towards a peer-to-peer technium
DESCRIPTION
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.TRANSCRIPT
Tony SmithKororoit Institute
17 November 2012
Asia-PacificForesight
Conference
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
Tony SmithKororoit Institute
17 November 2012
Asia-PacificForesight
Conference
Michel BauwensCo-founder andDigital Curator
OPENSourceStandardsDatamore
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
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
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
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
What is the Technium?
What is the Technium?• It is the made world
What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware
What is the Technium?• It is the made world• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware
• Equally our processes, systems, information
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
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
Why Peer-to-Peer?
Why Peer-to-Peer?• Challenge to management/leadership mythos
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
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
Media InfoTech
Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart
Ted NelsonIntermedia
PICA System
Environmental
Social Justice
Media InfoTech Industry Banking
Finance
Vannevar BushDoug Engelbart
Ted NelsonIntermedia
PICA System
Community MemoryWhole Earth Catalog
Stewart BrandKevin Kelly*
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*
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
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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)
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
Emergence/Systems/Complexity
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
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
• 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
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.
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.
Wars unending
Apple v Tandy
Apple v IBM
Wars unending
Apple v Micro$oft
Wars unending
Apple v Google
Wars unending
Apple v Samsung
Wars unending
Apple v Exxon
Wars unending
Apple v Exxon
Struggles ongoing
4 pillars of Transhumanism
Life extensionAubrey de Grey
Occupy SpaceKeith Henson
NanotechnologyK Eric Drexler
Artificial Intelligence
Humans as transitionalHumans as transitional
aka Humanity+
Interlewd
Switching from The Technium back to Peer-to-Peer
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
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
Extending the model
Extending the model• Open Standards
Extending the model• Open Standards‣ Licensing wars; XMLʼs long and circuitous history
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
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
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
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
Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNECo-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals
Busy event calendar
HUB MELBOURNE
Co-working Spaces
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals
Busy event calendar
HUBʼs Green Room
HUBʼs Green RoomWednesdayʼs venue forShareable Aust. launch
The Interwebs
The Interwebs
disintermediation
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
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