Tag Archives: Peer to Peer

Building a Cooperative Economy

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By Oliver Sylvester-Bradley

Source: Resilience

In permaculture terms the economy sometimes feels like a segregated monoculture planted with terminator seeds, sprayed with patented pesticides on venture capital backed farms designed to maximise profits in an unsustainable market place full of thieves and cheats. No wonder people prefer to potter in their gardens and allotments – and try to forget the craziness of corporate capitalism!

But no matter how much we try to ignore the corporate machine it ploughs on regardless and at various points in all of our lives we are forced to interact with the unsustainable, greed-based economy whether we like it or not. We all need to travel, buy energy, we like presents and holidays and now we are buying more and more of these goods and services online, from people we do not know.

As local banks close in favour of apps, local taxis are driven out by Uber and the likes of Airbnb and other holiday and comparison websites offer us ‘guaranteed savings’ – the brave new world of digital platforms is being thrust upon us, whether we like it or not.

The dominant form of business in our economy has not changed, but the method of delivery has. Platform businesses which reach further and wider than conventional ‘bricks and mortar’ businesses, that are able to ‘scale up’ and attract customers in their millions are forcing out the smaller players, just like supermarkets killed the traditional garden market. Except these “platform monopolies” are taking things to a new level – often unbeknown to us they’re gathering our data and using sophisticated algorithms to work out how to sell us more things, that quite often we don’t need or want. They’re aggregating data and dissintermediating in ways that we never knew were possible. Uber is valued at over 60 billion dollars but does not own a single taxi…

From monoculture to platform co-ops

To someone practicing permaculture, there is something almost offensive about vast fields where businesses cultivate the same single crop and, in a similar way, the exponents of ‘peer to peer’ and ‘open source’ technologies get equally offended by monolithic platforms that dominate the digital landscape.

Peer to peer, (where individuals share content with other people, rather than relying on centralised servers) and open source software (which is free to use and adapt, without requiring a licence fee) are like the digital community’s own versions of permaculture. They provide a pathway to greater independence, autonomy, diversity and resilience than is offered by the dominant system.

David Holmgreen’s ideas about creating small scale, copyable, adaptable solutions which have the power to change the world by creating decentralised, diverse, and more resilient systems have huge parallels with open source, collaborative software projects, which are developing as a response to the monolithic, proprietary and profit driven enclosures that dominate today’s Internet.

The end goal of this work is to create ‘platform cooperatives’, as alternatives to the venture capital backed platforms. Platform cooperatives that are member owned and democratically controlled – allowing everyone that is affected by the business, be they customers, suppliers, workers or investors, a say in how the business is run and managed. Co-ops are an inherently different form of organisation than Limited or Public companies, which place community before profit, hence have entirely different principles than their corporate rivals. For this reason they are more resilient in downturns, more responsible to their communities and environments and more effective at delivering real (not just financial) value to everyone they interact with.

Platform co-ops provide a template for a new kind of economy built on trust, mutual aid and respect for nature and community. By placing ownership firmly in the hands of the people and applying democratic forms of governance they offer a legitimate alternative to the defacto form of business. There are several platform co-ops that already provide comparable, and often better services than their corporate rivals and with more support others will continue to develop.

On 26 and 27 July the OPEN 2018 conference at Conway Hall in London will showcase platform co-ops such as The Open Food Network – which is linking up local food producers and consumers through Europe, Resonate – the music streaming co-op, and SMart from Belgium which provides support for a network of thousands of freelancers throughout Europe. The beginnings of a viable, self-supporting and sustainable economy are stating to emerge and OPEN 2018, along with similar events in the US and across Europe, is bringing together the people with the ideas, the tech developers and the legal experts to help catalyse the transition.

Shared values and the network effect

There are so many similarities between permaculture’s philosophy and principles and the works of other progressive groups that hope to encourage a more sustainable, more resilient and equitable future. From Occupy to Open source, Permaculture to Peer to Peer and Collaborative Technology to the Commons Transition groups there are clearly overlapping values.

David Bollier, writing on the Peer to Peer Foundation blog has suggested that “…permaculturists and commoners need to connect more and learn from each other…” and the idea that these communities are ultimately working towards the same objective seems especially important to recognise if we are to accelerate the development of a more sustainable world.

There is already an evolving “shared narrative” between these various, disparate initiatives, but it is often sidelined by our self-selecting filters which lead us back into the communities we know and trust. Collaboration and cooperation can be hard work and as groups get bigger they can become harder still but that’s no reason not to try. The fact that Wikipedia provides a better encyclopaedia for free in more languages than Britannica ever managed proves that online, open source collaboration can deliver greater value than proprietary, closed source systems.

The true value of a collaborative, open networks only really manifests when its members communicate, and work together, through connected systems. Sharing ideas, discussing problems and addressing challenges in larger networks creates positive feedback loops via the network effect – a term which describes how the value of something increases in proportion to the number of people using it (like a phone, or social media network) – something all the various ethical and progressive networks could benefit from enormously.

Parallels between collaborative, open source software development and permaculture principles:

1. Observe and interact

Progressive software projects often utilise ‘user focused’ design strategies to ensure they meet people’s needs. Taking time to understand how users interact with software systems via user experience testing groups and an ongoing, iterative design processes are recognised to deliver higher quality solutions which suit specific user needs.

2. Catch and store energy

Peer to peer networks don’t rely on centralised servers but instead make use of the latent capacity of other user’s machines. Imagine how much more efficient it would be than deploying huge server farms if our computers were not shut off at night, or left idle, when they could be providing valuable processing power for others. The Holochain project aims to make it simple and secure for anyone to join a truly peer to peer network and to share files and processing power in this way – and to even earn credits for hosting other people’s files and applications.

3. Obtain a yield

The Peer Production License provides a means by which open source developers can make the code they develop available for free and still benefit from it’s use. Sites like the Internet of Ownership, which contains a directory of cooperative platforms use the PPL to “permit reuse exclusively for non-commercial and worker-owned enterprises” thereby helping to grow the commons. The ultimate goal of the PPL is to enable mechanisms so commoners can support themselves and ensure their own social reproduction without resorting to capitalism.

4. Apply self-regulation and accept feedback

This principle is particularly integral to open source development since the concepts of ‘user focussed’ and ‘agile development’, ‘branching’ and ‘forking’ are all designed to ensure that software projects are self-regulating by listening to the users needs, driven by user feedback and that they are able to be adapted to changing needs.

5. Use and value renewable resources and services

Open source technology is inherently more renewable in the way it enables the reuse and repackaging of code for new purposes. Ethically minded hosts and developers such as Green Net power their servers with renewable energy.

6. Produce no waste

As above, open source code is often re-used and repurposed but progressive developers still have a lot to gain from better collaboration. There are often multiple teams working on identical problems and ideas and whilst this has benefits in terms of developing strength and resilience through diversity it also leads to waste, mainly in terms of time. At least the waste ‘product’ of web development is only digital and so old technology and code doesn’t littler the streets or pollute the environment as much as physical products can, especially if archives are stored on renewably powered servers.

7. Design from patterns to details

Genuine online collaboration has been slow to evolve, with the best examples being Linux (the open source operating system), Firefox, the open source web browser and Wikipedia, the open source encyclopaedia. It is only recently, with the rise of monolithic capitalist gardens such as Google and Facebook and Amazon that the hive mind of the internet is recognising the need to step back and redesign its systems according to new patterns. The push for “Net neutrality” and Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project are examples of this in action as is the Holo project, a very exciting and truly peer to peer “community of passionate humans building a distributed cloud, owned and run by users like you and me.”

8. Integrate rather than segregate

The move from centralised to decentralised, to distributed and federated technology is a a key element of open source and collaborative technology design. The entire Peer to Peer philosophy is based on the recognition that the connections and relationships between nodes (people or computers) in a network is what gives it strength and value. Collaborative technologists still have a lot to gain from developing deeper and wider integrations, like we see in nature, and which permaculturists know so well.

9. Use small and slow solutions

Designing a computer system to be slow is not something you will normally (ever?) hear a programmer talk about but they often talk about small, in many guises. Small packages (of code), small apps, “minified” (meaning compressed) code and even small computers, like the Raspberry Pi are key features of collaborative technology which all aim for increased efficiency.

10. Use and value diversity

Diversity is intrinsic to open source and collaborative technology. The plurality and adaptability of open source solutions ensures a highly diverse ecosystem. Users are free to adapt open source code to their needs and the open nature of most open source projects values contributions from anyone, irrespective of race, gender, age or any other factor. It is true that the majority of contributors to open source projects are normally young, white and male but the reasons for that seem more to do with societal inequalities and stereotypes rather than any specific prejudices or practices.

11. Use edges and value the marginal

The explanation of this principle places most value on “the interface between things…” and this is a central component of web design. Web services have now realised the necessity of providing intuitive user interfaces, to allow users to navigate complex data and to investigate deeper informational relationships but, more interestingly the latest developments in linked open data enable users to interface with more specific, more granular and more timely data to provide increase value. The Internet Of Things will facilitate a massive increase in the number and type of products which can interact over the internet. Whilst it is not the norm, drawing diverse information from the edges and valuing the marginal is something the open internet can really facilitate.

12. Creatively use and response to change

Most open source, collaborative projects use some kind of agile development, which advocates adaptive planning, evolutionary development, early delivery, and continuous improvement, and encourages rapid and flexible response to change. Permaculture and open source see eye to eye on this principle which bodes very well for a growing, symbiotic relationship in our rapidly evolving world.

We Need a Social Economy, Not a Hyper-Financialized Plantation Economy

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By Charles Hugh Smith

Source: Of Two Minds

The key to broadly distributing capital and reversing inequality is to nurture the source of social capital: the community economy.

We all know what a hyper-financialized economy looks like–we live in one:central banks create credit/money out of thin air and distribute it to the already-wealthy, who use the nearly free money to buy back corporate shares, enriching themselves while creating zero jobs. Or they use the central-bank money to outbid mere savers to scoop up income-producing assets: farmland, rental properties, cartels, etc.

The only possible output of a hyper-financialized economy is rapidly increasing wealth and income inequality–precisely what we see now.

What we need is a social economy, an economy that recognizes purposes and values beyond maximizing private gains by any means necessary, which is the sole goal of hyper-financialized economies.

Given the dominance of profit-maximizing markets and the state, we naturally assume these are the economy. But there is a third sector, the community economy, which is comprised of everything that isn’t directly controlled by profit-maximizing companies or the state.

What differentiates the community economy from the profit-maximizing market and the state?

1. The community economy allows for priorities and goals other than maximizing profit. Making a profit is necessary to sustain the enterprise, but it is not the sole goal of the enterprise.

2. The community economy is not funded by the state.

3. The community economy is locally owned and operated; it is not controlled by distant corporate hierarchies. The money circulating in the community stays in the community.

4. The community economy is not dominated by moral hazard; the community must live with the consequences of the actions of its residents, organizations and enterprises.

The community economy includes small-scale enterprises, local farmer’s markets, community organizations, social enterprises and faith-based institutions. Its structure is decentralized and self-organizing; it is not a formal hierarchy, though leaders naturally emerge within civic and business groups.

Few Americans have worked on a plantation. I am likely one of the few who has lived and worked in a classic plantation town (Lanai City, circa 1970; I picked pineapples along with my high school classmates as a summer job).

In my analysis, the current financial system is akin to a Plantation Economy:highly centralized and hierarchical, devoted to maximizing profits for distant owners, a finance-fueled machine for extracting wealth from local economies.

I call this the Neocolonial-Financialization Model:

The E.U., Neofeudalism and the Neocolonial-Financialization Model (May 24, 2012)

Wal-Mart and the Plantation Economy (August 24, 2010)

Colonizing the Plantation of the Mind (August 25, 2010)

Greece and the Endgame of the Neocolonial Model of Exploitation (February 19, 2015)

We can differentiate the community economy by comparing it to a hyper-financialized Plantation Economy. In a Plantation Economy, a once-diverse landscape of decentralized, locally owned small enterprises is displaced by corporations that are dependent on the state for their profits via direct subsidies, tax breaks, or a cartel/monopoly enforced by the state. (Think Big Pharma, Big Defense, the Higher Education Cartel, etc.)

The corporate Plantation’s low wages leave many of its workers’ families dependent on state aid to survive, and so it prospers on the backs of taxpayers who subsidize its low wages and the externalization of costs.

The current system rewards those with access to cheap capital and the power of the state. The community economy has neither.

The Plantation Economy institutionalizes poverty, parasitic finance, externalized costs, moral hazard (since the corporate/state overseers do not live in the community being cannibalized) and centralized wealth and political power.These are the only possible outputs of the hyper-financialized Plantation Economy.

Once the Plantation Economy has displaced the community economy, opportunities for work and starting small enterprises shrivel, and residents become dependent on state social welfare for their survival. By eliminating the need to be a productive member of the community, the welfare state destroys positive social roles and the inter-connected layers of the community economy between the state and the individual.

When the individual receives social welfare from the state, that individual has no compelling need to contribute to the community or participate in any way other than as a consumer of corporate goods and services. State social welfare guts the community economy by removing financial incentives to participate or contribute.

Why is the community economy so important? The community economy is first and foremost the engine of social capital, which is the source of opportunity and widely distributed wealth.

Social capital is the sum of all the connections and relationships that enable productive collaboration, commerce, exchange and cooperation. (I cover all eight kinds of capital in my book.)

Corporations offer a limited version of social capital–for example, meeting a manager in another department at a company picnic–but most of this capital vanishes once an individual leaves the company (or is “right-sized” into unemployment). This social capital is only superficially embedded in a place and community, as corporations routinely move operations in pursuit of their core purpose: expanding profits.

Corporations cannot replace communities for the simple reason each organization has different purposes and goals. The sole purpose and goal of a corporation is to expand capital and profits, for if it fails to do so, it falters and expires.

The purpose of a community is to preserve and protect a specific locale by nurturing social solidarity: the sense of sharing a purpose with others, of belonging to a community that is capable of concerted, collective action on the behalf of its members and its locale.

Political scientist Robert Putnam has described this structure as a web of horizontal social networks. Unlike corporations and the state, community economies are horizontal networks, i.e. networks of peers connected by overlapping memberships and interests.

It is not accidental that the current system of hierarchical corporations, banks and the state increases inequality and erodes the community economy: the only possible output of low social capital is rising inequality.

Putnam identified a correlation between the inequalities enforced by oppressive elites (slavery being the most extreme example) fearful of the potential of egalitarian (horizontal) networks to organize resistance to their exploitation.

Areas with low social capital are characterized by limited social mobility and rising economic inequality. In other words, the only way to lessen economic inequality is to nurture the horizontal peer-to-peer community economy that creates social capital.

This makes sense, as communities stripped of social capital offer limited access to the other forms of capital needed to launch local enterprises and construct ladders of social mobility.

A vibrant community economy provides members with an infrastructure of opportunity, i.e. multiple pathways to building capital, gaining knowledge and connecting with others.

The key to broadly distributing capital and reversing inequality is to nurture the source of social capital: the community economy.