How fragile is the system?

Let's imagine a scenario and try to assess how fast the multitude could demolish the system. Hypothetically speaking, the act of personal bankruptcy can one day become an act of rebellion and spread like a wildfire throughout the world. What would be the consequences? How possible is this?

What keeps people that are in debt up to their eyeballs from declaring personal bankruptcy?

Violent flash mobs, how should we understand it?

What should we make of these swarms or flash mobs?

When you are living in a society that you perceive as being unjust, unfair, when you're unable to dream anymore about a brighter future, when you feel trapped within a cycle of poverty, when you perceive that the society you live in is not yours, what incentives do you have to preserve order, to respect the commons or the property of those that you associate with the higher casts? 

As the chasm between the haves and the have-nots deepens, the tension also increases. This tension was kept under control through psychological and physical means. We tell young people that destroying property or steeling is not good, and hope that they will voluntarily behave in a moral way, moral as defined by the establishment, camouflaging the systemic injustice. When that is not enough, when the pressure is too large, when the injustice becomes obvious, when people decide to act against the haves indiscriminately, "we" send in the "security" forces (security mostly for the rich, less for the poor). The problem is that current "security" systems were not designed for a coherent and well-coordinated mob, which is now awaken by alternative information sources. The traditional psychological and physical means of control are breaking down! 

The answer is NOT more brutal force, but a more just society. Social stability, as defined by the upper class, is not sustainable anymore for a large gap between the haves and the haves-not, because the classical means to sustain it are now inappropriate, ineffective. This is the multitude social revolution, the emancipation of the masses, a natural transition towards a more just society that plays on the unbalance of power in the favor of the multitude (see The multitude page on our website). The answer is to let the masses emancipate, to let them participate, to provide people with a sense of belonging, to provide them with real opportunities, to give them a reason to respect the commons and the property of others, because they feel that in doing so they help build a society for themselves. Otherwise people will passionately destroy the assets of those who they perceive as being part of the oppressing class, or participating in the oppressive system, if they are pushed to their limits, because they can. Yes, they can... and there is nothing in place to stop them! 

"the police are getting quite savvy in heading off these gatherings before they come to a head, they are routinely monitoring Internet websites, including in particular social networking sites..."

How much resources does the police have to play cat and mouse with the disenfranchised, jobless youth?

"Why they [violent flash mobs] happen? ...kids being bored and acting stupid"

Acting stupid? I don't think so... These kids realize a gap in the system, which they perceive as being unjust, unfair, and they exploit it very brilliantly. They collectively understand the power of social media to coordinate spontaneous actions that can overwhelm the "security" forces. These young people understand that the balance of power is shifting. Call that stupid...        

Swarm of flash mobs, or any other type of decentralized, spontaneous, and well-coordinated massive action are a reality. We saw them coming by analyzing the possibilities introduced by the new technology. They can target positive as well as negative action. The only effective way to reduce negative action is by giving people a reason not to engage in it. We cannot prevent it by force. The multitude is the power, and it will move in one direction or another depending on the signals it gets form the environment. A more just society will generate dynamically stable attractors characterized by positive action. 

See also the article on Pre-programmed mass movements on our website.           

London, England: "Just to show the rich people that we can do what we want..." video bellow. 

By AllOfUs

Michel Bauwens on Open Source Design

By AllOfUs

Multitude Movement, from a theoretical perspective - beautiful!

It is organic... In fact, we are moving away from the industrial era paradigm of command and control, the machine paradigm, to the living systems paradigm. We are moving away from power relations, towards synergistic value-based relations. We are moving from coercion to voluntary involvement, from duty to passion. The pyramid is collapsing! A well-informed, well-coordinated and self-organizing crowd is taking over...

By AllOfUs

About crowdsourcing

First published on June 14, 2011 last updated June 11, 2021. 

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See history of the term and concept on Wikipedia.

The practice first appeared as a participatory action that is mediated by the Internet: people got together online to collaborate on some project - ex. open source development.

The term crowdsourcing was first coined in 2005 by Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson, editors at Wired, in a business context, referring to an organization "outsourcing work to the crowd". Outsourcing is externalizing some processes that previously were part of an organization to another organization, which implies a clear boundary between in and out, us and them. Although the outsourcing relation is mutually beneficial, it is not symmetrical. The outsourcee has an information disadvantage and is economically dependent on the outsourcer, cut-off from the market or the customer. Outsourcing can be seen as inter-firm collaboration or synergy. This leads to the notion of supply chains. This form of collaboration has become a key success factor in the global capitalist economy; it has been said that the best companies are the ones that can manage the best supply chains. 

Towards 2008 this phenomena of Internet-mediated sourcing got the attention of academia and Daren C. Brabham wrote the first review paper on the subject. He identified three patterns of crowdsourcing:

• open collaboration crowdsourcing
• competition crowdsourcing
• virtual labor market crowdsourcing

Open and collaboration crowdsourcing is the pattern that stands on the high moral ground. This is what we see in open source software and hardware development, knowledge repositories like Wikipedia, or transaction networks like Bitcoin. Open, in this context, means access to participation as well as transparency. This pattern establishes symmetric relations between participants and a plain field for opportunities and potential development. This is also the pattern used in open value networks.

The other two patterns are at odds with the multitude philosophy, or with the edicts of the p2p economy. 

Competition crowdsourcing is mostly used by companies in need of new ideas. They create a contest between individuals (sometimes organized in groups) and the best idea(s) is rewarded. These contests are usually high adrenaline events that generate a few happy winders and lots of sore losers, while trying to provide a fun experience and enriching experience. I call this type of crowdsourcing "flock milking". Examples: Xprize and the Mio project.

This practice comes from the realization that companies (i.e. closed and hierarchical organizations) can use some of the tools and techniques developed by the open source culture to coordinate a very large number of individuals and extract value from the crowd. The relation remains asymmetrical between the company, a closed, intrinsically individualistic organization and the crowd. In the eyes of the company, the role of the crowd is similar to the role of an outsourcee, although the different nature of the crowd forces the company to modify its practices.

Virtual labor market crowdsourcing is about externalizing low-skills and repetitive tasks, often through an intermediary platform with a market functionality. There, tasks (demand) are matched with skills (offer) and the platform facilitates the transaction and mediates potential disputes. Example: TaskRabit.

In both last cases, the crowdsourcing concept supposes a powerful entity (the outsourcer or the labor market provider), which has some advantage (informational, transactional, logistical, financial, access to market, etc.) over the crowd. The crowd is considered disorganized but resourceful. It is implicitly assumed that this powerful entity is necessary to channel potential out of the crowd, which is seen as incapable of producing a coherent output. For that matter, and for others too, it seams justified for this powerful entity, acting as a center of analysis, coordination and production, to keep the biggest part of the reward/revenues and to reward the crowd just enough. Let's call that the candy economy.

When it comes to motivation, there is a fundamental difference between outsourcing and crowdsourcing. The outsourcer has more influence over the outsourcee than over each individual in the crowd. Moreover, negative incentive doesn't work on the crowd. The outsourcer must become seductive, attractive and must give something in return, something that the crowd likes, which can be a bundle of intangibles (fun, learning experience, networking, exposure, badges, etc.). In some cases the crowd can insist on opening the new information or knowledge that is created during this process, to make it public, which is a form of open innovation that companies have started to appreciate, but not for altruistic reasons. Open innovation unleashed by crowdsourcing, if well conducted, is hyper-innovation, which can better tactic in a very dynamic, innovation-dependent market, as opposed to a defensive tactic based on intellectual property protection.

Structurally speaking, a these two crowdsourcing patterns exhibit a high degree of centralization. 

 

We cannot ignore the innovation potential of the crowd. Moreover, the crowd is building its production, transactional and distribution capacity. I believe that the last two patterns of crowdsourcing will fade away with the sunset of capitalism.

Sensorica is an example of an open network centered around the individual and its capacity to work in collaboration. Sensorica is not an entity exploiting the crowd, it is the crowd creating solutions for its own problems. It's mode of production is commons-based peer production (Yochai Benkler).

Open source communities don't "source" the crowd, they are the crowd working in collaboration to produce something, one entity, one system. They are not lead by any other entity. They are self-oriented and self-governed entities.

By t!b!   AllOfUs

Chris Cook - Capital Partnerships: A Debt Free Solution to the Property Crash

Chris Cook - Capital Partnerships: A Debt Free Solution to the Property Crash from Feasta on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

New Economy, New Wealth

This presentation by Arthur Brock is really nicely done. It pretty much summarizes everything. Send it to your friends who think you're crazy...   : )

New Economy, New Wealth on Prezi

By AllOfUs

Comparing business development paradigms

Steve Bosserman introduced the idea of "Production Centered Local Economies", and "People Centered Local Economies". This article synthesizes Steve's coining of those terms, and uses concepts developed by Sam Rose, Paul Hartzog and Richard C Adler of Forward Foundation to further explain the differences between these economies, from a business development perspective.

In fact, "People Centered Local Economies" is what we would call "Multitude Economics".

  Read more...

By AllOfUs

Build your own civilization

Marcin Jakubowski - part 1 from East Bay Pictures on Vimeo.

By AllOfUs

Marcin Jacubowski on the Global Village Construction Set & Open Source Ecology

Marcin, you really understood the essence of the Multitude constructive revolution. You are a hero! 

The Multitude movement builds new alternatives for production and distribution of value. It proposes new forms of property. It builds new decentralized institutions based on free and open collaboration, and sharing, alongside classical hierarchical and monopolistic institutions that are based on competition, secrecy and control. It greatly reduces our dependence on the system. It decentralizes innovation, production and distribution. It decentralizes power. The Multitude social movement dose NOT directly attack to destroy classic institutions, it builds new ones to compete with them. In that sense, the Multitude movement is a constructive revolution.  

In Marcin's case we can even take the term "constructive" literally.

By AllOfUs