< “ First, in the Axial Age, we tried religion; then in the industrial age, we tried ideology, essentially socialism. But what now? Well, you know my (our?) answer here at the Crypto Commons Gathering, and later, at the Valley of the Commons: we construct the future, right here, right now, and instantiate the peer relations we wish for, right here, right now, person to person, community to community, the human with nature, and the human with the Divine Spirit (the latter only if you are so inclined). Three in one so to speak (cosmotheandry). We’re not waiting, neither for transcendent revelation, nor for immanent revolution, though some of us would welcome it (either/or). There is no time, literally and figuratively, to wait for. This is the time, which contains the past, the present, and the future. We are not anti-historical, not post-historical, but trans-historical. We are not modern, postmodern, nor even metamodern, but trans-modern. “ >
Michel Bauwens, at Valley of the Commons (Hirshwang, Austria)
Where are we now with the commons movement ?
I won’t be able to tell this tale without referring at least a bit to my particular place and experience in it, since I obviously have my own particular perspective.
First, let us remind ourselves of the very broad history of the commons,
from the commons being the ‘background’ of social life in the participatory indigenous communities,
to the significant place accorded to it in the premodern, pre-capitalist class-based societies, such as feudalism and imperial systems,
to the systematic attempt to undo the existence of the commons under capitalism (the so-called Enclosures).
I’ve summarized this story a few times, here on the wiki for example.
But then came the internet, which, through the universalization of the Web, massively introduced shared digital commons, in the form of shared knowledge, free software, and open design. I consider October 1993, the day that the Web was made more user-friendly through the Mosaic browser, to be the pivot date which moved digital networking from a tool of the privileged corporate world and scientific elites, to the mass of the world population.
The Internet made it possible to create extraordinarily powerful commons of knowledge. Open-source software, Wikipedia, open data and peer production demonstrated that people could collaborate voluntarily across geographical boundaries and create resources that were neither conventional private commodities nor state-owned goods.
This is the period when I came on board. I was still part of the corporate world in the 90s, but was getting increasingly disillusioned by short-term profit-seeking, and experienced this early public internet as a true revolution, creating the capacity for peer-based self-organization.
This was the great promise of P2P: peer-to-peer relationships could coordinate productive activity without requiring either hierarchical command or market exchange as the sole organising principle. In 2005, just before creating the P2P Foundation to accompany that emerging field of possibility, I wrote the essay, The Political Economy of Peer Production.
But this first digital commons contained a hidden contradiction. The knowledge could be common while the material world on which it depended remained private, extractive and centralised. Linux is open, but servers consume energy. Wikipedia is a commons, but its physical infrastructure sits inside a capitalist economy. Open designs can circulate freely while the land, factories, logistics, finance and energy required to realise them remain enclosed.
And what effectively happened was the counter-revolution which took the name of Web2: corporatized platforms increasingly controlled internet usage, and the technical peer-to-peer aspects were overlaid with client-server platforms which could be centrally controlled, while the algorithmic revolution increasingly showed our corporate overlords how our human behavior and choices could be steered in various ways. But it also accelerated human division and polarization
The history of the commons since then can therefore be understood as an attempt to answer a progressively deeper question:
How can a digital commons become a commons of material life?
I will now describe that evolution as a movement through several stages:
The stage of the digital commons and peer production
A political-economic stage: from commons transition to cosmo-localism
A regenerative stage involving bioregional, territorial regeneration
A coordination-oriented stage, focusing on P4P federation, common infrastructure and bioregional and planetary coordination.
The important point is that these stages do not replace one another. They layer upon one another. The digital commons remains necessary, but it is increasingly becoming the nervous system of a much larger cyber-physical commons.
The first revolution: the Internet discovers the commons
The early Internet created something economically strange.
Information could be copied at almost zero marginal cost. People could contribute without necessarily being paid for every contribution. Improvements made by one person could immediately benefit everyone else. A shared resource could become more valuable through use rather than depleted by it. Free software was the paradigmatic case.
The important discovery was not simply that programmers liked sharing code. It was that distributed communities could produce sophisticated and socially valuable resources through voluntary cooperation.
This is what Yochai Benkler, I believe he was the first to use the concept, called ‘Peer Production’, but while Benkler saw it as just an extra part of capitalism, augmented by social coordination, the P2P Foundation and myself insisted from the very beginning on its transformative potential as a new mode of production based on ‘effort sharing’ or ‘contributions’, in which autonomous peers could self-organise around common resources.
The basic social architecture was therefore:
peer ↔ peer
The fundamental problem was coordination: how can people who are not employees of the same organisation nevertheless produce something together?
This was the first great digital-commons revolution. But it was only the beginning.
But please note the inherent limitations of this first model. It was still formulated according to ‘methodological individualism’, as an association of individuals first, and materially speaking, it really only worked at first to provide for digital production, i.e. the production of immaterial things: knowledge, software, designs. But let’s also not forget how revolutionary this is already: coding is a constitutional activity, which creates the conditions in which ‘noospheric’ cooperation can occur, just as architecture constrains how we work and live together physically.
Also important, these early forms of peer production were based on the commons, and reproducing commons already:
“In commons-based peer production, contributors create shared value through open contributory systems, govern their common work through participatory practices, and create shared resources that can, in turn, be used in new iterations. This cycle of open input, participatory process and commons-oriented output is a cycle of accumulation of the commons, in contrast to a capital accumulation.”
From P2P to the commons transition
During the 2000s and especially the 2010s, the question became considerably more ambitious.
If peer production works for software and knowledge, could its principles be extended to the economy as a whole?
This brought together the work of Elinor Ostrom, commons governance, open source, cooperative production, urban commons, social and solidarity economy, municipalism, ecological economics and the P2P movement.
In my own work, and that of my peers in the P2P Foundation network(s) this was reflected in a shift from studying free software communities, to studying urban (and rural) commons.
The question was no longer simply whether we could create open resources.
It became:
Could commons become seed forms of another political economy?
That was the great intellectual project of the 2010s commons movement.
A community garden could be understood not merely as a garden. A cooperative could be more than an alternative firm. An open-source project could be more than a software project. A FabLab could be a seed form of a different manufacturing system.
The underlying intuition was that capitalism is not reproduced only by corporations and markets. It is reproduced through an enormous infrastructure of everyday institutions. If alternative institutions could themselves reproduce, connect and scale, they might gradually constitute a different economic ecology.
But in this context, ‘who controls the resources’ becomes a crucial topic. Who creates the ‘surplus value’ which creates capital ?
This is why I proposed and stressed the need for “reverse cooptation“ and participated in the introduction of the ‘transvestment’ narrative: the objective was not simply to make capitalism more socially responsible, but to make institutions increasingly serve the accumulation and reproduction of the commons rather than the accumulation of private capital. Reverse cooptation stresses the need to go beyond complaining about the cooptation of the commons, to actively seek to engineer the opposite process: From Capital using the Commons, because that is now the new capitalism of the ‘internet rentiers, to using Capital for the Commons.
In this period, we also started insisting on Value Sovereignty, i.e. that peer production communities could self-define what value was for them, using programmable currencies, and that the ultimate source of value was no longer the commodity form, but the contributory form of value. The vehicle for this revolution would be the ‘Seed Forms’, which could already start applying these principles and practices, without waiting for the hegemonic economic form (aka capitalism) to change by itself. Seed Form Theory, also called Germ Form Theory as earlier developed by the Oekonux community, is an important part of our approach.
See it this way: since the productive revolution that came out of digital technology, i.e. through the emergence of the internet and now AI: Capital needs less and less to rely on Labor, but similarly, Labor needs to rely less and less on Capital.
Hence, seed form theory stresses that communities can rally around the joint creation of value, through social contracts, and spread virally from there. Not as the final word, but as the main strategy within this particular phase of human history, when the old paradigm is dying, but the new paradigm is not yet strong enough.
But the movement encountered a problem. The seed forms were multiplying faster than the connective tissue between them.
We also saw the need to insert this first strategy into the larger network of existing institutional forms. This would become our work on the Commons Transition, see later in this essay.
The ecological correction: cosmo-localism
The next breakthrough came from recognising that a purely digital theory of the commons was insufficient.
A digital commons can distribute knowledge globally, but human beings still need: food, water, land, energy, shelter, tools and care.
And these are subject to the constraints of physical reality and thermodynamics. In preparation, the P2P Foundation undertook a systematic study of ‘Thermodynamics’.
This eventually also led to the concept of cosmo-local production: globally distributed knowledge combined with locally grounded production.
This formulation became famous:
“all that is light is shared globally, all that is heavy is relocalised.”
The distinction is crucial. The Internet does not need to make everything global. Its deeper potential is to allow knowledge and design to circulate globally while production becomes more geographically embedded.
This turns globalisation inside out.
Instead of:
extract resources locally → manufacture globally → sell globally,
the possibility becomes:
share knowledge globally → adapt it locally → produce regeneratively in place → share the learning globally.
The global network becomes a support system for local autonomy rather than a mechanism for extracting value from localities.
This is the point at which the commons begins to acquire a thermodynamic dimension.
The question becomes not merely who owns information, but:
What social system can reproduce human life while remaining within the regenerative capacity of its ecological base?
We have undertaken a substantial effort to create clarity on how the different levels of scale relate to each other, and documenting seed forms across every kind of scale:
The Local Level https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Localization
The Bioregional Level https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Bioregional
The National and Political Level https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Commons_Policy
The Planetary Level https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Global_Governance
The Integrated Cosmo-Local Level https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net/Category:Cosmo-Local_Production
We are <not> saying, “Let’s scale the local.”, because such scaling often destroys precisely the qualities that made the local commons work. Rather, our alternative is polycentric scaling.
The local should remain locally autonomous. The bioregion should coordinate what genuinely needs bioregional coordination. The national level should provide capacities that cannot be generated locally. Planetary institutions should address genuinely planetary commons. This is basically the concept of ‘Subsidiarity’. And the digital/cosmo-local layer should allow knowledge, protocols, designs and experience to circulate among all of them. I also consider the cosmo-local layer, which is in my view separate from the planetary layer, to be the ‘integrative layer’, which holds all other layers together.
I recently formulated a distributed hermeneutic infrastructure which argued that knowledge and meaning should flow in both directions: upward from lived experience toward global abstraction and downward from universal patterns toward local enactment. That is a cultural and epistemic counterpart to cosmo-local production. I called it, “multi-scalar and negotiated universalism“, as it justifies the very contention implicit in the name of this Substack, that we are actually changing from one civilizational form to another, which may well be post-civilizational, since it introduces the Noosphere as a new integrative layer.
Our hope and hypothesis is that:
Universality need not mean centralisation.
A planetary commons could be universal in its capacity to coordinate without being uniform in its institutions.
The missing scale: the bioregion
Yet cosmo-localism exposed another problem.
If we simply say “think local, share globally”, we have not solved the intermediate scale.
A village cannot necessarily manage its water system alone. A community cannot manage a watershed alone. Food systems, energy systems, transport and ecological restoration often operate at scales larger than the municipality but smaller than the nation.
This is where Sacha Pignot’s work on fractal sovereignty becomes particularly valuable. Benjamin Life has done similar work on Bioregional Commoning, while Michael Haupt has recently given us a full historical account of the evolution of nodes of coordination that convincingly shows that bioregional hubs, BioHubs, are the logical next step for ‘mutual coordination economics’.
Pignot identifies three interlocking scales: the hyper-local, the bioregional and the cosmo-local. At the hyper-local level, communities retain autonomy over production and resource allocation while accessing global knowledge. At the bioregional level, multiple communities coordinate according to ecological boundaries. At the cosmo-local level, knowledge circulates globally while remaining under local control.
His formulation is that
“Bioregionalism organizes human activity along ecological boundaries rather than political ones”.
The bioregion is neither a larger municipality nor a small nation-state. It is a meso-level ecology of communities.
Yet, I would insist that we can not ignore the national level, i.e. the existing infrastructures of sovereignty (at all scales), that still control a sizable part of public investment, and the loyalty of large swaths of the population. They may not be an ecologically appropriate scale, but they are the result of deep cultural and historical evolution. Thus our work on strategies that can relate the commons to this reality, essentially our concepts of the Partner State and Public-Commons Partnerships, and the Commonification of Public Services. Our readers should not underestimate the progress that has been made in these fields of commons-based public policies and commons-based legal practices.
A big part of a successful bioregional approach will depend on active re-ruralization. Check out the model of the Repoblacion effort in Extramadura, Spain, for an effort which marries territorial policy with smart digital coordination and the principle of ‘Maximalism’ in terms of cooperative effort, as a mature example of marrying the physical with the digital. In November last year, I visited three rural communities associated with the National Rural Reconstruction Movement in China. What I learned from them was impressive. Faced with 70m empty apartments and the beginning of demographic decline, China set out a policy to tone down urban real estate speculation, effectively bankrupting this oligarchic sector and redeploying part of the savings into re-ruralization, the other, major part, into the technological revolution which has given us open sourced AI. This is coupled with an active policy around Ecological Civilization, that is now part of the incentive structure of state and party officials. I’m not suggesting this is the model to follow, but simply showing that the time has come for public policy shifts that could help sustain such a transformation,
From networking to federation
This brings us to what I now think is the most important conceptual transition: from P2P to P4P. The P4P concept was formulated by my friend and associate Jeff Emmett.
As a reminder, the original P2P concept primarily connected individuals, which then formed communities, acting as seed forms. But these seed forms are now a multitude, while still being relatively marginal in the power structure and productive capacity. Nevertheless, let’s not forget that they have exponentially grown, tenfold each decade since the 1993 pivot.
P4P, meaning “Peer FOR Peer (collective) Infrastructure — peer-to-place, if you like, or more usefully the place-to-place/community-to-community networking paradigm— asks how autonomous regenerative communities can connect with one another.
The distinction is subtle but fundamental. A network merely says: We are connected. It can mobilize rapidly, but has no staying power, as we have for example seen through the Occupy and 15M mobilizations. They do not have the infrastructure to accrue capital and social power.
A (con-) federation says: We are sufficiently interdependent to build something together.
Federating requires shared infrastructure, and not just knowledge, but access to capital flows, mutuality and solidarity mechanisms.
The unit of transformation therefore shifts:
individual → project → community → federation.
But let’s not misunderstand each other. We are not necessarily talking about a traditional political federation, known from the history of our geo-political world.
Benjamin Life, in his recent, The Infrastructure of Belonging, Life argues that our actual civic lives consist of overlapping, nested relationships — neighbourhoods, watersheds, ecological communities, energy cooperatives and other associations — that do not correspond to the rigid boundaries of conventional political geography. He proposes infrastructure that can allow these different communities to become legible and interoperable without requiring a central authority.
The metaphor he uses is particularly apt: infrastructure should work more like plumbing than like a central database, allowing knowledge to flow between different communities without forcing them all into one organisational structure.
That is essentially the digital infrastructure required for a P4P world.
The way I have formulated this as a global strategy, and an alternative to both the Western cybernetic world of private platforms controlled by predatory rentier classes, and the government and party controlled Chinese fusion of state planning, market dynamics and cybernetic coordination is to work on alternative third attractor, that of the Archipelago of Regenerative Projects.│
+------------------------------------------------------------+
| THREE COMPETING CYBERNETIC SYSTEMS |
+------------------+------------------+----------------------+
| CHINA’S STATE | WEST’S PLATFORM | P2P / COMMONS |
| CYBERNETICS | CYBERNETICS | CYBERNETICS |
+------------------+------------------+----------------------+
| Centralized | Netarchical | Decentralized |
| Control | Control | Coordination |
+------------------+------------------+----------------------+
| Feedback loop | Feedback loop | Feedback loop |
| controlled by: | controlled by: | controlled by: |
| THE STATE | THE PLATFORM | THE COMMONS |
+------------------+------------------+----------------------+
| KEY QUESTION: Who controls the feedback loops? |
| The State? The Platform? Or the Commons? |
+------------------------------------------------------------+
The problem of coordination becomes the problem of the commons itself
Michael Haupt makes a related observation from a somewhat different intellectual direction.
Following the TIMN model from David Ronfeldt, he describes the historical evolution of human coordination as moving through tribes, institutions, markets and networks, and argues that a fifth form — “Mycelial coordination” — may now be emerging: decentralised, bioregional, adaptive coordination organised around whole-system health rather than competition.
His most pointed formulation is:
“We have excellent nodes. We don’t yet have the mycelial network between them.”
That is perhaps the clearest description of the current predicament. The problem is the multitude of seed forms have largely remained isolated nodes. The next stage of the commons is therefore not necessarily to create more nodes. It is to create the mycelium between them.
But federation requires capital
This exposes another weakness of the early commons-transition vision.
It is considerably harder to acquire the land, buildings, machinery, energy systems and working capital required to make the peer to peer, commons-based cooperation forms viable for material production.
Conventional finance solves this through capital ownership and expected financial returns. But that creates precisely the dependency that the commons is trying to overcome.
This is where Will Ruddick’s Commitment Pooling becomes much more than an interesting complementary experiment.
Ruddick’s work emerged from Grassroots Economics’ engagement with Kenyan community practices, including rotational labour associations and systems of mutual service. The Commitment Pooling protocol attempts to make commitments to future provision visible and exchangeable, using digital infrastructure to coordinate resources without requiring conventional money to be the sole intermediary.
Ruddick’s 2026 work now explicitly describes Commitment Pooling as “proto-social infrastructure” for commons-based resource coordination, combining traditional rotational labour practices with modern digital infrastructure.
Here is Sarafu.network’s ‘Cosmo-Local Credit Visualizer’, which shows coordination through commitment pooling at a bioregional scale:
I am personally not yet sure that this will be the ‘only way to go’ but it is definitely a promising venue for mutual coordination economics.
In any case, as Benjamin Life’s has recently suggested, the emerging vision is that of “Upward Spiral Economics“, in which federated cooperatives retain and circulate value internally, building network effects and community wealth rather than continually leaking value to external shareholders. The commons begins to look less like a collection of alternatives and more like a self-reinforcing economic ecology.
This is what the upcoming Valley of the Commons village in Hirshwang, Austria, organized by the CommonsHub Vienna, is all about. It will bring together, not just peered individuals, as in most Web3 popup villages, who all strongly believe in the myth of the ‘Sovereign Individual’, but they will bring together members of already existing regenerative projects, i.e. ‘Sovereign Communities’. One of the ways the project is being formulated, is that of a ‘League of Neo-Monasteries’.
What to think of the ‘Web 3’ intermezzo ?
Web3, or the ‘Crypto Economy’, still has a role to play in this evolution, because again: coding is constitutional!
A reminder, Web3 was originally the attempt to recreate the early promise of Web1, by creating defense mechanisms against appropriation, surveillance and outside corporate or state control. Bitcoin, whatever our critique, did create the first socially sovereign and globally scalable currency based on social trust, rather than corporate or state institutions. It creates the wholly new field of programmable currencies that can circulate different types of value and can be used to achieve Value Sovereignty. Its associated universal ledger, the Blockchain, creates the possibility for ecosystemic accounting for networked coalitions that can <already> operate, on the principles of the commons and thermodynamic balance. On the negative side of the ledger, it is now largely under the control of transfinancial capital, and subject to state surveillance, and has been largely mobilized for for-profit economics if not speculation and crime.
But, it also creates the capacity for new forms of P4P coordination for digitally native coalitions, for example through DAO-based governance mechanisms, and both within and beyond Web3, many coders are now actively creating the conditions for a post-internet reality.
But the reality is now clear: if we are to succeed, we need a convergence between the cosmo-local regenerative projects, on the ground, who can create real physical resources and provisioning systems, aka our seed forms, <and> the coordination capacity created by the Web3 and other ecosystems of a similar nature. For example, some coders are now busy creating ‘quantum proof’ independent infrastructures (software <and> hardware) that can use the internet, but also exist without it, to provide the ‘coordination backbone’ for cosmo-local coordination. This new infrastructure, often based on Reticulum based p2p meshworks, which could survive the failure of the internet networks, is way more advanced than the Web3 paradigm and is designed for ‘uncentralizability’. This is already real tech, used by communities that have ‘gone dark’ because of the current surveillance situation. (cfr the Dark Forest Theory of the Internet). Just to give you an idea of the language used in these circles: “they are bringing ‘Cloud Computing’ back ‘down to earth’, which then becomes ‘fog computing’ i.e. creating a ‘mist’ that cannot be seen by the corporate trackers.”
Let’s be clear, if you are a regenerative project, do you want to be dependent on corporate platforms, that can exclude you on a whim, or surveilled by dark political forces that are actively hostile to Regeneration?
For this reason, I am a big fan of hybrid projects that already do both, i.e. they are able to produce physical resources based on physical commons, and transform capital into commons (aka transvestment), while using the new coordination infrastructures.
One of them is the Traditional Dream Factory, based in Abela, Portugal, which used global crowdfunding and lending to acquire land, and put it in perpetuity for the commons, and started farming, while created a new democratic do-ocracy, giving governance tokens to all who effectively do physical work in the community. Its 2026 report describes 25 hectares, more than 4,000 trees, substantial rainwater storage, food and mushroom production, community infrastructure and hundreds of token holders, with the project now trying to move from prototype toward permanence.
Another example would be GrowFi, the project of Rifai Sicilia, which has created a platform which allows consumers and investors to pre-invest in the products based on physical commons-based peer production, such as olive oil for example. It is scaling the Community-Supported Agriculture model at the trans-local, i.e. cosmo-local level, bringing ‘on-chain’, as they say. Pretty much like Will Ruddick, they are convinced that trust and productive commitments within a territory can become the basis of a new financial system. They are actively practicing ‘transvestment’, just like TDF did. They turn traditional finance, provided by their distributed network of supporters, and transform it into commons that they can take out of the extractive market environment!
Valley of the Commons: from projects to common infrastructure
This is why I think Valley of the Commons represents an important new phase. The Valley, which starts the week of August 23, in Hirshwang, Austria with our work on ‘civilizational transitions’ (in collaboration with Prof. Adam Arvidsson) is not simply another gathering of people interested in commons.
Its significance lies in the attempt to bring together place, production, regeneration, governance and finance.
It directly will tackle the question:
How do we create the shared infrastructure through which regenerative projects can become a coherent ecosystem?
This is the shift from networking to con-federating.
This is exactly the movement we have been tracing in the P2P Foundation wiki, and why we have chosen to reorganize it under the ‘Reconstruction Paradigm’. Please <do visit> that page, I sincerely believe you will be impressed by the body of knowledge that we have assembled over the last 20 years, so far without AI. Please, we do need your support, so consider donating!!
The digital layer has not disappeared. It has now become an organisational layer for a physical commons. The next step to which our gathering is dedicated is community-to-community infrastructure rather than simply community formation. This is the meaning of the P4P pivot identified by my friend Jeff Emmet.
It would be easy to interpret TDF, GrowFi, Valley of the Commons, Commitment Pooling and the various bioregional projects as a collection of eccentric experiments at the edge of Web3, but I think that would miss the larger historical pattern.
They are all grappling with the same problem:
How do autonomous, regenerative seed forms acquire the capacity to reproduce, federate and build infrastructure without becoming absorbed into extractive capital?
The early commons movement was fascinated by seed forms. But a seed form can remain a seed indefinitely. The missing mechanism is recursion.
The seed forms must be able to:
create value;
retain part of that value;
invest it in shared infrastructure;
connect with other seed forms;
exchange resources and knowledge;
reproduce themselves;
Accrue capital to grow and expand
help create additional seed forms.
That is what turns a collection of alternatives into an ecology. This is what replaces the ‘Circulation of Capital’, through the commodity form, into a ‘Circulation of the Common’, through the contributory economy and civilization.
As Nick Dyer-Witheford puts it:
“If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common. A commodity is a good produced for sale, a common is a good produced, or conserved, to be shared. The notion of a commodity, a good produced for sale, presupposes private owners between whom this exchange occurs. The notion of the common presupposes collectivities – associations and assemblies – within which sharing is organised. If capitalism presents itself as an immense heap of commodities, ‘commonism’ is a multiplication of commons.”
Let me however stress that the commons-centric approach chooses the form of a pluralist commonwealth. Public authorities and market forms will have their place, it’s just that the extractive forms need to be balanced by stronger regenerative practices, processes and institutions.
We can now see why the terminology shift matters.
P2P asked: How can peers coordinate?
But P4P asks a different and more ambitious question: How can communities provision and federate with one another?
The emergence of P4P is therefore a story of successive problem discoveries.
The first generation discovered that knowledge could become common.
The second discovered that peers could produce together.
The third asked whether commons could become a political economy.
The fourth discovered that digital commons must reconnect with physical production and ecological limits.
The fifth discovered the importance of territory and bioregions.
The sixth is discovering that territorial commons need finance, infrastructure and federation.
And the emerging seventh phase asks whether these federated systems can coordinate at planetary scale without reproducing the centralised hierarchies of the past.
After 2018, and related to my own cancellation experience when the commons movement itself was buckling under the moral panic of identity politics, reinforced by the Covid ‘Winter is Coming’ moment, I was briefly tempted to believe in a relative decline of the commons movement, after its political heyday in the 2010s. But more realistically, it should be seen as a period of differentiation. The old movement dispersed into regenerative agriculture, platform cooperativism, digital commons, ReFi, community currencies, urban commons, post-growth, bioregionalism and new forms of cooperative federation. What is now interesting is that these previously separated strands are beginning to encounter one another again. We are entering a new moment of integration, and I could not be more excited about it!
The decisive test for the success of commons-based production, in the new P4P form which we have described, will be material, or more precisely ‘thermodynamic’. Can P4P based commons-based peer production by the path towards a thermodynamically balanced, i.e. extraction and regeneration must be in balance for the very long term.
Can these systems actually reproduce human life within ecological limits?
Can they reduce extraction rather than simply redistribute its proceeds?
Can they create livelihoods? Can they acquire land? Can they build housing? Can they finance infrastructure? Can they care for people? Can they regenerate ecosystems?
Just as importantly: Can they survive political and economic shocks?
We are no longer just ‘playing around’. For the techies, and the new age commoners, the message is: stop re-inventing the wheel by asking to be financed for software programs that already exist in dozens, and sometimes hundreds of iterations! Stop just dreaming the future in workshops and then remain passive. Align yourself, from now on, with actual regenerative projects, and help them interconnect, helping to create supportive common infrastructure. We need ‘barefoot coders’, truly at the service of actual regenerative capacity.
And our monetary systems need not just be ‘asset-backed’, they will need to reflect actual progress in biocapacity. But that is for another time.
Reading this, I kept noticing something you don't claim.
The diagnosis at the center — Haupt's "we have excellent nodes, we don't yet have the mycelial network between them" — is an indictment of the conditions of your own work. You've been building connective tissue almost alone for twenty-five years, in an environment that funds nodes. Connecting Ostrom to free software to Kenyan rotational labour associations to Portuguese land trusts to Sicilian olive oil, holding it in one frame, introducing people to each other's work across languages and decades. Then you hand the formulation to Haupt and move to the next section.
The wiki gets a subordinate clause and a donation link. Twenty years, "so far without AI." Most movements don't have this. Most forget their own history every five years and rediscover the same three insights with new vocabulary, because nobody was willing to do the unglamorous filing. You were. That's the part I want to name: not the theories, the memory.
And the last paragraph is the most valuable thing here and the most likely to be skipped. Stop re-inventing the wheel. Stop dreaming the future in workshops and then remaining passive. Barefoot coders. Twelve thousand words of careful genealogy and then real impatience. You've earned that impatience.
Whether P4P works is a separate question. The refusal underneath it — not waiting for revelation or revolution, building at whatever scale is actually available — has been held for a quarter century without institutional backing and without becoming bitter. That last one is the hard part.
Am now reading Raimon Panikkar and it seems to me that a crucial element of phase 4 P4P co-ordination will be the shared understanding of the “middle way” or the open horizon by the founders of each island in the archipelago, so we can be symbiotic rather than parasitic. This, I believe, in turn, will require the temporary primacy of certain qualities such as humility, courage and a higher art of continuing to relate through dissonance towards coherence. Our ultimate commons may be breath and silence, and the revitalisation of circling to experience the materiality of the commons in our bodies.