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It's a co-production of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation, which is my organization.
So with a small team of researchers and funding from Orange Global, who supported us with this research.
And in fact, I think this the first time that we've tried to create a complete mapping of collaborative economy.
There are books on crowd-sourcing.
There are books on crowd-funding.
There are books on open innovation.
There are books on Wikinomics, but I don't think there is any sort of research that puts it all together.
So this shows how all these phenomenon are linked to one another other.
The principle theme of my book is that there is a certain horizontal of production factors.
The internet is not only a communications tool, it's a tool for the creation of collaborative value.
Today civil society is capable of self-organizing and creating products and quite complex systems like Wikipedia, Linux, etc.
So the first chapter, is, let's say, an introductory chapter, so it: horizontalisation.
There is a shock with vertical structures in society, so a diagonalism, a sort of appearance of a hybrid economy.
So in two stages, firstly, chapter two and three are how do the existing institutions adapt to this new reality.
We can see there are phenomenons like crowd-sourcing, like collaborative consumption, open innovation, co-creation and co-design
that are why businesses are asking themselves how they'll be able to mobilize horizontal creativity, but within their chain of values.
For example, in crowd-sourcing we can have phenomenons where the business will say, or even a person will say:
" i need a logo." They'll mobilize 300 teams all across the world to partake in a competition to make the logo and they'll pay them 300$.
Well that's not that interesting, but it's not just that.
What i want to say is that when it fits into a classic capitalist chain of values there is still an element of exploitation that can be very very present.
So the fourth and fifth chapters, in the fourth chapter I describe the bottom-up economy
that is to say that it's not the businesses trying to integrate these dynamics, it's the communities of value creators that institutionalize, and so will create their own economic institutions of governance.
But evidently they will also have to adapt to certain measures within the existing economy.
So typically how does this economy work? The value today is created in the commons.
We use shared property licenses, like the General Public License, like Creative Commons
and so innovation will be added to the commons,
and that is very different than the old system where innovation was added to the private, with private property licenses.
It's a community of volunteers or payed employees who contribute knowledge, software codes or designs to the commons.
So generally, there is a second actor that I call the For Benefit Associations.
These are generally NGOs, foundations that make collaboration possible,
like Wikipedia for example. A decent amount of money is needed to finance the servers because there are a lot of visitors, a lot of users.
o the Wikipedia foundation will generate funds to maintain the servers,
will create a governance tool to manage any conflicts that may emerge in the production of Wikipedia,
will protect the contents against attacks from let's say people who want to privatize the knowledge that has been written in the commons.
o all this is done by this foundation and we find different models in practically all open source projects in the software economy,
but there is also software for open hardware that is emerging. Even in currency for example,
today there is Bitcoin which is a peer-to-peer currency that is even created by computers.
There is a group called the Bitcoin Foundation that tries to maintain this process
the fifth chapter is a chapter that describes the distributed infrastructures
For example, in finance there is crowd-funding, the capacity to self-finance amongst peers.
So we're looking for money not at the banks or investors but... horizontally.
Social lending, or peer-to-peer lending, is looking for loans from your peers.
And peer-to-peer currency, or peer-to-peer money, is currency that is created by the community.
So Bitcoin for example is really interesting, it's a currency that has its limits, that has certain problems, but what is interesting about it is that it is a post-Westphalian currency.
So it is not created by the state, it is not created out of debt owed to banks, but is created by the community and sustained by the trust of a community in an algorithm, within a particular protocol.
And the sixth chapter is about currency(ism) and let's say what I call open business models.
So can we create economies when there is no intellectual property? Yes.
and I describe in the sixth chapter the different models that have emerged and so sustain this new economy.
We can consider the change part of the emergence of distinctive patterns that do not appear in dominant logic.
So for example, we are in feudalism. In the eleventh century there was the renaissance of italian cities.
They need money.
They need bankers.
But in Christianity, you can't ask for interest.
And so purgatory is invented, which allows bankers to acquire benevolence and redeem them of their sins and therefore not go to Hell.
And in the thirteenth century, the templars who protected the pilgrims going to Jerusalem.
they reinvented or invented accounting, with a input and output and the balance between the two.
And then there was the invention of the printer and Calvin who says that being rich means that we are chosen by God.
So all these patterns do not have a direct sense but in the 18th century we know that all these patterns found each other
and founded the capitalist logic, which has cultural, moral and financial aspects.
So Wikispeed, this is how I describe Wikispeed.
First of all, Wikispeed is a project for a car that is open source, so with an open and shared design. First pattern.
which was created by a global community, without capital, but with a social benefit, or effort. Second pattern.
that was conceived as a modular manufacturing, so that has a modular design where anyone around the world can contribute to the parts of the car. Which is another pattern.
The production is in Microfactory, so small localized factories with a series of 3D printers, that are connected, that are like Lego, so we find a new pattern.
So it is not mass production that requires marketing and publicity to sell any surplus, it's manufacturing on demand, so we only build when there is a demand,
and so there is no surplus. So we see an interest right away of this type of practice at the ecological level.
Plus, the design communities do not have the logic of planned obsolescence.
So how do we create a design that is not for the market, where you need a tension between supply and demand Ö but where the goal is to make the best possible design made by the community?
We are in a design that is sustainable, durable, etc.
I can buy spare parts of a car on Bitcoin,
a peer-to-peer currency pattern which allows me to buy a peer-to-peer car.
So we see clearly these patterns that have emerged here and in Wikispeed. We see that they fit together.
So what is also very interesting about Wikispeed is their production model.
It's called Extreme Manufacturing. They applied quick software design models for the design, the physical.
So, just like Henry Ford had a methodology to produce his cars,
Wikispeed has developed its own methodology to produce its car.
Voice off screen : chain production.
There you go.
So the problem with industrial production is that it's linear.
We do one thing after another, every time we need permission, there is hierarchal control.
On the other hand, at Wikispeed, it is a parallel development that is distributed, where all the contributors can change a part of the car in real time, continuously.
And so that is why with 80 people in 12 countries were able to make a car that, at the ecological level, is 5 times more efficient than the cars that are made today in factories in Detroit.
This is why the example of Wikispeed is so interesting, because for me it shows, in a very concrete way, the logic of this new economy.
Voice off screen : As well as this result, it is a result which is very reliable at the ecological level etc., but it's the cost of the car as well.
Yes, I believe that it is sold at 24 000$, so it is actually quite competitive.
It's a sports car that is quite competitive.
What we need to see also is when we are in open hardware or open source software, we are in the cost of production plus a margin of profit.
We are not in intellectual income.
So we make a huge surplus of 2, 3 000% on a monopoly of intellectual property.
So the business coalitions that work around open source software and hardware have very competitive prices
because they don't require a surplus that is due to an artificial monopoly imposed by the State.
So this is why it is also a very productive and competitive model, even in the capitalist world
because it can function at a price level significantly lower than the price used in the capitalist industry.
There are two aspects, so there is an aspect of control.
So there is a loss of control.
These firms no longer control the chain of value if there is a transformation switch towards this new model.
And they loose their income of intellectual property.
Therefore faced with these two loses, the industries that have grown thanks to this monopoly are not very interested in investing in this new model.
Of course there are exceptions.
For example, we can see that in the open source world for firms like IBM, it's very interesting to pool the development of their software, which is not key in competitiveness.
For example, everything internal at IBM can very well be done with Linux.
In fact, I think that without exaggerating too much, we can say that Linux, that IBM has become a Linux consulting firm.
Essentially, it's the business model.
So there is also an interest on behalf of certain firms to reorient themselves towards this production mode.
So the problem today, evidently, in this production between peers, is that it lives in a co-dependance with the capitalist system.
The commons believes, at a collective level, but the individuals contributing to the commons need to be payed employees in capitalist firms that take their added value in the capital accumulation system.
So one of my concerns is to make this production mode much more autonomous.
So my proposition is to combine a new form of licensing that I call the Peer Production License.
It was developed by someone named Dimitri Kleiner.
So the difference with this license in relation to the General Public License that is used by open source software,
is, instead of saying 'Everyone can use our commons'. We say:
If you are a private firm, that uses our commons without contributing to the commons, you must contribute financially to the commons.
But, if you are a cooperative or a non-profit and you contribute to our commons, you can use the cards.'
So the idea is to create a network of ethical and solidarity firms around a particular common.
Either the commons contributors create their own cooperative enterprise,
or convince the actors in the social economy to switch, to transform themselves and to adopt open source techniques.
So both bottom up and top down and to try to create a network that is more and more autonomous and supports itself within the dominant capitalist system.
So I believe that the change is happening, and when we look back in history, the change in feudalism or from feudalism to capitalism,
was because there was another system being born within a larger dominant system.
And when the dominant system fell apart, there were seeds of the new system already planted.
So I believe that this is the strategy for change that we should follow. It's to support this economy amongst peers.
It's to make it stronger and more autonomous,
Such that when there is an ecological and financial crisis that will occur within the capitalist system, we'll be ready to draw in a larger public to adopt to these new practices.
So I have a sort of plan.
In my opinion the peer-to-peer is inevitable.
That is to say that the growth and use of distributed production facts is inevitable.
It's too efficient, it's hyper productive, etc.
But the property and control of these technologies is not given in advance.
It depends on the balance of power, social struggles, etc.
So imagine that there are two poles, two axes.
where one axe is centralized control and one axe is distributed control.
One axe for profit, one for the commons.
So digital capitalism (capitalisme nÈtarchique) combines a centralized control of peer-to-peer technology with a combination for profit.
A key example is Facebook.
Yes Facebook has social peer-to-peer dynamics
where we share in a community, share links, create projects,
but we do not own our own data.
We don't control the design of the platform and the monetization is done exclusively by Facebook.
So there is a hierarchy of the network that controls the network.
So it's what I call digital capital, a hierarchy of a network.
So the other possibility is distributed capitalism.
For example, Bitcoin, so peer-to-peer currency, is still a rare design.
So the Bitcoin example is gold. It is produced by a computer, but you have to buy it.
So either you have to invest in a computer and electricity, or you have the buy Bitcoins.
So, if you're poor, you can't buy Bitcoins.
Bitcoin's design was inspired by the libertarian political ideology, which is against the State, against monopolies, but is for a world where everyone has the freedom to be a little capitalist if they want.
So there is a design in Bitcoin. At the beginning we made a lot and now we're making less and less.
So the demand will grow bigger than the supply and the value of Bitcoin will rise.
This means that we can be selfish and use Bitcoin. So it's not like the...
There are lots of complementary currencies that require an ethical investment.
The Bitcoin user does not make this investment.
So you can very well be completely greedy and like Bitcoin.
If we combine a local orientation for the commons, we're in what I call the local resilience movement.
So transition town, local organic agriculture, local currencies.
So there, there is really an orientation for the commons, but there is still that local aspect I would say.
So there is not necessarily a global vision, a political vision.
And often it's determined by a philosophy of survival.
So it is often ecologists who have a negative vision for the future, which can of course be correct,
that the contemporary world will not survive in the form it has today, and so it's what we call in english a life strategy, a survival strategy at the local level.
So I am a supporter of the fourth quadrant, global orientation for the commons.
That is to say there is a true political orientation.
That we are here today to change the world, that we'll have to reorient the deep structure of the world as it is.
Essentially to sum up my proposition, today we live in a world that combines a false abundance and a false scarcity.
So we believe that the physical world is infinite, but we're going to destroy it, impoverish it, and at the same time, we're going to create intellectual properties that make cooperation, culture, science and sharing difficult.
So the peer-to-peer world is a world where we recognize the physical limits and where we recognize the natural abundance of immaterial sharing.
What is very important to understand in my opinion is that scarcity and abundance are not only objective.
So they are not only material characteristics, but are also a way of seeing the world.
For example, when you are in abundance...
For example in the Third World...
I live in Thailand. There are still commons.
I live in Chiang Mai, there are mounting tributes. They have commons.
When we are in the common, we are in abundance because we also have the means to use the common resources to feed ourselves, etc.
When we start to privatize the commons, we are right away in scarcity.
Because I can't go to my neighbor for my needs.
So if I don't have my own land, I'm in scarcity.
So scarcity is not in the land, it is in the way we organize our land.
This is why I believe the Internet has played an important role because it has socialized the youth to share.
You can see that what we have been told is that it's impossible in the physical world, that is to say sharing, cooperating, but we've seen that it is in fact very possible in the virtual world
and so we've rediscovered abundance in the virtual world, and this is why I believe that there is a sharing renaissance in the physical world.
So I think that this is why digital culture is very important, because the physical commons were under assault from capitalism.
They were defensive, whereas digital cultures are offensive.
We are in the process of recreating the commons with our own efforts and we see that they are hyper-competitive and hyper-productive in relation to the dominant alternatives that already exist.
So I think that there are three main kinds of commons. There are the commons that we inherit, like oceans, rivers, nature, forests.
And so now we're asking ourselves, is it right that a human being can be the owner of something he didn't create himself?
So I agree that, when we add value to a work, we can profit from it, but the base itself, air, water, we do not own this.
It is owned by all of humanity and even all living things on earth.
So the second commons, are the commons that we create, language, culture, the Internet, open source software.
And we created these in common so there is a shared ownership.
But I think there is a third common that is very important and is the material we create.
For example in the Wikispeed model, the design is collaborative but the machines are also collaborative, they use open source 3D printers that were conceived collaboratively.
They use open source 3D printers that were conceived collaboratively.
And so I think that we should also work on this third common.
And so in my model I propose that there is a pooling of immaterial knowledge, but also a pooling of the physical.
So why is this important?
When we see the Roman Empire crisis for example...
There is always a moment in empires, when the maintaining of the empire, the cost of maintaining the existent, makes the conquests become too expensive.
It's more expensive to integrate new territories than to conquer them.
So at that moment, there is a crisis in material expansion of the empire, the Roman Empire in particular.
and we saw that the Roman Empire, when it collapsed, resulted in a relocation of production.I know it's a bit weird to call them that...
But the Christian monks were a global open design community.
It was them that maintained, through their work and their cultural exchange, the european cultural sphere.
So very quickly there was agricultural innovation in the techniques which recreated prosperity for Europe in the 10th century.
So today we have exactly the same problem.
We have impoverished the earth so much that we are going to have problems with energy resources, raw materials, water, food.
However, capitalist competition is related to an economy of scale, which means that we must produce more to be competitive.
Therefore using more energy and more materials to be competitive.
However, Wikispeed is an economy of scope, that is to say doing more with the knowledge we have...
So pooling our knowledge
and doing more with the materials we have.
So skinning up from one.
In the whole world, all the Wikispeed communities will contribute to the development, not only of product, but of the productive tool.
So we're doing more with what we have.
So we create competition by the scope and not the ladder.
I don't know if that's clear.
So when the world's resources become rare, we are going to need this civilizational shift, which really is the same shift that occurred at the end of the Roman Empire.
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