A new
economic system inspired by the internet is coming into being,
according to Michel Bauwens
Will
Harvie
“The
transition to a post-capitalist, sustainable economy will not happen
overnight, or even in a few years,” Belgian political and
economic theorist Michel Bauwens told web-magazine Commons Transition
in June. “It is a long process.”
But progress
will be visible by about 2030, when a major ecological, social and
economic crisis will happen, and it's important to have structures in
place to replace extractive and destructive capitalism, he said.
And happily
for New Zealand, there's a “perfect example” of an alternative,
post-capitalist organisation in this country, Wellington-based
Enspiral.
[...]
Bauwens'
theories were inspired by the internet, especially peer-to-peer
networking. In computer lingo, P2P is a “decentralised
communications model in which each party has the same capabilities
and either party can initiate communication”, according to this
website. It is different from the client-server model, which is
hierarchical and command driven.
There's much
more to these technologies; what's important for understanding
Bauwens is the metaphor.
The future
economy, he believes, will be P2P. That is, autonomous agents freely
determining their behaviour, economic and cultural, within open
networks. “Projects are open to all comers provided they have
the necessary skills to contribute to a project,” he explained
in the seminal 2005 essay The Political Economy of Peer Production.
That essay
is 5000 words so there's plenty more depth to P2P. To understand how
this works in real life, look to Enspiral. It got going in 2010 as a
handful of computer programmers doing contract work that had a
positive social impact, said Enspiral Foundation director Alanna
Krause.
Quickly it
attracted other professionals with similar social values and is today
something like 300 folks, some overseas, working projects like
Enspiral Accounting, which provides accounting services; Lifehack a
collaboration between Enspiral and the Ministry of Social Development
that aims to improve the mental health and wellbeing of young people;
and ActionStation, which enables petitions, social media swarms and
mass emails to decisions makers.
There's no
chief executive, although offshoots such as Rabid, a web development
company, have leaders. Importantly, Enspiral “runs businesses
and competes in the market”, Krause said. Post-capitalism isn't
marxism or socialism, although it's progressive.
“This
way of working is better because the outcomes are more effective,”
said Krause. “It's a better way to do business.”
Bauwens
acknowledges this sort of structure is never going to replace, say,
Big Oil companies. But they'll meet a fate. “It is more than
likely that the whole regime will come tumbling down, not in one day
of course, but gradually,” he told Shareable.net.
Bauwens' P2P
Foundation fondly quotes Buckminster Fuller: “To change an
existing paradigm you do not struggle to ... change the problematic
model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete.”
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