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[00:00:03] Michel Bauwens: Any competition for scarce resources leads to oligarchy. Why? Because it's a it's a game. And every iteration of the game, some is more lucky or more clever than you. So they already have more resources for the second game and then the third game. And so whether it's land or money, you, you see it, you know, that is always this tendency towards oligarchy.

[00:00:26] Jarrad Hope: Oh, thank you so much, Michel, for joining me. You don't quite know it, but your ideas and the peer to peer Foundation wiki was very transformative in my thinking. I think I came across it around sort of 2006, 2007 when I was looking at the Pirate Party.

[00:00:45] Michel Bauwens: That was right at the beginning.

[00:00:46] Jarrad Hope: Yeah, yeah, I was very in much in the sort of like file sharing side of peer to peer networks. But coming across the peer to peer foundation and what they were doing with the Pirate Party, I kind of started realizing the broader scope of peer to peer technologies. Peer production and the notion of a public good and building these as these protocols and these networks as public goods is something that stayed with me since. And I've been trying to kind of build that out. So that's like one reason. Also, another reason I'd like to speak with you is, you know, you've talked about the network society. You've been very concerned with civilizational transitions, as I understand it. And I'm very much about this notion of cyber states and so on. So, yeah, I guess before we get into any of that, would you like to introduce yourself?

[00:01:41] Michel Bauwens: All right. So. Yeah. So my name is obviously Michel Bauwens. I'm from Belgium originally. I would say, unfortunately, I'm 66. You know, start starts to count. And I live in northern Thailand in Chiang Mai, which last week was the most polluted city in the world. But was saying I nevertheless recommend outside of these hazing months, which is, you know, like March to May. It's it's quite a wonderful place to live normally. And it's, you know, one of the places where the number of digital nomads is very, very high. And it used to be Westerners. Now it's like a lot of Chinese people are coming are coming here. So, you know, the last few meetings of digital nomads that I attended were like full of Asian people from India, from Pakistan, from everywhere. So, you know, you kind of feel the shift also in the zeitgeist and the vibe, you know, the Westernization is in the air. What else should I say? Yeah. So I founded a peer to peer foundation that was in I took a two year sabbatical in in 2002, 2003, which was the purpose was to study transitions. And I came to the conclusion that before you have, you know, really radical transformations like revolutions and stuff, that this is really only the last stage. And it only happens when society cannot adapt peacefully. Then, you know, you need something more violent to to shake its foundations. But that mostly what's of importance is seed forms. So, you know, the way you should imagine it. And I know this is already outside of self presentation.

[00:03:31] Michel Bauwens: The way you should, the way you should imagine it. So you have a relatively stable system you know, that has solved some basic societal issue and that as a set of institutions that, as it has solved its institutions, creates its own problems, as it were, which can no longer be solved with, with, with that solution. And so at that point, people start quitting either voluntarily because they have like an anti anticipatory consciousness or because they have to because the old system no longer provides what they need and expect. And so these seed forms are experimentations in a new logic which eventually will find each other, create subsystems, and eventually be strong enough to, you know, to transform the whole, the whole civilization. So that's the way I look at the world. And so, of course, right now I look at the world at around two specific things, which is peer to peer, which is the capacity for translocal self-organization. So that's, you know, you have peer to peer in a tribal environment with, you know, a small village and people can you know, can solve their issues by talking to their family members, mostly because that's what tribes were about, about kinship. I'm talking about you know, what we are doing here and all the systems that go with it.

[00:04:57] Michel Bauwens: So the fact that people can join ecosystems of collaboration which transcend pure geography. And, you know, that's not to say that's the only reality, but that is certainly to say that this will change the old reality and that I think this is civilizational because civilization was actually a relation between agriculture and the city. So it's the surplus of agriculture allows you to create a new class writing class. And, you know, which was a minority, and the writing class created markets and states you know, to kind of upscale from tribal arrangements. And I think we're reaching a new pivot. So I think this is actually more like A5000 year shift rather than just like a, you know, a 50 year shift or even 500 years shift. I think we are moving towards this new form of mutual coordination. So distributed coordination. By Pierce. But to do that they need comments. So this is the second concept. So the second concept is comments which is shared resources that are managed or created or defended by a community or a group of stakeholders using their own regulation. And so that immediately distinguishes from the market and the state. So,

[00:06:19] Michel Bauwens: You know, without without saying or expecting that they will disappear anytime soon. I do think that we are creating this new sphere. So I don't know if you know. Mark Stallman from the center for the Study of Digital Life. He has a good way to. He says you have East and West, and now you have digital. So you have this

[00:06:38] Michel Bauwens: Kind of like, you know, market centric versus state centric competition between the West and the Russia-china axis and the BRICs and, you know, mostly allied now with with them. So that's like the struggle in the geosphere. But then we

[00:06:54] Michel Bauwens: A new layer and we come with our own solutions. And then of course there's a big debate and maybe we can have that debate whether the, you know, purely libertarian solution is, is the solution or whether, you know, it's some something else or some kind of hybrid adaptation between, you know, the the earlier layer, physical layer and this new layer. So that's the whole debate. I think that that is of interest is like, you know, where are we going? And so

[00:07:21] Michel Bauwens: If you if you study civilization, I and I will stop, I promise, you

[00:07:26] Michel Bauwens: Know, and especially civilization transition of the past. I think this gives you a lot of patterns that, you know, without saying they will be repeated in the same way. It's still, you know, allows you to think like, what if, right? What if this pattern, you know, is now also operative in this transition? And how would it be different once we have the digital? So that's the kind of what I use

[00:07:48] Michel Bauwens: To my thinking. I look at the end of Rome and, you know, like medieval I love medieval society, Western medieval society. I think it's a very

[00:07:57] Michel Bauwens: Good image of a distributed system. You know, it

[00:08:01] Michel Bauwens: Was full of contracts, as you know, you know, not digital contracts, but it was contract based society,

[00:08:08] Michel Bauwens: Very local, but at the same time, a unified culture through, you know, through the monks and the Catholic Church. And again, I'm not saying this to say we're going towards the same, but I think it's very useful to study patterns of the past and see if they apply or not, and whether they are transformed or not, and how they are transformed, and whether there's new things that, you know, that didn't exist before. But it helps you see the present especially, you know, because we are in a presentist moment, right, where people can't see anything like scales. So and they can't project themselves. And that's, that's very dangerous, right? If

[00:08:48] Michel Bauwens: Cannot project yourself. And, you know, and there's basically three two ways to deal with that one. One is transcendence. You know, you become spiritual and you choose the vertical dimension and you kind of like move away from the world in a certain way. Or you can have a horizontal transcendence, which is like to have a long enough view that you can project yourself beyond the catastrophe. Which, you know, every civilization transition also is so and that can give you strength and hope. And I think that's what I'm trying to do with, you know, my narratives about peer to peer and the Commons.

[00:09:26] Jarrad Hope: Right. Nice. I mean, thank you for that. There's a lot to unpack and I'd love to get into so I guess, like when it comes to this sort of like five year, 5000 year or 5000 year shift where are we in that sort of period? I guess, in your mind, like, if we bring this to, like, a more concrete, like, I assume that you you think

[00:09:54] Jarrad Hope: We're undergoing this civilizational shift?

[00:09:57] Jarrad Hope: And then, like, what is the agriculture equivalent we're talking about here?

[00:10:03] Jarrad Hope: Is this the the net or or or,

[00:10:07] Jarrad Hope: Communications.

[00:10:07] Michel Bauwens: Let me say a bit about cycles. Maybe first. So

[00:10:12] Michel Bauwens: What? So what I believe is that we are in a concatenation of cycles. I hope that's a good English word. What I mean

In this conversation, Jarrad Hope discusses the transformational impact of crypto and peer-to-peer technologies with Michel Bauwens, highlighting the potential seed forms for a new decentralized and commons-oriented societal organization. They acknowledge the complexity and the challenges of the current state of crypto, stressing the importance of building an inclusive and more user-friendly infrastructure while maintaining the pursuit of pluralistic and intelligent discourse.

<p>Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>

Logos Podcast is a bi-weekly interview show about building sovereign communities: the people, philosophies, challenges, and solutions. We invite the world's foremost experts and radical thinkers to discuss how to emancipate from repressive systems through new social, political, and economic institutions.

Jarrad Hope

Logos Podcast

<p>In this conversation, Jarrad Hope discusses the transformational impact of crypto and peer-to-peer technologies with Michel Bauwens, highlighting the potential seed forms for a new decentralized and commons-oriented societal organization. They acknowledge the complexity and the challenges of the current state of crypto, stressing the importance of building an inclusive and more user-friendly infrastructure while maintaining the pursuit of pluralistic and intelligent discourse.</p><section class="footnotes-container">&nbsp;</section>