[P2P-F] COOK Report : Understanding the Global Digital Economy ( 2013 )

[Dante-Gabryell Monson]

http://cookreport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=272:jan-feb-2013&catid=38:current-issues&Itemid=73
 ( Thanks Jeffrey, Eimhin, and offcourse Gordon )

COOK Report for January - February 2013



Next ><http://cookreport.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=271:nov-dec-2012&catid=38:current-issues&Itemid=73>Understanding
the Global Digital Economy

If you have not been led by the mainstream media into a false sense of
security, and if you give any time at all to thinking about whether any
politicians in the East or the West are expressing any positive leadership
on behalf of their citizens in charting a sustainable future  -- one that
does not involve a return to something bordering on medieval feudalism or a
right wing led, fascist-oriented corporate state dominated by its military
leaders; you probably are looking at the ideas and visions of a small
handful of Internet-based visionaries who are focusing on organizing
alternative societies.

In saying this we are speaking very broadly about a handful of thought
leaders who are making it their calling to scan the horizon and think
across the entire entire global range of technology: science,
communication, medicine, agriculture, and urban rural living patterns.
Readers will know many of these folk ranging from Doc Searls, Clay Shirky,
David Weinberger, JP Ramaswami, to George and Esther Dyson, to Vint Cerf
and the leaders at Google, and to Kevin Kelly and Chris Anderson of Wired.

But there are an even smaller handful of people who focus globally on
curating the leading thinkers in every discipline are with their curation
are describing positive potential outcomes from the best of these people's
work. Stewart Brand began the process decades ago with his Global Business
Network and Whole Earth Catalog.  Brand’s work nurtured Tim O'Reilly and
the rise of the O’Reilly publishing company and his own curatorship of
conferences that brought the leading visionaries in new technologies and
new disciplines together to explore whether a common vision of an
achievable future could be articulated.

Six or seven years ago Michel Bauwens began the Peer-to-Peer Foundation
which is a coordinated group of people from several dozen of countries
around the globe that has created and is sustaining an encyclopedic wiki of
peer-to-peer technologies -- technologies on which, according to John Robb,
resilient communities can be based.  Two years ago I reported across two
different issues on what Michel Bauwens and his Peer-to-Peer Foundation
allies were doing and how their wiki was built and structured.

Six years ago I took my first look at Jerry Michalski who worked for Esther
Dyson in the late 80s and early 90s writing and editing Release 1.0.  For
this issue I have returned to Jerry to dive into a much deeper discussion
of how his view of the world has changed since 2006 when we first talked in
some depth.  His thinking turns out to be very close to my own and that of
Michel Bauwens.  His approach is to found and develop a group of leaders in
their respective fields that can range from government organizations, to
corporations, to financial organizations and foundations and so on to
spread the ideas that are necessary to overturn the 20th century way of
thinking that had led to financialization of the global economy and to a
race to the bottom with globalization and unlimited deregulated speculation
and corporate control of nationstate systems that that, in the nearly 20
years since the fall of the Soviet bloc, has been making the world a more
dangerous and less sustainable place.

Having examined the way that Michel Bauwens puts the peer-to-peer wiki to
work and keeps  it functioning as the platform for his people, in this
issue I have asked Jerry to detail the workings of his “Brain” which is a
very different kind of software from the wiki but has been used by Jerry
for similar purposes to organize his own thoughts over the past 15 years. I
then go on to 3 detailed interviews with Jerry that lasted a total of
nearly 6 hours. During these discussions he shared with me how his thinking
evolved into a much more interesting and sophisticated version of what some
years earlier in the aftermath of the ClueTrain Manifesto he had referred
to as the Relationship Economy.

Jerry has seriously expanded his definition of what the convergence of
Internet technologies and globalism means to sustainable democratic
societies and he has developed a series of ideas based on what he calls
“contrarian thinkers” who became revolutionaries in their perspectives
fields of endeavor by effectively saying that everyone in that field must
be trusted and that their field must not build command-and-control
hierarchies over the people that  they sought to lead and that the Yang of
scientific hierarchical top-down we know what's best for the masses kind of
leadership needed to be balanced with the much more soft, feminine, open
and trusting Yin in the way that people dealt with each other

Jerry describes how he takes the visions of many of his contrarians and
puts them in front of leaders from both corporate and government; nonprofit
and research oriented organizations who have joined him in paying a monthly
fee over a period of time that will presumably range across many years to
develop a unified version of social political and economic leadership that
will be better to ride and survive the waves of the tsunami of change that
Jerry and many of his other compatriots see coming upon us.

Talking about the evolution of his thinking during the most recent years,
Jerry will admit that he does not quite readily know how to solve the
problem that the impact of evermore rapid technology change is bringing to
the nation states involved in 21st-century global capitalism.  I think it's
fair to say that he does believe that currant and predominant Yang-based
more masculine hierarchical version of global capitalism needs to be
considerably tempered by a more feminine, more Yin based kind of outlook on
how one gets things done

Now Tim O'Reilly in September 2012 gave a very interesting talk on what he
calls the global brain and he explained his philosophical cosmological
approach to understanding the evolution that the Internet has brought upon
the minds of people who use it to communicate and build parts of what can
be seen to become a net of global consciousness. I have made my own
transcription of Tim's Long Now talk and will close this executive summary
with some similar highlights of the points of view of Jerry Michalski and
Tim O’Reilly. (The material that follows is taken from the interview with
Jerry and the transcript of Tim’s Long Now talk.)
Michalski and O’Reilly -- Technology Destroys Jobs


According to Jerry, one is consumer mass marketing and no-holds-barred
capitalism, fueled by outsourcing and global labor arbitrage.  These last
trends are simply drying up paying work everywhere.

Michalski: “That giant sucking sound of global labor arbitrage and
automation is taking the life out of work.  I don’t see a rise of new jobs
that pay enough to pay the mortgage and pay the orthodontists and put the
kids through school.  But historically it does seem that there is always a
new wave of jobs that comes up to save day.”

COOK Report: “But Jerry, this brings to mind what frustrates me so much.
It is that, given all the problems out there, there is so much that needs
to be done that, if we educate our kids halfway decently, there shouldn’t
be such unemployment.  Because by using the Internet and other
collaborative tools, we should be able to find so many things for our young
people to do.  Given the need and the size of the challenge, how does one
help push and shove our economy to be reoriented to enable employment of
our young people on public service tasks or on infrastructure tasks on
building up our country instead of tearing it down? How do we accomplish
these changes?  Can we give our current college graduates hope for their
future?  It is an untenable situation for them to come out of college with
a lot of debt and no work.”

Michalski:  “Yes. That is a huge huge problem. And my concern is that there
are not enough paying jobs that will give people enough income to cover
their mortgage or their rent and what they owe on their tuition.  We are
entering a time that is going to be very difficult for a lot of people.
I’m really interested in helping people build alternative methods of
getting enough of what they want, of having sufficiency maybe even outside
of the current monetary economy, with alternative currencies, with
reciprocity, with whatever else it might take.”
New Fabrics and Global Minds


“We must create basically a new fabric for what ever is the task at hand.
One for learning, one for inventing, one for problem solving and building.
I’m not talking Big Government.  It is not quite a safety net. That implies
too much passivity one the part of the recipient. But it is an opportunity
for a social model of collaboration in a Commons where people can and do
support each other very much along the ideas of what Michel Bauwens’
chronicles.  What we are saying is that we are busy weaving a whole new
fabric within which people can be vitally alive and in community and
governance with each other.  That is the situation in which we’re working
right now.  It is an awesome era.”

Tim O’Reilly says very similar things. He uses greek philosophical concepts
to describe how humans know their reality and then suggests that because
humans know their software  tools very well and like google have so
incredibly much data that they can put data and toolsets together in
entirely new way to solve unforeseen problems in near real time.

O’Reilly offers the following chain of reasoning in describing where
computer based technology has led its human users.  “We don’t have better
algorithms. We just have more data.”  “The global brain is us -- connected
and augmented.”   The secret of algorithmic data systems is to focus on
real time measurement of outcomes.  We are building techniques for
extracting collective intelligence from large amounts of the data exhaust
of humans.

Finally Tim concludes basically the same conclusion to which Jerry came -
saying that in their recent book the Race against the Machine, Erik
Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee make the case that many of the jobs that
have gone away are not coming back that we are in effect automating jobs
out of existence.   You just take the case of this Google autonomous
vehicle and look at its impact.  There go the jobs of taxi drivers and
their go truck drivers  and you just repeat that across the  economy.   He
asks what does the future economy look like as we take away more and more
of the menial jobs?

YouTube may be closer to having the real business model for the attention
economy than does Facebook or Twitter.   Like Jerry’ emphasis on sharing,
Tim mentions sharing in the context of using a website called the Mesh as
his example.

I suggest that we take open technology as an example. We can use it, mix it
and mash it up in new ways that will make business models that produce
trade offs in time or place or scale. Our choices are virtually unlimited.
The question is what scales. Education the way we do it at the college
level and up does not scale according to a recent piece by Clay Shirky, on
Massive Open Online Courses [MOOCs]. Flexibility is good, tightly coupling
probably not so good. Furthermore rewards don’t have to be all monetary.
The web offers us an infinite number of ways to mix how people can
communicate and do things in new and different ways -- time binding being
one such way.  What evolves will be determined as much by physical location
as by the location of thoughts and ideas.

Finally, Jerry and Ferdi Serim; and probably Tim; and definitely myself
share very similar ideas about how education SHOULD work. But how to
implement them is another question.  It seems as though it would be easier
in a rural location than urban one to change the necessary basic
educational processes.
Contents


Executive  Summary                                p.4

Michalski and O’Reilly -- Technology Destroys Jobs        p. 6
New Fabrics and Global Minds                            p. 6
Introduction Jerry Michalski                        p.8

A Global Mind?                                        p. 9
Prelude EXPLAINING JERRY’S  “BRAIN”        p. 12


Part 1 Why the World Needs RebalancingBetween Yin and Yang
            p. 18

George Fox 1624-1691                                p. 19
The Need to Rebalance                                p. 21
Agency                                                p. 24
Origins of the REXpedition                                p. 29
Interlude -- What if We Trusted You?Jerry’s TEDxCopenhagen talk
                    p.31


Part 2 How Does Society Acquire New Knowledge?

An Agenda for Change                                    p. 34
Christopher Alexander and Pattern Language                p. 34
Eleanor (Lin) Ostrom                                    p. 36
Joel Salatin                                            p. 39
Alice Miller and John Taylor Gatto                        p. 40
Jimmy Wales and Ward Cuningham                        p. 42
Hans Monderman                                        p. 44
Back to the Brain                                        p. 45
A Titanic Battle Between Two Possible Futures            p. 51
Experiencing New Ideas                                p. 55
Part 3 Strategies and Making the Rexpedition Operational

p.59
Workshops                                            p.62
Alternative Systems                                    p.64
New Fabrics and Global Minds                            p.66
Learning to Live in a World of Nuance                    p.67
Tim O'Reilly: Birth of the Global MindSeptember 5, 2012
                    p. 73


Editor’s Introduction                                    p.74
Korzybski and Simon - Language as a Conceptual Map        p.75
Classical History                                        p.78
Open Source Revolution and Internet Paradigm Shift        p.80
Web 2.0 and Collective Intelligence                        p.80
Feedback Loops                                        p.83
Data Science                                            p.85
Economy                                                p.88
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