed Magazine reports on efforts to make genetic engineering research a public good and says that it is vital for the next green revolution.

Excerpt:

“Free distribution and local ownership of bioproperty will be one crucial aspect of the new Green Revolution. Another will be the cultivation of locally adapted varieties. “The second Green Revolution is going to be much more complicated than the first,” says Nina Fedoroff, a plant geneticist at Penn State, and science and technology adviser to the US Secretary of State. This time around, Fedoroff explains, scientists will have to address local needs and local crop varieties. Consider ringspot-virus-resistant GM papaya: “It’s been a wonderful, wonderful accomplishment,” says Fedoroff, “but the transgenic plants that are protected from the virus in Hawaii aren’t going to work in the Philippines.” Building locally focused biotech and training biotech-capable scientists is “a big deal,” says Fedoroff. “It’s a huge investment, and it needs to be done everywhere.”

A brilliant excerpt from the fifteenth chapter of Kevin Carson’s draft on Organisational Theory, which I will discuss in detail in daily submissions from October 2 to 5. If you can’t wait, go read it now, it’s has all the makings of a masterpiece.

In this excerpt, Kevin Carson discusses a possible counter-strategy to the collapse of the financial economy:

We’re experiencing a singularity, of sorts, in which it is becoming impossible for capital to prevent a shift in the supply of an increasing proportion of the necessities of life from mass produced goods purchased with wages, to small-scale production in the informal and household sector. The upshot is likely to be something like Vinay Gupta’s “Unplugged” movement (see below), in which the possibilities for low-cost, comfortable subsistence off the grid result in exactly the same situation, the fear of which motivated the propertied classes in carrying out the Enclosures: a situation in which the majority of the public can take wage labor or leave it, if it takes it at all, the average person works only on his own terms when he needs supplemental income for luxury goods and the like, and (even if he considers supplemental income necessary in the long run for an optimal standard of living) can afford in the short run to quit work and live off his own resources for prolonged periods of time, while negotiating for employment on the most favorable terms. It will be a society in which workers, not employers, have the greater ability to walk away from the table. It will, in short, be the kind of society Wakefield lamented in the colonial world of cheap and abundant land: a society in which labor is hard to get on any terms, and almost impossible to hire at a low enough wage to produce significant profit.

The potential for defection is heightened by the greater efficiency with which the counter-economy extracts use-value from a given amount of land or capital.

…[T]he owning classes use less efficient forms of production precisely because the state gives them preferential access to large tracts of land and subsidizes the inefficiency costs of large-scale production. Those engaged in the alternative economy, on the other hand, will be making the most intensive and efficient use of the land and capital available to them. So the balance of forces between the alternative and capitalist economy will not be anywhere near as uneven as the distribution of property might indicate.

If everyone capable of benefiting from the alternative economy participates in it, and it makes full and efficient use of the resources already available to them, eventually we’ll have a society where most of what the average person consumes is produced in a network of self-employed or worker-owned production, and the owning classes are left with large tracts of land and understaffed factories that are almost useless to them because it’s so hard to hire labor except at an unprofitable price. At that point, the correlation of forces will have shifted until the capitalists and landlords are islands in a mutualist sea–and their land and factories will be the last thing to fall, just like the U.S Embassy in Saigon.

Johan Soderberg refers to the possibility that increasing numbers of workers will “defect from the labour market” and “establish means of non-waged subsistence,” through efficient use of the waste products of capitalism. [Soderberg, p. 172.] The “freegan” lifestyle (less charitably called “dumpster diving”) is one end of a spectrum of such possibilities. At the other end is low-cost recycling and upgrading of used and discarded electronic equipment: the rapid depreciation of computers makes it possible to add RAM to a model a few years old at a small fraction of the cost of a new computer, with almost identical performance.

The central barrier to garage production of computers is the microprocessor, which can only be produced on capital equipment costing nearly a billion dollars. But reprogrammable microprocessors will eliminate that barrier, with millions of discarded chips enabling garage industry to operate entirely on recycled inputs in the same way that minimills reprocess scrap steel on a small scale wherever a market exists. In Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks, for example, a small workshop uses the chips harvested from thousands of discarded Elmo dolls.

Paul Goodman and Ivan Illich both remarked, in their unique ways, on the effect of radical monopolies in making comfortable poverty impossible. As the alternative economy undermines the ability of artificial property rights to levy tribute on access to the means of subsistence, comfortable poverty becomes increasingly feasible.

Dave Pollard, of How to Save the World blog, describes his own version of the singularity in “The Virtuous Cycles of the Gift Economy.” As people do the things they love and become better at them, it takes less and less money to live. People need to work less, and can devote the saved time not only to further developing production technique. People develop more skills, become more self-sufficient, and less dependent on store-bought commodities purchased with wages. They also invest a greater share of their productive energy in the gift economy and mutual aid, and a greater share of their time in building social capital. As a result, people on average are happier, healthier, and more responsible and competent; social problems and social costs decline, which further adds to the virtuous cycle of reduced cost and frees up more time from work. “These cycles are, of course, subversive. They threaten to undermine and starve the ‘market’ economy by freeing us, the end-customers of that economy, from the need to pay money into it.”

This undermining and starving is exactly what we discussed in Chapter Thirteen: building the structure of the new society within the shell of the old. Pollard describes, as one way of bring about major global change, “incapacitation–rendering the old order unable to function by sapping what it needs to survive.”

But suppose if, instead of waiting for the collapse of the market economy and the crumbling of the power elite, we brought about that collapse, guerrilla-style, by making information free, by making local communities energy self-sufficient, and by taking the lead in biotech away from government and corporatists (the power elite) by working collaboratively, using the Power of Many, Open Source, unconstrained by corporate allegiance, patents and ‘shareholder expectations‘?

Gupta’s short story “The Unplugged” related his vision of how such a singularity would affect life in the West.

Wealth stored as dollars was essentially a share in America’s national economy – a credit note backed by the US Government. But Buckminster Fuller showed us that wealth-as-money was a specialized subset of Wealth – the ability to sustain life.

If you are willing to live as an Unplugger does, your cost to buy out is only around three months of wages for a factory worker, the price of a used car. You never need to “work” again–that is, for money which you spend to meet your basic needs.

The idea was to combine “Gandhi’s Goals” (“self-sufficiency,” or “the freedom that comes from owning your own life support system”) with “Fuller’s Methods” (the dymaxion principle of getting more with less).

In conclusion:

If this singularity will enable the producing classes in the industrialized West to defect from the wage system, in the Third World it may enable them to skip that stage of development altogether. Gupta concluded “The Unplugged” with a hint about how the principle might be applied in the Third World: “We encourage the developing world to Unplug as the ultimate form of Leapfrogging: skip hypercapitalism and anarchocapitalism and democratic socialism entirely and jump directly to Unplugging.”

Gupta envisions a corresponding singularity in the Third World, when the cost of an Internet connection, through cell phones and other mobile devices, falls low enough to be affordable by impoverished villagers. At that point, the transaction costs which hampered previous attempts at disseminating affordable intermediate technologies in the Third World, like Village Earth’s Appropriate Technology Library or Schumacher’s Intermediate Technology Development Group, will finally be overcome by digital network technology.

The question of the transition period is a real one. There is a very real possibility that the material foundations of the new decentralized economy will not be sufficiently laid down before the old economy’s system of circulation breaks down, so that many who are dependent on employment lose their means of support with nothing to take its place. How to manage the transition is far beyond the scope of this analysis. My main purpose has been, first, to show that such a transition is likely, whether we like it or not, as state capitalism reaches its limits and the technical and organizational means of withdrawing from it become available; and second, to show the likely outlines of a successor society based on the new technical and organizational means. My personal opinion, as I have already discussed in Chapter Twelve in regard to the crisis of centralization resulting from Peak Oil, is that the transition will be relatively long and stable, compared to (say) the catastrophic collapse scenarios of James Kunstler.

At any rate, the more widespread the means of subsistence in the informal and household economies, and the more local infrastructure exists for exchange and barter, the more closely the transition crisis will resemble the paper crisis envisioned by Schumacher. For someone who has avoided or paid off credit card debt, who has obtained a modest mortgage and made paying it off as quickly as possible his top priority, and who has a large and productive vegetable garden, the possibility of unemployment is scary. But it’s nowhere near as terrifying as for someone who’s currently barely making the monthly interest payments on his mortgage, and who’s cashed out all his home equity and maxed out all his credit cards buying a Wii and a big-screen TV and getting a new model car every couple years. Even for the creditors and the unemployed described by Schumacher’s questioner, having a roof over your head free and clear and a reliable source of food will reduce, to a large extent, the concrete harm from the paper collapse.

My hope, at least, is that conventional measures like GDP will suffer (if only gradually, over a generation) what appears to be a catastrophic implosion, as people simply stop buying shit, cut back on the hours of wage labor they previously worked to earn the money to pay for shit, and supply more and more of their own needs producing for themselves and exchanging with their neighbors. My hope, at the same time, is that people will be so busy producing for themselves and their neighbors, and enjoying their control over their own lives and work and consumption, that the collapse of the state capitalist economy won’t matter very much to them.

Our Italian friend Marco Fioretti, of the social-catholic free software advocacy group Eleutheros, a man with a longstanding experience in the manufacturing of integrated circuits, has summarized a discussion we have on the specific difficulties of using peer to peer methods in the sphere of real physical production.

Marco summarizes the other contributions, and strongly challenges them.

Here only the abstract and the conclusion, so go to the full article for the concrete case studies and objections.

Marco Fioretti:

1. Abstract

“These days there is a great interest in finding ways to build a more open and balanced society through social structures, legal frameworks, proper education and innovative technical practices. The goal is to enable as many people as possible to produce, independently or directly collaborating with other individuals without any intermediary or delegation of power, everything one needs to live happily, creatively and sustainably. P2P networks for digital distribution and the P2P Free/Open Source software development model are often taken as examples to apply to other fields, due to their evident success.

This article is an edited summary of two email conversations which took place among a few subscribers of the p2p-research mailing list during spring of 2008 about the applicability of P2P development models to physical objects and infrastructures. It first sums two independent P2P visions or proposals: microelectronics manufacturing and deployment of telecom networks. Next follow my (Marco F.) comments and objections to each case study. The last chapter presents some general conclusions and questions about intrinsical limits of P2P production of physical objects or about its very necessity in some areas: if, to which extent, how and (maybe the more important part) where and when the P2P production models for immaterial products and services can be applied to the production and deployment of physical objects and infrastructures. ”

2. Conclusion

“Before concluding, let’s remind where we started from: are there limit to “P2P production and deployment of physical objects”? Is it possible and desirable in any field? What is the best scale for production, deployment and management of (networks of) complex physical objects? Can centralization be thoroughly substituted by appropriate scale as in the P2P movement? (the two last questions were asked to me by other participants in the threads).

What about aiming directly for a mixed model, instead, one where decentralized (P2P) and centralized activities mutually enforce each other? It may be not only much easier to build (by forcing the current system to evolve, instead of starting over): it may actually be the best possible solution, even better than a 100% P2P one.”

This is a response to some of the challenges expressed by Stefan Merten, who believes Siefkes book re-introduces capitalist concepts in another form.

Christian Siefkes:

“In so far as current peer production tends to go, my solution is the same as of current peer production processes: you can take anything, without having to give anything back, as long as you don’t take it _away_ from others. That means that you can freely take information and anything else that can be copied freely. Current peer production tends to end here.

That’s the difference between capitalism and the peer economy. For many people in our society, it would mean the difference between life and death, or at least between having to live in misery or being able to live a good life. And for almost everybody else it, it’s the difference between having to work very much (and often with the fear of losing that precious, if unloved job and the advantages it entails) and having to work much less (and without fear of dropping out). And that’s not even speaking of the fact that in the peer economy you’re part of a equal community of co-producers with a common goal (produce for everyone what that like to have), while in capitalism you must subjugate to the command of some boss whose goal (making profit) has nothing to do with you...”

Earlier this month, we started processing/summarizing a number of research papers that relate findings about the concrete governance of free software production.

As a reminder, we covered:

- The governance of sponsored open source projects and their communities

- Decision Rights in Open Source

- Modularity in Open Source

- Protective mechanisms in the peer governance of open source communities

Today, we cover the following research paper:

Relationships between open source software companies and communities: Observations from Nordic firms. By Linus Dahlander, Mats G. Magnusson. Research Policy 34 (2005) 481–493

If you want to read more extensive excerpts, go to our wiki page, here are the research questions and the conclusions.

The value of this research papers is that it gives a clear typology of possible relationships, the managerial issues that it poses, and how four Nordic firms have developed distinctive governance responses to engage and retain community engagement.

1. The Research Questions

Linus Dahlander, Mats G. Magnusson:

“In firms, the relationships between developers and their employers are regulated by contracts. Consequently, these developers employed by firms receive salary and other types of financial compensation. In OSS projects, anyone is free to join and the relations are informal. Whereas firm-based software creation is normally restricted to relations within the firm, OSS developers are not bound to firms but are dispersed in all parts of the world.

Research question 3: What operational means do OSS firms use in order to handle their relationships to communities?

2. The Conclusions

“The above suggests that OSS firms can use symbiotic, commensalistic, or parasitic approaches for inter-relating to their communities. By using a more symbiotic approach, firms have more possibilities to influence the community. However, a symbiotic approach implies the acceptance of dual roles, and the key issue becomes how to balance a distributed knowledge system incorporating both the firm and its community, also acknowledging that the modes of control available differ widely within this system. These firms have much larger possibilities to use various operational means of enforcing subtle control.

The ‘truth’ of intellectual property rights as the answer for spurring economic growth should be taken with great care. The debate in recent years to patent algorithms and business methods related to software has resulted in a heavy debate within Europe, as they discuss the benefits and drawbacks of increasing the possibility to use software patents. It has been noted that strong appropriability regimes may benefit individual firms, but slow the general cumulative advance (Levin et al., 1987). Our paper illustrates that through creating relations with communities firms can create economic impact, which illustrates that firms may benefit from the general advance in communities evolving at a rapid pace. An example of this is the case of MySQL. The firm has in a few years grown to become a major alternative to great software incumbents with millions of installations worldwide. The entire system of activities also includes actors with radically different goals and rationales for existing, and the inherent tensions in this set-up call for new ways of thinking about what a firm should do.“

“the tinkering networks we see in the software industry will be mirrored in synbio. Further, the skill sets associated with synthetic biology will be as widely dispersed as software programming is today and the tools will be just as inexpensive/ubiquitous.”

- John Robb

How realistically can we expect open source biology?

Consider the following recent quotes from the Washington Post, which show that clearly something is afoot:

“If biology is to morph into an engineering discipline, it is going to need similarly standardized parts, Knight said. So he and colleagues have started a collection of hundreds of interchangeable genetic components they call BioBricks, which students and others are already popping into cells like Lego pieces.”

“At the core of synthetic biology’s new ascendance are high-speed DNA synthesizers that can produce very long strands of genetic material from basic chemical building blocks: sugars, nitrogen-based compounds and phosphates. Today a scientist can write a long genetic program on a computer just as a maestro might compose a musical score, then use a synthesizer to convert that digital code into actual DNA.”

The above shows the distinct possibility of a hacker like approach to DNA. But how far could this kind of practice, which must rely on ‘open and free raw material’, be extended to the whole field of biological and pharmaceutical research?

This is the topic of Janet Hope’s new book:

Biobazaar. The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology. By Janet Hope. Harvard University Press, 2008.

In the introduction, she describes the aims and direction of her research:

“I want to explore whether and how key open source principles might be translated into a new context: that of biotechnology and its close industrial relations, pharmaceuticals and agriculture. Open source biotechnology would be a manifestation of the bazaar in a bioscience setting: hence, a “biobazaar.”

From the perspective of society as a whole, it is therefore a Bad Idea to let industry leaders gain too much control over the innovative process. Yet in both software and biotechnology over the past decade, more and stronger proprietary rights have contributed to a decrease in real competition, allowing large corporations—the beneficiaries of the status quo—to gain a stranglehold on the pace and direction of technological progress.”

She adds:

“A key premise of this book is that open source principles of technology development, licensing, and commercial exploitation offer at least a partial solution to the innovation lock-down caused by extensive private control over scientific and technological information within a highly concentrated industry structure. Open source development shows how groups of volunteers can “collaborate on a complex economic project, sustain that collaboration over time, and build something that they give away freely”—technology that can “beat some of the largest and richest business enterprises in the world at their own game.”

Because open source licensing makes use of existing intellectual property laws, open source strategies need not rely on domestic or international law reform. Open source is also highly resistant to the kinds of countermeasures traditionally adopted by monopolists and oligopolists when technological innovation threatens their market dominance. As Steven Weber points out, open source software is no marginal phenomenon, but a “major part of the mainstream information technology economy” that increasingly dominates those aspects that are becoming the leading edge in both market and technological terms.55 It seems natural, then, to ask: Could open source do for biotechnology what it is already doing for software?”

Her book has been well received by the scholars in the field, here’s the appreciation of Steve Webber:

“Life Sciences are set to become the driver of 21st century economic and national competitiveness, much as Information technology was at the end of the 20th century. Janet Hope’s Biobazaar: The Open Source Revolution and Biotechnology takes on a fundamental question that will determine where innovation happens in biotechnology: Who owns what pieces of intellectual property in this system, and what can they do with what they own? Her thoughtful and non-ideological assessment of the problem leads to a powerful analogy with software and the open source model for producing complex knowledge goods. Can an open source style economy in life sciences change the landscape of innovation, and for the better? Hope provides a much-needed, reasoned guide to thinking through that critical question.”