Michel Bauwens

11-05-2011

 

The second in our series of blog posts from participating speakers is from Michel Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives.

View all posts via the NAL11-conf tag, have your say and engage with the speakers via the NAL11 Linkedin group.

Peer production introduces a human subjectivity that merges creativity, production, and politics. Not that everyone will participate in everything, but everyone surely has a unique equipotential contribution that makes a difference in a networked environment.
 
Peer production does not make everyone a good artist, but it forces everyone to build his expression, to co-produce 'something' of value, and to be involved in dialogue in a community, which is inevitable political. We can say that creative expression is no longer a mediated expression that can lead to something else down the line, but it is immediately productive in the network, becomes part of generalized process of common value creation.
 
This blurring of boundaries cannot fail to have effects on the newly emergent peer to peer culture, thereby making the patterns of a 'future civilisation' already visible today if we are able toimagine the integration of these different patterns. This is the effort to which the P2P Foundation collaborative is dedicated, and which our Open Everything findings reflect.
 
http://p2pfoundation.net/