Michel Bauwens Substack: Fourth Generation Civilization

About twenty years ago, Michel Bauwens started the Foundation for P2P Alternatives. A big part of this work was digital curation. Using the main platforms at the time, such as Twitter and Facebook, Michel has been updating an audience daily on ‘all things P2P and the Commons’. At some point in this endeavour, they reached millions of people and accelerating in 2013, he gave on average one hundred lectures per year. But then, ‘common-enemy’ politics seemed to overtake ‘common-humanity’ politics, while at the same time, a heavy censorship and surveillance regime overtook the main platforms, making ‘integrative’, ‘dialogic’ and pluralistic curation a very difficult undertaking, with censorship messages, even for peer-reviewed scientific articles from reputed journals, and active censorship from the bottom-up, engaged in source and tone policing to protect communities from rival information and knowledge. It took him quite some time, but he has finally decided to move his curation to a new forum, but to do it in a more structured fashion. What does he mean? Well, in most social media forums, it is handy to share items ‘atomistically’. That is useful but also comes at the cost of less context and structure. So here, he will do something more like grouped curation, taking a theme, and sharing various items on that theme. He plans to do this daily.

He also has been developing a very active Wiki, which you can find at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net. This wiki has accumulated one billion views over the years, and has a collection of 25,000 articles, documenting various aspects of our current civilizational shift. Thus we cover what we call ‘peer production, peer governance, and peer property’, i.e. the decentralized forms of collaboration that we maintain, form the premises of a ‘contributive economy’, and civilization, based on ‘open infrastructures’ which allow for mutual coordination. If you monitor or search our wiki, you will encounter many new concepts, but all based on real and verifiable practices, which are sometimes called ‘Real Utopias’.

Here is an example of one wiki section, but on a very specific topic, which we call Civilizational Analysis. We have been studying and reading the various macro-historians, such as Oswald Spengler, Arnold Toynbee, and many others like Sorokin and Quigley; the world-systems analysis literature, think Fernand Braudel or Immanuel Wallerstein, and today perhaps Peter Turchin; but also what is now called Big History, and is attempting to find a common evolutionary ground to the evolving world of matter, life, and human culture.

See

So, in this forum, we will also be writing about this topic, and try to fill in, what we believe are the emerging premises of a Fourth Generation civilizational order (following Toynbee’s scheme of 3 prior phases). Our approach will be what is called integrative, i.e. we believe there is potential truth everywhere, and basically, we will attempt to be 1) empirical 2) coherent in the integration of this empirical base, and 3) try to develop the most encompassing integrated narrative of hope. Not a blind hope, mind you, so also expect a lot of attention to the ‘dark side’ of the human experience, and insights from people like Rene Girard for example. We are interested in looking at the past, the present AND the future.

Peer to peer dynamics refer to the possibilities of trans-local coordination of human activity, and the commons to the shared resources that we need to do this effectively. Our historical theory is called the Pulsation of the Commons, and basically what this means is that we recognize historical cycles of various durations - I will share my attempt to integrate these different cycles in a coherent historical narrative that helps us to understand what to expect in our current meta-crisis. Within these cycles, we can recognize ascending and descending phases, and while the ascending phases promote extractive institutions which secure a surplus for the core populations, these processes start failing in descending phases, which then naturally promotes the organization of more local commons, which protect and regenerate local productive forces. But today, mere localization would mean sublinear development, i.e. a huge loss of societal complexity and massive loss of life, so we must aim for ‘superlinearity’, i.e the hyperproductivity that comes from combining relocalized regenerative production, with global and shared knowledge commons, which ensure ‘economies of scope’. All these concepts, such as ‘Cosmo-Localism’ and “Magisteria of the Commons’, will be explained in due time if you read this substack.

If you are familiar with Gramsci’s notion of the organic intellectual, i.e. intellectual work that is not beholden to the ruling strata that fund this type of work, but is connected to real historical forces, which may be considered ‘emancipatory’, then the attempt here is to be part of a collective organic intellectuality, connected to the emergence of the commons.

We believe that, even though we recognize the legitimacy of nations and nation-states and expect a continued and actually revived role for them, that the future of the world lies in cosmo-local alliances. In short, as trans-national finance capital dominates the nation-state political and social forces, making national change inadequate, we need to work trans-locally and trans-nationally, working to overcome the commons gap, i.e. we need, next to the failing inter-state system and the over-extracting forces of rentier speculative finances, inter-civic commons institutions that are themselves ‘productive’. So think relocalized manufacturing, the mutualization of local provisioning systems to protect them from exhaustion, and mutual trans-local agreements.

So open source, urban commons, and the infrastructures developed by crypto-nomadic coders are seen as vital to create new alliances between the Somewheres, and the Everywheres.

Let me refer to two major bibliographic recommendations, if you want to know ‘where we are coming from’:

  • This is a reading list on the commons, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/What_You_Should_Read_To_Understand_the_Commons

  • And this is a reading list on peer to peer: https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sources_of_P2P_Theory

Here you will find my previous editorial activity, which, I have to warn you, is somewhat controversial, as I am unequivocally opposed to what is called ‘common-enemy’ politics, and favor broad alliances around constructive common goals, known as ‘common-humanity’ politics.

I am currently writing a book on Mutual Coordination Economics, and I will share insights on this topic. Here is the material I am using as documentation in that project:

  • https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Mutual_Coordination

For those that read less but like to watch videos, please see below, the extracted course material outlines my views on technology, in video format.

SO IF ANYTHING HERE ELICITS YOUR CURIOSITY, PLEASE SUBSCRIBE, and BECOME A FOUNDING MEMBER. I will find ways to return the favor to foundational members, before opening to regular subscriptions

Professionally, I am a contractor with the Civilizational Research Institute, the org co-founded by Daniel Schmachtenberger et al. and research coordinator for the Global Chinese Commons, a network nation of crypto-nomads dedicated to the production of commons goods for distributed infrastructures and to encourage the participation of Chinese coders to the global public good.

Thank you for reading Michel’s Substack. This post is public so feel free to share it!

Publicatie van partnerKoen Wynantscommons, P2P