[P2P-F] HOW DO WE ACHIEVE COMMONS-ORIENTED PHASE TRANSITION ?

Sat Feb 1 21:53:24 CET 2014

(Given the recent attacks on Michel's communications, I have a hard
time believing that Michele wrote this, but will proceed anyway)

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 7:53 AM, Michel Bauwens <michel at p2pfoundation.net> wrote:
> HOW DO WE ACHIEVE COMMONS-ORIENTED PHASE TRANSITION ?
>[...]
> today we have a paradox, the more communistic the sharing license we use,
> the more capitalistic the practice, with the Linux commons becoming a
> corporate commons enriching IBM and the like ...

I don't think the Linux commons should be compared at all to "becoming
a corporate commons" -- like democracy, f/oss is only a facilitator.
It's up to the people to derive the value from it or ignore that
value.  The problem that you're noticing really is that people are
just to spoiled with the comforts of capitalism, so they don't rise up
and create the alternatives or look for the people who already have
them.

You and much of the p2p crowd are way ahead of the curve, which
suffered an enormous blow with the defeat of Napster.  There seems to
be only a few of us "diehards" who know that the Internet is the last
hope for humanity to create a balanced governmental model for the
globe and an alternative to industrialism for the Creative Classes.

But that is just half of the problem (people understanding that the
internet offers hope for better world).  The other half (like alluded
to in the first paragraph) is that people are really trained to be
dumb.  They simply don't know that they don't have to work at all.
This is where Charles Eisenstein and such have been speaking well
upon.  The Earth grows food for free.  Yet people throw away this
enormous gift of independence and freedom for materialism.  I guess
the Earth doesn't have billion-dollar marketing departments, and the
current chrematistical system is all too quick to distract them to the
next fad -- keeping the cycle of dependence and self-destruction
active.

The GPL remains one of the most high-minded contracts in existence and
you should really study the philosophy behind it (Steven Levy's
"Hackers" is a good start).  Other than that, the problem is not
finding the right technique or protocol -- it is either waking the
people up with revolution or creating our little enclave of "new
world" alternatives to demonstrate the proof-of-concept and wait for
people to come to us.

I've tried both, but my attempt to create a revolution failed, so
hackerlabs/makerspaces represents the best way forward to me.  I've
re-written the front page of the pangaia project as my consciousness
has recovered from the failure trying to create the "revolution"
(brought about because both of a misunderstanding of how many people
understood the power of the U.S. Constitution to act on their behalf
and an overestimation of just how many people within the system were
with me for the Internet revolution.  (Where's John P. Barlow who
penned the Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, for example
-- did he sell out?))

Anyway, this message is getting too long.

MarkJ