Getting Ready for the Five Thousand Year Shift in Value Regime

An overview of signposts towards the civilizational shift in the direction of <contribution-based>, <thermodynamically informed> <mutual coordination> economics

In today’s article I want to review ‘signposts’ in terms of infrastructural innovation that permits a switch from the civilizational model of market-state coordination of value, towards a new regime that revolves around a core of mutual coordination technologies. 

The crucial question we are trying to answer is this one: does humanity have the tools to produce for its own needs, in harmony with non-humans and within the limits of planetary availability? In short: can we survive and thrive without unduly harming our natural environment, of which we are a part and are interdependent with ?

After an introduction, we present five crucial projects outlining the potential reality of this shift in terms of available technical tools.

Recapitulating the framing of our historical shift

Let me first recall the framing that gives sense to this approach:

Our planet was at first a biologically unstable entity, but it eventually evolved into a mature earth system that keeps itself in a complex balance that makes the evolution of life possible. This allowed the emergence of an intelligent species that created, at first, and until today, an immature technosphere, that is not capable of a long term balanced relationship with the biosphere that natures it. Hence the need to shift to a mature technosphere, that can live in a balanced way, for many thousands if not millions of years, with the biosphere. This is the huge task at which threshold we now stand as a human species.

This shift is dependent on the way we organize our exchanges with the non-human world, i.e. living species and matter-energy. This happens in a context in which we receive energy from the universe, but no new matter, and in which we are codependent with many if not all other living species.

Until more or less five thousand years ago (new archeology is finding earlier potential dates for this shift), humanity organized its exchanges with the natural world largely through hunter-gathering, where the value practices were mostly commoning, exchanging with a holistic entity, i.e. a shared resource that was necessary or beneficial to everyone, and gifting, i.e. creating a social regime based on mutual gifting which created mutual dependencies. This integrating modality eventually transformed, after a shift towards craft-agrarian practices, and morphed into the civilizational model, based on the new institutions of state and market, which allowed territorial scaling and social control much beyond the capacity of the tribal hunter-gathering modality, and much higher population numbers and productivity.

Markets and states allowed for the scaling of human society to imperial and nation-state models, but they were and are also essentially extractive institutions, which, in relation to natural cycles, also exhausted their natural environments, leading to an unending cycle of rise and fall of nations and empires. This exhaustion today has reached planetary levels, leading to a meta-crisis of our civilization.

But crucially, and although fundamentally weakened in a capitalistic world economy, humanity has always kept alive the counter-institution of the commons, and the attendant practice of commoning. This is what we call the pulsation of the commons. When market and states institutions start weakening and eventually failing, local communities revive local practices of mutualization, to heal the land, lower their thermo-dynamic usage of natural resources, and manage the land and resources in such a way that it can survive for generations.

The situation today however, is more complex, making a shift towards commoning more complex. This is because we have reached a level of planetarity and technological complexity that requires keeping major parts of the civilizational model alive. To give just one example: our nuclear reactors cannot just be switched off, they require long-term management and care, and we have many billions of people to feed. Hence, the current shift is not a shift backwards to ‘pre-civilizational’ models, but one to post-civilizational models. With post-civilizational we do not explicitly mean a model that abolishes the civilizational model completely but one that transcends and includes major features of it, while also fundamentally transforming the logic of this next emergent state of humanity. I also want to stress there is nothing automatic in that transformation, and even if it will eventually happen and be successful, it could very well only emerge after a new transitional dark age.

Documenting this shift is what the work of the P2P Foundation is about, and there is a lot of good news on that front (in the context of a lot of negative evolutions as well). Before we give examples of this, we have to explain the importance of the recent technological revolutions which point to that shift.

The most important one is the invention of digital networks, which allow the scaling of the coordination of human labor, outside of the hegemony of markets and states, at global scale. Shared knowledge, code and design are now a technical reality, combining the capacity to coordinate in open ecosystems that combine peer to peer human dynamics, with shared digital commons. Then, in a more recent development, a first socially sovereign currency was created, that also created a universal ledger or accounting system, allowing for global transactions through peer to peer and commons-based coordination. The capacity has been created to pay for human labor in these open global economic networks, and new ‘fourth sector’ forms of organization and institutions have been created, that can integrate market forms, public authorities, non-profit activities but crucially also, massive amounts of self-coordinated contributory work (DAO’s). These networks are capable of financing their own self-infrastructuring of common infrastructure, taxing themselves to fund their own ‘public goods’, outside of the state nexus, which was previously needed for public infrastructure and collective investments, which competing market forces never managed to do. Furthermore, they do this through anti-oligarchic funding and voting protocols, using commons-based governance mechanisms of alignment between the various stakeholders. Of course, this new infrastructure of global mutual coordination is not fully mature, but it is evolving rapidly. So do not read this as a claim that these infrastructures are fully ready, and non-problematic, but as a claim that enough of these seed forms has been developed to make emergent realities of mutual coordination much more possible. In fact, following the framework laid out by Kojin Karatani in his ‘Structures of World History’, we claim that the new modalities of mutual coordination for the first time are scaling the capacities of commoning (and presumably, ‘gifting’) to the level where they could potentially replace market-state forms of exchange and coordination. The practicalities of this transformation depend on the capacity for ‘functional equivalence’. To what degree can market and state forms be replaced by either these commons-centric integrating structures, or by commoning practices ? In the meantime, we need to look out for at least transitional phenomena which create new hybrid forms in which market, public and commons functions are cooperating and integrated in new ways.

The aim of the rest of the article is to document real projects that show that many pieces of the puzzle of the next transition are evolving at a substantial pace.

Before I move on to the examples, let me stress that there were of course many shifts in value regime within the market-state nexus, but what is now on the agenda is a shift to a meta-infrastructure, that globally scales communing and gifting, while ‘transcending and including’ the civilizational achievements of markets and states. We will be talking about a higher order integration.

Tools for the Economy and Society of Mutual Coordination

So the shift I am proposing, and believe to be actually happening through seed forms is an economy in which economic agents can more readily coordinate their value creating and distributing activities, integrating market dynamics, non-market coordination, and some forms of regulation protecting the public, non-human agents, and the natural world. The order of this coordination would be the following:

·        The largest possible autonomy for participating economic and social agents, individual or collective, through ‘stigmergic coordination’, i.e. free mutual coordination in open ecosystems

·        The capacity to exchange goods, services and value, through monetary or other value-measuring tools. This would be necessary for all goods needing investments and capital goods

·        The capacity to undertake these forms of coordination within a context of sustainability, i.e. for humanity to live within planetary boundaries for the long term.

The following concerns examples of really existing projects that are either in serious experimentation, or already practical, and exemplify the kind of technologies we would need for a mutual coordination based economy and society to function reasonably well.

In this article, I am listing the projects, with only a basic explanation of why they matter in the context of the capacity for mutual coordination. I will provide more explanation in a further iteration of this newsletter.

·        Sensorica’s Open Value Network allows for the accounting of all contributions and the use of mutualized machinery

The first example that comes to mind is the long experience in ‘open value accounting’, undertaken by Sensorica, originally a project to produce open hardware based sensors. Sensorica has pioneered Open Value Accounting. OVN allows for any permissionless contributor to log their work with a project number, be peer reviewed, and received a karma token that shows the relative value of this contribution in the context of the whole project, and which can be financed whenever revenue is realized. Sensorica also practices Non-Dominium forms of property, i.e. mutualized property for the project as a whole:

·        Sensorica, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sensorica

·        Open Value Accounting, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Open_Value_Accounting

·        Non-Dominium, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Nondominium

·        The Sarafu Network shows how local relational value can be protected and augmented, mixing ancient social practices and the latest technologies

The second example concerns the capacity to exchange economic value, using monetary, para-monetary and non-monetary means, as shown by the Sarafu Network of Grassroots Economics, active in Kenya and other African countries. Based on thousands of savings group managed by women in the slums and countryside of Kenya, Sarafu created a mutual credit network, and put it on the blockchain, leading to a huge multiplicator effects and gains against poverty. This mutual credit network is augmented with ‘Commitment Pooling’, in which members commit value, respecting relative value exchange that can be honoured outside of the existence of the national currency. In addition, Sarafu has engaged in the cyber-formalization of the ancient sharing and gifting practices, scaling them beyond the village.

·        Sarafu Network, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sarafu_Community_Crypto-Currencies_in_Kenya

·        Grassroot Economics, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Grassroots_Economics

·        Commitment Pooling, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commitment_Pooling

·        Regen Network: A Planetary Ledger with Ecological State Protocols

Our third example concerns the ability to integrate thermo-dynamic value streams. For this we first look at the planetary ledger technology of Regen Network. Regen Network has created a planetary Ledger, reflecting the Ecological State of a resource. This allows for any ecological entity to be described, and to describe its amelioration and degradation, and to create funding streams for its regeneration. In addition, the related Regeneration Foundation, headed by Austain Wade-Smith, is working on a new type of ecological institution, i.e. Sovereign Nature, that can not only get legal status through Rights of Nature laws, but also can manage its own value streams as a DAO, mobilizing human alliances to assist the survival of the non-human.

·        Regen Network , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Regen_Network

·        Sovereign Nature , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Convivial_Ecological_Institutions ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Sovereign_Nature_Initiative 

·        Ecological State Protocols, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Ecological_State_Protocols

·        Planetary Ledger, https://medium.com/regen-network/a-ledger-for-the-earth-af7e0d1fc238

·        Global Thresholds and Allocations to stay within planetary limits

·         

R30.org works on the capacity for expanded value streams to be taken into account in the management and valuation of ecologically responsible production. By adding human and non-human value, including the capacity to visualize and value multiple streams of matter and energy, it allows for context-based sustainability decisions at every scale. The main tool for this is a global accounting of ‘thresholds and allocations’, in which the reserves, flow and limit of resources can be known contextually, allowing for agreements about the balanced use of such resources for the very long term.

·        Global Threshold and Allocations, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Thresholds_and_Allocations

·        Multi-Capitalism , https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Multicapitalism ; https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/From_Monocapitalism_to_Multicapitalism

·        The Commodity Ecology Platform: streaming 130+ commodities into 850+ bioregions for context-based sustainability decisions at the granular level

     

The Commodity Ecology Platform funded by the Korean government, allows for the streaming and visualization of more than 130 different commodities, linked to 850+ bioregions, that are matched to individual smartphones of the citizens. This could also be matched to a nested system of bioregional scales, called Glomo, and linked to bioregional blockchains. Substantial work has been done on theorizing the nature of a Bioregional State.

·        Commodity Ecology Platform, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Commodity_Ecology_Mobile_Platform

·        Glomo, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Glomo

·        Bioregional State, https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Bioregional_State