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Desktop Regulatory State

Kevin Carson book, 2016. The Desktop Regulatory State: The Countervailing Power of Individuals and Networks

https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/kevin-a-carson-the-desktop-regulatory-state

Table of Contents

Preface

    1. The Stigmergic Revolution
  • I. Reduced Capital Outlays
  • II. Distributed Infrastructure and Ephemeralization
  • III. Distributed Infrastructure and Scalability
  • IV. Network Organization
  • V. Stigmergy
  1. Networks vs. Hierarchies
  • I. The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies
  • II. Hierarchies vs. Networks
  • III. Networks vs. Hierarchies
  • IV. Systems Disruption
  1. Networks vs. Hierarchies: The EndGame
  • I. The Transition from Hierarchies to Networks
  • II. The Question of Repression
  • III. The Question of Collapse
  • Conclusion
  1. The Desktop Revolution in Regulation
  • I. The Regulatory State: Myth and Reality
  • II. Individual Superempowerment
  • III. The “Long Tail” in Regulation
  • IV. Networked Resistance as an Example of Distributed Infrastructure
  • V. Informational Warfare (or Open Mouth Sabotage)
  • VI. A Narrowcast Model of Open Mouth Sabotage
  • VII. Attempts to Suppress or Counter Open Mouth Sabotage
  • VIII. Who Regulates the Regulators?
  • IX. Networked, Distributed Successors to the State: Saint-Simon, Proudhon and “the Administration of Things”
  • X. Monitory Democracy
  • XI. “Open Everything”
  • XI. Panarchy
  • XII. Collective Contract
  • XIII. Heather Marsh’s “Proposal for Governance”
  • XIV. Michel Bauwens’s Partner State
  1. Basic Infrastructures: Networked Economies and Platform
  1. Basic Infrastructures: Money
  • I. What Money’s For and What It Isn’t
  • II. The Adoption of Networked Money Systems
  • III. Examples of Networked Money Systems
  • Conclusion
  1. Basic Infrastructures: Education and Credentialing
  • Introduction: Whom Do Present-Day Schools Really Serve?
  • I. Alternative Models
  • II. Potential Building Blocks for an Open Alternative
  • III. Open Course Materials
  • IV. Open Textbooks.
  • V. Open Learning Platforms
  • VI. Credentialing
  • Conclusion
  1. The Assurance Commons
  • I. Introduction
  • II. Legibility: Vertical and Horizontal
  • III. Networked Certification, Reputational and Verification Mechanisms.
  • IV. Commons-Based Governance and Vernacular Law
  1. The Open Source Labor Board
  • I. Historic Models
  • II. Networked Labor Struggle
  • III. Open Mouth Sabotage
  • IV. Networked Labor Platforms
  • V. Examples of Networked Labor Struggle in Recent Years
  1. Open Source Civil Liberties Enforcement
  • I. Protection Against Non-State Civil Rights Violations
  • II. When the State IS the Civil Liberties Violator
  • III. Circumventing the Law
  • IV. Circumvention: Privacy vs. Surveillance
  • V. Exposure, Embarrassment and Shifting the Terms of Debate
  • VI. Networked Activism and the Growth of Civil Society
  1. Open Source Fourth Estate
  1. Open Source National Security
  • I. The State as Cause of the Problem: Blowback
  • II. Meta-Organization
  • III. Active Defense, Counter-Terrorism, and Other Security Against Attack
  • IV. Passive Defense
  • V. The Stateless Society as the Ultimate in Passive Defense
  • VI. Disaster Relief

Appendix. Case Study in Networked Resistance: From Wikileaks to Occupy—and Beyond

Bibliography

Excerpts

5. Basic Infrastructures: Networked Economies and Platform*

When it comes to networked economies, it seems to be “steam engine time.”

The building blocks were the digital revolution and the open Web of the 1990s.

A common feature of all the networked infrastructures discussed in this chapter is that they follow a module-platform architecture. As a result they are scalable without limit, with any number of local communities or organizations being able to connect to them on a stigmergic basis.

one of the advantages of the module-platform architecture is that it makes adoption feasible on a granular basis without any need for society as a whole to reach some “tipping point.” It also achieves economies of scope—and minimizes unit costs of infrastructure—by maximizing shared use of the same infrastructure.

The module-platform architecture has a venerable history. The Rule of St. Benedict, for example, amounted to a protocol.

While at Monte Cassino, he writes the Rule as a guide to people wishing to live together in a monastery.... Most importantly, the Rule does not specify a set of goals and activities to reach them

following the Rule can result in many outcomes, all beneficial from the point of view of Benedict and his crew. Most of them could not possibly have been foreseen by Benedict himself. (generative)

Consistently with the protocol nature of the Rule (and, one suspects, with his own mindset as a protocol hacker), Benedict never actually founded an order. Benedictines are not an order in a strict sense; each monastery is a sovereign institution, with no hierarchy among them.

Instead of going for Vatican politics, Benedict appears to have focused on running things at home in Monte Cassino and distributing copies of the Rule to whoever wanted one. As a result, more and more people adopted the Rule for their own monastery projects

I. Bruce Sterling: ISLANDS IN THE NET

The Net” in Islands is much closer to an extrapolation from older visions of the “Information Superhighway” than to the post-Tim Berners-Lee World Wide Web.

Sterling’s transnationals did, however, to some extent foreshadow the kinds of platforms later envisioned by David de Ugarte (phyles), Daniel Suarez (the Darknet/D-space), and John Robb (Economies as a Software Service)—see below.

The protagonists’ transnational, for instance—Rhizome—is a worker cooperative with an official philosophy of self-management. Its “bottom line is ludic joy rather than profit,” and it has “replaced ‘labour,’ the humiliating specter of ‘forced production,’ with a series of varied, playlike pastimes

A “large number” of its associates do no paid work at all, but participate in the internal non-money economy of Rhizome or are taken care of as dependents

II. Phyles: Neal Stephenson

The term “phyles,” as far as I know, itself comes from Neal Stephenson’s novel The Diamond Age. The book is set in a fictional world where encrypted Internet commerce destroyed most of the tax base of conventional territorial states,[433] most states became hollowed out or collapsed altogether and the world shifted instead (after a chaotic Interregnum) to organization based on localized city-states, and on transnational distributed networks (the phyles).

Most phyles were national or ethnic

and others were “synthetic” (of which the largest and most important was the First Distributed Republic, a hacker phyle that created and maintained nodes for the global CryptNet).

The larger phyles commonly maintained territorial enclaves in major cities around the world, much as Venetian merchant gilds rented enclaves for the habitation of their merchants in major cities on the Mediterranean coast

Although the novel is vague on the nature of the support platforms provided by the phyles, it’s clear from the specific case of the neo-Victorian phyle that it supports an ecosystem of member business enterprises.

III. Phyles: Las Indias and David de Ugarte

In his series of books culminating in Phyles, David de Ugarte developed the phyle concept as a model for real-world organization, in an era of declining states and corporations and rising networks

networked merchant organizations and guilds in the Middle Ages (he characterizes his phyle model as “neoVenetian”).

De Ugarte’s model replicates the features of the Venetians while incorporating the benefits of digital technology and network organization as force multipliers. As he describes the process of their development, first the network replaces centralized systems and then communities arise on the backbone of the network. Finally, some communities evolve into phyles

Community precedes and has always priority over business, so economic decision making processes never can impose its results over the scope of community plurarchy

The] phyle itself could be consensually defined as a networked, distributed, small sized, hacker ethic empowered, Internet born organism with high productivity and great resilience [which] has its own universe of myths, narratives and tools

Las Indias, as described by the members of that phyle, is a case in point

We think cooperatives and economic democracy (a rent-free market society), hand in hand with a liberated commons as the alternative to capitalism, can be made possible through distributed networks.[436

The main players in these communities belong to two generations that have grown up with Himanen’s hacker ethic: the network logic of abundance and the work ethic of free software are the glue that binds the blogosphere. The result: conversational communities, identitarian, transnational nonhierarchical tribes, based on the powerful incentive that is recognition.

The Las Indias cooperative arose from the cyberpunk milieu in Europe, centered in Berlin, and more particularly Spanish circles

With the years it developed into an ezine and a civil rights’ cyberactivist group

during the late 90s it became strongly influenced by Juan Urrutia’s “Economics of Abundance” theory. Very soon, we linked “abundance” with the idea of empowerment in distributed networks.

new P2P relationships and an ever-growing diversity. We cyberpunks recognized in this essay the basics of of the new economic theory we needed to be able to “export” the new freedoms we were experiencing on the network to new parts of life. That was when we started calling the Internet “the Electronic Indies.”

But in 2002 three of us [David de Ugarte, Natalia Fernandez, Juan Urrutia[436]] founded Las Indias Society, a consultancy firm focused on innovation and networks

After the cyberpunk dissolution in 2007, the “Montevideo Declaration” openly stated that our objective will be to construct a “phyle,” a transnational economic democracy, in order to ensure the autonomy of our community and it members

Their new banners: economic democracy, resilience, and transnationality. They changed names: now they are known as “Indianos,” the Spanish word for the emigrant who would return to his home village after making his fortune in the Americas. Only that the Indianos’ America has been the Internet, and their business has spread from consultancy to sustainable production or local development

The most urgent short term objective was to find clients. But we didn’t have money to buy ads

We looked online for business blogs all over the world .... and we didn’t find a single one. There was no model to follow. We began to write, and on the seventh of October, 2002, el Correo de las Indias [the Indies Mail] was born, with Bitácora de las Indias [Log of the Indies] in the masthead. It was the first business blog in the world, and later would also be the first whose posts, thanks to a well-known publisher, would be published as a book. The blog was the way we found our clients, but, more importantly over time, the current indianos.

we would not have—and still don’t have—savings, properties, or personal clients. The cooperative is our community savings and the only owner of all that we enjoy

economically, we’re closer to a kibbutz than to the big cooperatives at Mondragon.[

finally we arrived to the idea of building our own economical structure in order to give safety to our way of living and to the liberty we always loved but we only lived in the Internet

The only possible security—we thought—is to have a distributed environment and distributed income sources in the same way Internet’s safety is based in it’s distributed architecture. Las Indias Cooperative Group is the materialization of this project*

The Las Indias phyle is “a transnational community of people that guarantee their autonomy and freedom through companies organized by the principle of the economic democracy around Las Indias Cooperative Group”

two primary physical bases in Madrid and Montevideo (Uruguay)

Jose F. Alcantara: Madrid is where it all began, even though most of us are not from Madrid. Montevideo symbolizes our will of living transnationally, our commitment to achieve that and the very first touchable fact that we are on the right way

Our community owns the companies, not the other way.” And de Ugarte adds that the community, the Las Indias phyle, is “the owner of our coops.”

it is not just a secondary network built on member cooperatives as primary units; the cooperative enterprises bear the same intimate relationship to the phyle that their counterparts do in the Mondragon system or Kibbutzim

The structure of the Indiano phyle is made up of

The Assembly of the Indianos. Made up of all the Indianos

it decides in common what part of the available surplus from the Indianos’ work will be dedicated to the common funds, and gives direction about its management to the specific working groups or projects charged with its use, evaluating their results and tutoring their performance

The working groups. The Indianos develop their economic activity in different productive projects born of their initiative

it’s not the projects themselves that sustain the common structure, but rather their working groups, when they are formed by Indianos

The structural projects. In spite of the above, we Indianos have created projects with different forms—cooperatives, associations, societies—formed exclusively by us and oriented towards the development of specific functions to bring about a common system of entrepreneurship, training, well-being, and support for the cohesion of our surroundings

The individual working groups and their projects—cooperatives, etc.—do have some obligations to the phyle. They share a portion of their surplus with the phyle

In the My Ninja Please interview, de Ugarte mentioned Sterling’s Islands in the Net as prefiguring the phyle organization

The internal cultural milieu of the phyle is propagated by a variety of online platforms, like aggregated member blogs

Posts are written in individual, personal blogs. If one day you decide to go, you take what you gave with you (as it happens with cooperatives capital).

There is interaction, truly interaction of everyone, from personal independence, reflecting the permanent discussion

Maria Rodriguez: El Correo de las Indias is the newspaper of our world, the world of las Indias

Natalia Fernandez: El Correo de las Indias is a small sample of we are and we do. In El Correo we share our interests, theoretical reflections and deliberations

The internal governance of the economic structure is based on economic democracy. Because the phyle collectively confronts genuine shortage situations, members must decide between options. The best way to deal with such scarcity is, externally, in an open market (“without dependence on donors or subsidies”), and internally making decisions democratically as to the most efficient way to allocate limited resources. As described by de Ugarte, economic democracy is strongly reminiscent of the “free market anticapitalism” I’ve advocated in much of my writing

We have to build it by ourselves, and demand the state to remove the obstacles (as IP, contracts for big politically connected corporations, etc.) that protects privileged groups’ rents from competition in the market.

The phyle is both a safety net and a safe haven, giving members a base—a “Digital Zion”—from which to operate:

The happiness and welfare of each of us is above the economic benefit. This allows us to decline those well-paid jobs that do not satisfy us and this also allows us to build together a free and full life

The lifestyle combines a much lower material footprint and cost of living with a high quality of life, largely through ephemeralization and informalization and the sharing of capital goods. That means, in particular, a shift toward low-rent housing and a quality of life based mainly on immaterial goods. A large share of the things they consider indispensible for a high quality of life are free, abundant, nonrival goods.

None of us has a car or has bought a house.

The hacker ethic, as described by Rodriguez, sounds much like the ludic ethos attributed to Bruce Sterling’s fictional Rizome network in Islands in the Net.

Las Indias proves it is possible “to develop knowledge, cultural goods and free skills liberating all our works” through open licenses

The internal democracy of the phyle is based on principles of distributed intelligence and deliberation.

Deliberation means long term discussion without the urgency of taking a decision

If there’s a way of improving the intelligence we all own as single persons, it is not to aggregate them as they used to tell us on the wisdom of crowds

something that really makes a difference is the intelligence you give birth when different people put their efforts on a distributed way.

The key word would be “distributed” instead of collective. Connect all nodes, eliminate the hierarchy and you’ll be allowing that all knowledge to flow through the members of the network

Las Indias was not the only virtual tribe to emerge in the same period, as de Ugarte points out. “In these very same years,”

the Murides, the old pacifist Sufis from Senegal, went from having a nationalist discourse and growing peanuts to constituting a community trade network with two million members that spreads from South Africa to Italy.*

Phyles are “order attractors” in a domain which states cannot reach conceptually and in areas that states increasingly leave in the dark: phyles invest in social cohesion, sometimes even creating infrastructures, providing grants and training, and having their own NGOs.

A phyle’s investment portfolio may range from renewable energies to PMCs, from free software initiatives to credit cooperatives. Their bet is based on two ideas. First: transnational is more powerful than international. Second: in a global market the community is more resilient than the “classic” capitalist company.

In fact the phenomenon seems to be the wave of the future, given the growing economic importance of ethnic diasporas around the world coupled with the increasing availability of network communications technology

Consider the difference between China and the Chinese people

Diasporas have been a part of the world for millennia

thanks to cheap flights and communications, people can now stay in touch with the places they came from

diaspora networks have three lucrative virtues. First, they speed the flow of information across borders: a Chinese businessman in South Africa who sees a demand for plastic vuvuzelas will quickly inform his cousin who runs a factory in China

Second, they foster trust

Third, and most important, diasporas create connections that help people with good ideas collaborate with each other, both within and across ethnicities.

In countries where the rule of law is uncertain—which includes most emerging markets—it is hard to do business with strangers

Diaspora ties help businesses as well as scientists to collaborate. What may be the world’s cheapest fridge was conceived from a marriage of ideas generated by Indians in India and Indians overseas

the Internet has consequences as it removes the barrier to entry for many markets. Consequently and unexpectedly, you may find yourself having access to new markets originated around the Internet, but also to some old markets whose access were forbidden in the past due to many reasons (need of intensive capitalization, oligopolies that were restricting the free competence). But the emergence of markets with a virtual infinite competition also removes the rents: the benefits that came from having a control over a market with a restricted competence. Under this circumstances, innovation and development are the only way of improving benefits. But as they provide extra benefits only for a short period of time, the need of internalization of these processes, so that continuously we have some new development or some brand new innovative strategy, are key to the survival of any community.

This September, we’ll found two new businesses in Bilbao called Gaman and Fondaki. Gaman will make free software. Fondaki will be the first Public Intelligence business in Europe. Both will create jobs—based on a new values system, with products designed to strengthen the fabric of small businesses—for a dozen people, in the middle of the most important crisis

the evolution of the transition towards a P2P mode of production has been accompanied by the appearance of new, deterritorialized, transnational, and even nomadic, communities.

A person is only free if [he] owns the foundations [of] his own livelihood, when he has no obligation to pay homage to anyone and can leave his network effectively if he understands that no longer serves the needs of their own happiness, happiness that only himself can judge.

Another useful fictional illustration, alongside Stephenson’s—and perhaps more relevant to de Ugarte’s neo-Venetian model—is the starfaring human subspecies in Poul Anderson’s “Kith” series, genetically and culturally isolated by time dilation from the rest of the human race

De Ugarte has referred directly to John Robb and to Suarez’s Darknet (see below) as fellow travelers with his phyle movement. Interestingly, the Las Indias cooperative uses the Freenet as an internal communications and webhosting platform, and de Ugarte recommends it as a primitive version of the Darknet envisioned in Suarez’s work

Freenet “is still far from the darknet described in FreedomTM, accessible through augmented reality goggles.” Local Freenets are a lot like the Web of the mid-90s, when updating a website took time, searches were slow, and blogs (or flogs—Freenet blogs) had to be written without ready-made software like Wordpress and Blogger

IV. Bruce Sterling: THE CARYATIDS

The Caryatids is set in the world of the 2060s, where most nation-states have collapsed from the ecological catastrophes—desertification, droughts, crop failures, rising sea levels, monster storms, and multi-million refugee Volkswanderungs as entire countries became uninhabitable—of the previous decades.[447

The world is dominated by two networked global civil societies, the Dispensation and the Acquis. The two civil societies coexist uneasily, engaging in constant worldwide competition

Both have ideologies strongly centered on sustainable technology. The Acquis is largely green, open-source and p2p in orientation. The Dispensation is commercial and proprietary, oriented toward what we would call the Progressive/Green/Cognitive Capitalism of Bill Gates, Bono and Warren Buffett.

The Acquis, and in particular its experimental reclamation project on the Adriatic island of Mljet, is most relevant to our consideration here of networked platforms. The Acquis team there is linked by the “sensorweb,” a neural network, with brain-computer interfaces. Individuals can maintain constant realtime communications with the rest of the team

V. Daniel Suarez

In the fictional world of Daniel Suarez’s novels Daemon and Freedom(TM), local mixed-use economies (holons) are built on common Darknet platforms; in Suarez’s terminology, the holons are local nodes in the Darknet economy

an augmented reality or virtual dimension called “D-Space,” which is “overlaid on the GPS grid.” D-Space is built from the mapping architectures of massively multiplayer online role-playing games (MMORPGs), but tied to to the physical world as an overlay via GPS coordinates and to physical objects via RFID chips.

If d-space is overlaid on the physical world, rather than constituting a separate “cyberspace” dissociated from the physical world, then it reinforces physical community and becomes a tool for facilitating it. Such a platform promotes relocalization, and builds social capital

VI. John Robb: Economies as a Social Software Service

For some time, John Robb has written about Resilient Communities— generally along the same conceptual lines as Transition Towns or Global Villages—as an emergent form of social organization to fill the void left by the collapse of the centralized state and large corporation.

As services and security begin to fade, local sources of order will emerge to fill the void

Parallel with this line of thought, he has also been exploring the idea of networked platforms as a support base for his resilient communities. In his 2006 book Brave New War, he discussed the importance of platforms as a vehicle for decentralization

In a couple of blog posts in December 2009-January 2010, he developed this theme, apparently under the influence primarily of Suarez, but in language that also sounded very much like de Ugarte’s.

Software can be built that automates the rules by which any social and economic system operate. Nearly any social construct imaginable can be automated (at least on a small scale).

It is also constructed in a way that makes it opaque to outside observation and impervious to non-members or intrusion

This system, both economic and social, runs both in parallel and in conjunction with the global economy.... It is self-referencing, autonomous, and willing to defend its own interests

Which social, political and economic system can BOTH protect you from the excesses of an uncontrollable/turbulent global system AND advance your quality of life? One thing is increasingly clear: hollow nation-states aren’t the answer....*

Robb put increasing stress on the inadequacy of isolated efforts at building Resilient Communities, and the consequent need for networked organization as a base of support

The nationstate is now adrift, unable to orient its decision making cycles.
As a result, the nation-state has been largely co-opted by increasingly powerful non-state entities—from parasitical banks that sit astride core functions of the global system.... to transnational gangs that puncture borders with drugs and other smuggled goods—and that corruption is spreading

Attempts to bootstrap resilient communities are definitely possible. However, isolated and small, I fear these efforts will either result in a reduction in the quality of life for its participants or quickly fall prey to parasites/predators

The dominant solution to all of these pitfalls, dangers, and threats is to team up. Create a virtual tribe that helps communities become resilient—by financing, protecting, and accelerating them

What emerged from Robb’s rumination on network organization, later in the year, was the concept of “complete economies and social structures delivered as software service”—or “Economies as a Software Service.” (2010-11-09) Robb Intentional Economy As Service

A plethora of new economic systems within which you can make a living (all you need to do is opt-in to the one that makes sense to you).

The ability to build and experiment with new rules that both fix the increasingly dire problems with the current dominant economic system while providing new capabilities and avenues for success (new currencies, new incentive structures, new forms of status, etc.).

If N-1 strategies (theft, cheating, fraud, etc.) only yield small amounts and continued association is very beneficial, the sanctions used to ensure people don’t act badly are variations of expulsion

One of the complications of building networked economy platforms in the period of the state’s decline is that the state will attempt, at least sporadically and haphazardly, to suppress such efforts

The Freedom Engineering blog posted a detailed article on how to police an internal marketplace while maintaining secrecy:

What people want to know about a stranger before they engage in a volitional exchange of value is .... (1) how many volitional exchanges of value this stranger has completed before and (2) were some of these exchanges carried out with someone that they already know and trust?*

Robb is optimistic about the rate of adoption of networked platforms in the transition period

VII. Filé Aesir

Filé Aesir is a phyle consciously patterned on the Las Indias model. It was formulated as an explicit project in late 2012

VIII. Venture Communes

Dmytri Kleiner, the founder of the Venture Communist project, saw it as a support platform much like phyles, but one in which the land and capital used by individual worker-managed cooperatives was communally owned by everyone in the larger community.

Even within the cooperative movement, which I’ve always admired and held up as an example, it’s clear that the distribution of productive assets is also unequal. The same with other kinds of production; for example, if you look at the social power of IT workers versus agricultural workers, it becomes very clear that the social power of a collective of IT workers is much stronger than the social power of a collective agricultural workers

In response to a question from Michel Bauwens in the same interview, Kleiner affirmed that the sharing of rent by all members of the commune functioned as a sort of basic income

IX. Medieval Guilds as Predecessors of the Phyle

Among the services which the guilds performed for their members—who named each other as “brothers and sisters” under the terms of their charters—were relief of the destitute, paying the compensation for members convicted of a crime to prevent the financial ruin of them and their families, and arbitration of disputes between practitioners of a craft

The town communes frequently acted as bulk buyers of commodities like grain and salt, using their bargaining power to negotiate prices near cost from the foreign merchants and then distribute them among the households.[467] The guilds, likewise, bought raw materials in bulk for their members, and marketed their products.[

X. Transition Towns and Global Villages

In 2006 Rob Hopkins, recently arrived from Ireland, cofounded the first Transition Town initiative in the small English town of Totnes with some friends. As of 2012 the movement had grown to 500 “official” Transition Town initiatives in more than 38 countries, with several thousand more in the works.

Global Villages. As Franz Nahrada explains Global Villages (in the context of a GIVE initiative to fund expansion of the project:

Rather than the further growth of already unliveable cities, we foresee the emergence of more and more inside-looking communities, who—with the help of decentralizing technologies—build their own self-sustaining microcosms

XI. Hub Culture

Hub Culture—“a network with primary bases in the world’s big urban hubs, including London, New York and San Francisco, Geneva, Bermuda, Singapore and Hong Kong,” which has representatives in ‘“over 130 major cities around the world”

is a useful illustration of the phyle model

Hub Culture is a global collaboration network founded in 2002. Over 25,000 global urban influentials are connected, giving the network far reaching ability to build worth through leveraged collaboration.

Hub Culture uses collaboration technology to drive high value deals. Tools include Groups with file sharing and wikis, and Knowledge Brokerage for rapid dealmaking. These tools support the Hub Culture Pavilions, real, low-carbon places designed for meetings and connections....

It all began in 2002 with the publication of the book Hub Culture: The Next Wave of Urban Consumers, one of the first explorations of globalized social communities.

the company released Ven, first available in Facebook. Today Ven is priced in real time against the markets, with a combination of currencies, commodities and carbon futures making up the value of Ven. Millions of units are in circulation as the world’s first knowledge currency, perfect for micropayments, favours and valuing knowledge. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hub_Culture

XII. Networked Labor Organizations and Guilds as Examples of Phyles

A number of labor organizers, advocates and historians have advocated a return to the guild model of the labor union in situations where membership through a workplace-based local is impractical: freelance workers, professionals and tradesmen in occupations with project- or task-based employment rather than jobs with a single employer, and members of the so-called “precariat.”

The line between labor unions in the nineteenth century, and the kinds of friendly societies and mutuals described by writers like E.P. Thompson and Pyotr Kropotkin, is so blurry as to be almost nonexistent

The labor movement grew naturally into a vast interwoven network of local communities throughout the country, exercising a growing influence in their respective areas.... They created a network of cooperative institutions of all kinds: schools, summer camps for children and adults, homes for the aged, health and cultural centers, insurance plans, technical education, housing, credit associations, et cetera*

sex workers in Vancouver, BC, who

set up social protection funds, for emergencies and for scholarships for children of dead or sick workers; they developed a group medical plan, drew up occupational safety guidelines, provided an information service for potential entrants to the profession, and developed courses to teach ‘life skills*

As much as 30 percent of the base pay of Screen Actors Guild members goes to the guild’s benefits fund. In return, members get full health benefits (even in years when they have no work), generous pensions, and professional development programs.

Hoyt Wheeler writes:

A further advantage of the craft form of organization is its ability to provide a stream of trained, competent workers to employers. In the building trades, and in some other fields as well, individual employers have no incentive to train workers who may soon move on to work for someone else*

Most attempts at worker-organized manufacturing, after the rise of the factory system, failed on account of the capital outlays required. The Knights of Labor, in the 1880s, undertook a large-scale effort at organizing worker cooperatives

The defeat of the Knights of Labor cooperatives, resulting from the high capitalization requirements for production, is a useful contrast not only to the artisan production of earlier worker co-ops, but to the potential for small-scale production today

XIII. Virtual States as Phyles: Hamas, Etc.

John Robb argues that virtual states like Hamas sometimes outcompete hollowed-out conventional states in providing services to subject populations.

Since its founding in 1987, Hamas has proven to be a well run counterweight to Yassar Arafat’s corrupt Palestinian National Authority.... Hamas runs the following services.... : An extensive education network.... Distribution of food to the poor

May’s dispute between the Lebanese government and Hezbollah is an interesting example of the contest between hollow states and virtual states over legitimacy and sovereignty. As in most conflicts between gutted nation-states and aggressive virtual states, Hezbollah’s organic legitimacy trumped the state’s in the contest (an interesting contrast between voluntary affiliation and default affiliation by geography). The fighting was over in six hours

XIV. Eugene Holland: Nomad Citizenship

Eugene Holland proposes “nomad citizenship” as a way of deterritorializing citizenship and organizing citizenship functions outside the state.

Besides deterritorialization, Holland’s nomad citizenship—like the phyle—is associated with networks and virtual community.

Can virtual communities and anonymous trading networks institute forms of distributed decision making and collective intelligence, establishing and occupying a new erth on the self-organizing plane of a world market free from capitalism’s infinite debt?*

it is paired with two other concepts: “free market communism” and “the slowmotion general strike.”

Holland, referring to Walter Benjamin’s analysis of the general strike, treats it as a means of seceding from the system rather than changing it.

In the nomad citizenship model, the form of networked organization resembles David Graeber’s anarchist concept of “horizontalism,”

XV. Producism/Producia

Producism is an evolutionary economic model that has the goal to help everyone become an impactful social entrepreneur to eventually self-actualize. (Theory)
Producia is a fun, barter-based marketplace by and for social entrepreneurs. It’s a Marketplace, Social Network, and Startup Incubator all-in-one. (Practice

Money becomes an accounting unit aka Barter Dollars Enterprise becomes a for-purpose company Education becomes Producer-focused Social Networking becomes driven by epic meaning[

XVI. Emergent Cities

Seb Pacquet’s idea of “Emergent Cities” is another good example of a deterritorialized network acting as a support platform for participants

Is it a school? Is it a business? Is it a bank? A venture capital fund? An economy? Is it a lab? An incubator? Is it a creative space? Is it a living space? A community? A network? It is all of those at the same time....*

XVII. The Incubator Function

One function of the phyle that receives comparatively less attention—De Ugarte gives it more attention than anyone else—is the incubation function of a networked economic platform. The resilient community, as a local component plugged into the networked platform, needs a way to generate the formation of new local enterprises

This function is vital, because each new enterprise increases the autonomy and resilience of the local economy through what Jane Jacobs called “import substitution,” and contributes to the “economies of scope” of the whole system

The networked economic platform must actively foster the formation of enterprises by its members.

Impact Hub. The Impact Hub network[506] began in 2005 with its first Hub in London, and has (as of November 2015) Impact Hubs in 73 cities around the world, and plans underway to open them in twenty more; it has 11,000 members in 49 countries.

Unmonastery, an offshoot of the EdgeRyders group in Europe, is sort of midway between the networked economic platform and the local business incubator

An unMonastery.... brings together a group of specifically selected thinkers, hackers, and makers to serve the greater good of the surrounding community

The first unMonastery pilot project has been established in the town of Matera, Italy

XVIII. Mix & Match

On top of all the previous models of networked platforms, and particularly those supporting local communities on a modular basis, we can also throw in one more possibility: networked organizations forming partnerships with other networks, and local communities forming partnerships with a number of networked support platforms

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