Thomas Greco writes:

“Paul Grignon, creator of the excellent videos, Money as Debt I and II, came to my presentation on Salt Spring Island and brought with him a new short video called The Essence of Money, a Medieval Tale. In less than eight minutes, this video explains as well as anything I’ve seen how simple and effective a community-created currency can be. Highly recommended!”

View it here: www.digitalcoin.info/The_Essence_of_Money.html

That, ultimately, is the biggest problem with the hand-made approach to sustainability: even when it works, it makes us passionate about small things in our lives, not engagement with the world. Visiting a neighbor’s great backyard garden may well encourage me to want to grow my own; it doesn’t encourage me to understand global agrobusiness, connect with food policy activists and do something to change the $2,000 in destructive agricultural subsidies the U.S. government pays with part of my taxes every year. The hand-made can be beautiful. It can be deeply personally meaningful. I’d like a world where the hand-made abounds. But the hand-made is not The Revolution.

Excerpt from an editorial from Alex Steffen:

“Given how far we need to go, how quickly (I think we need — for reasons I’ll explain in another piece — about a 95% reduction in our impacts in the next two decades), we can’t waste time on what doesn’t work. We’re being forced, I think, to look at our solutions with a colder eye and clearer judgment. What works? What scales? What has the best political chances of happening? What can make money or creative infectious behavioral change or in some other way self-replicate? What solutions, in short, could work?

The opposite of democracy is depoliticization. The idea that “regular” people can’t do this is insultingly elitist, psychologically isolating and inherently depoliticizing. Of course we can. Even those of us who lack formal education in these fields are entirely capable of contributing in important ways to big efforts — if we learn to think of ourselves as connected and collaborating, and start to pay more attention.”

Book: The Sharing Solution. How to Save Money, Simplify Your Life & Build Community. Janelle Orsi & Emily Doskow. Nolo, 2009.

This is an extremely practical handbook for people who want to organize or join sharing networks in their lives.

This is how lawyer-authors Janelle Orsi and Emily Doskow explain their motivation:

“Some people worry that sharing will end in the loss of friendly relationships if something goes wrong. We believe that the process of working through the potential problems in advance, and communicating openly about concerns when they arise, actually strengthens bonds between friends, neighbors, and fellow sharers of all kinds.”

A recent review writes:

“The Sharing Solution is a well-written, straightforward and inspirational book, overflowing with great ideas for ways we could all share with each other. There are chapters on specific things that can be shared: sharing food, sharing housing, sharing household goods, sharing care for children, family and pets, sharing transportation, sharing work; and, along with inspiration, the book provides concrete steps for forging connections with like-minded sharers and steps to making it happen.

The authors are attorneys and the book includes agreements, check-lists, forms and sample contracts that provide the average person with the tools they need to create protected, mutually beneficial sharing relationships.”

As an example, see how co-author Janelle Orsi approaches the housing issue, in her treatment of Slow Housing. Or here on the trend towards Neighborrow-hoods, through which you can borrow and lend items with people who live near you.

Their blog covers many different examples of sharing in all areas of life.

Excerpt from the introduction:

“As we use the term, “sharing” refers to two or more people coming together to pool property, resources, or obligations or to do or create something together. In other words, the sharing arrangements we talk about in this book are mutual and reciprocal. Everyone involved is giving something and getting something, through endeavors like:

* exchanging goods or services in a barter process.”

Ways to share things:

“You may choose to share in many different ways, including:

• Shared use. The sharers all use something, even though everyone might not have an ownership share.”

What is Sharing good for?

“For a variety of reasons, people are looking for ways of living that are more sustainable—not only environmentally sustainable, but also economically and personally sustainable. One of the most sustainable choices we can make is sharing.

Sharing contributes to the greater good in lots of ways. First, it’s nice. It can help people feel connected to their neighbors, coworkers, and even strangers. It builds community and meets our needs in creative ways. It sets a good example for our children. Second, it’s economical. Almost every type of sharing we discuss in this book will save you some money—sometimes more, sometimes less, but always some.

Third, it’s green. Most kinds of sharing result in fewer resources being used, and that’s good for the planet. Sharing also makes it possible to afford more environmentally friendly choices, such as solar panels, grey water systems, and community supported agriculture.

In many ways, sharing is already an integral part of our society. We share the sidewalks, streets, and highways—and the cost of building and maintaining them. We share public schools, public utilities, and public services, all of which we pay for through our taxes.”

Social networking services available on the web are based upon proprietary software which have the ultimate purpose of advertisement-driven profit which implicitly demands tracking user activities. On the other hand, in order to allow people’s collective intelligence to fully develop by means of their self-organized social networks, communication in social networking software must be independent of intrinsic intermediaries, free of external influence.

Robin Good has republished Rafael Pezzi‘s important While Paper in a very readable format. Read it here.

Introduction:

“Rafael Pezzi introduces in this white paper a new concept for designing social networking services, not provided by centralized servers, but by nodes of the network forming a cloud of computers owned by individuals who are all joining the network.

In Part 2 you will also find more in-depth information on the hardware required to run the social network client and its possible implementation for communities with limited economic resources.”

About (roughly) 5,000 years, humanity witnessed a first revolution in productivity. It discovered that you can make people work through coercion (slavery), or by forcing farmers to give away a part of their production. To simplify, the emergence of negative extrinsic motivation was born. The city-state was probably one of it earliest instrument. As it could not produce its own livelihood, it could only exist by extracting a surplus from the surrounding countryside. Civilisation, with its managerial classes and the state, was born, but of course, at a high price. Nevertheless, the core of what we experience today, i.e. the ‘fruits of civilisation’, is the result of this primitive extraction of surplus value from unwilling humans, the ones that lost the battles and were reduced to slavery, or needed ‘protection’ from tribute-demanding lords.

About 500 years ago, a new revolution occurred. It occurred to more and more people that mutual interest, the exchange of equal value, i.e. extrinsic positive motivation, was a more powerful and more productive motivator to extract surplus value. This is the basis of capitalism and its explosion in human productivity. Of course, we should also concede that this equal exchange is in a large part mythological as well, based as it is on unequal power relationships. In order for labour to become a commodity willingly exchanged for a salary, masses of people had to be disposed through the enclosures of their farmlands. Only people ‘freed’ of access to their own productive resources, would be willing to enter in such exchange. Nevertheless, it was an extraordinary leap in human productivity, and again, certainly in the western world, most of what we enjoy is the product of that leap.

As we must conclude however, is that both the previous modes of ‘progress’, were both based on structural coercion, and hence came at a heavy price in human suffering.

About 20 years ago, a third revolution started occurring. Some humans discovered that the permissionless self-aggregation afforded by the internet, allowed humans to congregate around their passionate pursuits. Thus, peer production was born, first in the field of knowledge, including software. It was discovered that when people are motivated by intrinsic positive motivation, they are hyperproductive. We discovered that peer communities do not strive just for relative quality, i.e. being better than the competition, but for absolute quality, making the best possible ‘product’.

Whenever peer producing communities start moving in a particular field of production, say the building of a universal operating system, or a universal encyclopedia, after a few years it would outcompete or better, ‘outcooperate’ those relying exclusively on proprietary strategies. This is not so difficult to understand, if we remember that while barely one in five of corporate workers are passionately motivated, one hundred percent of peer producers are, since the system filters out those lacking it! Moreover, peer producing communities are not hampered by any of the negative strategies that corporate players have to engage in, like planned obsolescence, striving for monopoly, ignoring social and natural externalities, etc…

In other writings we have explained by in the current social form, peer production can only take on hybrid formats, i.e. in alliance with corporate entities, since its non-monetary logic of voluntarily contributing to a universally available commons, cannot sustain itself in a corporate economy. It is therefore the hybrid constructions, combining peer communities, for-benefit foundations managing the infrastructure of cooperation, and the corporate entities extracting or creating new value from the commons for use in the marketplace, which are the current format out-competing exclusively proprietary strategies.

It will take a few decades for this new model to become dominant, with a key social factor being what modalities the social charters between communities, foundations, corporations, and the state, will take in that intermediary period.

In the longer term, we believe humanity will find a way to reorganize its economic and social order in such a way, that pure peer production becomes sustainable by itself. Crucial for this is to translate the value and wealth created by peer production, in a means of reproducing one’s livelihood. This requires that the state, society and the market, and any sphere that benefits from the positive externalities of the peer production communities, acknowledges and funds that value creation, but in such a way that the proper dynamic of peer production is respected.

William Yenner’s book on the spiritual abuse happening at Andrew Cohen’s community, American Guru, has been the subject of a vigorous counter-campaign by his followers, yet no denial’s of the factual allegations have come forward, only the argument that they should be understood ‘in their context’.

For those readers who may not have read the book, a small sample of the happenings could be useful. It’s part of a longer excerpt which you can read here. After you read them, ask yourself, what possible kind of ‘context’ could justify such practices?

William Jenner:

“Regarding many examples of the extreme measures sometimes taken by Andrew Cohen at Foxhollow, students have since stated that far from being freed from their own ignorance, they had been subjected to a new and pernicious version of someone else’s. Cohen’s “acts of outrageous integrity” included disciplinary face slapping—usually in response to a student’s performance of some task failing to measure up to his expectations—in which it was difficult to discern any particular “lesson” other than “Shape up!” This practice began soon after our arrival at Foxhollow. In some cases, Andrew would direct one student to slap another; in others, he administered the slaps himself. I myself was slapped on two occasions, once by a woman and once by another man.

Andrew often employed red paint in this fashion to create environments designed to induce shame and guilt in students that he felt had questioned his judgment or disobeyed him. Another female student who had displeased Andrew and, after leaving the community, had returned to help out on a weekend painting project, was summoned to another basement room. There she was met by four female students who, having guided her onto a plastic sheet on the floor, each poured a bucket of paint over her head as a “message of gratitude” from Andrew. She left the property traumatized and fell ill in subsequent days (during which she was harassed by phone calls from another student who, at Cohen’s instigation, repeatedly called her a “coward”) and never again returned to Foxhollow. “Crazy wisdom” is the most charitable possible explanation for these often traumatic and disturbing incidents, many of which have already been related on the whatenlightenment.net blog. Several of these student accounts of Andrew Cohen’s “acts of outrageous integrity,” employed to dubious or damaging effect, are reproduced below.”

This is an excerpt from chapter 24 of Howard Zinn’s book, A People’s History of the United States, chosen by Paul Fernhout:

“However, the unexpected victories-even temporary ones-of insurgents show the vulnerability of the supposedly powerful. In a highly developed society, the Establishment cannot survive without the obedience and loyalty of millions of people who are given small rewards to keep the system going: the soldiers and police, teachers and ministers, administrators and social workers, technicians and production workers, doctors, lawyers, nurses, transport and communications workers, garbage men and firemen. These people-the employed, the somewhat privileged-are drawn into alliance with the elite. They become the guards of the system, buffers between the upper and lower classes. If they stop obeying, the system falls.

The prisoners of the system will continue to rebel, as before, in ways that cannot be foreseen, at times that cannot be predicted. The new fact of our era is the chance that they may be joined by the guards. We readers and writers of books have been, for the most part, among the guards. If we understand that, and act on it, not only will life be more satisfying, right off, but our grandchildren, or our great grandchildren, might possibly see a different and marvelous world.”

A report via Mutopo:

“Local Motors wants to build C.O.O.L cars. They invite a large community or car enthusiasts to participate in the development of their car. But this is where the similarities with Powell Motors ends, because Local Motors decides to decide differently. While Homer was the decider with rather unfortunately results, Local Motors doesn’t let the community decide everything. The don’t leave them alone to figure things out and show up at the end to see the result.

Local Motors is using crowdsourcing – making very clear choices about where and how they want the crowd involved, how things are owned and they are discussing with the crowd as they go and experimenting to see what works (we love recursiveness almost as much as crowdsourcery). It sounds a lot like the process experiments that saw Linux depart from the traditional processes of its time, or the cleverly organized participation in WordPress or Mozilla as they go up against traditionally organized competitors.”

This is a comment on Clay Shirky’s “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority,”, excerpts of which were also featured on our p2p blog.

Frank Pasquale:

“Here are some reasons to worry about that process:

a) Shirky notes in the piece that there are several kinds of knowledge out there unsusceptible to assessments of accuracy. He cleverly calls these “epistemological potholes.” My worry is that the potholes are in fact larger than the road itself, and that we should be particularly concerned about the accumulation of algorithmic authority in news. If we merely relied on journalists for facts, perhaps a wikipedian directive of objectivity and neutrality could permit algorithmic authorities to separate the wheat from the chaff. But the media is more an engine than a camera, the font of ultimate political reality it pretends merely to mirror.

Moreover, if personalized search ever evolves to the point where someone can type into their gmail “what job should I look for,” and receives many relevant results, new media literacy demands that the searcher reflect on the fact that his or her very idea of relevance has probably been affected by repeated interactions with the interface and the results themselves. As Nicholas Carr and Jaron Lanier have pointed out (recalling Sherry Turkle and Sven Birkerts), tools aren’t just adapting to better serve us-–we are adapting in order to better compete in the environment created by tools. Algorithmic authority can be just as disciplinary as the old forms of cognitive coordination it’s displacing. To paraphrase Foucault: “Responding precisely to the revolt of the [netizens,], we find a new mode of investment which presents itself no longer in the form of control by repression but that of control by stimulation”. . . and search engine optimization.”

Douglas Rushkoff’s keynote from the O’Reilly Web 2.0 conference.

Key thesis: How we’re using an obsolete operating system for money, optimized for a pre-Internet economy.

(an interesting video, with remarks on the situation in the Middle Ages)