 So it's just an enormous pleasure to be able to introduce Michel Balans to speak here at the Berkman Luncheon Series. We first met, we now realize, about 10 years ago in Budapest at a reactivism conference bringing all sorts of people trying to think about the way in which the world is changing. Michel is probably the single most active, broad thinker about questions of peer production, commons, how they can fundamentally reshape economy. He is the founder and director of the P2P Foundation that just got an award from ours, Electronica, for online communities. He is now spending the semester at the Haven Center at Wisconsin, which those of you who don't know is one of the major homes for utopian thinking, real utopian thinking, to take Eric Olin Wright's framing of how life can be genuinely different in a way that is both radical and real. He also practices what he speaks in the sense that he really has created an intellectual existence, an activist existence around the world, not based in traditional organizations like the traditional academia, not based in traditional nonprofits, but really in some sense existing in a global network of people who care and think about the commons and care and think about cooperation. Is here today to talk about how we think about what we're seeing in practice, in reality, on the ground as a fundamental potential alternative to capitalism as we've known it in the late 20th, early 21st century. It's a real pleasure to have you here, Michel. I'm thrilled you're here. Of course, I don't say that to be good standing with you, but of course, Yochai was the first one to talk about peer production to my knowledge, so I owe you a great debt for the wealth of networks and those types of things. So I feel in a way I've been continuing your work in a certain direction. I will start with a kind of broad framing. When I started my work, which is more or less 2004, so I used to be a business person. I did a great many sins in my life. I was working for British Petroleum, buying up solar companies and closing companies and stuff like that. I also had a job as a Siberian, closing down libraries and replacing them with electronic systems. So I have a lot to atone for, exactly. And so I had a kind of a moral crisis at the end of the 90s. I was thinking am I on the side of the people who solved the issue or on the side of the people who make it worse? And I was clearly making it worse rather than making it better. So I took a two-year sabbatical to find out what I could do today to change society. And I decided to spend two years more or less reading about phase transitions. So I planned to do the Yenon Roman Empire, the emerging of capitalism. To be honest, I got stuck at the Yenon Roman Empire because there's so much stuff about it that that was basically what I had time for. But I did have from that a kind of idea of what I wanted to do. And one system that I used at the very beginning was an anthropologist called Alan Page Fisk. If you ever heard of him, it's a very boring book, 1,000 pages or maybe 800. It's called Structures of Social Life. And he says basically at all times and in all regions of the world, there have been four main ways to allocate resources. In other words, it's a relational grammar. So I'll briefly tell you what they are. So because this is important for my work. So the first one he calls equality matching. Equality matching is the gift economy, right? Mostly used in tribal societies, clan-based societies through mutual obligation. You give something, it creates a debt on the other side and then they want to give back more in order to restore the equality. So it's a kind of strange way to name it. But that's I think really what it's about. So equality matching. He also talks about authority ranking. So when you have class society, imperial systems, etc., it's basically plunder and then redistribute but according to a hierarchical ranking of society. Depending on your place in that society, whether you're a lord or a serve or a craftsman in the city, you should get a certain amount of access to goods that correlate to your power and status in that society. Market pricing, I don't need to explain that because that's where we live in today. But there's also another one he calls communal shareholding. Now communal shareholding is basically what we do in the family unless you have a neoliberal couple where you really do all your accounting separately, which happens. But in a lot of families, you practice communal shareholding, right? So it's sort of family. You're not charging, hopefully, I think, your kids for what you do for them, right? You don't price or you don't expect anything directly in return. The way it works is it's a whole. It's a family is seen as a totality and we all do the best to make the family work. Which is basically the way it worked in the first 100,000 years of human history when small nomadic bands were the norm, where you can't accumulate property because you're moving around so you go on a hunt, you're not going to sell your deer to your family. It's just distributed. So probably also here from what I'm seeing that there's kind of a, I wouldn't call it the historical progression because that's taboo now to use that. But you can see there is, in history, relative changes in the dominance of one modality over another, right? So from the communal shareholding as the norm, that doesn't mean the other didn't exist. That's a very important point. But communal shareholding is the norm in nomadic societies to the gift economy as the norm in clan and tribal societies to authority ranking in class pre-capitalist societies, class society and market pricing in a capitalist society. Now some time ago I found a book which really reinforces this frame. It gave me multiple brain gasms. It's called the evolution, it's called the structure of world history by coaching Karatani. It was published in 2014. So he calls it a bit different. I don't know if you can see it because it's a really small print. What he does is he kind of re-reads major anthropological authors like Pierre Clastre, Marshall Salins, all these people. He re-reads the big historians. And he comes with a very similar scheme, just very briefly, mode A, reciprocity of the gift, mode B, ruling and protection, mode C, commodity exchange and mode D. So here is an interesting thing. He calls it a mode which transcends the other three, which integrates the other three. He makes a very important point about capitalism. He says the reason it's so strong is because it's not one mode of production, it's three in one. So it's capital, state and nation. So capital is the forces of the commodity exchange and commodity production. The nation is the seed of reciprocity. In other words, the survival of the tribal mechanisms is in the nation. People have a sense of what is fear in a nation. And whenever capital becomes too strong and disturbs the balance in society, you have what Calpolania calls a double movement. So you have a reaction from the nation which forces the state to make rebalancing efforts. In the same way, and this is what I will talk about mode D, we will see that mode D as it emerges is also an integrative mode. So I'll try to explain what I mean with that. But I think one important thing you have to remember until now is we're talking about a multimodal world, right? We're talking about a world in which all these things exist at the same time represented by different forces, different institutions, but they exist under a kind of attractor system, like a dominant mode. For example, today, well, if you were a Catholic before the Reformation, you know, there was a feudal kind of model, right? The religion was molded by feudalism. If you were a reformed Christian, it had a lot of different already kind of pre-capitalist democratic aspects to it, right, in a way it was run and seen. Nowadays, maybe nowadays, not anymore, but maybe when I was young, you know, it was New Age, so you pay for it, right? You want an enlightenment, you take an instant alignment course, and it was commodified, right? You pay for workshops, right? So you can see how something that exists through history changes its form because it's kind of dominated by this one attractor which changes over time. And now if you do online dating, it's like work, there's an article, I haven't read it yet, but it looks at dating as work. You know, you have to pay for dating site and all that stuff, right? So I hope you know what I'm trying to say here. But it's also very important in terms of when we think in terms of social change, think about Marxism as kind of a paradigmatic way of thinking about change in the industrial society was very much a sense of, okay, capitalism creates this counter force, the workers, which will take power and then will change it, right? So the idea, whether you were reformist or revolutionary, was always, we will change the system and then the other system will be installed. But if you look at transitions and we have a transition from mode A1, communal shareholding, nomadic tribes to clan-based society, that's the first transition. We have a transition from clan-based tribal society to class-based societies. We have a transition from class-based pre-capitalist society to capitalist society. So it's not like there hasn't been a transition before. We can look at transitions, right? And to be honest, it kind of never, ever confirmed to the Marxist vision. It's just not the way it happened. The reason capitalist is one was because they are capitalists. Capitalists existed within the feudal society and strengthened themselves and eventually became the dominant force. So here, so what am I trying to do? What is the P2P foundation? What is P2P theory? What is this all about? Well, it's following Jochai Benkler's ideas about peer production, is we are in a period of history where we see a new modality which was marginal moving to the center of value creation. In other words, and through that mechanism, we now have commoners. Commoners exist. They're not people who have to take power and then change everything. They're people who today exist, try to reinforce themselves, try to do things to exist better and expand. So what we do in the P2P foundation is focus on this particular transition from a system that is dominated by market forms, in a particular way of market forms, capitalism, to a new complex society where the attractor becomes the commons rather than the market. In other words, that new system that is emerging is starting to develop mechanisms to subsume the market and the state to its own interests and to its own values. Now, it's emergent, yes, but it's also exponential. And maybe you think I'm dreaming. Just one study is studied by Tina DeMore. She's a Belgian commons historian. She produced some fascinating books. I'm not sure they're translated, but for example, I always assumed that the commons were always there. No, they emerged in the 12th century in 70 years' time. The crafts, the guilds, were they always there? No. They emerged in a very small period in about 70 years' time. You go from a situation where there's almost none to a situation where they become the dominant form. This was like the 11th, 12th century. There's a fantastic book about it, The First European Revolution, by Richard Moore. I don't know if you've read it. It's really interesting because it goes into detail into one of those transitions from a plunder economy that existed after the fall of the Roman Empire to a feudal economy based on land, where the value comes from, the land and the service. So I lost my thread. Let me go back to, yes, okay. So if you wanted to know in the 10th century or in the 15th century another transition time, how society would look like after a certain time of this thing going on? Well, what you could do, and this is what we're doing at the P2P Foundation, is to systematically look at the seed forms. Okay, now remember what I wanted to say. Tina DeMor has done a calculation of state, corporate and civic initiatives. From 1980 to 2005, it's linear growth. From 2005, it's exponential. So the amount of people today doing things in a different way, trying to feed themselves differently, trying to do energy provision differently, trying to do housing differently. If you start mapping it, and I've seen maps in Amsterdam, I've seen maps in Berlin, I've seen maps in Paris, you do not see the map. There's so many people involved in change today that you do not see the map. You see only the red arrows of Google. It's there, okay. So what do you do if you're interested in change? Well, you look at those seed forms. What are these people doing? Right, for example, in the 15th century, why is purgatory suddenly so popular, right? Because you couldn't lend money as a Christian, you went straight to hell before, then suddenly you can go to purgatory and buy an indulgence and the church can build its cathedrals, right? So it's an ideological change. Then the Franciscans and the Templars invite double entry book accounting, or maybe reinvent it, I'm not sure, but anyway. So you have all these changes that are patterns that are emerging at that time, which probably people at the time think, oh my God, everything is changing, but not knowing exactly in what direction. But two, three centuries later you would say, I think with justification that these were the seed forms that would come together as capitalism. So this is a bit what I'm trying to do, right? So if you look at the seed forms, like what you see today is a fall. We have a mode of value creation which is based on contributions, not on labor and capital. So the old system, which you're all familiar with, right? Entrepreneurs and capitalists fund projects, hire labor, accumulate capital, make profits, et cetera, et cetera, right? Because in the market transaction, we only look at our mutual benefits. We have an external body, the state, which tries to regulate the negative externalities that we produce through market exchange. It's not working as well as it used to, but that was the idea. And then civil society, when we talk about it, we talk about non-profits and non-governmental, meaning it's derivative. There's no value being created in civil society. It's what people do with the surplus they get from the market. The money has to come from the market, and then we can do maybe a few other things. So this is the way we see value creation under capitalism. If you look at value creation in peer production, it's contributors contributing to a commons. It's software developers contributing to Linux. It's open designers contributing to Arduino. It's people producing to tens of thousands of commons that today exist based on contributions. And also interesting, if you look at how that happens, it is not the allocation of resources and that you explained in the first half of your book, if I remember correctly, doesn't happen neither with market pricing nor through hierarchical decision making. It happens to massive mutual coordination. I don't know if you use a language. We use a language of Stig Mergy, the language of the ants, the social insects, where you know what to do because you receive signals from your peers, go left, go right, go straight. So we have built these massive open contributory systems which allow for contributory based value creation. If you have a system that is based on contributions, so there is no labor dependency for huge amount of people within these circuits. You have to change where you organize labor because if I can tell you what to do, you have to find other ways. So we are inventing all kinds of participatory processes in order to manage these production processes. Finally, the third aspect is we are creating commons, right? So these contributions do not create commodities, they create shared resources that everybody can use. This is, for me, very interesting, right? In the heart of the commodity exchange system, we are creating a cybernetic communal share holding-based system that is at the core of value creation. The argument that I'm making is that this is so productive, hyperproductive, compared to pure commodity exchange, that we see a massive transfer of capital towards these new modalities, right? This is what I call netarchical capitalism. And this is, and I know people on the left generally don't agree with me, what I say, this is very necessary. It's a transvestment of value from one mode of production to another. The question, though, is the following. Is capital subsuming these new modalities? Now, of course, the answer is yes, absolutely. They're doing it. They are subsuming the commons and peer production to capital accumulation. But just as interesting as the other question is, how can it happen in another way, right? How can we have transvestment? How can we subsume capital to the needs of peer production communities? Now, this brings me to the second institution that is growing. So the first one is called productive communities that consist of contributions and contributors, commoners, peer producers. The second aspect is that people who are in this sphere, and I can assure you they are more happy than people who are not on that sphere, right? So I think the studies show, if I'm correct, that in an average corporation, one of the five people would continue to do what they do without being paid. Maybe that's optimistic, right? But if you look at Wikipedia, with all its words and all, I do a lot of Wikipedia critique in my free time, but 100% or maybe 90%, a few people are probably paid by PR companies and intelligence agencies and stuff. But 99% of the people who are in the Wikipedia are there because they want to be there, right? So this is something you can look at if you have time. It's a Japanese thing called Ikigai. This is like where you want to be in your life, right? In the middle of all of that, your passion, your mission, your vocation, your profession, right? When you do peer production, you are there. Well, no, you're not there. You have passion. You may have skills. But how do you make money? How do you survive? How do you produce yourself in the sphere of peer production? And that is where, so here's the situation today, right? So collectively, it reproduces itself. Wikipedia, Linux, Arduino, Wikihouse, Wikispeed, they all exist. They continue to exist on a collective level. We know how to do this. There is self-production, self-reproduction of the commons. But to self-reproduce the commoners, we have an issue, right? So the issue is that today it's these netarchical, extractive, commodity exchange institutions that extract the value from our human cooperation. This is a big shift, right? Captain used to be enclosing the commons, destroying the commons. The Soviet system was even worse in doing that actually, even more destroying the commons. The new, and you pay labor, right? If you look today, Airbnb, Uber, they don't have labor, right? They don't pay people to build houses into hotels that they then rent to you. What they are doing is they are allowing us to do peer-to-peer commons, as the case of IBM with Linux, or peer-to-peer exchanges, as in the case of Uber and Airbnb, and they extract value from our production, right? This is already a recognition by the system that this is a real thing and they are extracting value from it. The problem, of course, is that they are not reinvesting in that human cooperation, right? And that gives you precarities. One thing we could call the value crisis, and to explain it in a short way. We are now in a system which has a capacity to exponentially increase our capacity to create used value directly, and to exchange it with our peers, share or exchange with our peers. Our capacity to monetize the human cooperation only increases linearly and is extracted by private monopolies who are not reinvesting in the self-reproduction of the system. And this gives us massive precarity. In that sense, unfortunately, peer production actually creates some kind of hyper neoliberalism. You don't even have to pay people anymore, right? But it doesn't have to be that way. So again, so what are people doing? Well, people are doing today is they're creating ethical economic entities that are generative vis-a-vis the commons. If you want to read a good book about this, it's Marjorie Kelly, the Emerging Ownership Revolution, where she describes many, many examples in the United States. Actually most of them are pre-digital, but it's still very interesting. That shows many examples of how you can do that. Creating generative, ethical, entrepreneurial coalitions around commons production. So what I like very much is called N-SPIRAL. It was born in Occupy, Wellington, in New Zealand about, oh, that's a pretty short time, 2011. And here's how it works, just to give you an idea how these people function. So at the core of N-SPIRAL, there are two commons, maybe more, but the two ones I know. One is called Lumio. Lumio is an open-source decision-making system for virtual communities, yeah? Co-budgeting is an open-source software for reinvesting the surplus from a network. So in Lumio, they make their decisions, and P2P Foundation, we use Lumio as well. So if you have a virtual organization with many people in different places of the world, because this is something I want to add, following Mode D as an integrative mode, Mode D is a reinvention at a high level of complexity of nomadic condition, right? You can contribute to whatever project you like or not, and you can retract your contribution. Well, no, I mean, what you've done is done, but you can stop contributing, right? So you have these people, for example, I live in Chiang Mai, Northern Thailand, and there's thousands of neo-nomadic developers living in Chiang Mai, 30 people from the Mozilla Foundation work and live in Chiang Mai, right? You have this whole circuit being developed now of young people, developers, designers that are just traveling around doing projects, they have effectively a neo-nomadic condition. And in that sense, this is a technology which enables a renomadization of our world. Second, I'm continuing on my integrative logic here. Second, the clam-based, tribal-based reciprocity equality matching. That's what I'm talking about. When I say generative, right? When I say a generative ethical-entrepreneurial coalition, so the 18 social business ventures that exist in the inspired coalition around Lumio and co-budgeting commons. This is about reciprocity. This is about how can I use the commons and build a livelihood around the commons without weakening and extracting value from the commons? Because we are all co-dependent from the commons, right? So even though these are market entities, they are actually market entities that subsume themselves to the value of reciprocity. Does that make sense, right? So it's like the idea of a moral economy in the Middle Ages, right? So this is a reintegration of mode A2, reciprocity, into a higher level mode D, mode of production. So how can you do this? Just a few examples. This is something that we have very hefty discussions with the free culture and free software movement. In the P2P Foundation, we support something called reciprocity-based licensing, okay? If you do software, it's no problem, right? You live in Italy, you stay until you're 42 with your parents, no problem. You can do software, right? But if you want to make stuff, if you want to move from Linux to Wikihouse or Wikispeed, make cars in the houses, you need to buy raw material, you need to rent space, you need to... So there's capital requirements and regeneration requirements which come into the game. Then it becomes problematic that big companies who do not contribute to your commons just take the common knowledge and build an economy around it and drive you out of business, right? This becomes problematic. A famous example, MakerBot 1 and MakerBot 2. MakerBot 1 was a commons. A whole community in the world had contributed to making a self-generating 3D printer. Then they got venture capital and of course the first thing the venture capital demands is enclose. So MakerBot 2 is no longer a commons, right? So what is the reciprocity-based license? It's very easy to explain. I'll use an example from the UK. It's called the Fair Shares Association. It's a new form of property which combines one-fourth founders, one-fourth funders, one-fourth workers and one-fourth users. So they have four types of shares. They're expanding this model in different companies in the solidarity economy. They have a double licensing scheme that says everybody can use our knowledge. So the sharing is not in danger. It's full share, fully open source. But if you want to make money with it, then you have to be a member of our association, reciprocity, and then you get the Creative Commons commercial license instead of the Creative Commons non-commercial license. This is what we mean. I hope you understand. So the idea is to reintroduce in the market the demand of reciprocity. And that's what we mean with an ethical market coalition. So if you want to study this, Enspiro, Las Indias, Sensorica, Ethos in the UK are amongst the larger of these. They're still very small. We talk about 200, 300 people, but these are models of this new regime. Now, third thing I didn't mention and I should absolutely mention is the idea of a four-benefit association that manages the infrastructure of cooperation. So it looks like an NGO, but it's not an NGO. It's legally it's an NGO, but they have a different way of thinking about stuff. So an NGO still thinks in terms of scarcity. We have a problem in the world, health care in war zones, so we'll collect fundraise and then we'll direct the resources to the war zones, you know, doctors without borders, right? As opposed to the Wikimedia Foundation, which says we want to create this universal resource, university available for everybody who seeks knowledge, the Wikimedia in all its languages, etc. We need money for the servers, so we're going to fundraise to create this infrastructure that allows people to continue to do what they want to do. So in a way, it's kind of it's an abundance way of thinking, right? It's a way of thinking that all these contributions are there potentially in the world. So let's make a system, a social signaling system that allows people to match their efforts and skills to that project. So in the Wikimedia, there's no business around it, but what I'm interested in is these models which actually do that, so the Inspires and Sorikas, etc. So reciprocity licensing is one example. I want to give you another one, which is just to show you that I'm not dreaming all these things up. Here is our section on accounting. Now, every value shift in history, whether it's the invention of the state in Mesopotamia, the temple irrigation systems, was based on accounting, right? The invention of accounting created the state, well, not really, but it's correlated, right? It's correlated. The invention of capitals is correlated with the invention of new forms of accounting in the 15th century that were used by merchants, etc. The peer production value shift is correlated to the invention of new forms of contributory accounting. So just to give you an idea, it's a Mac, so I don't find the scrolling thing. How do you go down, man? Are you here? Sorry, oh, there it is. It doesn't always show up. How many do I have? 419, right? 419 forms of accounting changes, but generally, the idea is open and contributory accounting, right? So here's the way we reason about this. The real class struggle is not fighting for a piece of the pie within the system that predetermines for you what value is, right? This system that tells you that polluting a bay is good for GDP, but volunteering to clean up the beaches is bad for GDP, right? So that's deciding what the value is, right? That's the real struggle, right? So this is what these communities are doing. Of course, they can change the whole system, but if you look at the contributory accounting system, which is the most advanced and the most complex, what they're really saying is, in our community, we will decide what is value, right? So contributory accounting allows people in that network to say, okay, I gave space, I gave a machine, I rented a machine, I worked 10 hours. So they decide collectively what value is, what a contribution is. They evaluate it, they have a karmic system. It pretty much works like in Buddhism. You sin and then you get merits and your credit card goes back in balance. So they use this karmic mechanism. And the social contract is if we make money. And of course, that doesn't depend on them. That is the interface with the existing dominant system. They can't change that. They're too small. What they say is that the dominant value stream, if they can access it, will be subsumed to the contributory accounting karma that they have decided, right? So this is transvestment. This is the idea of transvestment. Generating a stream of value from one system, the commodity-based system, mode C to mode D, right? It's five minutes. How can I, okay. So maybe I'll give you the secret plan. The secret plan, right? So this is how we strategize. So we call ourselves post-capitalist rather than anti-capitalist, right? And the reason we do this is that... So I see this like it in a divorce, right? So you have your wife and it doesn't work and you keep fighting and fighting and fighting and everybody's unhappy. And then there's a moment when you feel it's not worth it. And that's when the relationship is really dead, right? As long as you keep fighting, you're nourishing that relationship, however dysfunctional it is. Once you feel or decide that it's done, you move on. Does that make any sense? So that's the difference between being anti-capitalist and being post-capitalist. Like I'm not even interested anymore. I know it exists. I know it's evil. But I'm doing something else. I'm building the future. I'm constructing right now a life in which I feel happy with my peers because they have different logic of value. So that's the whole idea. So, you know, if you look at... Okay, I'll have to... If you look at transitions in the past, it's hard to say whether a transition happens and it's probably for both reasons, right? There's different schools of thought. It's because the old system is no longer working. That's one thesis. Or because the new system is so much better than it logically follows that people shift to the new. I'm not sure. But, you know, I would say it's creating more and more ecological havoc and more and more social inequality. It's not working. It has a number of systemic crises. People are responding in fragmented ways to these crises. So they're doing sustainability, you know, already 10 years ago. What was it? David Corden or Paul Hawken? Blessed Unrest? You know, already 2 million sustainability organizations. That was like 10, 15 years ago, right? Openness, free culture, open design, free software. All these movement wants to share knowledge, mutualized productive knowledge. And then we have all the people who are interested in fairness, the solidarity economy, the cooperative economy. All these three things are happening at the same time, but they are fragmented. This is a big issue. So I went to Italy, spoke to the community-supported agricultural movement there. Oh, okay, they have 12 different softwares for ordering food in just one country, right? No wonder that Uber and BMW win that kind of a game, because they only have one software to do it. So this is one thing. Within those big streams, people are still fragmented, but they're also fragmented in between. So open source circle economy is a set of strategies and proposals to converge the sustainability model and the open model. Open corporativism is a set of strategies and propositions to converge the solidarity models with the open models. Does that make sense? So in that way, these different patterns which exist but are not yet reinforcing each other, that's the idea, right? It's to reinforce that more de-modality. And as I said, it's integrative. Now, maybe I'll stop with that. It's integrative because it allows a revival of neonomatic conditions. Now, the reason that I survive, not always very well, outside of institutions, is because we have pooling mechanisms in nomadic society. And I profit from that. Whenever I'm really in a bad shape, I just tell people and I get fundraising. Not a lot, but 5,000, 6,000 euro. Okay, I'm good for another three months. Yeah, it's not always fun, but it works. And then of course we try to actually work on institutionalizing those mechanisms, right? So we are working on this. For example, in Inspiral, one of the things that move me most is that they mutualize their mortgages. So anytime somebody wants a mortgage, they all pitch in so that the person has 10% to go to the bank. Right? So it's based on these mutualizing resources. Okay, it's integrating reciprocity mechanism. I talked about it. It integrates the market. The ethical, entrepreneurial coalitions are market forms. They're not capitalist market forms. They're not extractive capital accumulation-based market forms. The state, the for-benefit association, is the state of peer production. It's a common good institution that looks at the whole, not just at individuals connecting to each other. And we project that, and that is my real end. We project that as a social model for the future. So we see a future system as a reconfiguration of the capital state nation, Terayaki, into another one. Where civil society becomes productive, because citizens are now engaged in contributing to creating shared resources, commons. We see an economy that's become ethical and moral because it has become generative towards nature and human communities. And we see a state who has become an enabler and a facilitator of social and personal autonomy. Just one example, the Bologna Regulation for the Care and Regeneration of the Urban Commons. It's a mouthful, I'm sorry. It basically allows neighborhood collectives to propose improvements to their neighborhood. There's an evaluation and negotiation with the city about how the city can help these collectives achieving those goals with money, infrastructures, etc. This is a reversal of the idea of a state which stands outside as a provider of public services that are passively consumed by citizens into a system that creates the conditions, the capacitation, because this is very important. Peer production does not solve the inequalities in the existing system. As you all know, free software is very male dominated. There's lots of reasons. One could be culture, but they are open systems. Another could be, well, in this society a lot of women are not studying technology and I don't know what the situation is, but I'm saying by itself they are not solving that issue. So this is called capacitation building, capacity building. So we need a partner state as an enabling mechanism to make sure that everybody can contribute in optimal ways to building shared resources in their society. As opposed, this is my real conclusion, to a model that is very common in England, the big society, participation society in the Netherlands which says basically, oh, guys, you can't do it all yourself. Let us save the banks and fund the military. But pensions, you don't really need them. What's called for young people who flee their homes and women's shelters, you don't need all that stuff. Because you can self-organize now. So this is a very dangerous kind of encapsulating of the same words and vocabulary, but within a very different political program which is kind of a right-wing communism. Okay, great, thank you. Let me ask a first question and then sort of start to take responses. There's a version of this that ducks conflict. This business of we can mostly accept and this really builds on the very, very last point you made. We're fed up with fighting. We'll build our own. Here, let me show you the hundreds of instances where people are building their own in many directions. But every one of the transitions you've described historically is accompanied by massive bloodshed and conflict. Even within capitalism, the transition of the second industrial divide and the rise of social democracy is fundamentally on the backs of people fighting and being killed and killing. Where are the battles? I can't imagine. I refuse to imagine that you have a deterministic story here that says if we just build it, they will come and all will be well. Don't worry, we'll just leave them behind. There are points of battle. There are points of control. There are places where battles need to be won. If you were to diagnose where they are in the next two, five, 20 years, where do you think of battles? Right. Well, first of all, I see three big dangers, things that I personally don't like. And these are kind of the absolutisms of these forms. So we have fascism and Sovietism, which were forms of totalizing the state form. We have neoliberalism and anarcho-capitalism, which are ways to totalize the commodity form. But I also critique communism, and the way I use it is for the people who are only the horizontal. And that would include also a lot of people who think exactly like that, which just do our stuff. And my view, of course, we take conflict very seriously in the P2P Foundation. The reason... But it's kind of... So if you take a traditional leftist approach, there is kind of a sense, meaning the radical left of, we need power first. It's all or nothing. So you're building organizations, but the organization itself do not prefigure the future you want. They're more like warriors organizations, in a way, right? As opposed to a vision where you build your strength first and then you engage in conflict, but you're careful about what conflicts you engage in because you want to win, right? Does that make any sense? And think about the early labor movement. I think that's how they did it. They had mutuals, they had social insurance, they had the unions, they had the labor party. Some things were interconnected to create like a contrary Germany, right? And somehow that got lost in kind of more anti... Very verbally aggressive strategies, but... Okay. So I think that's the different of... The emphasis is you emphasize the building of the alternative and defensive measures before engaging in battles that you can't win. Okay. Then, of course, you have to discuss what a battle is and can you win it or not. But I would look for a fusion, right? Because I think you have people who are activists who like to fight, who like conflict, who need to engage in conflict, who may not have alternatives, really. They're defensive. And then you have people who are building the alternatives and I think the idea is to find convergences between these movements. For example, in Occupy, I thought that was wonderful, the Vermont bio farmers, right? Fed the Occupy people in Zuccotti Park. That for me is a really interesting convergence. Now, these people in Vermont are, you know, are growing organic food, consumer-supported agriculture, but they were fully conscious that Occupy was an interesting, potentially interesting, you know, conflictual event. So, I'm optimistic, I tell you why, because, you know, the other side doesn't allow you to rest like that. The thing about file sharing, right? Severely repressed and it created the pirate parties. The pirate party is going to win the election in Iceland. It's going to be the main party. You know, there were no more apolitical people than file-sharing people. You know, they just want to listen to music, right? But out of that, Kaldran came the pirate parties. Another good example is in Komu, in Barcelona. So, you have 2011, 15M, they're entirely anti-political. They don't go on the square with any sign of, you know, belong to any organization. Then there is elections and they don't vote. And they have the most right-wing, vicious, anti-commons government in the history of Spain. Well, Franco not included. Post-Franco history of Spain, right? And the result is that these people then repoliticized and now they're in power. And Komu is in coalition, a pre-ended political coalition. And actually they have a person, I think it's Maia, who is actually in charge of developing these collaborative economies at the city level. So I think they go together and it's a question of finding convergences between various emancipatory movements. Yes, Oleg? Let's bring in... You put a lot of emphasis on the modes of production and... Actually modes of exchange. And modes of exchange. But capitalism is extremely good at organizing and its structures. So this, I think, this is where the gravitas is. And if you have a look at Airbnb winning with couchsurfing or Uber winning with right-sharing or even Wikipedia, you know, I'm an engaged Wikipedia and I'm all for Wikipedia, but over the last 10 years we've seen a lot of parasitic organizations around it including Yahoo. Google is having knowledge, what is it called, knowledge engine now that is actually feeding our content without even attribution. So my question is maybe, of course, it would be nice to say that we are having sort of like seeds of new modes, but maybe there was a war and we've lost. Yeah, it's a good point and nobody can deny that it's... that it's partially true. I just don't find it very interesting. You know, I rather think, okay, this is the case. You know, I also can give counter-exams, right? Like you look at cars and you see wiki speed and of course they're not building a lot of cars, but they're able to produce a new design of a car every week, right? So in terms of actually productivity and innovation, I think we are very good. In terms of permanent organization, I think capital still has a lot of headway and I blame horizontalism for it, right? So the blob, I call it the blob, right? So you shift from the hierarchical mode to the horizontal mode and then it's like permanent processing, talking, talking, everybody has to agree and nothing gets done. So I'm dreaming of a new mode that combines fully democratic participation but then actually responsible action. And so, yeah, I think when we get that right, then we can move in that direction. I think another thing, and I'm not sure it's realistic, but that's the thing I'm working on. We have co-ops. They represent 10, 15% of the economy. We have solidarity economy. They work. But then you look at Mondragon and they privatize their knowledge, right? So the idea of an open cooperative is an idea of convincing those forces that are now existing as a sub-form within capitalism to become hyper-productive through these open strategies, right? And they know how to organize already. So, yeah, it's... I don't know if you read the book, what's it called? From a Belgian guy, Friedrich Lalou, reinventing organizations, right? Capitalism right now is extremely communistic, right? I mean, the way they deal with labor, the self-management within a for-profit enterprise, it's amazing what they're able to do. And then you go to a leftist organization and it's like the army. So, yeah, we need to... There's all the things we need to change, but I just fundamentally, of course, this is not... This is just a joke and it's not meant for you, but here is... I like to say this. We have three ruling classes. Neoliberal businessmen, social democratic politicians and post-modern academics. And they're in charge of the immoralizingness. So, anyway. I have one, two. Any more? So, I guess at the end of your talk, you said peer production does not solve existing inequalities. And I was listening... On its own, right? On its own. Right, on its own. And I guess I wanted to ask if you could sort of go a little bit deeper on that. I was listening to your talk thinking about... I was recently spent a period of time in Cuba with a number of open-source developers there and got to know that community in a little bit. And it is a really interesting context for that kind of work because of the unique way that the state operates there. But what I was sort of not surprised to find but interested to think about was the fact that the open-source community there, like in so many other places, is extremely dominated by men. And like one of the biggest email lists there has 420 people on it and two of them are women. And it also is dominated by people who are in something like a middle class. So, young men who live with their families where women are doing most of the labor of maintaining a home. And in Cuba, that's a big chunk because you don't... There isn't actually... People aren't working in the same way that we do here. So, I guess I wanted you to just reflect a little bit on that and on... In the open-source context there, every woman that I talked to about it said, well, it's a club and it's incredibly much east of society. I was going into all these conversations and was in so many different contexts of technology or anything else in Latin America, you have to deal with the fact that everybody wants to take you out after, you know? And so, I'm just curious... I want to just sort of push and see... Are you worried about that or are you sort of accept this post-capitalist scenario also will be dominated by men and that's... Yeah. Well, I mean, it's a difficult issue and I don't have all the answers. Certainly in free software this is very, very much the case. I think as you move to design communities you'll see a lot more women. For example, you know, co-working, very much under the leadership of women, almost all the one I've been to where, you know, had female leadership. You know, lots of these... Even Fab Labs, you see a lot of women in Fab Labs. So it's, you know, it's not... I'm just saying it's not black and white, right? And yeah, I, you know, it's too... Unfortunately, I think it's the women who have to do that work, you know, and push for the change within those communities. And you see that within free software, right? You have these... And you may not like the names they choose for themselves, but, you know, they're net girls and net chicks and cyber girls with four R's and... So most of these communities have actually, because of that problem, you know, women are organizing themselves with reason, you know, to change that machistic culture. There is also the class issue, absolutely. You know, one of the things I liked was going to Oakland. I will actually have an... I actually wasn't in there, but I talked with people from the... What's it called? The Omni Commons, where, you know, by being more ambitious of size of these fabrication spaces, they can do more for inclusionary politics, as opposed to a small space that, you know, you have geeks and that's it. So, yeah, I don't have, you know, particularly answers to that. And I don't think pre-production as such is enough to make all these changes. It's going to be a conversion of struggles and constructions that, you know, is going to make a more full change. If I can just add to that before moving to your question. I was just at WeShare last week, and it's a completely... I know the picture you're talking about. Obviously, I come... I have a different place in it when I encounter it, but I know it's completely different. I don't know whether it were more women than men, but certainly you couldn't tell the difference. I mean, there are those own internal tensions between people who are completely within this framework and people who are not, but it seems more domain, in terms of practice domain, determined than peer determined, which is to say, because it starts out in a highly technologically mediated form on the background of technology being coded male in the 20th century society, I suspect you're looking at a generational and domain effect, and that once you move to other places, if you look at the National Domestic Workers Alliance iLAP and the effort to create a platform for domestic workers, you actually have obviously the opposite because of the background social structure of domestic work being coded as female. So my suspicion is that what you're seeing is periodically, you're looking at a social organizational phenomenon that is rooted in technological practice at the time that technological practice is coded male, being generalized into domains that may not be. That's at least the optimistic. So fan culture was another domain in which you had, in the free culture movement, parallelism that wasn't anywhere near as male dominated and actually had domains that were quite heavily female. So that's my guess in the quasi-optimistic version. Yeah, here's another optimistic thing. So we have this program to interview women leaders in the peer-to-peer sphere. If you have any suggestions, welcome. We have 3,400 now in the pipeline. We've done about 15 to 20 interviews already, so we do like one every month. It's a lot of work. But so we're trying to work on this, right? We're trying to show that there's this other side. And next year, our priorities do the global south so that we haven't started yet. So it's kind of like seeing what are the imbalances within the movement and what can we do as an intervention to at least do something. There also, yeah. So a few months ago, my friend Darius here told us Wikipedia was struggling with a declining rate of editors, mostly because new people who came into the platform didn't feel welcome because the modes of moderation of the platform were so deeply entrenched and not communicated well to the new arrivers. So my question to you is more general. What's the sustainability and resilience of a system that relies on multiple organisms that each one has its own definition of value? Well, I know this is controversial, but from Wikipedia you actually look at the statistics and it's very clear. The stagnation of contribution starts after the introduction of deletionism. It's at that point where the growth curve just stops and there's a Chinese researcher, he has all the stats showing it. So this is a critique of Wikipedia, right? So when they decided that instead of having an abundant encyclopedia to look at what is called notoriety or whatever the notion is that they use, right? Then you introduce a class of editors and the thing is that in free software the maintainers know more than the developers. But in Wikipedia the editors know less than the contributors. But they know the rules. And so as an inexperienced contributor to the Wikipedia within a day or two, and I've tried a few times, you have 15 codes lapped on your... And if you're not full-time willing to engage and have a support because you have vicious people in there that want to delete your page, you lose. And in that way I feel the open source ethos which is continuing to improve an article has been severely damaged in the way the Wikipedia works today. But I think it's so entrenched it's not going to change anymore and so Wikipedia will become probably more professionalized, start being people. I know this is not very popular view within the Wikipedia but it's mine. I support paid editing as long as it's open we know who's being paid. People at museums scanning stuff for us, that's great. But the deletion is just a short comment. I don't think it's a valid link. I think deletion has spread through many projects at different times and we see a decline across projects in pretty much the same time. The broader question maybe you have in the dress how do you ensure portability between the different systems that develop their own norms when it comes to value? How do you make a system that's sustainable? I'm not sure what you mean by sustainable. If I work on Wikipedia and I know all the rules of Wikipedia if I start with another system, if I don't like Wikipedia anymore then I start from scratch. How do you... That happens all the time in free software and that's one of the reasons I stress the economic structure because if you only rely on volunteering people volunteer three to five years and then they go on. So if you want a system to persist over time for me you have to create livelihoods. And once you're in a livelihood situation you have a very different logic. So I even notice it in my own organization. So the Wiki, 20,000 articles, 35 million viewers, it works. But as soon as I have a contract with somebody to produce a report or a synthesis it doesn't work because I need to be on time and people are not on time and so I actually have to reintroduce hierarchy in the production process when I'm with the market. Does that make any sense? So every modality is not going to work for every situation. It works good for constant iterative improvement but when you're interconnecting with a market organization and you have a contract it's not working because you have no guarantee that the thing will be done at those conditions within a time period that is the condition of you getting the income. Does that make any sense? We have a last question. There was one already for a long time there. Hi, so I wanted to ask you this is all based on a physical infrastructure enormous physical infrastructure satellites zooming overhead and it's almost like you're taking that for granted that all that's there and you're building on top of this. Is that a sort of accurate way of looking at what you're doing? Well, actually I'm even worse than you think. I think the only way to get to a sustainable society is through peer production. So I'll give you my argument. First of all, if you design for a market organization you always design for scarcity and planned obsolescence is not a bug, it's a feature. So everything we make today is made to fail, is made for waste, is made to forces to buy again but when you look at open source communities, WikiSpeed, WikiHouse WikiHouse makes houses that are carbon positive. So not only do they not produce carbon they actually take carbon out of the environment. Then the second thing is, so we have projects one is called the thermodynamic efficiencies of peer productions. We are actually calculating that if we take all and we need help for that. If you have research because it's a very complex thing. So if you mutualize your knowledge, you mutualize your infrastructure, you create a participatory ecosystem as a supply chain, right? Then everybody knows what everybody else is producing. Everybody knows the surplus of everybody else. I claim that we can have 2080. So what I mean is the following. If we move radically to this new system, we can have 80% less matter and energy to produce 80% of what we have now. So I'm even saying the opposite. So I'm saying not only we actually need this infrastructure, it's through the knowledge sharing that we actually can save our world from destruction. We need to share all innovations. We need open supply chains. We need open book accounting. And so it's like roads. If you want commerce, you need roads. If you have no roads, there's no commerce. So we have to make choices. And for me, this infrastructure is really vital for a shift towards sustainable society. It doesn't mean it has to be the same like it's today because there's a normal wastage. For example, when you have ISPs, right? As a commercial entity, they create scarcity in bandwidth. It's not objective. It's something that they need to sell your subscriptions. So they maintain these scarcities because of their business interests. You could have an internet that is like WifiNet in Catalonia, which has no ISPs, where actually everybody who adds a device on his house increases the bandwidth for everyone. We could continue this for much longer, and I would lean into WifiNet, for example, just as a first next step, but we've reached the end. Thank you very, very much.