Multitude Manifesto - Part 1

Things are changing fast. We are rewriting the Multitude Manifesto. You are invited to contribute. Start by commenting below. - last modified on Mar. 30 2011

  

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Dear humans, 

We are at a crossroads.

Our society is evolving and if everything else maintains its course, we'll take a turn towards more freedom or we slide into tyranny. The chances seem to be stacked in our favor, the multitude, but we still need to do our best to escape tyranny. History is part destiny, part luck and in part man made.

Civilizations go in cycles. When development is not interrupted by exogenous causes, setting aside the possibility of a cataclysmic event, civilizations take shape, consolidate their structures and grow, get corrupted from within and collapse. We are at the latest stage.

We are witnessing the greatest socioeconomic transition in human history, set in motion by a new potential. On the one hand, this potential is actualized by us, the multitude, to build a p2p society. On the other hand, those in positions of power use this new potential to build a dystopian technocratic society. The left-right dichotomy of the past has been flipped sideways into a top-down antagonism, understood as a struggle between those who seek freedom through decentralization and those who seek domination through centralized control.

What is p2p music?

The open culture rewires our society. p2p practices have been applied to all spheres of human activity, but our relation to music is still a one-way affair: a musician writes a song and you consume it passively.

By design, p2p processes allow many-to-many interactions. They brake the asymmetry between producers and consumers that we find in capitalism and socialism. In other words, anyone can engage in co-creation and the fruits of collaboration are not distributed as products but rather disseminated as commons. 

So what is p2p music? It must be open (not canned as a finished product) and participatory (allowing anyone to add to a musical experience).

If p2p music is not created to be distributed as a product, how can it  sustain those who engage in its creation and dissemination?

The video below explores these questions and more... Feel free to engage in this reflection by commenting below or directly on the video, on YouTube.

By AllOfUs

By Tibi

Please donate to Multitude Project!

Networks of networks

This is just a first draft... I copied this text from an email and will add to it later. Last modified on Mar 02, 2022

 

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Living systems theory is at the core of p2p. 

Life requires flow. Organized flows require support and structure.

 

All the p2p talk is about new forms of living systems, open networks. That's the new thing and the novelty makes this field interesting, because we need to understand the potential of these new creatures. Are they going to coexist with hierarchical forms of organizations and be dominated by hierarchies or are they going to dominate hierarchies? Is Bitcoin (or an OVN similar to it) going to replace banks in the future, which rule the world of exchange?  Are Youtubers going to crash mainstream institutional media?

Open value networks have always existed, but we have never considered them seriously for organizing society. What makes them interesting now? Their potential is much greater today, because the Internet acts as a medium that allows open networks to grow and spread to global proportions.

Coase made us understand why large scale networks can exist. Benkler showed us why they can out-compete hierarchies. But open networks are nothing like an open community, which can be seen as a unit. Open networks are fractal. They are made of smaller open networks and can themselves easily coalesce into larger open networks. In other words, open networks "try to discover" new ways to connect among themselves. It's in their nature.

This trend is clearly happening in the blockchain space, with new blockchains sitting on top of other blockchains (L2) or connecting/linking other blockchains together. Blockchains are open networks (the permissionless ones, not the fake ones).

I think that we should not need intermediaries to be able to connect open networks together.

How material resources are handled in peer production

A presentation of the use of a network resource planning and contribution accounting system (NRP-CAS) in material peer production.

 

By AllOfUs

By Tibi

Please donate to Multitude Project!