Andrew Dobson and David Hayes have an interesting article in Open Democracy, entitled: A politics of crisis: low-energy cosmopolitanism.

It starts by warning that the current crisis is not necessarily a boon to the left, which is fair enough.

It then goes on with a critique of localism, which I believe is misguided. Though there is indeed a form of localism that is inward-looking (this is pretty much what John Robb has been describing in his Global Guerilla blog as a return to ‘primary loyalties’), this is definitely not the case with the kinds of progessive localism that they are describing. Movements like the Transition Towns are local in their desire for physical resilience, but are at the same time globally networked and have a cosmopolitan outlook.

They stand for a sustainable relocalization of the physical economy, together with a globalization of intellectual productive cooperation around open design and tinkering communities.

(In my favourite historical analogy: combining local domain economy with the international culture and territorial interconnection of the Catholic Church …)

So, after their critique of left optimism, comes the following passage that includes their critique. Judge for yourself, and thanks for any comments.

Andrew Dobson and David Hayes:

“Such caution about anticipating shoots of progressive recovery is often met by arguments that emphasise the energy and vitality of grassroots campaigns. It is true that local movements can often sustain an impressive standard of commitment even during a downturn. But there is also a problem in their political underpinning – in that activity aimed at coping with increasing levels of insecurity is ambivalent in its character and intentions.

The limitation of a politics of resilience is that it can so easily become defensive, reactive, insular (a characterisation that fits much of what remains of the political left as a whole). The whole point of the transition movement is to manage a move beyond – rather than merely respond to circumstances that have got out of control. This managed approach to change could in principle permit a soft, cosmopolitan landing in a world that is (in ways unimaginably different from the 1930s) globalised, connected, and plural. But to do so will require creating structures that can mediate between local initiatives, and a larger politics that can articulate these links. In the absence of such structures and politics, the sound of the wagons circling could drown out cosmopolitan sentiment.”

Will P2P do to the utilities, what it has already done to the proprietary software and porn industry, i.e. substantially weaken it?

Robert X. Cringely thinks so:

“The result of this relentless application of Moore’s Law to the solar industry is that we can see a time in that near future when the cost of producing a watt of electricity from a solar cell on your roof will be approximately the same as the cost of delivering that same watt over a power line from an electric utility. And of course that means that 18 months after that point the solar watt will cost HALF of what the same power would cost from the electric company, which will completely change the game.

And it will work — for a while. But Moore’s Law is relentless, you know, and the role of electric utilities will change dramatically over the next decade as a result. As far as I can see, this is all for the better.”

Aram Sinnreich and Masha Zager have written an excellent overview article that describes the dangers to free digital speech.

Amongst the danger listed and described are:

* Searches without warrant
* Network Neutrality
* Asymmetrical Internet Access
*Walled Garden approaches

They then discuss counter-strategies, dismissing the first one as impractical at the present stage, presumable because the weakness of the social movement that would impose it.

Here are their 2 strategies, and it is the second one that they, and we in our excerpts, will focus on:

• Laws that strictly protect digital privacy and net neutrality, deter abuse of market power, and encourage investment in new ultra-broadband technologies; or

• User-owned or unmanaged networks with very-high-speed connections.

Since building an individual infrastructure is unfeasible and too expensive, they focus on collective provision of alternative access infrastructures.

Adam and Masha write:

Different organizations are inching toward it from different angles, and if we can take the best aspects of each approach, an e-speech solution might emerge. Here are four of the partial solutions being proposed:

1. Customer-owned (or controlled) fiber or ‘private condo fiber’:

Customer-controlled fiber helps attract ISPs due to the low investment costs and high degree of customer loyalty.

• In Canada, CANARIE—the public/private organization that runs Canada’s advanced research network—is trying to jump-start a residential condo fiber project. Bill St. Arnaud, CANARIE’s chief research officer, asked residents in an Ottawa neighborhood whether they wanted their own fiber connections to the Internet; about a third said they did. He then convinced a business fiber provider to run a trunk line through the neighborhood, and to agree to run a connection to the nearest Internet POP for any neighborhood resident who could pay about $1,500. He also worked out a complex financing scheme (he calls it “green broadband”—don’t ask) to make the fiber easily affordable for those who can’t buy it outright.

At the POP, customers will have to connect their fiber to an ISP’s equipment. In theory, customers can choose among ISPs. But there’s a slight hitch: As of this writing, no ISPs have agreed to participate.”

2. Public condo fiber:

“Many Swedish cities operate publicly owned systems that work in ways similarly to the CANARIE scheme. These municipal fiber networks are open to any ISP—some have dozens of competing ISPs—and the operator will run fiber to any building where the owner pays for a connection. Individual homeowners finance their fiber connections by adding around $10 to their monthly mortgage payments (a better investment than granite countertops in terms of resale price). As in the CANARIE plan, customers can decide whether and when to install the fiber; once connected, they can change ISPs at the click of a mouse ”

3. Net-neutral ISP’s

” A company called Copowi (short for Community Powered Internet) was launched in 2007 as the first strictly “net neutral” ISP. It now offers broadband services in 12 Western states over DSL lines wholesaled by Verizon, AT&T and Qwest. Copowi promises not to block, degrade or modify data or to discriminate for commercial advantage on the basis of source or destination—with exceptions for necessities such as spam prevention and, of course, law enforcement. It also provides encryption for e-mail and Web surfing, both to help users protect their privacy and to make it more difficult for network owners to implement non-neutral access.

After a year in business, Copowi has about 4,000 customers, according to founding partner George Matafonov. Eventually it would like to partner with more network owners or even to build its own networks, but first it needs to develop a larger subscriber base, which isn’t easy for a niche player.”

4. Wireless Mesh Networks

“New “mesh” wireless networking gear—which lets people share Internet access something like BitTorrent lets them share files—has made it easy and inexpensive to create decentralized networks. Wireless mesh networks are now being used in locations as diverse as low-income housing projects, Indian reservations and South African schools. Citywide (or nearly citywide) mesh networks are being built in places like San Francisco and Urbana, Ill. Internet access becomes much less expensive because neighbors can share a commercial DSL connection in the same way that co-workers in an office do.

However, mesh networks tend to be less decentralized in practice than they are in theory, and for technical reasons any really large mesh network seems to require a degree of structure and management. And even a decentralized mesh network is dependent on an ISP to communicate with others outside the neighborhood. ”

Conclusion:

In their conclusion, the authors write that none of the solutions is perfect (they explain why here), and therefore offer these provisional recommendations:

“If wireless devices were ever to become powerful and prevalent enough for the mesh to replace much of the Internet as we know it, every mobile phone and laptop could become a voluntary peer in a global community of equals, without oversight or restrictions. Alternatively, if virtualization, a technology that slices up computers into multiple “virtual” machines, is ever successfully applied to the hardware at the Internet POP (right now it’s busy transforming the corporate data center), we could conceivably all afford to be our own ISPs someday. But the limitations of current technology—as well as the opposition of ISPs and telcos, fighting to fend off what they see as a doomsday scenario—make these blissful utopias unlikely anytime soon.

In the meantime, keeping in mind our mantra of “e-speech,” we can continue to push federal regulators and access providers to support net neutrality and lower their garden walls, and we can continue to experiment with new models for community-owned and decentralized access. Most important, however, we have to remain aware of our civil liberties in the Digital Age, and to realize how easily—and invisibly—they can be removed. “

The following short Video was produced last year to showcase the first experiences with VideoBridge, a simple methodology to share educational content between institutions. The idea this leads to is to encourage these educational institutions – especially those in rural areas, but not only them – to share and record the best they have to offer and build an entirely new curriculum on the base of cooperative exchange. The idea is not only that in producing a shared lecture the quality of the lecture is augmented, but also that institutions at the producing end can show their expertise and specialisation. Furthermore, at the receiving end, the learning process can be arranged by moderators in a way to add whatever they need – so learning is successful for the locals. This would form in my view eventually the base for a virtual p2p university of the villages.

Forgive me the few minutes of personal introductions at the beginning, but this helped me already not to be forced to travel and demonstrate at some conferences. We are pretty busy with our dream of bringing a network of 300 places of access and learning into existence here in Austria, and I will also try to instigate international (and maybe global) VideoBridge clusters that eventually could grow together. For the beginning please leave a comment here if you are interested.

Our next attempt will be a European network of adult education institutions based on strong ties that we created in our MIR project. (Adult Education as Source of Motivation, Integration and Resources for Local Development).

But there are many projects in the loop and it would be great to hear of yours!

(an excerpt from the Ethical Economy book, sneak preview at www.ethicaleconomy.com)

These might seem like three terms picked at random. However I would like to suggest that beyond its direct, contingent causes, the current financial crisis is a symptom of the emergence of a new economic system, where value is increasingly based on ethical factors, or on ‘life conduct’. I call this an ethical economy: and I will try to explain why, and how it relates to the current crisis.

The last ‘Great Crisis’ that lends itself to (imperfect) comparison with today’s events was the Crisis of 1929 followed by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Great Crisis was triggered by an over-valuation of industrial stock which had accelerated during the post-War boom of the ‘roaring twenties’. Industrial profits, private savings (and borrowed money) were pumped into stock markets where stock prices were inflated. Like today this exuberance produced a situation where nobody really knew what the stocks were actually worth. Instead their value were related to the overall tendency of the stock market to keep rising. So the basic mechanisms behind the bubble and crash (like in all bubble crash and cycles) was the absence of a measure of the real value of stock, and its replacement by a self-referential measure that related the value of stock to the presumed future dynamics of the stock market itself.

The post-War, Keynesian solution, which served to guarantee a relatively smooth financial development up until the oil crisis of 1973, and the following neo-liberal deregulation, was premised on the establishment and institutionalization of such a measure. This happened through the Fordist compromise between capital and labour, which institutionalized the productivity of industrial labour as the established measure of all economic values, including the value of stock. This establishment of an institutionalized measure happened through a democratization of the standards of value. Up until the 1930s, the people had no insight in the ways in which economic value standards were set. Instead such standards were set by a small minority of market operators who followed what we would today call a ‘swarm logic’. With the Fordist compromise, popular representatives (principally the labour movement) came to have a say in determining what standards of values should prevail. This way these standards also acquired a wider democratic base, which made them enduring and robust as they now corresponded to what was a shared view of what constitutes ‘real value’.

Today, the dynamics leading up to the financial crisis are very much the same. We have seen an exploding share of immeasurable values that are capitalized on on financial markets (so called ‘intangibles’) and a generalized insecurity of the ‘real values’ of the assets that back the various kinds of securities that circulate. As a consequence, the credit and real estate boom that preceded the crisis was premised on a self-referential pricing mechanism: The value of a house was thought to be determined by the continuous upward movement of the housing market. Like in 1929, there is no democratic influence on how the standards of value for these kinds of assets are determined, and hence no way of guaranteeing that they correspond to a shared view of what constitutes ‘real value’.

But the today the assets are different form those of the 1920s. The most important assets in todays financial crack – mortgage-backed securities, credit card debt and many intangibles, like brand values are essentially securitizations of what we could call ‘life conduct’. The value of a mortgage or of  credit card debt depends on the life conduct of the borrower. The value of a brand depends on the life conduct of consumers (this is actually what is measured in brand valuation schemes) and of the ethical conduct of the company that owns the brand; the value of a real estate market depends on the life conduct of  the inhabitants of a neighborhood or a city- after all this is what ‘creative city’ policies are all about. And to a large extent the productivity of a knowledge intensive company is about the life-conduct of its employees. So in many ways current financial markets build on the direct securitization of life-conduct, of ethically coherent forms of life. Swiss-Italian economist Christian Marazzi pointed this out long ago. Looking at the New York financial crisis of 1929, for many the origin of the neoliberal era, he showed how the privatization of city debt (through city bonds sold to the middle classes) gave a direct economic importance to the life-conduct of the poor. This, he argues, was the origin of the neoliberal era with its combination of freedom of private property and discipline for the propertyless.

So the present crisis was preceded by a boom that built essentially on the securitization of life conduct, where the ethics of everyday life became a direct foundation of value. Like in the 1920s, however, the crisis resulted form a lack of rational measurements of the value of such forms of life conduct. What kinds of lessons can we draw form this?

Many voices on the left (and on the right) speak of a severe restriction of the power and freedom of financial markets. This is probably not a good idea. There are many reasons that suggest that a financial distribution of value is in fact a functional response to a situation in which the production of wealth is thoroughly socialized and operates through the putting to work of social capital and what Marx called General Intellect, rather then through the direct deployment of labour time and private capital. In this sense financial markets serve to distribute a global surplus, which is essentially produced in common. What we need is a democratization of the standards of value. We need established, generally accepted standards for how to value forms of life conduct to underpin a rational valuation of the securities that they support. How can this be done? A centralized authority build around the state, like in the Fordist compromise is simply not possible. Furthermore, standards of life conduct are multifaceted, so that a rational measurement requires a multitude of points of view. This seems like a task for the collective intelligence of the networked multitude! My suggestion would be to use social media platforms that combine the functions of networking and rating. (These are already emerging, networking sites like Facebook are enormously popular; according to the PEW Internet and American life project in September 2007, 32 per cent of the US internet population had rated a person or product online) If E bay is able to give a rational and generally accepted value to the life conduct of its users (is the seller trustworthy or not?), then something similar could perhaps work for financial securities? Consumers, workers and other stake-holders involved in the globalized production of a branded commodity continuously rate the social impact of the brand. Their ratings are aggregated into an quantitative index that serves as an input for financial operators. When I go to the bank and ask for a mortgage I present a quantitative ethical index that summarizes what people in my networks think of my trustworthiness and general life conduct. That index affects the interest rate I would have to pay on my loan, and consequently the risk and price of the security that the bank subsequently derives from the mortgage An ethical economy? An Orwellian nightmare?

As Eben Moglen once said, peer production is the wet dream of both capitalists and communists.

In my interpretation this means: as the possibilities for non-alienated voluntary participation in common projects increases, so does its use as free labour for for-profit companies.

Mark Deuze has an interesting analysis of how this is being played out in the media field.

Below is a modified version of his original essay on the topic.

Mark Deuze:

“In 2006, NYU professor Jay Rosen penned an astute observation about the changing power relationships in the media industries – and more specifically, the world of journalism – regarding the impact of internet. His analysis had the catchy title “The People Formerly Known as the Audience”, and pointed towards a shift in access to reporting tools (news gathering, editing, and publishing) to what used to be imagined by newsworkers as the audience. Importantly, it is not just the tools of reporting now being available to “We the Media” (such as blogging, podcasting, vodcasting, and other forms of social or “our” media), but also emerging forms of legal protection (Creative Commons licensing), and increasing uses of users by professional media organizations, thereby giving the former audience the semi-official status as competitor-colleagues.

Perhaps we should take this analysis even further: the only way we can live in the world as this power shift continues, is to rely exclusively on our own terms. This in turn inevitably leads to mass solipsism and paranoia – as the only truth we can still believe in has to be strictly our own, and nothing or nobody can (or should) still be trusted. It is the perfect storm.”

Matt Sinclair of the We don’t do retro blog has been interviewed by Duann Scott for Ponoko’s blog.

In one of the questions of this interesting interview, Matt gives a good feeling for the concrete difficulties facing self-produced designs and 3D printing.

Matt Sinclair on the current limitations of customer-driven design:

“There are two main ones, which both come down to the question of ‘quality’. The first is that the surface finish of parts made by rapid prototyping or rapid manufacturing is relatively poor compared to mass manufactured products: they tend to have ridges, or rough surfaces, and the colours are limited. But these are gradually improving, and it’s worth remembering that injection moulding is a process that’s 140 years old. 3D printers and other rapid manufacturing technologies are still in their infancy by comparison. The second limitation is the tools that consumers have available to design their own products. This is hard enough in 2D, which is why I imagine Ponoko has introduced Photomake, for people who can’t use Adobe Illustrator. 3D Computer Aided Design is much harder to learn, most designers take at least three years to get good at a single CAD package. So there needs to be much simpler modelling tools, and that’s now a significant part of my research. But again there are signs that things are moving: Google SketchUp and 3DVia Shape are undoubtedly consumer-oriented, and Shapeways Creator and FluidForms show some interesting approaches. I also think there’s a hell of a lot to learn from Spore Creature Creator, in the way it both helps and restricts you in designing new creatures.”

Marc Fawzi of the Evolving Trends blog proposes a discussion of a civil-society engineered programmable money.

Join us to discuss whether this is a desirable and/or feasible propostion. The proposal was also published on his blog.

To participate, go here in our Ning Forum.

A comprehensive literature and issue review of the ecological disruption caused by maintaining resource-hungry virtual worlds such as Second Life, by Leigh Blackall.

Worth reading in full as it refers to the blogosphere discussions on the topic, as well as to significant articles.

An excerpt:

“Indirect impacts of Second Life on sustainability issues relate more to content and the possible influence this has on people’s awareness and appreciation of sustainability issues. On the one hand there are several content projects like the eTopia Eco Village being developed in Second Life that present models and ideas for more efficient resource use, less energy waste, less pollution, and better building design; but on the other hand there are messages implicit in all of these, and throughout the Second Life operating system itself, that arguably reinforce problematic cultural assumptions and behaviors that are fundamentally disrupting sustainability from the outset. Things such as perpetual consumerism, futurism, comodification, culturally inappropriate symbolism, and an inherent preference for human design over established ecological systems, are all prevalent in the Second Life program, including the many user generated models within it.”