Understanding the Peer to Peer Revolution

Because of the increased distributed nature of production technology, not just for immaterial production but for physical production as well, it is increasingly possible to imagine modes of social life which combine re-localised production with global open design communities. How can we move away from a world that is based on a false notion that the natural world is abundant, and on a equally false notion that we need to impede the free sharing of social innovations through the creation of artificial scarcities in the digital world? The answer may be a reliance on the emerging peer to peer dynamic, and the emergence of peer production, peer governance, and peer property formats as an alternative ways of organizing social life. The increasingly global availability of social cooperation technologies is empowering and enabling the creation of global-local communities that are able to directly create social value, through new types of for-benefit institutions. In this lecture, Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives, will examine the key characteristics of this new mode of production, how it creates new business models, and how it could be enabled and empowered by new Partner State-based approaches by public authorities at all levels.