Dear Roberto, You are probably aware of that report that showed that not a single industry would be profitable if they had to pay for their destructive externalities .. This in echo of your strategy, which I think is very complementary to our transvestment proposals, as we grow our power to impeach their destructive behaviours, and as they are increasinly unable to outlets for their investments .. funneling their surpluses into the commons networks will be seen as reasonable I have just become an advisor of an investment fund that will do just that, only invest in purpose driven companies in which investment shares give no voting shares, and the voting shares are in the hands of the purpose-driven creators, with capped returns and all the techniques to subsume formerly extractive capital have you worked out somewhere, this strategy of yours, i..e. how do we make 'extraction' so difficult, that 'generation' becomes a rational option ? Michel <<Message: 2 Date: Sun, 19 Jun 2016 10:41:44 +0800 From: Roberto Verzola <[email protected]> Subject: Re: [P2P-F] [NetworkedLabour] A note on the post-capitalist strategy of the P2P Foundation To: [email protected] Message-ID: <20160619104144.1c102a30@hotline> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8 I agree with Kevin that at the hardware-software level much can be done locally, given the technologies that he cites. My own worry is more about the increasingly vast info-gathering powers (the technologies also improving rapidly) that centralized institutions--govt and private--are acquiring: the NSA-Microsoft-Google-Facebook complex. Just to give one example: the increasing numbers of CCTV cameras deployed in public places. In some areas, even small businesses are now required (using crime and terrorism as excuse) to install them. Almost every computer/smartphone now comes with a camera. And microphone too. Sooner or later, if it has not happened already, these can be remotely activated for surveillance. Plus all the info we willingly give in every online transaction, in exchange for convenience. In short, we can choose to go small-scale/local/p2p/foss/organic/ renewable/bike transpo PGP Duckduckgo Bitcoin etc but how many are willing to put up with the inconveniences (the central institutions will make sure of that) that go with them? How many on this list, for instance? It is dilemma of The Matrix. The mere use of technologies themselves, as E.F.Schumacher observed a long time ago, shapes minds and changes mindsets. Eric's earlier post about adaptive reuse describes a decaying civilization that has lost a lot of its powers. Unfortunately at the level I'm describing (control of information, behavior and mind), their powers are increasing day by day. I am reminded of a debate here (on media) between mining companies and the local farmers who opposed them. The mining rep accused the anti-mining leader of hypocrisy because he used the metal products of mining like laptops and cellphones. The leader replied, "Ok, we can stop using your products if you also stop using ours. Let's see who gives in first!" Very powerful riposte, but are we willing to exercise that option? (I try, one reason why my posts are very occasional, only when I think what I'll say is important enough.) All this implied suggestion about violence (behind the word "expropriation") recalls to me the old Marx Lenin Mao etc approach though cast in contemporary terms. Be careful what you ask for... Had they won the Cold War, can you imagine where we'd be today? (I can already hear in my head a friend's reply, "Probably like China!" Or like North Korea?, who knows...). The law of unintended consequences can play cruel historical jokes sometimes. I've tried that route too by the way. Today, in case anybody is interested, my personal "ideology" if you can call it that, is the prayer "Give me the courage to change the things I can, the serenity to accept the things I can't, and the wisdom to know the difference." I couple this apparently less "revolutionary" approach with the insights from the sciences of complexity, which have seeming equivalents in quantum physics although I don't know if they are real or imagined. These insights say even ordinary termites, working only locally and aware only of what their immediate neighbors are doing, can build architectural/ecological wonders, which somehow emerge out of local interactions without need for a grand design (or a grand designer for that matter). But then again, termites are the products of millions of years of evolution and God knows how many failures, before the species that survive today got it right. We don't have that luxury. We will probably need to act with more intentionality and mindfulness than termites do. As you can see, although I am somewhat confident in my own ideas, I'm not so sure about them that I'd be willing to ask people to "expropriate" others for these ideas. Also those others will probably "expropriate" back and we end up with the law of unintended consequences again. I do have an idea how to deal with corporations, which I try every so often. It is not expropriation. It is more about asking everyone (you have to do it yourself of course) to take all kinds of steps, big and small, legal or otherwise, to whittle down their profits, until existing is not profitable anymore. For Monsanto, for instance, mandatory labelling of GMOs will probably do it. Even at the 5% content level (big debate I know), they cannot be profitable with only 5% of the market, and as a contaminant at that. Edward Abbey's Monkey Wrench Gang described other ways, probably applicable to mining companies. Just keep whittling down their profits. We can be very creative here, more than termites. Deny them markets. Raise their costs. etc. I call this approach "working with the nature of corporations." Like termites bringing down an unwelcome house. Greetings to all, Roberto Verzola-- Check out the Commons Transition Plan here at: http://commonstransition.org P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net <http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens #82 on the (En)Rich list: http://enrichlist.org/the-complete-list/