towards a peer-to-peer technium

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Tony Smith Kororoit Institute 17 November 2012 Asia-Pacific Foresight Conference Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

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Presentation made to Asia-Pacific Foresight Conference in Perth, WA, November 2012. Explores commercial and social consequences of ongoing IT development and how they may be starting to reconverge.

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Page 1: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 2: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 3: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 4: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

But what istechnology?

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 5: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

But what istechnology?

http://p2pfoundation.net/

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 6: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

But what istechnology?

http://p2pfoundation.net/

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 7: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Tony SmithKororoit Institute

17 November 2012

Asia-PacificForesight

Conference

Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator

OPENSourceStandardsDatamore

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/

But what istechnology?

http://p2pfoundation.net/

Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium

Page 8: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?

Page 9: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?• It is the made world

Page 10: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware

Page 11: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware

• Equally our processes, systems, information

Page 12: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware

• Equally our processes, systems, information

• It is not (the rest of) the social world

Page 13: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware

• Equally our processes, systems, information

• It is not (the rest of) the social world

• Nor is it (the rest of) the natural world

• It is disproportionately correlated with the measured economy

• And a disproportionate share of that economy is devoted to servicing the Technium, rather than human community needs, let alone nature

Page 14: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Why Peer-to-Peer?

Page 15: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Why Peer-to-Peer?• Challenge to management/leadership mythos

Page 16: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Why Peer-to-Peer?• Challenge to management/leadership mythos

• Open Source Software (intrinsic validation)

• Open Standards (non-discriminatory licensing)

• Open Data (especially government data)

• Open Access (reviving academic tradition)

• Community, Commons, Co-working

• Distributed File Sharing, Pirate Party, Occupy

• Alternate notions of value and wealth

Page 17: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Taking view from axis of history of electronic information technologies

• telegraphy• broadcast media• mainframe computers • personal computers• the internet• world wide web• social media• mobile apps

Page 18: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Media InfoTech

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Page 19: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Environmental

Social Justice

Media InfoTech Industry Banking

Finance

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog

Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*

Page 20: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Environmental

Social Justice

Media InfoTech Industry Banking

Finance

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog

Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*

The Well/BBS

The InternetWorld Wide Web

WIRED*

Page 21: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Environmental

Social Justice

Media InfoTech Industry Banking

Finance

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Commercialdata processing

as amplifier

Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog

Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*

CensusCredit Cards

The Well/BBS

The InternetWorld Wide Web

WIRED*

ProprietarySecurity

SurveillanceThe Technium*

eCommerceCloud Hosting

Apps

Page 22: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Environmental

Social Justice

Media InfoTech Industry Banking

Finance

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Commercialdata processing

as amplifier

Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog

Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*

CensusCredit Cards

The Well/BBS

The InternetWorld Wide Web

WIRED*

Request For CommentOpen Source

CopyleftPeer-to-Peer

Digital CommonsPirate Party

Occupy

ProprietarySecurity

SurveillanceThe Technium*

eCommerceCloud Hosting

Apps

Page 23: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Environmental

Social Justice

Media InfoTech Industry Banking

Finance

Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart

Ted NelsonIntermedia

PICA System

Entrepreneurship

Employment / Consumption

Commercialdata processing

as amplifier

Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog

Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*

CensusCredit Cards

The Well/BBS

The InternetWorld Wide Web

WIRED*

Request For CommentOpen Source

CopyleftPeer-to-Peer

Digital CommonsPirate Party

Occupy

ProprietarySecurity

SurveillanceThe Technium*

eCommerceCloud Hosting

Apps

The Arms of Government

Page 24: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Page 25: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Page 26: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Page 27: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Page 28: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Page 29: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Enter Mark PesceArchetypical

TechniumFlown under my

radar until Melbourne 2012

Singularity SummitInventor of VRMLNow an Australian

Judge onThe New Inventors

Proponent of KickStarter project MooresCloud light

(LAMP lamp)

Page 30: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In the months since this paper was proposed, connections grew between Peer-to-Peer and The Technium, significantly influenced by the community surrounding HubMelbourne, includingMichel Bauwens’ September visit.

Enter Mark PesceArchetypical

TechniumFlown under my

radar until Melbourne 2012

Singularity SummitInventor of VRMLNow an Australian

Judge onThe New Inventors

Proponent of KickStarter project MooresCloud light

(LAMP lamp)

Page 31: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

In whatʼs left of 40 minutes• Emergence/Systems/Complexity as guide

• The Technium

‣ What is Technology?

‣ Humanity Plus

• Peer-to-Peer/OPEN

‣ Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration

‣ Social Impact Professional

• A long way to go if we get it right

Page 32: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Emergence/Systems/Complexity

Page 33: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Emergence/Systems/Complexity• More fundamental than physics

• Synergy; feedback; supervenience; map-territory

• Look to biology for exemplars; value diversity

• Dissipative systems, ref. Stan Salthe

• Kevin Kelly again: Out of Control (1993)

• Life, the Universe and Everything?

‣ Exploring Possibilities, ref. Cantor, Gödel

• What should we be doing?

‣ Exploring Possibilities; without limiting others

Page 34: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Emergence/Systems/Complexity• The terminology (silo) problem• Donella Meadows on Systems• Melanie Mitchell on Complexity• Ilya Prigogine and Robert Laughlin

on emergence in condensed matter• Ralph Stacey on organisations• Bill Hall on knowledge management• Gradient dissipation in flow of words• Biology still the elephant in the room

Page 35: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

• Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants (2010)

• Itʼs not just hardware + software

‣ itʼs also our organisations and our systems

• Economy serves The Technium more than us

• Cities designed for cars rather than humans

• Leaving an arguably unhealthy dependency

• Words are cheap, forming a gradient flow

‣ which self-justifying institutions dissipate

Page 36: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

What is Technology?In 1992, working with educationalist Don Tinkler and futurist Peter Ellyard to produce a Federal Government report on the Effectiveness and Potential of State-of-the-Art Technologies in the Delivery of Higher Education, we set out to survey technology vendors.

H.B. Selby Australia Limited had been a leading supplier of scientific and especially chemical equipment, with Higher Ed a big market, yet responded that they did not consider themselves a supplier of technologies to education.

This was a year before release of Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic graphical World Wide Web browser and Al Gore’s information superhighway being quoted in the New York Times, yet gave a clear message that education technology had come to mean information technology.

Twenty years on, developing Maker and DIY Bio communities may indicate a swing back. The map is not the territory.

Page 37: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

This is one of those books that, after you’ve read it, you wonder

how you will ever be able to hold relevant conversations with those who haven’t yet.

Page 38: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Wars unending

Apple v Tandy

Page 39: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v IBM

Wars unending

Page 40: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v Micro$oft

Wars unending

Page 41: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v Google

Wars unending

Page 42: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v Samsung

Wars unending

Page 43: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v Exxon

Wars unending

Page 44: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Apple v Exxon

Struggles ongoing

Page 45: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

4 pillars of Transhumanism

Life extensionAubrey de Grey

Occupy SpaceKeith Henson

NanotechnologyK Eric Drexler

Artificial Intelligence

Humans as transitionalHumans as transitional

aka Humanity+

Page 46: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Interlewd

Switching from The Technium back to Peer-to-Peer

Page 47: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Peer-to-Peer / OPEN• Internet Engineering Task Force RFC‣ Request for comment: governance by peer consent

• Open Source Software as core & model‣ Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python, equivs & more‣ Intrinsic valuation criteria: has to work & be useful

• Open anything and everything• “Information wants to be free”‣ Redressing recent bloat of “intellectual property”‣ Licensing, Copyleft, Digital Commons

• Peer-to-Peer: natural internet distribution

Page 48: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Open Source Software• Transparent, auditable, verifiable• Maintainability, extensibility, repositories‣ Reduced obligation on founders‣ Foundations in lieu: Apache, Perl, Mozilla (Firefox)

• Repurposing: forking, merging• Version control: CVS, Subversion, GIT• Problem reporting and tracking‣ Bugzilla, Request Tracker

• Long tail project mgmt: SourceForge

Page 49: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Extending the model

Page 50: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Extending the model• Open Standards

Page 51: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Extending the model• Open Standards‣ Licensing wars; XMLʼs long and circuitous history

Page 52: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Extending the model• Open Standards‣ Licensing wars; XMLʼs long and circuitous history

• Open Data, Govt. stats, Public Transport• Open Access to academic research• Maker (Open Hardware), DIYBio• As way of life / business‣ crowd funding: KickStarter, Pozzible‣ micro tasking: Airbnb, Shareable

• Revisiting (tragedy of) the Commons

Page 53: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Indefensible business models(Though lens of emergence/systems/complexity)

• Property begets a rentier class• Defend & grow your business model‣ whether or not there is any fun in it

• Cultivate dependencies‣ the overly $impli$tic come to dominate

• Invent intellectual property• Prosperous times beget middle men‣ creating v adding value, defend first

Page 54: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Occupy Everything• Anonymity, trolls, flamewars‣ neither ability to maintain nor need for secrecy,

but for societyʼs rampant censoriousness

• Peer-to-peer file sharingʼs many uses‣ over?reaction of copyright licensing intermediaries

• Pirate (political) parties gaining traction• Occupy Wall Street as contagion‣ urban growth constraints, esp. sans favelas

• White collar, paternalist commentariat

Page 55: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens increasingly Tweeted about co-operatives in the same time period the Basque Mondragon federation of co-operatives was receiving wider attention.

Since the baseless triumphalism of Wall Street destroyed much of living memory, the white collar urban commentariat has developed amnesia with respect to what had been a long legal colonisation of more democratic business ownership models.

Even as recently as 1992, Clever Country Coöperative sounded like a really good idea but, after one consultancy for the Keating Government had pre-occupied half our membership, the group as a whole failed to complete its first reporting obligation cycle.

As cracks in the still oft presumed only business model widen, it is time to look at a round of remutualisation alongside a new set of legal fictions to legitimise more natural forms of virtual organisation for crowd funding, micro tasking and lots more.

Back in our shared world

Page 56: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Co-working Spaces

Page 57: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNECo-working Spaces

Page 58: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Page 59: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Page 60: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Technology-enabled

Page 61: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Technology-enabled

Page 62: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Technology-enabled

Social Impact Professionals

Page 63: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Technology-enabled

Social Impact Professionals

Busy event calendar

Page 64: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUB MELBOURNE

Co-working Spaces

Heritage Repurposed

Up 3 flights or old lift

Technology-enabled

Social Impact Professionals

Busy event calendar

Page 65: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUBʼs Green Room

Page 66: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

HUBʼs Green RoomWednesdayʼs venue forShareable Aust. launch

Page 67: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

The Interwebs

Page 68: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

The Interwebs

disintermediation

Page 69: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

Stigmergic Collaboration• Coördination Coöperation Collaboration‣ Collabforgeʼs Mark Elliottʼs 2007 dissertation

expounds their root word differentiation

• Stigmergy as divergent/exploratory‣ c.f. synergy, emergence, goal-directed

• Wikipedia as exemplar of target medium‣ from perspective of musical group performance

• From eusocial insects to cities‣ urban and environmental planning, public transport

Page 70: Towards a Peer-to-peer Technium

To the Future, Together• Joe expounded the Big context last night• Our incomparably self-indulgent lives‣ Saltheʼs maximum entropy production principle

• Intelligence in isolation vastly overrated• Trade federation might deliver anything• Creative tensions and synergies‣ without seeing it, could not anticipate what a proton

and electron might achieve by getting together

• Techno power with sharing caring ethic