Michel Bauwens - Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto

Peer to Peer:

The Commons Manifesto

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis

Critical, Digital and Social Media Studies

Series Editor: Christian Fuchs

The peer-reviewed book series edited by Christian Fuchs publishes books that critically study the role of the internet and digital and social media in society. Titles analyse how power structures, digital capitalism, ideology and social struggles shape and are shaped by digital and social media. They use and develop critical theory discussing the political relevance and implications of studied topics. The series is a theoretical forum for internet and social media research for books using methods and theories that challenge digital positivism; it also seeks to explore digital media ethics grounded in critical social theories and philosophy.

Editorial Board

Thomas Allmer, Mark Andrejevic, Miriyam Aouragh, Charles Brown, Eran Fisher, Peter Goodwin, Jonathan Hardy, Kylie Jarrett, Anastasia Kavada, Maria Michalis, Stefania Milan, Vincent Mosco, Jack Qiu, Jernej Amon Prodnik, Marisol Sandoval, Sebastian Sevignani, Pieter Verdegem

Published

Critical Theory of Communication: New Readings of Lukcs, Adorno, Marcuse, Honneth and Habermas in the Age of the Internet

Christian Fuchs

https://doi.org/10.16997/book1

Knowledge in the Age of Digital Capitalism: An Introduction to Cognitive Materialism

Mariano Zukerfeld

https://doi.org/10.16997/book3

Politicizing Digital Space: Theory, the Internet, and Renewing Democracy

Trevor Garrison Smith

https://doi.org/10.16997/book5

Capital, State, Empire: The New American Way of Digital Warfare

Scott Timcke

https://doi.org/10.16997/book6

The Spectacle 2.0: Reading Debord in the Context of Digital Capitalism

Edited by Marco Briziarelli and Emiliana Armano

https://doi.org/10.16997/book11

The Big Data Agenda: Data Ethics and Critical Data Studies

Annika Richterich

https://doi.org/10.16997/book14

Social Capital Online: Alienation and Accumulation

Kane X. Faucher

https://doi.org/10.16997/book16

The Propaganda Model Today: Filtering Perception and Awareness

Edited by Joan Pedro-Caraana, Daniel Broudy and Jeffery Klaehn

https://doi.org/10.16997/book27

Critical Theory and Authoritarian Populism

Edited by Jeremiah Morelock

https://doi.org/10.16997/book30

FORTHCOMING

Bubbles and Machines: Gender, Information and Financial Crises

Micky Lee

Peer to Peer:

The Commons Manifesto

Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis

University of Westminster Press

www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk

Published by

University of Westminster Press

115 New Cavendish Street

London W1W 6UW

www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk

Text Michel Bauwens, Vasilis Kostakis, and Alex Pazaitis 2019

First published 2019

Cover design: www.ketchup-productions.co.uk

Series cover concept: Mina Bach (minabach.co.uk)

Printed in the UK by Lightning Source Ltd.

Print and digital versions typeset by Siliconchips Services Ltd.

ISBN (Paperback): 978-1-911534-77-8

ISBN (PDF): 978-1-911534-78-5

ISBN (EPUB): 978-1-911534-79-2

ISBN (MOBI): 978-1-911534-80-8

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book33

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA. This license allows for copying and distributing the work, providing author attribution is clearly stated, that you are not using the material for commercial purposes, and that modified versions are not distributed.

The full text of this book has been peer-reviewed to ensure high academic standards. For full review policies, see: http://www.uwestminsterpress.co.uk/site/publish. Competing interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare.

Suggested citation:

Bauwens, M., Kostakis, V. and Pazaitis, A. 2019 Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto London: University of Westminster Press.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.16997/book33 License: CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0

To read the free, open access version of this book online, visit https://doi.org/10.16997/book33 or scan this QR code with your mobile device:

This work is dedicated to Jean Lievens, who passed away in 2016 after a lifetime of engagement for social justice and the commons.

,

,

.

.

Tell me those stories of yours

that make the reeds bend,

at the edge of the fields, and that, amidst wind lull,

cool the farmers brow.

Tell me those stories of yours.

Thanasis Papakonstantinou, San Michele (avena un gallo) (2011)

CHAPTER 1

Not since Marx identified the manufacturing plants of Manchester as the blueprint for the new capitalist society has there been a more profound transformation of the fundamentals of our social life. As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new social, political and economic dynamic is emerging: peer to peer.

What is peer to peer (P2P)? Why is it essential for building a commons-centric future? How could this happen? These are the questions we try to answer, by tying together four of its aspects:

P2P is a type of social relations to connect.

P2P is also a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible.

P2P thus enables a new mode of production and property .

P2P creates the potential for a transition to an economy that can be generative towards people and nature.

We believe that these four aspects will profoundly change human society. P2P ideally describes systems in which any human being can contribute to the creation and maintenance of a shared resource while benefiting from it. There is an enormous variety of such systems: from the free encyclopedia Wikipedia to free and open-source software projects, to open design and hardware communities, to relocalization initiatives and community currencies.

Our narrative is structured as follows. This chapter explains what this book is about by introducing some basic concepts. proposes a generic strategy for a transition to a commons-oriented society. At the end of each chapter, the infographics visualize the central message of it.

Consensual connections between peers characterize P2P computing systems. The computers in the network can interact with each other without going through a separate server computer. It is in this context that the literature started to characterize the sharing of audio and video files as P2P file-sharing and that a part of the underlying infrastructure of the Internet, like its data transmission infrastructure, has been called P2P. So, in a P2P network, peers are equally privileged, equipotent participants in the application that the network performs.

Let us now assume that behind those computers are human users. A conceptual jump can be made to argue that users now have a technological affordance (a tool) that allows them to interact and engage with each other more efficiently and on a global scale. P2P is a social/relational dynamic through which peers can freely collaborate with each other and create value in the form of shared resources. It is this mutual dependence of the relational dynamic and the underlying technological infrastructure that facilitates it, which creates the linguistic confusion between P2P as a technological infrastructure and P2P as a human relational dynamic.