A very important essay on a policy for abundance and the commons in the physical world

[Michel Bauwens]

Via Roberto Verzola:

URL = http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/verzola-on-abundance1.pdf

I have just finished a piece that puts under a single theoretical
frameworks disparate issues like software, books, music, video,
inventions, agriculture, natural resources, the Internet etc. The unifying
concept is abundance.

This new piece extends my earlier analysis of ICT and society contained in
my book Towards a Political Economy of Information.

If you are interested, you can download the piece here:

http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/verzola-on-abundance1.pdf

The full text of the book cited above is also on this site.

I would welcome any comment, critique or debate about the piece by private
mail (or even on this list, if there is enough interest).

Greetings to all,

Roberto Verzola
Philippines

[Evolving Trends]

My problem is with the choice of words they use, e.g. "friends," and the structure that encourages quantity over quality... No one in the world has 5,000 friends. In fact no one has 500, not even 50. Acquaintances, casual friends, work friends, colleagues, co-creatives, yes, but the word "friend" is at risk of losing its powerful meaning in this age where everyone is your friend. I had no problem with "IM Buddies" :) ... It's only that certain things like "friendship" is not quantifiable, so having 5 friends is not any less than having 10 friends, but on social networks it is LESS. And you can't compete with things that are not quantifiable. There is a trend now to build trust metric into social networks, so then if 3,000 people "trust" me and 2,000 people trust another person, does that mean I'm more trustworthy than that person? The trend toward quantifying the unquantifiable is dangerous, IMO.

[Michel Bauwens]

I agree that social networks by itself, though they do have an effect in facilitating relationships, do not in any way guarantee deep human relationships; it's a dialectic between the quality of the individual, the social network, and the subtle invisible architectures which may drive the type of relationship that will blossom in a particular environment (I often feel there's a subtle neoliberal bias in many of the applications on facebook, inducing ranking, competition, etcc.._

Michel

[Evolving Trends]

And I would definitely add "goodness" to the non-computable/non-provable values of trust, beauty, love, friendship, wisdom, etc.

In other words, goodness like trust and friendship and all related 'psychic' concepts (using Roberto's terminology) are immune to calculation.

That's why the digg model of wisdom of crowds does now work right, IMO. 3,000 people digging an article does not give it 3000 units of goodness. Digg's model only computes popularity within a given arbitrary population. So to put the word "wisdom" next to it is improbable.

Related discussions:

1. P2P Social Currency (where the current thinking is to exclude the above-mentioned 'psychic' values from the Buyer-Seller Affinity Matrix, for being non-computable/non-provable, and only allow those values that are computable/provable)

[Evolving Trends]

Perfect. Thank you Michel.

This comment below probably has little to do with the focus of Roberto's book, which I have yet to read, but it may be of interest to some...


The term “psychic” is used here not in the ESP sense but in the same psychocultural sense as “psychic rewards” (i.e. non-monetary, non-material), . It refers to certain human feelings and concepts, variously described as “emotional” or even “spiritual”, which are not captured by the term “information”. Psychic abundance covers phenomena which cannot be digitized, copied or reproduced like information. These include love, happiness, companionship, peace, joy, tranquillity, beauty, wisdom, and related concepts. These concepts are often associated with a certain kind of abundance. Many references to abundance on the Internet are of this kind. These references clearly express certain human needs that cannot be met with information, energy or material phenomena but require a special human response that, like the rest, also needs to be studied, learned and mastered.
>>

To the bolded/underlined, I would add "trust"

These all involve non-computable value dimensions, yet many of us are pursuing things like "the perfect trust metric" or "a theory of beauty", or "a theory of love" ...

I tend to believe that some value dimensions are not computable, and instead they are to be derived from a basic "knowing" that we have, not a Bayesian/probabilistic judgment (or what's sometimes confusingly referred to as 'gut feeling') but a basic non-computable 'knowing' that we have.

So while Web 2.0 has brought an abundance of "friends" (e.g. in my facebook account) I am surprised, even made mad, by the fact that most people seem to be buying into this false abundance and forgetting about the natural abundance.

If some person listens to music I like on last.fm and I add them as a "friend" are they really a friend? Now what if the algorithm becomes more sophisticated and a machine/agent goes out and makes friends for me, will they be my "friends" ? What if a trust system is developed and a machine/agent goes out and builds me a network of 300 trusted people, can I really "trust" those people?

My point is that technologies such as social networking and trust networks that are supposed to help us tap into the natural abundance of love, beauty, friendships, trust, and related concepts are in fact making us tap into a fake abundance or an abundance of misconceptions

It's just an observation, which could be complementary to what Roberto is asserting about natural abundance and how technology and law are used to circumvent that natural abundance... in this case by giving us fake abundance

[Michel Bauwens]

I have put large excerpts of this important essay, and a follow-up one, at
http://www.p2pfoundation.net/Roberto_Verzola_on_Undermining_vs._Developing_Abundance

The above contain long excerpts of two important texts developing a philosophy, politics and economics related to abundance.

For context, see http://rverzola.wordpress.com/2008/11/09/classifying-managing-abundance/

1. Verzola, Roberto, Undermining Abundance (Counter-Productive Uses of Technology and Law in Nature, Agriculture and the Information Sector)(July 14, 2008). INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY RIGHTS AND ACCESS TO KNOWLEDGE, Gaelle Krikorian and Amy Kapczynski, eds., Zone Books, Forthcoming. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1160044


2. Verzola, Roberto, Studying Abundance. Draft at http://rverzola.files.wordpress.com/2008/11/studying-abundance-1.pdf

[Evolving Trends]

The sun cannot be hidden, suppressed, illegalized or otherwise made scarce.
Instead, this universal source of absolute abundance has been largely ignored intentionally,
it has been argued26 as
energy industries focused on energy
sources easier to privatize and to control, like fossil and nuclear fuels.
>>

That's exactly why tying money creation to solar (and other naturally abundant) energy production is going to change things dramatically.

I would point Robert to the P2P Social Currency proposal on this forum, and specifically the Images Only thread (as it summarizes the concept)