The problem with geniuses is: sometimes they are so bright and inspiring, that you can only ‘listen’ and be excited about the way they express your own rational and inuitive visions.This is what happened to me at the 1st Brussels-Hub-breakfast seminar, where Michel Bauwens talked about the potential of a peer to peer-economy. I forgot completely about the delicious croissants that where served, and, though I’m not a native English-speaker, I took in every word of a man who has used his intellegence and experiences -and for sure not only his own- to form an inspiring vision for a modern society which is ready to embrace change on many levels.
Michel cited different examples of how products or services were developed thanks to the accumulated “free” choices of very diversely-skilled people using the tool of peer to peer platforms. In these examples P2P created not only more value for the users, by giving ‘products’ freely ‘ away and through better quality of the product or services but they also shaped the conditions for an almost organic amelioration of the product or service whenever the needs or circumstances for its use change.
Michel described how this kind of ‘open creation,’ wich meets many ideals of former utopian, communist or religious movements, fits ‘naturally’ into the reality of capitalism and our new-won-individualism. He laid out the difficult interaction between the ‘abundancy’-based peer-to-peer-productions and the ’scarcity’-based capitalistic economy. He gave many examples from the IT-sector where those open platforms lost their power of effectivity and creativity when they were bought and brought back into the scarcity-economy. But other examples exist, too, i.e. classic companies which saw their IT-cost decrease dramatically when they started using open-source software and who, because of their huge savings, are now supporting the open-source community with funds. For the owners of capital and ‘hard resources’ it is probably quite a challenge to start trusting production-platforms that work only with a ‘probalistic efficiency’ instead of or in synergy with a traditionally planned and controlled approach( it is no longer like this that you give an order and you expect someone to execute this order within a certain deadline.It is rather that you describe a problem and see which community or team comes up with the best solution)However some dare, and they share the benefit in a more complete way then before.
I can try to reproduce more of Michel splendid vision. For example how ownership and governance are organised in the P2P model. Or I can add my own vision of the driving motor of a P2P-economy: the satisfaction of contributing to human’s procreation on a level that has passed -but still is related to- the physical level.One thing is clear however. Michel´s vision has already manifested in Brussels.The Hub Brussels is definitely one of those places where human and economic diversity combined with real-life experience can meet capital with its(technological)powers,markets and resources to co-create solutions for the real needs of today´s world. If you want you can read more in Michel’s public treasure chamber here :
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Rik Verschueren
