Roberto MartÃnez Hernández has kindly translated the second part of the recent interview I did with Michel Bauwens into Spanish. It can be accessed on his blog here, or you can download it as a PDF file here.
The original English version of the first part of the interview can be read here, and the second part here. Both parts in English can be read in a single PDF file, which is available here.
Monday, September 18, 2006
Thursday, September 07, 2006
P2P: The very core of the world to come
In the first part of this interview Michel Bauwens, the creator of The Foundation for P2P Alternatives, explained why he believes the various free and open movements should be viewed as part of a larger P2P movement; and why this larger movement offers the potential for creating an alternative to the current political and economic order.
But do Bauwen's claims owe more to idealism than to a realistic analysis of current developments? And what are the politics that inform his vision? Moreover, even if he is right about its potential, how will the P2P movement resist the increasingly aggressive counter offensive now being waged by incumbents of the current economic and political system? In the second part of his interview with Richard Poynder, Bauwens addresses these and other questions.
RP: There are, as we discussed last time, a growing number of open and free movements today — the Free and Open Source Software movements of course; but also Open Data, Open Access, Open Source Biology, Open Source Journalism, Creative Commons, Open Politics, and so on. You argue that these movements are all components of a larger P2P phenomenon — a phenomenon that arises from what you call the "relational dynamic" inherent in distributed networks.
MB: That's right. The P2P dynamic has created the three new social processes I mentioned: peer production, peer governance and peer property. And these social processes flow from the ability of networks to enable the highly efficient distribution of intellect, of the means of production (computers), and of co-ordination.
And the fact that this is happening in many areas of social life demonstrates that the three paradigms I talked about — the open and free production of immaterial culture, the extension of participation and democracy to all social fields, and the development of a Commons for intellectual creations — can be applied across the board, with the necessary adaptations of course. Today, for instance, we can even see things like Open Reiki and Open Yoga initiatives developing!
A little flakey?
RP: Not everyone is convinced by your arguments. One critic I spoke to said that attempting to build a political and economic theory around P2P was "a little flakey." What is it that he is missing?
MB: P2P theory is not a theory "of" everything, but just a theory "for" something. The aim is to understand what is going on, to generate meaning, and to offer a guide for action.
If you'd lived in the early part of the mid-19th century, and were witnessing the rapid growth of factories, would you not naturally strive to understand what was happening, and to build theories to explain it — as of course the political economists of that time did?
As happened then, today we can see new modes of production, governance, and property emerging. That surely warrants some effort to try and understand what it means. Would you call people like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig "flakey"?
RP: No, personally I wouldn’t. But of course they do have their own critics.
MB: Sure. I would add, by the way, that the difference between their work — which I greatly admire and respect — and The P2P Foundation, is that they operate within the horizon of the present market economy, while I choose to look beyond it. I do so because I don’t believe in eternal social systems. After all, social systems have changed substantially in the past.
The central point here is that P2P is the natural paradigm for the new world we can see being built today. And that is what the P2P Foundation is trying to understand, and to encourage.
RP: You are clearly right to argue that we should try to understand how all the new movements fit together, and what they portend. However, advocates of the individual movements themselves are generally more interested in stressing their differences rather than their similarities. Some even argue that treating them all as part of some larger movement creates more problems than solutions. Steven Harnad, for instance, strongly resists any attempt to conflate the Open Access Movement (OA) with the Free and Open Source Software movements. Doing so, he says, ignores a "deep disanalogy" between them? How do you respond to that?
MB: Yes, there are different meanings involved, but they are related, since both ensure access to raw material for cultural production.
RP: I guess the point is that Harnad is focused on a very specific objective — that of "freeing the refereed literature." As such, he is very keen to avoid anything that might distract the OA movement from that objective. You, by contrast, see the P2P movement as a catalyst for the next stage in the evolution of human societies?
MB: That's right. And when I talk about P2P I have in mind three things. First, it is a description of an existing trend that any social scientist would have to agree is taking place. Second, it is a normative position on the desirability of enabling more egalitarian subject-to-subject human relationships — and people from any number of different "metaphysical" positions would surely agree that that is a good thing. Third, it is a praxis for strengthening and promoting these human relationships.
RP: So in addition to trying to understand what is happening, you want to encourage and promote it?
MB: That's right. I want to marry both the pragmatic and radical visions in one integrated perspective.
RP: Can you explain what you mean?
MB: I mean that we cannot sit around waiting for the new society to develop. I believe that we should strive to extend the positive trends that we can see around us. After all, we live in the here and now, not the future.
No one can prevent us from having a vision of where we want to be, but my focus is very much on creating that new world right now, not waiting for a hypothetical alternative.
The strength and the secret of peer-to-peer
RP: So a P2P-based society would be a better place to live would it?
MB: Absolutely. In my view, P2P transcends and includes equality and freedom, which are no longer opposed to each other in the way that they are in the industrial paradigm (a point I explain in my paper P2P and Human Evolution).
Similarly, in P2P altruism and self-interest are no longer seen as being in opposition to each other. People can be politically opposed to each other in some aspect, but pragmatically united in their P2P practices.
RP: A more fulfilling society then?
MB: Yes. One big difference, for instance, is that where a traditional peasant may have liked his work and his community, he was not able to resist the higher productivity of the money economy. Since the peer producer model is more productive than the current model based around corporations, people living in a P2P society will produce more social wealth, and be much happier human beings than the Organisation Man. That is the strength and the secret of the peer-to-peer movement.
RP: In your writing you frequently argue that we are currently in a stage of "cognitive capitalism". I assume this is another way of talking about the knowledge economy. But can you describe cognitive capitalism for me, and say how it differs from regular capitalism?
MB: Industrial capitalism was about the accumulation of material assets; cognitive capitalism is about the accumulation of immaterial assets, essentially through the copyright system — which creates state-protected rents for the companies involved. Peer-to-peer transcends cognitive capitalism, because its focus on creating an information commons undermines the monopoly of intellectual property.
RP: OK, so like industrial capitalism, cognitive capitalism is based on the private ownership of assets, but ownership of knowledge rather than material assets. P2P, by contrast, assumes that knowledge assets are communally shared?
MB: Right.
RP: You say that when you talk about P2P you are describing observable social practices. Some, however, might argue that these social practices are only temporary phenomena that will soon disappear, or perhaps be emasculated or criminalised. Is The P2P Foundation building its house on shifting sand?
MB: When Karl Marx wrote his early books, there were only a few thousand workers in manufacturing, but he saw this as the future, and he was correct in this essential insight, though he made many other predictive mistakes.
Rather than being transient, P2P is the core of a new society, and so just as important as those 19th Century factories.
The key question
RP: Why are you so sure of that?
MB: There are good reasons for believing it to be so. First, it is already the mainstay of the current technological infrastructure — nobody can argue that the Internet and the Web are only transient — and the distributed team is also the new model for working together in corporations.
Second, as I said previously, the focus of social innovation is moving away from the world of the enterprise, to civil society, and you'll find many trend watchers who agree with this.
So these are incontrovertible facts. What is also incontrovertible is that immaterial production is becoming an ever-larger part of our economy and, within that sphere, it is increasingly apparent that peer production is more productive and more efficient than the traditional model — in so far as it creates more value than for-profit alternatives.
These things guarantee that P2P processes will continue to grow, and demonstrate that it is more than a transient phenomenon.
RP: The P2P-based society that you describe sounds very different to today's political and economic realities. How do you envisage a P2P-based economy co-existing with the current system?
MB: Well, the key question today is a simple one: will P2P remain a subsystem within a capitalist economy, or will the market at some point become a subsystem within a pluralist economy that revolves around a core of peer production.
RP: What is your answer to that question?
MB: My expectation is that the market will eventually become a subsystem with a P2P economy. So in the system I foresee we would have:
MB: In a non-reciprocal model there is no direct reciprocity. So if, for instance, you work for a free software project most of the time you do it doubly free: that is, you do it out of free will, and you do it for no remuneration, for no direct benefit. Moreover, everybody can use your contributions.
By contrast, in a gift economy situation — such as a Local Trading Exchange System like LETSystem, or the Time Dollar system — you do expect a return for your contribution. As such, it is a reciprocal model.
This distinction, by the way, demonstrates why it is a mistake to describe the Internet, or peer production, as operating like a gift economy. It's actually a non-reciprocal arrangement.
From here to there
RP: OK, so that's how you see the future. But how do you envisage us getting from here to there?
MB: Peer-to-peer is continuing to grow organically, that is its strength. It also strengthens the wider economy in many ways, and leads to new business models. So I expect to see capitalism embrace P2P to a certain degree.
In that respect it will be similar to the way that feudalism embraced capitalism: essentially because it was more productive, enriched certain feudal lords and the monarchy, and they thought they could control it.
Ultimately, of course, it represented a new form of social organisation, much as peer-to-peer does today.
RP: You make it sound like a gradual process of change. But if your analysis is correct it seems more likely that the ancien regime will fight tooth and nail to resist P2P. In fact, battle has already begun — with the music and movie industries apparently intent on destroying, or at least enfeebling, P2P technology. We can also see growing resistance from publishers and many other intermediaries, all of whom view peer-to-peer as a direct threat to their livelihood?
MB: As you say, incumbents like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and others who live from IP rents are already actively resisting peer-to-peer, and they have persuaded governments to create a copyright regime that is stifling cultural freedom.
But the established forces are not a monolithic bloc, and many other companies have clearly realised that adapting to P2P processes is a necessity. In fact, the huge success of companies like Google, eBay, and Skype — whom I term the netarchists — flows directly from their enablement of P2P processes.
Self-conscious movement
RP: Nevertheless, given the way in which incumbents are attacking P2P today I doubt that it will be able to withstand the onslaught without itself becoming more organised, and developing into a self-conscious movement committed to the kind of changes you want to see?
MB: You are correct of course. Today we can see civil society is furiously engaged in creating new social practices, which are then attacked by corporate vested interests — for example when youngsters are told that online sharing is illegal.
In the process, however, these youngsters become more conscious of the issues. It is precisely this evolution that is the basis for the coalescing of an emerging but already powerful movement, with supporters of free/open, participatory, and commons-related ideas joining together and becoming a large self-conscious movement. And we see The P2P Foundation playing an important role in facilitating this.
The creation of the Pirate Party in Sweden, by the way, is a good example of how political and economic resistance to P2P creates a more conscious social movement. The Pirate Party is now a real social force.
RP: Attacks from incumbents aside, what other threats does P2P face?
MB: One threat is that as we as individuals increasingly use participative platforms with weak links, we will co-evolve with corporate Web 2.0 platforms. However, as communities consciously involved in peer production, and hence with strong links, we will naturally prefer open infrastructures, open standards, and an end to dependency on corporate platforms.
RP: I guess you are referring to the way in which for-profit corporations attempting to profit from Web 2.0 developments will "naturally" want to create proprietary platforms. To be effective, however, P2P communities need open platforms. The danger here I guess is that — in the way that Microsoft captured the PC with its proprietary Windows software — Web 2.0 companies could appropriate the infrastructure of the Web?
MB: Right. So our relationship with these Web 2.0 companies is double: we are happy for them to enable further participative practices, but we are aware that as for-profit companies, they might want to control, or even appropriate, our cultural creations.
For the moment, the Web 2.0 companies are embracing the ecology that sustains the commons created by their users, so I consider Web 2.0. to be a welcome development. But in order to avoid becoming too dependent on these companies, it would be wise to ultimately develop community-based resources as a back-up option.
The politics of P2P
RP: You make frequent use of terms like capitalism and feudalism, and in your writing you often refer to Karl Marx and other communist and socialist thinkers. Do you not think that this, and indeed the assumptions beneath your analysis, might alienate a lot of people?
MB: In what way?
RP: Well, the various free and open movements are already viewed as a dangerously radical development. Bill Gates, for instance, famously commented, "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." In a similar vein, the editor of the American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News, Rudy Baum, wrote an editorial in which he concluded, "Open access, in fact, equates with socialised science."
I'm wondering if it is possible, in 2006, to use the politically-charged terminology and concepts that you do without losing your audience before you have the chance to state your case. After all, we live in a world in which the only acceptable way of talking about economic and political issues is by first doing obeisance to the primacy of "market forces"?
MB: I agree that the use of certain concepts can be problematic, but that has to do with my own individual background and limitations. I would add that in Europe such terms are mainstream in the social sciences, and used daily in the press. The US has different sensibilities, but it is not the whole world.
But you are right: resistance to the concepts I use could pose problems. That is why it is better to focus on pragmatically supporting and interlinking concrete projects that are able to unite people from different backgrounds.
Most of the people around the P2P Foundation, by the way, would not consider themselves to be leftists, and I would think that most have an entrepreneurial spirit. As I say, peer-to-peer is a description of existing social practices that we are merely seeking to extend, not an attempt to sell a particular ideology.
RP: I am assuming that you personally have always embraced left wing ideologies.
MB: I was certainly to the left in my youth, but during my career in business I gradually arrived at more centrist positions. Then, in 1998, after seeing the growing crisis of the corporate world, and all the negative indicators concerning the destruction of the biosphere, I re-assessed the desirability of continuing to occupy a cosy position in the establishment. As I say, however, you should not assume that P2P is the monopoly of the left.
RP: Indeed, the co-founder of the Open Source Movement, Eric Raymond, is a Second Amendment libertarian, and when I interviewed him I was struck at how right wing his views are, even though he describes himself as an anarchist — a political ideology normally associated with the left. Interestingly, he argued that in creating the Open Source peer governance model, software developers have demonstrated the practicality and desirability of anarchism.
The choice is simple
MB: Like many social phenomena P2P can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on your political perspective. So while people with an anarcho-capitalist disposition like Eric Raymond (who are opposed to the state, but favourable to a free market), may support and practise peer-to-peer relationships as a way of achieving individual freedom, they are likely to be suspicious of any talk about communities.
People of a more left-wing disposition, on the other hand, will find it attractive because of the new relationality that it empowers, although they may fear its encapsulation within the current for-profit system.
I’m pretty sure we’ll have right-of-centre P2P theories as well at some point. As you point out, Open Source advocates can be extremely pro-capitalist.
RP: When you use the term relationality here I assume you mean the way in which P2P encourages what you call egalitarian subject-to-subject relations and equipotentiality?
MB: Right. As traditionally conceived, by the way, anarchism was a social ideal, and I do not share its a priori hostility to the market and the state.
So people of my own disposition differ from traditional anarchism in that we are not opposed to the state, nor to the market, but rather we want these to be reformed within the context of a pluralist economy that evolves around a core of non-reciprocal peer production, and where the state is not a corporate servant, but a neutral arbiter between various aspects of this pluralist economy.
The only thing we need to get rid of is the endless accumulation of material goods in a finite world. It is for this reason that I find the notion of natural capitalism to be a necessary component of social reform.
RP: Can you say more about this?
MB: We can no longer afford a system that externalises the true costs of things. So I am attracted to the notion of a market without capitalism — i.e. a free market but not based on infinite accumulation. Fair trade, by the way, is an example of a market form that has already merged with a form of peer arbitrage: producers and consumers are treated as partners. So it’s a form of capitalism that attempts to divorce itself from unequal power relationships.
There is also a lot of interest in monetary reform today, with the aim of moving from a scarcity-based model to an abundance-based model. That is an interesting form of capitalism that is compatible with peer-to-peer.
RP: As we have agreed, there is likely to be increasing opposition to the development of P2P. What would be the implications if all the free and open movements were to fail in their objectives, and we ended up in an even more proprietary world than find ourselves in today? What's at stake?
MB: I think it's pretty simple: that would lead to a terrible maiming of the biosphere, and massive dislocation. It would also mean increased social inequality, and global civil wars. The kind of regression we saw after the collapse of the Roman empire in fact.
So the choice is simple, we either scale up to a higher form of complexity, which is what I think P2P represents, or we will face a powerful disorganisation of society.
There is also a clear danger of our evolving towards a panoptical society, where everything is known about us. Likewise, we find ourselves confronted with the threat of information feudalism.
RP: The point you are making here is that as a side effect of current attempts by corporations to protect their outdated business models — through increasing use of digital rights management (DRM) technologies and Trusted Computing for instance — we could find that everything we do online is tracked and most, if not all, the information and knowledge we want to access is now proprietary?
MB: Exactly. In such a world, we would no longer own anything ourselves, and we would only be able to access information by agreeing to restrictive licenses that limited our property and our liberty. That would be a clear regression, but it is the world that content owners and their DRM-advocates want to create.
Illogical state of affairs
RP: And that is precisely the kind of dystopia that Richard Stallman described in his 1997 article, The Right to Read. What, then, do supporters of the various free and open movements need to do in order to avert such a gloomy scenario?
MB: We need to increase the scope of applications in which open and free principles are applied; we need to apply and experiment with peer governance, and learn from our mistakes; and, as I said earlier, we need to interconnect and learn from each other, in the understanding that all these efforts are related, and have a larger common purpose.
In addition, we have to defensively stop the destruction of the biosphere, and stop the new enclosures of the information commons we are witnessing. Instead, we need to be constructively building the new world, and in a way that ends and means are congruent with each other. If we do this then the P2P subsystem will continue to strengthen, and eventually reach a tipping point. At that juncture it will become the dominant model.
RP: You clearly believe that the environmental movement and the free and open movements share some commonality of purpose. What is it that that they have in common?
MB: What they have in common is that both the physical world and the immaterial world need a more commons-based approach. Peter Barnes, for instance, has argued that in order to protect the environment we need to adopt trust-based systems that ensure capital is preserved for our environmental assets.
RP: Right. One of Peter Barnes' proposals is that we should seek to protect the atmosphere by treating the sky as a commonly-owned asset. His proposed Sky Trust, for instance, would be a non-governmental not-for-profit institution that would manage and sell a gradually diminishing number of emission permits to oil, gas and coal companies. The income from these sales would then be used to pay yearly dividends to every American.
MB: Exactly. So I think the respective approaches of the informational and environmental commons are complementary, although of course there are a number of differences. This is a debate that David Bollier monitors in his On the Commons blog.
RP: What is the central issue in that debate?
MB: The central issue is this: currently we live in a society that treats scarce and rival resources (i.e. nature and the biosphere), as if they were infinite, and artificially renders scarce what is infinite, since it can be reproduced for free. This is an illogical state of affairs that both destroys the biosphere and impedes the growth of social productivity. And that illogicality is what we want to reverse.
No tried and trusted long-term model
RP: One of the most frequent criticisms of the free and open movements is that they simply won't stand the test of economic reality over time. You clearly believe they will, but can you tell me precisely how people will be able to make a living in a P2P-based economy? How exactly would I pay my bills in such a society?
MB: This is a funny question, since the free and open movements have existed for over two decades now, and the Open Source model is being embraced by venture capital, and becoming the mainstay of the software industry.
It is also funny, since we are witnessing the decline of the mass media, and the growth and proliferation of Internet-based micromedia. So the free and open movements are surviving very well, growing continuously, and expanding at a remarkable rate.
RP: Nevertheless, there is still no tried and trusted long-term sustainable economic model. Not even the flagship of the P2P movement, Open Source software, can yet offer this. In the first part of the interview you talked about the need to develop interim hybrid business models. Whatever happens, there will need to be a process of transition right?
MB: Yes. As I say, The Foundation is working on this at the moment.
RP: Earlier, you gave a broad outline of how a P2P economy might look. Are you able to give me some specific examples of how a P2P-based society might work in practice?
MB: I'm afraid that I have no fixed answer to your question, other than to say that we have to continue developing and studying open business models. The problem is that, despite our best intentions, we cannot safely predict the overall effect of the multiple actions that take place in complex systems like economies.
What's clear is that there won’t be one business model, but many. At the same time, we have to look at state-based solutions, such as public funding of open source projects, etc.
That said, I have of course thought about this issue, and I have speculated as to what a pluralist economic system might look like.
RP: What do you see?
MB: I see a P2P civilisation that would have to be post-capitalist, in the sense that human survival cannot co-exist with a system that destroys the biosphere; but it will nevertheless have a thriving marketplace. At the core of such a society — where immaterial production is the primary form — would be the production of value through non-reciprocal peer production, most likely supported through a basic income.
And as I said earlier, it will have a strong reciprocity-based gift economy component — a model that is ideal for services such as the local and complementary currencies springing up that utilise personal community currency models like the LETSystem, and which also offers hope for the survival of traditional economies.
In addition, of course, I see a market that still includes the production of scarce and rival material goods, although this process would now be based on peer arbitrage.
RP: Right. As you previously said, you believe that P2P principles can also be utilised in the production of physical goods.
MB: That's right; it's potential for expansion is remarkable. Yochai Benkler, for instance, has noted that the second most popular form of transportation in the US — car pooling — operates under the principles of a sharing economy.
Essentially, I see three main ways in which P2P might migrate to the physical sphere:
RP: So what does the P2P movement need to focus on in the near term?
MB: The important thing at this point in time is the interdependency of peer production and the existing market/state system. In one sense, peer production exists because of the abundance and distribution of resources available in the present system. On the other hand, the present system is becoming ever more dependent on the social innovation taking place outside the world of enterprise, and on peer processes.
So the issue is two-fold. From the macro point of view, the existing stakeholders have every interest in sustaining and promoting P2P, and indeed many of the open/free foundations are now supported by corporate money.
But clearly we need a more durable macro scale arrangement and, as I said, it is my belief that it will require the introduction of a universal basic income. This is a logical outcome, but it is surely several decades away.
RP: Actually, the idea of a basic income has support in some surprising quarters. Milton Friedman, for instance, proposed a negative income tax system in the 1960s. And The Financial Times economic commentator Samuel Brittan has been arguing the case for a basic income for a number of years now.
MB: Right. And on a micro scale, the current challenge for peer projects is to generate some income, but in such a way that the non-reciprocal aspects are not threatened or destroyed. So far, it seems to be working.
RP: Final question then: when they write the future history books, how much importance will be attached to P2P?
MB: How big a deal is P2P? It is as big as the early manufacturing plants in Manchester — the very core of the world to come. It is only small if you have a static view of present realities, and do not understand the underlying dynamic.
RP: Thanks for your time. And good luck with The P2P Foundation!
A PDF file containing both parts of the interview with Michel Bauwens can be downloaded here. Please note that I am asking those who do download the file to make a voluntary contribution of $8 to my PayPal account. Details of how to do this can be found at the end of the PDF file text.
But do Bauwen's claims owe more to idealism than to a realistic analysis of current developments? And what are the politics that inform his vision? Moreover, even if he is right about its potential, how will the P2P movement resist the increasingly aggressive counter offensive now being waged by incumbents of the current economic and political system? In the second part of his interview with Richard Poynder, Bauwens addresses these and other questions.
RP: There are, as we discussed last time, a growing number of open and free movements today — the Free and Open Source Software movements of course; but also Open Data, Open Access, Open Source Biology, Open Source Journalism, Creative Commons, Open Politics, and so on. You argue that these movements are all components of a larger P2P phenomenon — a phenomenon that arises from what you call the "relational dynamic" inherent in distributed networks.
MB: That's right. The P2P dynamic has created the three new social processes I mentioned: peer production, peer governance and peer property. And these social processes flow from the ability of networks to enable the highly efficient distribution of intellect, of the means of production (computers), and of co-ordination.
And the fact that this is happening in many areas of social life demonstrates that the three paradigms I talked about — the open and free production of immaterial culture, the extension of participation and democracy to all social fields, and the development of a Commons for intellectual creations — can be applied across the board, with the necessary adaptations of course. Today, for instance, we can even see things like Open Reiki and Open Yoga initiatives developing!
A little flakey?
RP: Not everyone is convinced by your arguments. One critic I spoke to said that attempting to build a political and economic theory around P2P was "a little flakey." What is it that he is missing?
MB: P2P theory is not a theory "of" everything, but just a theory "for" something. The aim is to understand what is going on, to generate meaning, and to offer a guide for action.
If you'd lived in the early part of the mid-19th century, and were witnessing the rapid growth of factories, would you not naturally strive to understand what was happening, and to build theories to explain it — as of course the political economists of that time did?
As happened then, today we can see new modes of production, governance, and property emerging. That surely warrants some effort to try and understand what it means. Would you call people like Yochai Benkler and Lawrence Lessig "flakey"?
RP: No, personally I wouldn’t. But of course they do have their own critics.
MB: Sure. I would add, by the way, that the difference between their work — which I greatly admire and respect — and The P2P Foundation, is that they operate within the horizon of the present market economy, while I choose to look beyond it. I do so because I don’t believe in eternal social systems. After all, social systems have changed substantially in the past.
The central point here is that P2P is the natural paradigm for the new world we can see being built today. And that is what the P2P Foundation is trying to understand, and to encourage.
RP: You are clearly right to argue that we should try to understand how all the new movements fit together, and what they portend. However, advocates of the individual movements themselves are generally more interested in stressing their differences rather than their similarities. Some even argue that treating them all as part of some larger movement creates more problems than solutions. Steven Harnad, for instance, strongly resists any attempt to conflate the Open Access Movement (OA) with the Free and Open Source Software movements. Doing so, he says, ignores a "deep disanalogy" between them? How do you respond to that?
MB: Yes, there are different meanings involved, but they are related, since both ensure access to raw material for cultural production.
RP: I guess the point is that Harnad is focused on a very specific objective — that of "freeing the refereed literature." As such, he is very keen to avoid anything that might distract the OA movement from that objective. You, by contrast, see the P2P movement as a catalyst for the next stage in the evolution of human societies?
MB: That's right. And when I talk about P2P I have in mind three things. First, it is a description of an existing trend that any social scientist would have to agree is taking place. Second, it is a normative position on the desirability of enabling more egalitarian subject-to-subject human relationships — and people from any number of different "metaphysical" positions would surely agree that that is a good thing. Third, it is a praxis for strengthening and promoting these human relationships.
RP: So in addition to trying to understand what is happening, you want to encourage and promote it?
MB: That's right. I want to marry both the pragmatic and radical visions in one integrated perspective.
RP: Can you explain what you mean?
MB: I mean that we cannot sit around waiting for the new society to develop. I believe that we should strive to extend the positive trends that we can see around us. After all, we live in the here and now, not the future.
No one can prevent us from having a vision of where we want to be, but my focus is very much on creating that new world right now, not waiting for a hypothetical alternative.
The strength and the secret of peer-to-peer
RP: So a P2P-based society would be a better place to live would it?
MB: Absolutely. In my view, P2P transcends and includes equality and freedom, which are no longer opposed to each other in the way that they are in the industrial paradigm (a point I explain in my paper P2P and Human Evolution).
Similarly, in P2P altruism and self-interest are no longer seen as being in opposition to each other. People can be politically opposed to each other in some aspect, but pragmatically united in their P2P practices.
RP: A more fulfilling society then?
MB: Yes. One big difference, for instance, is that where a traditional peasant may have liked his work and his community, he was not able to resist the higher productivity of the money economy. Since the peer producer model is more productive than the current model based around corporations, people living in a P2P society will produce more social wealth, and be much happier human beings than the Organisation Man. That is the strength and the secret of the peer-to-peer movement.
RP: In your writing you frequently argue that we are currently in a stage of "cognitive capitalism". I assume this is another way of talking about the knowledge economy. But can you describe cognitive capitalism for me, and say how it differs from regular capitalism?
MB: Industrial capitalism was about the accumulation of material assets; cognitive capitalism is about the accumulation of immaterial assets, essentially through the copyright system — which creates state-protected rents for the companies involved. Peer-to-peer transcends cognitive capitalism, because its focus on creating an information commons undermines the monopoly of intellectual property.
RP: OK, so like industrial capitalism, cognitive capitalism is based on the private ownership of assets, but ownership of knowledge rather than material assets. P2P, by contrast, assumes that knowledge assets are communally shared?
MB: Right.
RP: You say that when you talk about P2P you are describing observable social practices. Some, however, might argue that these social practices are only temporary phenomena that will soon disappear, or perhaps be emasculated or criminalised. Is The P2P Foundation building its house on shifting sand?
MB: When Karl Marx wrote his early books, there were only a few thousand workers in manufacturing, but he saw this as the future, and he was correct in this essential insight, though he made many other predictive mistakes.
Rather than being transient, P2P is the core of a new society, and so just as important as those 19th Century factories.
The key question
RP: Why are you so sure of that?
MB: There are good reasons for believing it to be so. First, it is already the mainstay of the current technological infrastructure — nobody can argue that the Internet and the Web are only transient — and the distributed team is also the new model for working together in corporations.
Second, as I said previously, the focus of social innovation is moving away from the world of the enterprise, to civil society, and you'll find many trend watchers who agree with this.
So these are incontrovertible facts. What is also incontrovertible is that immaterial production is becoming an ever-larger part of our economy and, within that sphere, it is increasingly apparent that peer production is more productive and more efficient than the traditional model — in so far as it creates more value than for-profit alternatives.
These things guarantee that P2P processes will continue to grow, and demonstrate that it is more than a transient phenomenon.
RP: The P2P-based society that you describe sounds very different to today's political and economic realities. How do you envisage a P2P-based economy co-existing with the current system?
MB: Well, the key question today is a simple one: will P2P remain a subsystem within a capitalist economy, or will the market at some point become a subsystem within a pluralist economy that revolves around a core of peer production.
RP: What is your answer to that question?
MB: My expectation is that the market will eventually become a subsystem with a P2P economy. So in the system I foresee we would have:
- a core of non-material production using peer-to-peer principles in their pure format (non-reciprocal peer production);
- a surrounding sphere of reciprocity-based gift economy, for services in the West, and for the protection of the remaining traditional world in the South;
- a market that is divorced from the obligation of endless accumulation, and so becomes 'natural capitalism' (as envisaged by Hazel Henderson, David Korten and Paul Hawken.) In other words, it would no longer be obliged to destroy the biosphere, and it would have a market that is subject to peer arbitrage, not just power play — as is the case today with fair trade;
- States and governance enriched with multi-stakeholder principles (e.g. states subjected to peer arbitrage as well).
MB: In a non-reciprocal model there is no direct reciprocity. So if, for instance, you work for a free software project most of the time you do it doubly free: that is, you do it out of free will, and you do it for no remuneration, for no direct benefit. Moreover, everybody can use your contributions.
By contrast, in a gift economy situation — such as a Local Trading Exchange System like LETSystem, or the Time Dollar system — you do expect a return for your contribution. As such, it is a reciprocal model.
This distinction, by the way, demonstrates why it is a mistake to describe the Internet, or peer production, as operating like a gift economy. It's actually a non-reciprocal arrangement.
From here to there
RP: OK, so that's how you see the future. But how do you envisage us getting from here to there?
MB: Peer-to-peer is continuing to grow organically, that is its strength. It also strengthens the wider economy in many ways, and leads to new business models. So I expect to see capitalism embrace P2P to a certain degree.
In that respect it will be similar to the way that feudalism embraced capitalism: essentially because it was more productive, enriched certain feudal lords and the monarchy, and they thought they could control it.
Ultimately, of course, it represented a new form of social organisation, much as peer-to-peer does today.
RP: You make it sound like a gradual process of change. But if your analysis is correct it seems more likely that the ancien regime will fight tooth and nail to resist P2P. In fact, battle has already begun — with the music and movie industries apparently intent on destroying, or at least enfeebling, P2P technology. We can also see growing resistance from publishers and many other intermediaries, all of whom view peer-to-peer as a direct threat to their livelihood?
MB: As you say, incumbents like the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) and others who live from IP rents are already actively resisting peer-to-peer, and they have persuaded governments to create a copyright regime that is stifling cultural freedom.
But the established forces are not a monolithic bloc, and many other companies have clearly realised that adapting to P2P processes is a necessity. In fact, the huge success of companies like Google, eBay, and Skype — whom I term the netarchists — flows directly from their enablement of P2P processes.
Self-conscious movement
RP: Nevertheless, given the way in which incumbents are attacking P2P today I doubt that it will be able to withstand the onslaught without itself becoming more organised, and developing into a self-conscious movement committed to the kind of changes you want to see?
MB: You are correct of course. Today we can see civil society is furiously engaged in creating new social practices, which are then attacked by corporate vested interests — for example when youngsters are told that online sharing is illegal.
In the process, however, these youngsters become more conscious of the issues. It is precisely this evolution that is the basis for the coalescing of an emerging but already powerful movement, with supporters of free/open, participatory, and commons-related ideas joining together and becoming a large self-conscious movement. And we see The P2P Foundation playing an important role in facilitating this.
The creation of the Pirate Party in Sweden, by the way, is a good example of how political and economic resistance to P2P creates a more conscious social movement. The Pirate Party is now a real social force.
RP: Attacks from incumbents aside, what other threats does P2P face?
MB: One threat is that as we as individuals increasingly use participative platforms with weak links, we will co-evolve with corporate Web 2.0 platforms. However, as communities consciously involved in peer production, and hence with strong links, we will naturally prefer open infrastructures, open standards, and an end to dependency on corporate platforms.
RP: I guess you are referring to the way in which for-profit corporations attempting to profit from Web 2.0 developments will "naturally" want to create proprietary platforms. To be effective, however, P2P communities need open platforms. The danger here I guess is that — in the way that Microsoft captured the PC with its proprietary Windows software — Web 2.0 companies could appropriate the infrastructure of the Web?
MB: Right. So our relationship with these Web 2.0 companies is double: we are happy for them to enable further participative practices, but we are aware that as for-profit companies, they might want to control, or even appropriate, our cultural creations.
For the moment, the Web 2.0 companies are embracing the ecology that sustains the commons created by their users, so I consider Web 2.0. to be a welcome development. But in order to avoid becoming too dependent on these companies, it would be wise to ultimately develop community-based resources as a back-up option.
The politics of P2P
RP: You make frequent use of terms like capitalism and feudalism, and in your writing you often refer to Karl Marx and other communist and socialist thinkers. Do you not think that this, and indeed the assumptions beneath your analysis, might alienate a lot of people?
MB: In what way?
RP: Well, the various free and open movements are already viewed as a dangerously radical development. Bill Gates, for instance, famously commented, "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises." In a similar vein, the editor of the American Chemical Society's Chemical & Engineering News, Rudy Baum, wrote an editorial in which he concluded, "Open access, in fact, equates with socialised science."
I'm wondering if it is possible, in 2006, to use the politically-charged terminology and concepts that you do without losing your audience before you have the chance to state your case. After all, we live in a world in which the only acceptable way of talking about economic and political issues is by first doing obeisance to the primacy of "market forces"?
MB: I agree that the use of certain concepts can be problematic, but that has to do with my own individual background and limitations. I would add that in Europe such terms are mainstream in the social sciences, and used daily in the press. The US has different sensibilities, but it is not the whole world.
But you are right: resistance to the concepts I use could pose problems. That is why it is better to focus on pragmatically supporting and interlinking concrete projects that are able to unite people from different backgrounds.
Most of the people around the P2P Foundation, by the way, would not consider themselves to be leftists, and I would think that most have an entrepreneurial spirit. As I say, peer-to-peer is a description of existing social practices that we are merely seeking to extend, not an attempt to sell a particular ideology.
RP: I am assuming that you personally have always embraced left wing ideologies.
MB: I was certainly to the left in my youth, but during my career in business I gradually arrived at more centrist positions. Then, in 1998, after seeing the growing crisis of the corporate world, and all the negative indicators concerning the destruction of the biosphere, I re-assessed the desirability of continuing to occupy a cosy position in the establishment. As I say, however, you should not assume that P2P is the monopoly of the left.
RP: Indeed, the co-founder of the Open Source Movement, Eric Raymond, is a Second Amendment libertarian, and when I interviewed him I was struck at how right wing his views are, even though he describes himself as an anarchist — a political ideology normally associated with the left. Interestingly, he argued that in creating the Open Source peer governance model, software developers have demonstrated the practicality and desirability of anarchism.
The choice is simple
MB: Like many social phenomena P2P can be interpreted in a number of ways, depending on your political perspective. So while people with an anarcho-capitalist disposition like Eric Raymond (who are opposed to the state, but favourable to a free market), may support and practise peer-to-peer relationships as a way of achieving individual freedom, they are likely to be suspicious of any talk about communities.
People of a more left-wing disposition, on the other hand, will find it attractive because of the new relationality that it empowers, although they may fear its encapsulation within the current for-profit system.
I’m pretty sure we’ll have right-of-centre P2P theories as well at some point. As you point out, Open Source advocates can be extremely pro-capitalist.
RP: When you use the term relationality here I assume you mean the way in which P2P encourages what you call egalitarian subject-to-subject relations and equipotentiality?
MB: Right. As traditionally conceived, by the way, anarchism was a social ideal, and I do not share its a priori hostility to the market and the state.
So people of my own disposition differ from traditional anarchism in that we are not opposed to the state, nor to the market, but rather we want these to be reformed within the context of a pluralist economy that evolves around a core of non-reciprocal peer production, and where the state is not a corporate servant, but a neutral arbiter between various aspects of this pluralist economy.
The only thing we need to get rid of is the endless accumulation of material goods in a finite world. It is for this reason that I find the notion of natural capitalism to be a necessary component of social reform.
RP: Can you say more about this?
MB: We can no longer afford a system that externalises the true costs of things. So I am attracted to the notion of a market without capitalism — i.e. a free market but not based on infinite accumulation. Fair trade, by the way, is an example of a market form that has already merged with a form of peer arbitrage: producers and consumers are treated as partners. So it’s a form of capitalism that attempts to divorce itself from unequal power relationships.
There is also a lot of interest in monetary reform today, with the aim of moving from a scarcity-based model to an abundance-based model. That is an interesting form of capitalism that is compatible with peer-to-peer.
RP: As we have agreed, there is likely to be increasing opposition to the development of P2P. What would be the implications if all the free and open movements were to fail in their objectives, and we ended up in an even more proprietary world than find ourselves in today? What's at stake?
MB: I think it's pretty simple: that would lead to a terrible maiming of the biosphere, and massive dislocation. It would also mean increased social inequality, and global civil wars. The kind of regression we saw after the collapse of the Roman empire in fact.
So the choice is simple, we either scale up to a higher form of complexity, which is what I think P2P represents, or we will face a powerful disorganisation of society.
There is also a clear danger of our evolving towards a panoptical society, where everything is known about us. Likewise, we find ourselves confronted with the threat of information feudalism.
RP: The point you are making here is that as a side effect of current attempts by corporations to protect their outdated business models — through increasing use of digital rights management (DRM) technologies and Trusted Computing for instance — we could find that everything we do online is tracked and most, if not all, the information and knowledge we want to access is now proprietary?
MB: Exactly. In such a world, we would no longer own anything ourselves, and we would only be able to access information by agreeing to restrictive licenses that limited our property and our liberty. That would be a clear regression, but it is the world that content owners and their DRM-advocates want to create.
Illogical state of affairs
RP: And that is precisely the kind of dystopia that Richard Stallman described in his 1997 article, The Right to Read. What, then, do supporters of the various free and open movements need to do in order to avert such a gloomy scenario?
MB: We need to increase the scope of applications in which open and free principles are applied; we need to apply and experiment with peer governance, and learn from our mistakes; and, as I said earlier, we need to interconnect and learn from each other, in the understanding that all these efforts are related, and have a larger common purpose.
In addition, we have to defensively stop the destruction of the biosphere, and stop the new enclosures of the information commons we are witnessing. Instead, we need to be constructively building the new world, and in a way that ends and means are congruent with each other. If we do this then the P2P subsystem will continue to strengthen, and eventually reach a tipping point. At that juncture it will become the dominant model.
RP: You clearly believe that the environmental movement and the free and open movements share some commonality of purpose. What is it that that they have in common?
MB: What they have in common is that both the physical world and the immaterial world need a more commons-based approach. Peter Barnes, for instance, has argued that in order to protect the environment we need to adopt trust-based systems that ensure capital is preserved for our environmental assets.
RP: Right. One of Peter Barnes' proposals is that we should seek to protect the atmosphere by treating the sky as a commonly-owned asset. His proposed Sky Trust, for instance, would be a non-governmental not-for-profit institution that would manage and sell a gradually diminishing number of emission permits to oil, gas and coal companies. The income from these sales would then be used to pay yearly dividends to every American.
MB: Exactly. So I think the respective approaches of the informational and environmental commons are complementary, although of course there are a number of differences. This is a debate that David Bollier monitors in his On the Commons blog.
RP: What is the central issue in that debate?
MB: The central issue is this: currently we live in a society that treats scarce and rival resources (i.e. nature and the biosphere), as if they were infinite, and artificially renders scarce what is infinite, since it can be reproduced for free. This is an illogical state of affairs that both destroys the biosphere and impedes the growth of social productivity. And that illogicality is what we want to reverse.
No tried and trusted long-term model
RP: One of the most frequent criticisms of the free and open movements is that they simply won't stand the test of economic reality over time. You clearly believe they will, but can you tell me precisely how people will be able to make a living in a P2P-based economy? How exactly would I pay my bills in such a society?
MB: This is a funny question, since the free and open movements have existed for over two decades now, and the Open Source model is being embraced by venture capital, and becoming the mainstay of the software industry.
It is also funny, since we are witnessing the decline of the mass media, and the growth and proliferation of Internet-based micromedia. So the free and open movements are surviving very well, growing continuously, and expanding at a remarkable rate.
RP: Nevertheless, there is still no tried and trusted long-term sustainable economic model. Not even the flagship of the P2P movement, Open Source software, can yet offer this. In the first part of the interview you talked about the need to develop interim hybrid business models. Whatever happens, there will need to be a process of transition right?
MB: Yes. As I say, The Foundation is working on this at the moment.
RP: Earlier, you gave a broad outline of how a P2P economy might look. Are you able to give me some specific examples of how a P2P-based society might work in practice?
MB: I'm afraid that I have no fixed answer to your question, other than to say that we have to continue developing and studying open business models. The problem is that, despite our best intentions, we cannot safely predict the overall effect of the multiple actions that take place in complex systems like economies.
What's clear is that there won’t be one business model, but many. At the same time, we have to look at state-based solutions, such as public funding of open source projects, etc.
That said, I have of course thought about this issue, and I have speculated as to what a pluralist economic system might look like.
RP: What do you see?
MB: I see a P2P civilisation that would have to be post-capitalist, in the sense that human survival cannot co-exist with a system that destroys the biosphere; but it will nevertheless have a thriving marketplace. At the core of such a society — where immaterial production is the primary form — would be the production of value through non-reciprocal peer production, most likely supported through a basic income.
And as I said earlier, it will have a strong reciprocity-based gift economy component — a model that is ideal for services such as the local and complementary currencies springing up that utilise personal community currency models like the LETSystem, and which also offers hope for the survival of traditional economies.
In addition, of course, I see a market that still includes the production of scarce and rival material goods, although this process would now be based on peer arbitrage.
RP: Right. As you previously said, you believe that P2P principles can also be utilised in the production of physical goods.
MB: That's right; it's potential for expansion is remarkable. Yochai Benkler, for instance, has noted that the second most popular form of transportation in the US — car pooling — operates under the principles of a sharing economy.
Essentially, I see three main ways in which P2P might migrate to the physical sphere:
- In industrial processes, as I previously mentioned, we could see the design phase being separated from the material production phase. I see no objection in theory or practice, for instance, why cars cannot be designed by Open Source communities, and then produced by a third party who has access to the necessary capital.
- I can also see further expansion of distributed models, particularly in the field of financial capital. I mentioned, for instance, the "distributed capital" model being promoted by Open Capital schemes.
- Finally, we could start to make physical items freely available under Open Source licences — artworks say, or bicycles; or indeed books, as already happens with the Book Crossing project. The licensed item could then be linked to a digital address so that it can be monitored, and protected from private appropriation or theft. This strategy offers a tremendous opportunity for creating a wide variety of different physical commons.
RP: So what does the P2P movement need to focus on in the near term?
MB: The important thing at this point in time is the interdependency of peer production and the existing market/state system. In one sense, peer production exists because of the abundance and distribution of resources available in the present system. On the other hand, the present system is becoming ever more dependent on the social innovation taking place outside the world of enterprise, and on peer processes.
So the issue is two-fold. From the macro point of view, the existing stakeholders have every interest in sustaining and promoting P2P, and indeed many of the open/free foundations are now supported by corporate money.
But clearly we need a more durable macro scale arrangement and, as I said, it is my belief that it will require the introduction of a universal basic income. This is a logical outcome, but it is surely several decades away.
RP: Actually, the idea of a basic income has support in some surprising quarters. Milton Friedman, for instance, proposed a negative income tax system in the 1960s. And The Financial Times economic commentator Samuel Brittan has been arguing the case for a basic income for a number of years now.
MB: Right. And on a micro scale, the current challenge for peer projects is to generate some income, but in such a way that the non-reciprocal aspects are not threatened or destroyed. So far, it seems to be working.
RP: Final question then: when they write the future history books, how much importance will be attached to P2P?
MB: How big a deal is P2P? It is as big as the early manufacturing plants in Manchester — the very core of the world to come. It is only small if you have a static view of present realities, and do not understand the underlying dynamic.
RP: Thanks for your time. And good luck with The P2P Foundation!
A PDF file containing both parts of the interview with Michel Bauwens can be downloaded here. Please note that I am asking those who do download the file to make a voluntary contribution of $8 to my PayPal account. Details of how to do this can be found at the end of the PDF file text.
Sunday, September 03, 2006
P2P: A blueprint for the future?
One of the abiding debates about the Internet is the extent to which it represents a step change in the way that societies — and economies — will function in the future. What is undeniable is that the Web has sparked a growing number of "free" and "open" movements that challenge current economic models — including the Free and Open Source Software movements, the Open Access Movement, Open Source Journalism, and Creative Commons. Many also believe that the peer-to-peer (P2P) phenomenon has significant implications for the traditional top-down model on which modern societies are based.
But what is it that all these movements have in common? And how revolutionary will they prove over time? Thailand-based Michel Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, believes that they have a great deal in common. He also believes that they offer a potential new model for the future development of human society. However, he argues, since the free and open movements are all components of a more generalised revolution, advocates of these movements should combine forces with the larger P2P movement if they want to ensure the success of their individual objectives. Here, in the first of a two-part interview, Bauwens talks to Richard Poynder.
RP: As I understand it, you started your career as an information analyst for the United States Information Agency, and then became an information manager for BP Nutrition in Antwerp. At BP you created the first virtual library — for which you won a number of awards — and coined the term cybrarian.
MB: Certainly some credit me with the invention of the cybrarian concept, although I'm not sure that that is strictly correct —often new terms are independently coined by different people as and when new technology creates the need for them. But yes, I created a virtual library at BP and I used the term cybrarianship to describe the way that library functions would be re-engineered for the electronic realm.
RP: Subsequently you have had a number of different careers, and in 2005 created The Foundation for P2P Alternatives. Talk me through the journey you took from European-based librarian (or information professional if you like) to creator of The P2P Foundation.
MB: Ok. After setting up the virtual library at BP, I became editor-in-chief of the Flemish cyberculture magazine Wave. Unfortunately, the magazine was ahead of its time and closed in 1994. I then went on to create two dotcoms: eCom, which was the first Belgian company to specialise in intranets and extranets and was eventually sold to Alcatel; and Kyberco, a cyber-marketing company. Kyberco was sold to a Belgian holding company called Virtuology, which was later renamed Tagora.
Kind of burnout
RP: You don’t like standing still then?
MB: Right. I guess I'm more of a serial entrepreneur: as soon as a company reaches a 25-40 staff barrier, I tend to loose interest because of the increased management workload, and so move on to new projects.
Anyway in 1998, after selling the two companies I had founded, I had a kind of burnout. This was partly due to the fact that I had been combining my day job with the co-production of a three-hour TV documentary.
RP: What was the documentary about?
MB: It was called TechnoCalyps, the Metaphysics of Technology and the End of Man. It was an extensive meditation on the transhuman / posthuman impact of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
RP: Can one still see it?
MB: It was originally shown on Belgian and Dutch television during the 1997-98 periods, and a new version directed by Frank Theys is slated for viewing this month. However, while I co-wrote the scenario, did the research, and conducted the 40 interviews for the original version, I wasn’t involved in the new version.
RP: Thinking about a posthuman world would be enough to trigger a burnout in anyone I guess!
MB: Absolutely. If you want some background information on the topic, by the way, you should take a look at the special issue of Cybersociology that I edited. I also had an article about the topic published in First Monday in 1996.
RP: So how did you end up Thailand?
MB: After the burnout I took a job directing the ebusiness strategy of Belgium's largest telecommunications company Belgacom; but the experience just made me increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate world, and so open to alternatives. Then around that time I took an unplanned trip to Thailand and met my wife, who is Thai, and I stayed on. I guess you could consider me a refugee from western civilisation!
RP: What was it about the corporate world that dissatisfied you?
MB: Well, the job I had with Belgacom really shocked me. After the dynamism of creating two companies with a bunch of hugely enthusiastic and collaborative youngsters, the inefficiency of such a traditional company was hard to bear.
Moving in the wrong direction
RP: There was back then a view that the Web — and the rash of dotcom companies — would force traditional companies to reinvent themselves or perish wasn’t there?
MB: Sure, but it became clear to me that attempts to graft the Internet and the Web onto the corporate world had largely failed — as evidenced by the dotcom crash.
It was also clear that the belief that change would come from corporations — as envisaged by the stakeholder concept of the late seventies — had also proved wrong. Finally, it occurred to me that all the social and ecological indicators were moving in the wrong direction.
RP: How do you mean?
MB: I could see that despite the dotcom crash, the social dynamism of the Internet had not died, but had simply continued in the social sphere, in civil society. At the same time, corporations had become worse places to work in than they had ever been, and poverty and environmental destruction was growing at an unprecedented scale.
RP: So you had previously seen companies as being facilitators for social and political change then?
MB: I had. But I eventually realised that change would primarily have to come from civil society, and that corporations would adapt themselves to these new trends only indirectly — i.e. companies and other institutions would only change in response to outside pressure, rather than on their own initiative. That meant that if I wanted to contribute to the kind of change I wanted to see, I had to ask myself questions about strategy and tactics.
RP: And the answer to those questions was what?
MB: Well, the answers weren’t obvious, because I didn’t feel that I could find them in the old left, which was still state-focused and operating within the paradigms of industrial society. So I decided to take a two-year sabbatical: I spent one year reading, and one year writing, and the end result was the P2P Foundation.
RP: What is the aim of The P2P Foundation?
MB: To research, document and promote peer-to-peer principles.
Relational dynamic
RP: Presumably, then, you see P2P as a lever for the kind of changes you believe are necessary. I'm conscious that most people think of P2P as being synonymous with "illegal" file-sharing services like Grokster, Kazaa and Gnutella, although it's true that less controversial distributed technologies like SETI@home are also described as P2P, as indeed are some new business services. But you see P2P as a much broader phenomenon don’t you? Your web site, for instance, describes P2P as "a new form of political organising and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order." That's quite a leap isn’t it?
MB: Well, we define P2P as the "relational dynamic at work in distributed networks." That is, any situation in which autonomous agents can freely connect without coercion. And to the extent that distributed networks are increasingly being used as technological and organisational communication platforms, the P2P dynamic keeps growing.
RP: What you are talking about is decentralised co-operation over the Internet?
MB: Not quite. With decentralised services you still have obligatory hubs. So you can have centralised hierarchical structures, and you can have structures that are decentralised and heterarchical (i.e. having many power centres rather than one). What is radically different about distributed P2P arrangements, however, is that they have diffused power structures.
And what is attractive about the peer-to-peer mode of organisation is that it combines both freedom, and what I call equipotentiality — which is a finer-grained vision of equality since it honours the differences between people.
RP: Equipotentiality?
MB: In the context of P2P, equipotentiality is the assumption that the individual can self-select his contributions, which are then communally validated.
RP: Self selection here implies that individuals choose what, when, and how they contribute?
MB: Exactly. Nobody but the individual concerned knows better the precise nature of the skills he can contribute; and his peers then validate his contribution. As such, it turns the old model on its head. There is no a priori selection, only ‘after the fact’. It is the model you see in citizen journalism and in projects like Wikipedia for example: Not select, then publish; but publish, then select
Jorge Ferrer has expressed this well. In an equipotential relationship, he says, the various participants are "equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavour (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivialising our encounter with others as being merely equal."
RP: The connection here with the open and free movements is that when, say, Open Source developers co-operate over the Web to produce software they adopt this P2P model. By, for instance, self-selecting what they contribute?
MB: Exactly. Whenever people can connect freely and engage in common projects without coercion you have a peer-to-peer dynamic. So it applies to computers, as in file sharing, and, crucially, it also applies to people. However, while small groups of people can physically connect in a peer-to-peer arrangement, the use of technology is vital for larger groups.
The point about the Internet/Web, then, is that it enables the creation of global microstructures that consist of many small cyber collectives. These are autonomous, but they can co-ordinate on a global scale. That is the power and the transformative potential of P2P.
Three new social processes
RP: So what are the implications of this P2P dynamic in terms of enabling the social and political changes that you want to see?
MB: The P2P phenomenon gives rise to three new social processes: peer production (which is best explained by Yochai Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks); peer governance (i.e. how these groups manage themselves) and peer property (i.e. commonly-owned property).
RP: What is it that is new and distinctive about these three new social processes?
MB: Well, the interesting thing about peer production is that while it is embedded in the market, it is managed by neither pricing nor corporate hierarchies. As Benkler points out, it has therefore introduced a third mode of production, one organised by neither markets nor the state.
Similarly, non-hierarchical governance represents a third mode of governance, one based on civil society rather than on representational democracy; in other words, non-representational democracy.
Finally, P2P gives rise to non-exclusionary property forms. These are based on both free and open access, and they seek to prevent the private appropriation of commonly produced work arising from peer production.
RP: Which has given rise to the notion of copyleft for instance?
MB: Indeed. It has given rise to things like the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and some of the Creative Commons licences. While there are many variants, what these licenses all have in common is that, although they honour individual contributions, they insist that participants agree to a ‘share-alike’ principle that commits them to only using commonly-produced work if they are prepared to abide by the principle of common ownership themselves.
This ensures that peer property spreads in a viral fashion, in a process that we call the ‘circulation of the common.’ This is a new phenomenon, and it operates in parallel with the ‘circulation of commodities’ process of the traditional market system.
RP: So the peer-to-peer dynamic introduces new ways of doing things, and new share-alike property relationships. And it is these things that have given rise to the rash of free and open movements?
MB: Yes. When we use the term P2P we are referring to a number of new developments and phenomena. And one of the new phenomena that P2P creates is a new public domain — an information commons — which people are expected to protect and extend, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation.
New egalitarian digital culture
RP: Let's go back to your assertion that P2P creates a new form of political organising and subjectivity. Can you expand on that for me?
MB: Sure. What we believe is that the networked format, expressed in the specific manner of these new peer-to-peer relations, encourages an alternative to the current political and economic order.
I should add that we are not saying that it offers solutions per se, but that it points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organising formats for devising different processes to arrive at such solutions.
It reconnects, for instance, with older traditions, and attempts to create a more co-operative social order. This time, however, it obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralisation — so it has the potential of creating a new egalitarian digital culture.
We also believe that P2P technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens that desire for participation. Indeed, participatory and self-creating habits seem already to have reached a tipping point. That at least appears to be the implication of recent reports from the Pew Institute and Edelman.
RP: You are referring to the various surveys suggesting that people now attach as much authority to web-based information sources — such as blogs — as they do to so-called "experts", and one-directional, top-down news sources?
MB: Indeed. So what we now need to do is to develop adequate institutional formats to encompass these changes.
RP: What sorts of alternative political and economic order do you envisage?
MB: I think we are looking at an era of 'non-representational democracy', where an increasing number of people will be able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of networks and peer circles.
One consequence of this is that P2P extends non-representational democracy from politics to production and culture. And that is really a new step in the history of civilisation.
John Heron expressed this evolution very well in a letter he sent to me recently. As he put it, "There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:
RP: As you say, P2P doesn’t offer any solutions per se. In fact, what you are describing sounds like a kind of democratic overlay over the existing economic and political system. Indeed, you could argue that this democratic overlay is not rooted in any real-world economic or political system? Critics might accuse you of being unrealistically utopian might they not?
MB: I disagree. As a description of existing social trends, there is nothing utopian about it. P2P theory does not seek an ideal world, but rather seeks to strengthen positive trends that are already occurring. As a vision of how things should be, therefore, it is a concrete utopia, which strives to change daily life in the context of an ethical position.
RP: Ok, so you are simply describing what you see happening out there. You also think that it is a good thing right?
MB: Yes. The normative position is: are we ready to treat each other as subjects and as peers, rather than as masters and slaves? That part is utopian, and no doubt cannot be fully realised in our imperfect world, but it is an inspiring vision, and such concrete utopians as Jesus, King, Mandela and Gandhi, have changed lives and societies in the past though their concrete utopian visions.
The difference today, of course, is that we are no longer waiting for great leaders, since it is the collective intelligence of humankind that needs to rise to the level of its global challenges.
So, yes, I think it is a good thing. As I say, the task today is to develop new tools and techniques to arrive at solutions through a common democratic process.
What I expect to see, by the way, is that peer governance within peer communities will co-exist with our current political democracies, and these in turn will be influenced by the P2P ethos, and so begin to adopt more and more multi-stakeholder forms of governance themselves. I would also point out that it is no longer realistic for any political group to claim that it has easy solutions to complex problems.
Common initiative
RP: So what are the specific objectives of The P2P Foundation?
MB: There are a number of things we want to do. Today P2P exists in a variety of discrete and separate movements and projects, and these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them. While these different social movements would doubtless continue to exist regardless of the existence of the P2P Foundation, they can gain strength from interconnecting, and understanding their common ground.
For that reason we believe there is a need for a common initiative to bring information about P2P together, to connect people, and to mutually inform them. In this way they will be able to develop integrative insights culled from their different perspectives and experiences, and organise events for reflection, action and education. They can also develop the critical and creative tools needed to drive P2P forward.
So we see the Foundation as a matrix, or womb, to inspire the development and linking of the different nodes active in the P2P field, and to organise people around common interests and geographic localities, or indeed any other type of identity that they wish to organise around.
RP: How are you going about this?
MB: The first thing I did was simply to put a stake out in the virtual world, and ask: do you believe in these principles and values? If so, then why not join with me? And to support this I started a newsletter, a blog and a Wiki.
RP: What sort of feedback have you had?
MB: Growth so far has been primarily organic. Slowly, the number of emails I receive has grown from five a week, to five a day, to 25 a day. As I said, I started out by taking a year of study-time, and then a year of writing. It is only this year that I have started to devote my efforts to developing our online presence. Next year I hope to make our activities more physical — by organising events and meetings, and so on. And we are in the process of creating a legal structure for our activities as we speak.
RP: Who else is involved with the Foundation, and in what capacity?
MB: Currently we have a core of about ten to twelve people who contribute most days, and another two dozen who contribute once or twice a week. We also have occasional contributors.
In terms of more active participation, our team consists of James Burke, a young Dutch entrepreneur and strategic designer who is developing the blog; Jeff Petry, a Chiang Mai-based anthropologist, who is responsible for spreading the P2P meme; Adrian Chan, who contributes on relationality issues; Samuel Rose, who focuses on co-operation studies; Remi Sussan, who helps us with French-language material; Brice Leblevennec, a Belgian entrepreneur, who provides us with service space and technical support; Valentin Spirik, who monitors audiovisual developments; and Michael Pick, who is focused on open standards.
We also have a number of others working in additional areas; plus we have a network of people who help us by developing country pages. Right now we are active in around a dozen different countries.
RP: I get the feeling that interest in The Foundation is mainly coming from North America. Is that right?
MB: If you look at the Frappr map on our home page you will see that contributors mainly come from North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. A number of active contributors have also recently joined us from Brazil and Peru.
RP: How is the Foundation funded?
MB: Right now we are mostly funded through voluntary contributions from subscribers to P2P News, although we also have a small grant from W-S Networks — which is a network of complexity consultants.
Information Commons
RP: Let's return to the question of the information commons you mentioned. Can you say more about this and why we need an information commons?
MB: The first point to make is that the cost of producing and distributing knowledge and other immaterial assets is near zero in a networked world, and the role of immaterial production is growing continuously in today's economy.
What this means is that the most natural and productive use of these immaterial assets is to create an open and free pool of information. Anyone can then take this material and freely remix and augment it. As I said, it allows for a process that we call the "circulation of the common."
RP: Where does the current debate about the role of intellectual property fit into a discussion about P2P?
MB: It's clear that since technology has brought the cost of reproducing immaterial assets down to near zero, we need to make some fundamental changes to the IP system. While it is acceptable to have a compromise in which authors and content producers are remunerated, this should be a minimal regime, not the totalitarian regime that the content multinationals seek to impose on the world.
There are, in any case, a number of alternative schemes being developed that would be better for creative artists than the current regime. We envisage, for instance, hybrid P2P projects — which will sit between the market and the pure sphere of non-remunerated peer production.
RP: You mean devising ways in which knowledge and content producers can make a living by combining more traditional business models with new P2P models, in the hope of allowing a smoother transition to the new world?
MB: Yes, and The Foundation is currently investigating such hybrid models.
RP: On your web site you say that the general principles behind movements like Open Source software and Open Access provide models that can be used in "other areas of social and productive life". Does this include material production in any way?
MB: Sure. While these principles naturally apply to any form of immaterial production, we believe they also have relevance in the sphere of physical production. After all, although physical production requires large amounts of capital, the manufacturing process also includes an immaterial design phase.
RP: So while physical products like, say, washing machines and television sets, will always need to be sold at a price that reflects the cost of the raw material and the labour that went into producing them, the knowledge about how to produce and design them should be made freely available for anyone to make us of?
MB: That's right. Essentially, P2P expands democracy from the political sphere, to all spheres of life. I would add that P2P's strength is that, as a mode of production, it is more efficient than the for-profit and state-centralised modes in many areas of production.
The other point to make is that in many cases the capital (be it financial or industrial) required to produce material products will also be distributed, and so P2P principles can be applied in the distribution of capital too.
RP: Can you explain that?
MB: I mean that it would be wrong to think that material production will not be affected by the P2P paradigm, so we need methods whereby, instead of having one or several large investors, or shareholders interested in short-term profit, capital can be obtained in distributed ways, from the producing communities and their customers themselves for instance.
That means that we need 'distributed capital'. The UK-based Limited Liability Partnerships and other Open Capital schemes could be a step in that direction for instance. User-built networks and P2P-exchange projects like Prosper and Zopa also point in that direction.
RP: OK, I'd like to probe you a bit more on the practicalities of P2P, and the politics, and then look at the kind of threats it faces. But let's take a break for the moment.
The second part of this interview can be read here.
A PDF file containing both parts of the interview with Michel Bauwens can be downloaded here. Please note that I am asking those who do download the file to make a voluntary contribution of $8 to my PayPal account. Details of how to do this can be found at the end of the PDF file text.
But what is it that all these movements have in common? And how revolutionary will they prove over time? Thailand-based Michel Bauwens, creator of the Foundation for P2P Alternatives, believes that they have a great deal in common. He also believes that they offer a potential new model for the future development of human society. However, he argues, since the free and open movements are all components of a more generalised revolution, advocates of these movements should combine forces with the larger P2P movement if they want to ensure the success of their individual objectives. Here, in the first of a two-part interview, Bauwens talks to Richard Poynder.
MB: Certainly some credit me with the invention of the cybrarian concept, although I'm not sure that that is strictly correct —often new terms are independently coined by different people as and when new technology creates the need for them. But yes, I created a virtual library at BP and I used the term cybrarianship to describe the way that library functions would be re-engineered for the electronic realm.
RP: Subsequently you have had a number of different careers, and in 2005 created The Foundation for P2P Alternatives. Talk me through the journey you took from European-based librarian (or information professional if you like) to creator of The P2P Foundation.
MB: Ok. After setting up the virtual library at BP, I became editor-in-chief of the Flemish cyberculture magazine Wave. Unfortunately, the magazine was ahead of its time and closed in 1994. I then went on to create two dotcoms: eCom, which was the first Belgian company to specialise in intranets and extranets and was eventually sold to Alcatel; and Kyberco, a cyber-marketing company. Kyberco was sold to a Belgian holding company called Virtuology, which was later renamed Tagora.
Kind of burnout
RP: You don’t like standing still then?
MB: Right. I guess I'm more of a serial entrepreneur: as soon as a company reaches a 25-40 staff barrier, I tend to loose interest because of the increased management workload, and so move on to new projects.
Anyway in 1998, after selling the two companies I had founded, I had a kind of burnout. This was partly due to the fact that I had been combining my day job with the co-production of a three-hour TV documentary.
RP: What was the documentary about?
MB: It was called TechnoCalyps, the Metaphysics of Technology and the End of Man. It was an extensive meditation on the transhuman / posthuman impact of biotechnology, artificial intelligence, and nanotechnology.
RP: Can one still see it?
MB: It was originally shown on Belgian and Dutch television during the 1997-98 periods, and a new version directed by Frank Theys is slated for viewing this month. However, while I co-wrote the scenario, did the research, and conducted the 40 interviews for the original version, I wasn’t involved in the new version.
RP: Thinking about a posthuman world would be enough to trigger a burnout in anyone I guess!
MB: Absolutely. If you want some background information on the topic, by the way, you should take a look at the special issue of Cybersociology that I edited. I also had an article about the topic published in First Monday in 1996.
RP: So how did you end up Thailand?
MB: After the burnout I took a job directing the ebusiness strategy of Belgium's largest telecommunications company Belgacom; but the experience just made me increasingly dissatisfied with the corporate world, and so open to alternatives. Then around that time I took an unplanned trip to Thailand and met my wife, who is Thai, and I stayed on. I guess you could consider me a refugee from western civilisation!
RP: What was it about the corporate world that dissatisfied you?
MB: Well, the job I had with Belgacom really shocked me. After the dynamism of creating two companies with a bunch of hugely enthusiastic and collaborative youngsters, the inefficiency of such a traditional company was hard to bear.
Moving in the wrong direction
RP: There was back then a view that the Web — and the rash of dotcom companies — would force traditional companies to reinvent themselves or perish wasn’t there?
MB: Sure, but it became clear to me that attempts to graft the Internet and the Web onto the corporate world had largely failed — as evidenced by the dotcom crash.
It was also clear that the belief that change would come from corporations — as envisaged by the stakeholder concept of the late seventies — had also proved wrong. Finally, it occurred to me that all the social and ecological indicators were moving in the wrong direction.
RP: How do you mean?
MB: I could see that despite the dotcom crash, the social dynamism of the Internet had not died, but had simply continued in the social sphere, in civil society. At the same time, corporations had become worse places to work in than they had ever been, and poverty and environmental destruction was growing at an unprecedented scale.
RP: So you had previously seen companies as being facilitators for social and political change then?
MB: I had. But I eventually realised that change would primarily have to come from civil society, and that corporations would adapt themselves to these new trends only indirectly — i.e. companies and other institutions would only change in response to outside pressure, rather than on their own initiative. That meant that if I wanted to contribute to the kind of change I wanted to see, I had to ask myself questions about strategy and tactics.
RP: And the answer to those questions was what?
MB: Well, the answers weren’t obvious, because I didn’t feel that I could find them in the old left, which was still state-focused and operating within the paradigms of industrial society. So I decided to take a two-year sabbatical: I spent one year reading, and one year writing, and the end result was the P2P Foundation.
RP: What is the aim of The P2P Foundation?
MB: To research, document and promote peer-to-peer principles.
Relational dynamic
RP: Presumably, then, you see P2P as a lever for the kind of changes you believe are necessary. I'm conscious that most people think of P2P as being synonymous with "illegal" file-sharing services like Grokster, Kazaa and Gnutella, although it's true that less controversial distributed technologies like SETI@home are also described as P2P, as indeed are some new business services. But you see P2P as a much broader phenomenon don’t you? Your web site, for instance, describes P2P as "a new form of political organising and subjectivity, and an alternative for the current political/economic order." That's quite a leap isn’t it?
MB: Well, we define P2P as the "relational dynamic at work in distributed networks." That is, any situation in which autonomous agents can freely connect without coercion. And to the extent that distributed networks are increasingly being used as technological and organisational communication platforms, the P2P dynamic keeps growing.
RP: What you are talking about is decentralised co-operation over the Internet?
MB: Not quite. With decentralised services you still have obligatory hubs. So you can have centralised hierarchical structures, and you can have structures that are decentralised and heterarchical (i.e. having many power centres rather than one). What is radically different about distributed P2P arrangements, however, is that they have diffused power structures.
And what is attractive about the peer-to-peer mode of organisation is that it combines both freedom, and what I call equipotentiality — which is a finer-grained vision of equality since it honours the differences between people.
RP: Equipotentiality?
MB: In the context of P2P, equipotentiality is the assumption that the individual can self-select his contributions, which are then communally validated.
RP: Self selection here implies that individuals choose what, when, and how they contribute?
MB: Exactly. Nobody but the individual concerned knows better the precise nature of the skills he can contribute; and his peers then validate his contribution. As such, it turns the old model on its head. There is no a priori selection, only ‘after the fact’. It is the model you see in citizen journalism and in projects like Wikipedia for example: Not select, then publish; but publish, then select
Jorge Ferrer has expressed this well. In an equipotential relationship, he says, the various participants are "equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavour (intellectually, emotionally, artistically, mechanically, interpersonally, and so forth), but with none of those skills being absolutely higher or better than others. It is important to experience human equality from this perspective to avoid trivialising our encounter with others as being merely equal."
RP: The connection here with the open and free movements is that when, say, Open Source developers co-operate over the Web to produce software they adopt this P2P model. By, for instance, self-selecting what they contribute?
MB: Exactly. Whenever people can connect freely and engage in common projects without coercion you have a peer-to-peer dynamic. So it applies to computers, as in file sharing, and, crucially, it also applies to people. However, while small groups of people can physically connect in a peer-to-peer arrangement, the use of technology is vital for larger groups.
The point about the Internet/Web, then, is that it enables the creation of global microstructures that consist of many small cyber collectives. These are autonomous, but they can co-ordinate on a global scale. That is the power and the transformative potential of P2P.
Three new social processes
RP: So what are the implications of this P2P dynamic in terms of enabling the social and political changes that you want to see?
MB: The P2P phenomenon gives rise to three new social processes: peer production (which is best explained by Yochai Benkler in his book The Wealth of Networks); peer governance (i.e. how these groups manage themselves) and peer property (i.e. commonly-owned property).
RP: What is it that is new and distinctive about these three new social processes?
MB: Well, the interesting thing about peer production is that while it is embedded in the market, it is managed by neither pricing nor corporate hierarchies. As Benkler points out, it has therefore introduced a third mode of production, one organised by neither markets nor the state.
Similarly, non-hierarchical governance represents a third mode of governance, one based on civil society rather than on representational democracy; in other words, non-representational democracy.
Finally, P2P gives rise to non-exclusionary property forms. These are based on both free and open access, and they seek to prevent the private appropriation of commonly produced work arising from peer production.
RP: Which has given rise to the notion of copyleft for instance?
MB: Indeed. It has given rise to things like the GNU General Public Licence (GPL) and some of the Creative Commons licences. While there are many variants, what these licenses all have in common is that, although they honour individual contributions, they insist that participants agree to a ‘share-alike’ principle that commits them to only using commonly-produced work if they are prepared to abide by the principle of common ownership themselves.
This ensures that peer property spreads in a viral fashion, in a process that we call the ‘circulation of the common.’ This is a new phenomenon, and it operates in parallel with the ‘circulation of commodities’ process of the traditional market system.
RP: So the peer-to-peer dynamic introduces new ways of doing things, and new share-alike property relationships. And it is these things that have given rise to the rash of free and open movements?
MB: Yes. When we use the term P2P we are referring to a number of new developments and phenomena. And one of the new phenomena that P2P creates is a new public domain — an information commons — which people are expected to protect and extend, especially in the domain of common knowledge creation.
New egalitarian digital culture
RP: Let's go back to your assertion that P2P creates a new form of political organising and subjectivity. Can you expand on that for me?
MB: Sure. What we believe is that the networked format, expressed in the specific manner of these new peer-to-peer relations, encourages an alternative to the current political and economic order.
I should add that we are not saying that it offers solutions per se, but that it points the way to a variety of dialogical and self-organising formats for devising different processes to arrive at such solutions.
It reconnects, for instance, with older traditions, and attempts to create a more co-operative social order. This time, however, it obviates the need for authoritarianism and centralisation — so it has the potential of creating a new egalitarian digital culture.
We also believe that P2P technology reflects a change of consciousness towards participation, and in turn strengthens that desire for participation. Indeed, participatory and self-creating habits seem already to have reached a tipping point. That at least appears to be the implication of recent reports from the Pew Institute and Edelman.
RP: You are referring to the various surveys suggesting that people now attach as much authority to web-based information sources — such as blogs — as they do to so-called "experts", and one-directional, top-down news sources?
MB: Indeed. So what we now need to do is to develop adequate institutional formats to encompass these changes.
RP: What sorts of alternative political and economic order do you envisage?
MB: I think we are looking at an era of 'non-representational democracy', where an increasing number of people will be able to manage their social and productive life through the use of a variety of networks and peer circles.
One consequence of this is that P2P extends non-representational democracy from politics to production and culture. And that is really a new step in the history of civilisation.
John Heron expressed this evolution very well in a letter he sent to me recently. As he put it, "There seem to be at least four degrees of cultural development, rooted in degrees of moral insight:
- autocratic cultures which define rights in a limited and oppressive way and there are no rights of political participation;
- narrow democratic cultures which practise political participation through representation, but have no or very limited participation of people in decision-making in all other realms, such as research, religion, education, industry etc.;
- wider democratic cultures which practise both political participation and varying degree of wider kinds of participation;
- commons P2P cultures in a libertarian and abundance-oriented global network with equipotential rights of participation of everyone in every field of human endeavour."
RP: As you say, P2P doesn’t offer any solutions per se. In fact, what you are describing sounds like a kind of democratic overlay over the existing economic and political system. Indeed, you could argue that this democratic overlay is not rooted in any real-world economic or political system? Critics might accuse you of being unrealistically utopian might they not?
MB: I disagree. As a description of existing social trends, there is nothing utopian about it. P2P theory does not seek an ideal world, but rather seeks to strengthen positive trends that are already occurring. As a vision of how things should be, therefore, it is a concrete utopia, which strives to change daily life in the context of an ethical position.
RP: Ok, so you are simply describing what you see happening out there. You also think that it is a good thing right?
MB: Yes. The normative position is: are we ready to treat each other as subjects and as peers, rather than as masters and slaves? That part is utopian, and no doubt cannot be fully realised in our imperfect world, but it is an inspiring vision, and such concrete utopians as Jesus, King, Mandela and Gandhi, have changed lives and societies in the past though their concrete utopian visions.
The difference today, of course, is that we are no longer waiting for great leaders, since it is the collective intelligence of humankind that needs to rise to the level of its global challenges.
So, yes, I think it is a good thing. As I say, the task today is to develop new tools and techniques to arrive at solutions through a common democratic process.
What I expect to see, by the way, is that peer governance within peer communities will co-exist with our current political democracies, and these in turn will be influenced by the P2P ethos, and so begin to adopt more and more multi-stakeholder forms of governance themselves. I would also point out that it is no longer realistic for any political group to claim that it has easy solutions to complex problems.
Common initiative
RP: So what are the specific objectives of The P2P Foundation?
MB: There are a number of things we want to do. Today P2P exists in a variety of discrete and separate movements and projects, and these different movements are often unaware of the common P2P ethos that binds them. While these different social movements would doubtless continue to exist regardless of the existence of the P2P Foundation, they can gain strength from interconnecting, and understanding their common ground.
For that reason we believe there is a need for a common initiative to bring information about P2P together, to connect people, and to mutually inform them. In this way they will be able to develop integrative insights culled from their different perspectives and experiences, and organise events for reflection, action and education. They can also develop the critical and creative tools needed to drive P2P forward.
So we see the Foundation as a matrix, or womb, to inspire the development and linking of the different nodes active in the P2P field, and to organise people around common interests and geographic localities, or indeed any other type of identity that they wish to organise around.
RP: How are you going about this?
MB: The first thing I did was simply to put a stake out in the virtual world, and ask: do you believe in these principles and values? If so, then why not join with me? And to support this I started a newsletter, a blog and a Wiki.
RP: What sort of feedback have you had?
MB: Growth so far has been primarily organic. Slowly, the number of emails I receive has grown from five a week, to five a day, to 25 a day. As I said, I started out by taking a year of study-time, and then a year of writing. It is only this year that I have started to devote my efforts to developing our online presence. Next year I hope to make our activities more physical — by organising events and meetings, and so on. And we are in the process of creating a legal structure for our activities as we speak.
RP: Who else is involved with the Foundation, and in what capacity?
MB: Currently we have a core of about ten to twelve people who contribute most days, and another two dozen who contribute once or twice a week. We also have occasional contributors.
In terms of more active participation, our team consists of James Burke, a young Dutch entrepreneur and strategic designer who is developing the blog; Jeff Petry, a Chiang Mai-based anthropologist, who is responsible for spreading the P2P meme; Adrian Chan, who contributes on relationality issues; Samuel Rose, who focuses on co-operation studies; Remi Sussan, who helps us with French-language material; Brice Leblevennec, a Belgian entrepreneur, who provides us with service space and technical support; Valentin Spirik, who monitors audiovisual developments; and Michael Pick, who is focused on open standards.
We also have a number of others working in additional areas; plus we have a network of people who help us by developing country pages. Right now we are active in around a dozen different countries.
RP: I get the feeling that interest in The Foundation is mainly coming from North America. Is that right?
MB: If you look at the Frappr map on our home page you will see that contributors mainly come from North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. A number of active contributors have also recently joined us from Brazil and Peru.
RP: How is the Foundation funded?
MB: Right now we are mostly funded through voluntary contributions from subscribers to P2P News, although we also have a small grant from W-S Networks — which is a network of complexity consultants.
Information Commons
RP: Let's return to the question of the information commons you mentioned. Can you say more about this and why we need an information commons?
MB: The first point to make is that the cost of producing and distributing knowledge and other immaterial assets is near zero in a networked world, and the role of immaterial production is growing continuously in today's economy.
What this means is that the most natural and productive use of these immaterial assets is to create an open and free pool of information. Anyone can then take this material and freely remix and augment it. As I said, it allows for a process that we call the "circulation of the common."
RP: Where does the current debate about the role of intellectual property fit into a discussion about P2P?
MB: It's clear that since technology has brought the cost of reproducing immaterial assets down to near zero, we need to make some fundamental changes to the IP system. While it is acceptable to have a compromise in which authors and content producers are remunerated, this should be a minimal regime, not the totalitarian regime that the content multinationals seek to impose on the world.
There are, in any case, a number of alternative schemes being developed that would be better for creative artists than the current regime. We envisage, for instance, hybrid P2P projects — which will sit between the market and the pure sphere of non-remunerated peer production.
RP: You mean devising ways in which knowledge and content producers can make a living by combining more traditional business models with new P2P models, in the hope of allowing a smoother transition to the new world?
MB: Yes, and The Foundation is currently investigating such hybrid models.
RP: On your web site you say that the general principles behind movements like Open Source software and Open Access provide models that can be used in "other areas of social and productive life". Does this include material production in any way?
MB: Sure. While these principles naturally apply to any form of immaterial production, we believe they also have relevance in the sphere of physical production. After all, although physical production requires large amounts of capital, the manufacturing process also includes an immaterial design phase.
RP: So while physical products like, say, washing machines and television sets, will always need to be sold at a price that reflects the cost of the raw material and the labour that went into producing them, the knowledge about how to produce and design them should be made freely available for anyone to make us of?
MB: That's right. Essentially, P2P expands democracy from the political sphere, to all spheres of life. I would add that P2P's strength is that, as a mode of production, it is more efficient than the for-profit and state-centralised modes in many areas of production.
The other point to make is that in many cases the capital (be it financial or industrial) required to produce material products will also be distributed, and so P2P principles can be applied in the distribution of capital too.
RP: Can you explain that?
MB: I mean that it would be wrong to think that material production will not be affected by the P2P paradigm, so we need methods whereby, instead of having one or several large investors, or shareholders interested in short-term profit, capital can be obtained in distributed ways, from the producing communities and their customers themselves for instance.
That means that we need 'distributed capital'. The UK-based Limited Liability Partnerships and other Open Capital schemes could be a step in that direction for instance. User-built networks and P2P-exchange projects like Prosper and Zopa also point in that direction.
RP: OK, I'd like to probe you a bit more on the practicalities of P2P, and the politics, and then look at the kind of threats it faces. But let's take a break for the moment.
The second part of this interview can be read here.
A PDF file containing both parts of the interview with Michel Bauwens can be downloaded here. Please note that I am asking those who do download the file to make a voluntary contribution of $8 to my PayPal account. Details of how to do this can be found at the end of the PDF file text.
Thursday, June 15, 2006
Open Access: Stage Two
Public Library of Science (PLoS), the non-profit open access publisher, has announced the launch later this year of a next-generation publishing system. The new service will allow researchers in biology and medicine to publish peer-reviewed papers in an open access online repository called PLoS ONE. Chris Surridge, the UK-based managing editor of PLoS ONE, talks to Richard Poynder about the new initiative, and explains why he quit one of the world's top science publishers to work for a small upstart with a still unproven business model.
A 2011 follow-up article on PLoS ONE is available here
RP: Can you begin by saying something about your background? You started out as a biophysicist?
CS: Yes. I did an undergraduate degree in biophysics at Leeds University and then a PhD at Imperial College.
RP: What was your area of research?
CS: I was looking at microtubule assembly, mainly in vitro.
RP: You'll forgive me, I'm not a scientist. What do biophysicists do?
CS: Biophysics is a component of molecular biology. What you are looking at are the molecules that make up organisms and how they interact. So the focus is not on the chemical properties of those molecules but on their physical properties.
RP: Their structure rather than their chemical interactions?
CS: Well, structural studies are very important within biophysics, but the point is that we use physical techniques rather than chemical techniques to explore molecules.
RP: Your web page says that your specialism was "the dynamics of microtubule assembly". What is a microtubule?
CS: Microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton, which is the structure that holds a cell in its shape, and allows it to do the things it does. So in the way that an organism has a skeleton — whether an internal one consisting of bones like you and I have, or an external one like those that insects or, say, lobsters have — cells have a structure that holds them in shape and gives them mechanical stability. Microtubules also help cells to divide.
Sounded like fun
RP: You subsequently went into science publishing and worked as an editor at Nature. Why publishing?
CS: The opportunity arose at the point where I had done a couple of years as a postdoc, trying to get the experiments that didn’t quite work for my PhD to work, and generally tidying the research up. My grant money was running out so I started exploring a number of different avenues and I came across an editorial job at Nature Structural Biology. I decided to take a punt, and applied for the job — as much to find out what an editor actually did as anything. It also sounded like it would be fun!
RP: No regrets at leaving research?
CS: Not really. While I enjoyed doing experimental research I could see that it could become wearing. I have always liked the breadth of science, which is something you can easily lose track of when you are doing research. You have to concentrate quite hard on the problems that you are specifically handling, especially when you are a postdoc.
RP: You also edited Nature's Brief Communication?
CS: Right. I was an assistant editor on Nature Structural Biology for eighteen months. Then an opportunity came up to work on Nature itself, again looking after primary research in the biological field. I did that for about a year, and then I looked after the Brief Communication section of Nature half time for about nine months. I also spent some time as Nature's web editor.
Just another publishing job?
RP: Then last year you gave up traditional publishing and moved to the open access publisher PLoS. You underwent a conversion to OA then?
CS: You make it sound like moving to PLoS was some kind of road to Damascus thing! It wasn’t quite like that.
RP: So is working at PLoS just another publishing job to you?
CS: No, it's not just another publishing job. It was more that moving to PLoS to look after this new project that we are calling PLoS ONE was too exciting an opportunity to miss.
That said, I have always had sympathy for open access publishing, which I think is a very, very good idea. Even while I was at Nature the logic of it seemed compelling. It wasn’t so much a conversion to OA, therefore, but an opportunity to do something that I think is very important for scientific publishing.
RP: How were you recruited? Did you answer a job advertisement?
CS: No. A lot of the editors within PLoS are old colleagues of mine — at least four of them have passed through the Nature editorial office in their careers. They knew the kind of things I was interested in, so I was rung up and told about the PLoS ONE project, and asked whether I would be interested in being involved.
RP: Clearly you were interested. But tell me, why does the world need PLoS ONE?
CS: Because the system of disseminating scientific research has become extremely inefficient, and the concept of the journal has been eroded by the Internet.
RP: How do you mean?
CS: The Internet is providing us with all sorts of new tools for communicating science, so simply publishing journals, and distributing them electronically isn’t using the full potential of the Web to make the dissemination of scientific information efficient and effective. It just isn't the best way to do it anymore.
Inclusivity
RP: When I interviewed PLoS co-founder Harold Varmus he described PLoS ONE as "a very large compendium of papers that have been vetted for scientific quality, but which will not be confined in terms of their likely importance." Is PLoS a journal?
CS: I haven’t got a better word for it, but it's not really a journal: it's somewhat different.
RP: In what way?
CS: If you think of a journal you immediately start asking questions like "So what area of science will this journal cover?" But we can’t think of a good reason to sub-divide PLoS ONE.
RP: Why?
CS: Because if you are looking to provide an extremely efficient and cost-effective way of disseminating the results of scientific research, and you start to think about dividing things up into biology and medicine, and specialities like biophysics, you quickly run up against a boundary question: where, say, does biophysics end and biochemistry begins? You find yourself starting to have to make lots of unnecessary decisions about borders.
RP: The way that science has been divided into different disciplines says something about the way that it has developed presumably?
CS: Actually, I think science subjects developed in a pretty arbitrary way. The boundaries have effectively been imposed as a consequence of the way that journals work, and the way that universities are structured.
RP: So there is no need for such rigid boundaries?
CS: No. At least, not when publishing. Consider, for instance, if you were to have a study that compared the genomes of man and the great apes, looking at a cluster of genes that controls the development of the brain cells associated with language. Now what subject is that? Is it neuroscience? Is it evolution? Is it genetics? Is it genomics? Actually, it is all of these things, so you could classify it in any one of these subject areas.
RP: Why the name PLoS ONE? What does "one" imply here?
CS: One implies inclusivity. What we are saying is that we offer one place to publish; that if you can go to PLoS ONE you don’t need to go elsewhere.
RP: So your message to the scientific community is, "If you have a paper you want to publish we are happy to take a look at it?"
CS: We are happy to look at your research.
RP: You must have some boundaries in mind though. After all, if someone came to you with, say, some research on nuclear physics you would presumably say that that is not what PLoS ONE is about?
CS: Actually, I wouldn’t say that at all. What we are about is science, and science is a way of answering questions about the world.
So if someone came to PLoS ONE with nuclear physics we would welcome them with open arms, and go and find some editors who knew something about nuclear physics who could make a decision about whether the paper was worth publishing. And if they felt it was worth publishing we would then publish it. That's what I mean when I say we are about inclusivity.
That said, we don’t anticipate people with nuclear physics coming to us to begin with because that is not where PLoS' reputation currently is.
The idealised general reader
RP: Right. PLoS' reputation is in biology and medicine. So PLoS ONE is not so much a journal as an online repository — or to use Harold Varmus' word, compendium — of peer-reviewed papers in biology and medicine?
CS: Right. The other point to make is that if you think of a journal you start imagining selecting papers for presentation to a particular target audience. The problem is that the decisions surrounding this selection are generally done in a subjective way.
RP: Can you explain what you mean?
CS: What happens is that journals like Nature, Science, Cell and even PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine work on the principle that they want to take the most interesting and best science that they can lay their hands on, and provide a selection that their audience will want to read.
Yet the audience that these journals have in mind is in the main a convenient fiction, since they are thinking about some idealised general reader for every journal, and assuming that that general reader will be interested in pretty much everything that the journal publishes. No journal editor believes that such a ‘general reader’ exists but that is the mindset behind the journal model.
RP: And as you say, that is an outdated mindset in the age of the Web. One could perhaps also argue that PLoS ONE harks back to the idea of "Proceedings" or "Transactions"?
CS: In a sense, yes. Certainly we are making it much easier for authors because they won't have to ask questions like: "So what journal am I supposed to submit my work to?" They won’t have to worry about establishing the subject remit of a journal when publishing with PLoS ONE.
RP: So talk me through how PLoS ONE works in practice, and how that differs from the traditional journal model?
CS: OK. Researchers will submit papers to PLoS ONE and the editors — of which there will be a large number in order to cover the breadth we expect PLoS ONE to have — will make a decision whether to publish the paper. In this regard we will not be changing the system hugely.
RP: The criteria for accepting a paper, however, will be different will it not? The PLoS ONE press release, for instance, says that "subjective considerations like 'likely impact,' 'degree of advance,' or 'interest to a general reader' will not play a role in deciding whether an article should be published or not."
CS: That's right. Traditionally a lot of the work that goes into peer reviewing consists of asking questions like: "How significant is this? How surprising are the conclusions?" Essentially, these are subjective questions. A more objective question to ask would be: "Is this properly done science".
Simpler question
RP: So what question will peer reviewers be expected to answer when considering whether a paper submitted to PLoS ONE should be accepted for publication?
CS: They will be asked to answer a simpler question than has traditionally been asked. Essentially, that question will be: "Has the science in this paper been done well enough to warrant it being entered into the scientific literature as a whole?"
What is also different about PLoS ONE, by the way, is that we do not see peer review ending on publication of the paper.
RP: Can you expand on that?
CS: Sure. We believe that the more subjective questions about how a paper relates to other work, and where it fits into the whole corpus of scientific literature are still important questions — but we feel that these can be better answered via an open peer review process that takes place after the paper has been published.
RP: So the intention is to go through the traditional peer-review process (although asking a simpler question when considering whether a paper should be published), but then to have additional reviewing take place after the paper is published?
CS: Exactly.
RP: How will this open peer review take place?
CS: Every paper in PLoS ONE will have a discussion thread attached to it. We are also developing ways to allow people to directly annotate the papers themselves.
RP: What else will PLoS ONE do as part of the publication process?
CS: We will also be tagging the papers so that references to them can be linked into the major databases. And we will be assigning DOIs [Digital Object Identifiers] to them, and to their component parts.
In addition, we will undertake archival maintenance of the papers, and we will also submit them to PubMed Central for archiving, as we do with the other PLoS journals.
RP: Do you expect people to find the papers primarily by searching PLoS ONE, or will they come via PubMed Central, or even perhaps Google?
CS: People will come through Google Scholar, and through PubMed Central, but we hope that they will also come to PLoS ONE. After all, with such a broad spectrum of papers we are offering more than a single journal. We also hope to make the experience of coming to the PLoS ONE site a very personalised one.
RP: Can you elaborate on that?
CS: What we plan to do is to give users of PLoS ONE an identity. This will allow us to develop a number of personalised features for them. When they come to the site, for instance, we will already know the sort of things that they are interested in, and so will be able to suggest recently published papers that they are likely to be interested in.
If they tell us that they are only interested in biochemistry papers, for instance, we will show them the biochemistry papers first. And instead of traditional table of contents alerts we will tailor alerts for them that will signal when papers in the subject area that they are interested in have become available on PLoS ONE.
Semantic Web
RP: Presumably these will be based on automated keyword searching. Do you expect PLoS ONE to also embrace the Semantic Web in the future? I'm thinking, for instance, of a scenario where, instead of scientists having to input a search query into the PLoS ONE database, or indeed into Google Scholar or PubMed Central, software agents will be sent out to discover and interrogate papers. They would then analyse and manipulate the data in them, and deliver the results to researchers in the form of a computer-generated report; alerts if you like, but a step beyond today's notion of an alert.
CS: The Semantic Web makes a lot of sense in the context of PLoS ONE, and we are having lots of discussions about how to exploit the tools of the Semantic Web in the service.
Certainly we want to make PLoS ONE papers accessible by those sorts of routes. We also think it is important to try to establish links between papers. Scientific papers don’t exist in isolation but have a host of other papers related to them both closely and more distantly, by virtue of their content. We want to make those connections discoverable. So we are looking to provide lists of articles related to the article you are reading in PLoS ONE.
RP: This would be similar to the way that Amazon makes recommendations to its users would it — telling them what books other people have bought?
CS: That too. In addition to showing papers that are related because of the topic they are covering or the techniques they employ we want to be able to say "Other people who have read this paper also read these other papers." So we plan to incorporate a lot of different algorithms to help uncover the links and connections between papers.
Open Access 2.0
RP: PLoS ONE is very different to anything else that PLoS has done to date isn't it? While they utilise an open access business model, for instance, PLoS' journals are still subject-based publications.
CS: That's true.
RP: Indeed, PLoS ONE seems closer to the original concept of the Public Library of Science. The PLoS Open Letter published in 2001, for instance, stated: "We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form." Does that not sound more like PLoS ONE than the PLoS journals?
CS: Of course. Personally, I don’t see the journals as an end point in themselves. In a sense, the journals are a demonstration that the open access model can work. Certainly PLoS ONE is an idea that we have been kicking around from the start, and it underlies the core reason for the Public Library of Science to exist — which is to get as much of the literature into an open access environment as possible.
RP: Perhaps we could say that PLoS ONE is stage two in the development of the Public Library of Science, and indeed of Open Access?
CS: In some ways. Certainly we see PLoS ONE as an example of what we are calling Open Access 2.0.
RP: This is a reference to Web 2.0?
CS: Yes. There is a lot of buzz around Web 2.0 applications; and that is the way we are looking at PLoS ONE. Essentially, we are providing a new synthesis of the things you can do on the Web to improve the dissemination of primary research.
RP: Web 2.0 implies greater interactivity and a more community-driven service I guess?
CS: Indeed. So when we talk about PLoS ONE as Open Access 2.0 we are saying that we see it very much as a community-up approach to science.
RP: Can you give me an example of how that might work?
CS: Absolutely. We have, for instance, been looking at tagging as a way of organising the literature — in the manner of sites like Flickr, which is creating a vast resource of pictures where users themselves apply tags, and provide structure to the information.
RP: Folksonomies.
CS: Yes. So we see folksonomies as a way of letting the community organise the papers, and we are looking at having the community of PLoS ONE users rate the papers. Consequently, rather than having to guess how good a paper is (I don’t like words like good but I will resort to it here) people will find that others have given them a status.
A distraction
RP: At the moment scientists and administrators tend to judge how good a paper is in terms of which journal it has been published in — by reference to the so-called Impact Factor. Might new methods like folksonomies eventually replace today's notion of the Impact Factor?
CS: Maybe. But the question of impact is in many ways a distraction. As you say, when scientists talk about the impact of a journal they tend to be thinking of Impact Factor, which is effectively the average number of citations that a paper in that journal gets. That is a useful measure for comparing journals with exactly the same scope, but it is a useless way to assess the importance of individual papers. The distribution of number of citations to individual papers is too broad and it isn't normal in shape.
RP: Scientists and their institutions, however, still attach considerable value to the Impact Factor. Given this, why would an author choose to publish in PLoS ONE when publishing in a traditional journal like Nature, Science, or Cell, provides much great kudos?
CS: The problem with the Impact Factor is that you are judging a paper by how good its neighbours are, and it tells you very little about the quality of an individual paper, since the Impact Factor is applied to the entire journal, not individual papers. It's strange that this is the only tool for assessing quality we have at the moment. If you think about it, it is like deciding whether someone is likely to be a bank robber on the basis of who their neighbours are!
PLoS Medicine has, by the way, just published an editorial explaining why we need to re-think the Impact Factor.
The point is that with PLoS ONE we want to maximise the true impact of every paper. By that we mean making them available to everyone who will be interested in their content, while providing efficient tools to allow readers to find the papers and for the papers to find them.
RP: Nevertheless is it not likely that — at least until people feel more confident about new ways of measuring the quality of a paper — PLoS ONE will be viewed as a second rate place to publish; the place to go if you cannot get published anywhere else?
CS: We definitely don't see PLoS ONE as a journal of last resort. It is an alternative to conventional journals, and so stands outside the hierarchy of journals that we have got so hung up on.
RP: So the appeal of PLoS ONE to authors will be what?
CS: PLoS ONE will be a great place to publish work that is so hot that everyone wants to talk about it, because that is exactly what can happen. Everyone can talk about it within PLoS ONE, and listen to what is being said.
It is also a great venue for the papers that only a handful of people wish to read. To that handful of people — those doing highly related work — such "minority interest" papers can be vitally important. Currently, however, their access is inhibited because the papers take too long to publish, and appear in obscure journals — many of which the interested reader's institution may well not have a subscription to in any case.
RP: So who exactly should be looking to publish in PLoS ONE?
CS: We want everyone to use PLoS ONE. We aren't looking at this as a competitor for "conventional" journals, but rather as an alternative to them.
So the issue for researchers is this: if you want to spend months revising and re-revising your paper to satisfy the demands of two or three experts who may or may not be the most appropriate people to judge your work (and so face a small chance of eventually being published), and if you are happy for your paper to be inaccessible to many of the readers who might wish to read it, then conventional journals are for you.
If, on the other hand, you want to share your results — as soon as possible — with the whole scientific community in a way designed to stimulate discourse and so scientific advance, then PLoS ONE will be your journal of choice.
Rates will be lower
RP: The business model utilised by PLoS journals requires authors to pay to publish their papers. Will PLoS ONE authors also be charged to publish?
CS: Yes. PLoS is a not-for-profit organisation but we still have to be self-sustaining.
RP: Will the article processing charges for PLoS ONE be the same as those applying to the journals, which I understand have just risen from $1,500, to between $2,000 and $2,500 per paper?
CS: Hopefully the rate can be lower. One of the driving forces of PLoS ONE is that we want to be able to publish lots of papers. To that end we are setting up the system in a completely scaleable way so that we can cope with as many papers as people want to publish with us. One of the advantages of doing so is that we can start getting economies of scale, and this will keep author fees as low as possible.
RP: So you expect author fees to be lower than the journals?
CS: We haven’t worked out a figure yet, but I am almost able to guarantee that the author fees will be less than the PLoS journals. This is because we expect PLoS ONE to be much less expensive to manage than the PLoS journals. And so it is fair that the journals should cost more.
RP: Why are the journals more expensive to manage?
CS: Because the PLoS journals require quite a lot of intensive editorial work in order to answer those subjective questions I talked about: establishing exactly how exciting a paper is, for instance, or how much of an immediate impact it will have. Essentially their task is to select the cream, although I hate to use that term. That means that both PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have a very low acceptance rate, and the selection process associated with that requires a lot of time-consuming work.
Faster and more efficient
RP: When will PLoS ONE be launched?
CS: We hope to launch at the end of the year. We have just announced the service, and we plan to start accepting submissions at the beginning of August.
RP: In conclusion then, what will PLoS ONE offer to science, and to researchers, that is not currently available?
CS: A faster and more efficient way of publishing papers. As I said, we are looking at an easier decision on whether to publish, and researchers won't have to find the right journal to publish in, since PLoS ONE has sufficient scope that it will be able to publish any paper that is worth publishing. This will also give us sufficient economies of scale to make it a far less expensive way to publish. Moreover, since we hope it will stop the problem of reviewers being asked to review the same paper for a number of different journals it should free up researchers' time.
The point is that the whole hierarchy of journals we have today is wasting huge amounts of scientists' time, whether they are authors, referees or readers. It is an inefficient system that needs replacing. PLoS ONE provides an alternative; one that will make science more efficient, and will see much more of the literature becoming available within an open access environment.
RP: OK, thank you for your time; and good luck with PLoS ONE.
Further information about PLoS ONE can be found here. A blog is also available here.
A more recent (March 2011) article about PLoS ONE is available here.
RP: Can you begin by saying something about your background? You started out as a biophysicist?
CS: Yes. I did an undergraduate degree in biophysics at Leeds University and then a PhD at Imperial College.
RP: What was your area of research?
CS: I was looking at microtubule assembly, mainly in vitro.
RP: You'll forgive me, I'm not a scientist. What do biophysicists do?
CS: Biophysics is a component of molecular biology. What you are looking at are the molecules that make up organisms and how they interact. So the focus is not on the chemical properties of those molecules but on their physical properties.
RP: Their structure rather than their chemical interactions?
CS: Well, structural studies are very important within biophysics, but the point is that we use physical techniques rather than chemical techniques to explore molecules.
RP: Your web page says that your specialism was "the dynamics of microtubule assembly". What is a microtubule?
CS: Microtubules are part of the cytoskeleton, which is the structure that holds a cell in its shape, and allows it to do the things it does. So in the way that an organism has a skeleton — whether an internal one consisting of bones like you and I have, or an external one like those that insects or, say, lobsters have — cells have a structure that holds them in shape and gives them mechanical stability. Microtubules also help cells to divide.
Sounded like fun
RP: You subsequently went into science publishing and worked as an editor at Nature. Why publishing?
CS: The opportunity arose at the point where I had done a couple of years as a postdoc, trying to get the experiments that didn’t quite work for my PhD to work, and generally tidying the research up. My grant money was running out so I started exploring a number of different avenues and I came across an editorial job at Nature Structural Biology. I decided to take a punt, and applied for the job — as much to find out what an editor actually did as anything. It also sounded like it would be fun!
RP: No regrets at leaving research?
CS: Not really. While I enjoyed doing experimental research I could see that it could become wearing. I have always liked the breadth of science, which is something you can easily lose track of when you are doing research. You have to concentrate quite hard on the problems that you are specifically handling, especially when you are a postdoc.
RP: You also edited Nature's Brief Communication?
CS: Right. I was an assistant editor on Nature Structural Biology for eighteen months. Then an opportunity came up to work on Nature itself, again looking after primary research in the biological field. I did that for about a year, and then I looked after the Brief Communication section of Nature half time for about nine months. I also spent some time as Nature's web editor.
Just another publishing job?
RP: Then last year you gave up traditional publishing and moved to the open access publisher PLoS. You underwent a conversion to OA then?
CS: You make it sound like moving to PLoS was some kind of road to Damascus thing! It wasn’t quite like that.
RP: So is working at PLoS just another publishing job to you?
CS: No, it's not just another publishing job. It was more that moving to PLoS to look after this new project that we are calling PLoS ONE was too exciting an opportunity to miss.
That said, I have always had sympathy for open access publishing, which I think is a very, very good idea. Even while I was at Nature the logic of it seemed compelling. It wasn’t so much a conversion to OA, therefore, but an opportunity to do something that I think is very important for scientific publishing.
RP: How were you recruited? Did you answer a job advertisement?
CS: No. A lot of the editors within PLoS are old colleagues of mine — at least four of them have passed through the Nature editorial office in their careers. They knew the kind of things I was interested in, so I was rung up and told about the PLoS ONE project, and asked whether I would be interested in being involved.
RP: Clearly you were interested. But tell me, why does the world need PLoS ONE?
CS: Because the system of disseminating scientific research has become extremely inefficient, and the concept of the journal has been eroded by the Internet.
RP: How do you mean?
CS: The Internet is providing us with all sorts of new tools for communicating science, so simply publishing journals, and distributing them electronically isn’t using the full potential of the Web to make the dissemination of scientific information efficient and effective. It just isn't the best way to do it anymore.
Inclusivity
RP: When I interviewed PLoS co-founder Harold Varmus he described PLoS ONE as "a very large compendium of papers that have been vetted for scientific quality, but which will not be confined in terms of their likely importance." Is PLoS a journal?
CS: I haven’t got a better word for it, but it's not really a journal: it's somewhat different.
RP: In what way?
CS: If you think of a journal you immediately start asking questions like "So what area of science will this journal cover?" But we can’t think of a good reason to sub-divide PLoS ONE.
RP: Why?
CS: Because if you are looking to provide an extremely efficient and cost-effective way of disseminating the results of scientific research, and you start to think about dividing things up into biology and medicine, and specialities like biophysics, you quickly run up against a boundary question: where, say, does biophysics end and biochemistry begins? You find yourself starting to have to make lots of unnecessary decisions about borders.
RP: The way that science has been divided into different disciplines says something about the way that it has developed presumably?
CS: Actually, I think science subjects developed in a pretty arbitrary way. The boundaries have effectively been imposed as a consequence of the way that journals work, and the way that universities are structured.
RP: So there is no need for such rigid boundaries?
CS: No. At least, not when publishing. Consider, for instance, if you were to have a study that compared the genomes of man and the great apes, looking at a cluster of genes that controls the development of the brain cells associated with language. Now what subject is that? Is it neuroscience? Is it evolution? Is it genetics? Is it genomics? Actually, it is all of these things, so you could classify it in any one of these subject areas.
RP: Why the name PLoS ONE? What does "one" imply here?
CS: One implies inclusivity. What we are saying is that we offer one place to publish; that if you can go to PLoS ONE you don’t need to go elsewhere.
RP: So your message to the scientific community is, "If you have a paper you want to publish we are happy to take a look at it?"
CS: We are happy to look at your research.
RP: You must have some boundaries in mind though. After all, if someone came to you with, say, some research on nuclear physics you would presumably say that that is not what PLoS ONE is about?
CS: Actually, I wouldn’t say that at all. What we are about is science, and science is a way of answering questions about the world.
So if someone came to PLoS ONE with nuclear physics we would welcome them with open arms, and go and find some editors who knew something about nuclear physics who could make a decision about whether the paper was worth publishing. And if they felt it was worth publishing we would then publish it. That's what I mean when I say we are about inclusivity.
That said, we don’t anticipate people with nuclear physics coming to us to begin with because that is not where PLoS' reputation currently is.
The idealised general reader
RP: Right. PLoS' reputation is in biology and medicine. So PLoS ONE is not so much a journal as an online repository — or to use Harold Varmus' word, compendium — of peer-reviewed papers in biology and medicine?
CS: Right. The other point to make is that if you think of a journal you start imagining selecting papers for presentation to a particular target audience. The problem is that the decisions surrounding this selection are generally done in a subjective way.
RP: Can you explain what you mean?
CS: What happens is that journals like Nature, Science, Cell and even PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine work on the principle that they want to take the most interesting and best science that they can lay their hands on, and provide a selection that their audience will want to read.
Yet the audience that these journals have in mind is in the main a convenient fiction, since they are thinking about some idealised general reader for every journal, and assuming that that general reader will be interested in pretty much everything that the journal publishes. No journal editor believes that such a ‘general reader’ exists but that is the mindset behind the journal model.
RP: And as you say, that is an outdated mindset in the age of the Web. One could perhaps also argue that PLoS ONE harks back to the idea of "Proceedings" or "Transactions"?
CS: In a sense, yes. Certainly we are making it much easier for authors because they won't have to ask questions like: "So what journal am I supposed to submit my work to?" They won’t have to worry about establishing the subject remit of a journal when publishing with PLoS ONE.
RP: So talk me through how PLoS ONE works in practice, and how that differs from the traditional journal model?
CS: OK. Researchers will submit papers to PLoS ONE and the editors — of which there will be a large number in order to cover the breadth we expect PLoS ONE to have — will make a decision whether to publish the paper. In this regard we will not be changing the system hugely.
RP: The criteria for accepting a paper, however, will be different will it not? The PLoS ONE press release, for instance, says that "subjective considerations like 'likely impact,' 'degree of advance,' or 'interest to a general reader' will not play a role in deciding whether an article should be published or not."
CS: That's right. Traditionally a lot of the work that goes into peer reviewing consists of asking questions like: "How significant is this? How surprising are the conclusions?" Essentially, these are subjective questions. A more objective question to ask would be: "Is this properly done science".
Simpler question
RP: So what question will peer reviewers be expected to answer when considering whether a paper submitted to PLoS ONE should be accepted for publication?
CS: They will be asked to answer a simpler question than has traditionally been asked. Essentially, that question will be: "Has the science in this paper been done well enough to warrant it being entered into the scientific literature as a whole?"
What is also different about PLoS ONE, by the way, is that we do not see peer review ending on publication of the paper.
RP: Can you expand on that?
CS: Sure. We believe that the more subjective questions about how a paper relates to other work, and where it fits into the whole corpus of scientific literature are still important questions — but we feel that these can be better answered via an open peer review process that takes place after the paper has been published.
RP: So the intention is to go through the traditional peer-review process (although asking a simpler question when considering whether a paper should be published), but then to have additional reviewing take place after the paper is published?
CS: Exactly.
RP: How will this open peer review take place?
CS: Every paper in PLoS ONE will have a discussion thread attached to it. We are also developing ways to allow people to directly annotate the papers themselves.
RP: What else will PLoS ONE do as part of the publication process?
CS: We will also be tagging the papers so that references to them can be linked into the major databases. And we will be assigning DOIs [Digital Object Identifiers] to them, and to their component parts.
In addition, we will undertake archival maintenance of the papers, and we will also submit them to PubMed Central for archiving, as we do with the other PLoS journals.
RP: Do you expect people to find the papers primarily by searching PLoS ONE, or will they come via PubMed Central, or even perhaps Google?
CS: People will come through Google Scholar, and through PubMed Central, but we hope that they will also come to PLoS ONE. After all, with such a broad spectrum of papers we are offering more than a single journal. We also hope to make the experience of coming to the PLoS ONE site a very personalised one.
RP: Can you elaborate on that?
CS: What we plan to do is to give users of PLoS ONE an identity. This will allow us to develop a number of personalised features for them. When they come to the site, for instance, we will already know the sort of things that they are interested in, and so will be able to suggest recently published papers that they are likely to be interested in.
If they tell us that they are only interested in biochemistry papers, for instance, we will show them the biochemistry papers first. And instead of traditional table of contents alerts we will tailor alerts for them that will signal when papers in the subject area that they are interested in have become available on PLoS ONE.
Semantic Web
RP: Presumably these will be based on automated keyword searching. Do you expect PLoS ONE to also embrace the Semantic Web in the future? I'm thinking, for instance, of a scenario where, instead of scientists having to input a search query into the PLoS ONE database, or indeed into Google Scholar or PubMed Central, software agents will be sent out to discover and interrogate papers. They would then analyse and manipulate the data in them, and deliver the results to researchers in the form of a computer-generated report; alerts if you like, but a step beyond today's notion of an alert.
CS: The Semantic Web makes a lot of sense in the context of PLoS ONE, and we are having lots of discussions about how to exploit the tools of the Semantic Web in the service.
Certainly we want to make PLoS ONE papers accessible by those sorts of routes. We also think it is important to try to establish links between papers. Scientific papers don’t exist in isolation but have a host of other papers related to them both closely and more distantly, by virtue of their content. We want to make those connections discoverable. So we are looking to provide lists of articles related to the article you are reading in PLoS ONE.
RP: This would be similar to the way that Amazon makes recommendations to its users would it — telling them what books other people have bought?
CS: That too. In addition to showing papers that are related because of the topic they are covering or the techniques they employ we want to be able to say "Other people who have read this paper also read these other papers." So we plan to incorporate a lot of different algorithms to help uncover the links and connections between papers.
Open Access 2.0
RP: PLoS ONE is very different to anything else that PLoS has done to date isn't it? While they utilise an open access business model, for instance, PLoS' journals are still subject-based publications.
CS: That's true.
RP: Indeed, PLoS ONE seems closer to the original concept of the Public Library of Science. The PLoS Open Letter published in 2001, for instance, stated: "We support the establishment of an online public library that would provide the full contents of the published record of research and scholarly discourse in medicine and the life sciences in a freely accessible, fully searchable, interlinked form." Does that not sound more like PLoS ONE than the PLoS journals?
CS: Of course. Personally, I don’t see the journals as an end point in themselves. In a sense, the journals are a demonstration that the open access model can work. Certainly PLoS ONE is an idea that we have been kicking around from the start, and it underlies the core reason for the Public Library of Science to exist — which is to get as much of the literature into an open access environment as possible.
RP: Perhaps we could say that PLoS ONE is stage two in the development of the Public Library of Science, and indeed of Open Access?
CS: In some ways. Certainly we see PLoS ONE as an example of what we are calling Open Access 2.0.
RP: This is a reference to Web 2.0?
CS: Yes. There is a lot of buzz around Web 2.0 applications; and that is the way we are looking at PLoS ONE. Essentially, we are providing a new synthesis of the things you can do on the Web to improve the dissemination of primary research.
RP: Web 2.0 implies greater interactivity and a more community-driven service I guess?
CS: Indeed. So when we talk about PLoS ONE as Open Access 2.0 we are saying that we see it very much as a community-up approach to science.
RP: Can you give me an example of how that might work?
CS: Absolutely. We have, for instance, been looking at tagging as a way of organising the literature — in the manner of sites like Flickr, which is creating a vast resource of pictures where users themselves apply tags, and provide structure to the information.
RP: Folksonomies.
CS: Yes. So we see folksonomies as a way of letting the community organise the papers, and we are looking at having the community of PLoS ONE users rate the papers. Consequently, rather than having to guess how good a paper is (I don’t like words like good but I will resort to it here) people will find that others have given them a status.
A distraction
RP: At the moment scientists and administrators tend to judge how good a paper is in terms of which journal it has been published in — by reference to the so-called Impact Factor. Might new methods like folksonomies eventually replace today's notion of the Impact Factor?
CS: Maybe. But the question of impact is in many ways a distraction. As you say, when scientists talk about the impact of a journal they tend to be thinking of Impact Factor, which is effectively the average number of citations that a paper in that journal gets. That is a useful measure for comparing journals with exactly the same scope, but it is a useless way to assess the importance of individual papers. The distribution of number of citations to individual papers is too broad and it isn't normal in shape.
RP: Scientists and their institutions, however, still attach considerable value to the Impact Factor. Given this, why would an author choose to publish in PLoS ONE when publishing in a traditional journal like Nature, Science, or Cell, provides much great kudos?
CS: The problem with the Impact Factor is that you are judging a paper by how good its neighbours are, and it tells you very little about the quality of an individual paper, since the Impact Factor is applied to the entire journal, not individual papers. It's strange that this is the only tool for assessing quality we have at the moment. If you think about it, it is like deciding whether someone is likely to be a bank robber on the basis of who their neighbours are!
PLoS Medicine has, by the way, just published an editorial explaining why we need to re-think the Impact Factor.
The point is that with PLoS ONE we want to maximise the true impact of every paper. By that we mean making them available to everyone who will be interested in their content, while providing efficient tools to allow readers to find the papers and for the papers to find them.
RP: Nevertheless is it not likely that — at least until people feel more confident about new ways of measuring the quality of a paper — PLoS ONE will be viewed as a second rate place to publish; the place to go if you cannot get published anywhere else?
CS: We definitely don't see PLoS ONE as a journal of last resort. It is an alternative to conventional journals, and so stands outside the hierarchy of journals that we have got so hung up on.
RP: So the appeal of PLoS ONE to authors will be what?
CS: PLoS ONE will be a great place to publish work that is so hot that everyone wants to talk about it, because that is exactly what can happen. Everyone can talk about it within PLoS ONE, and listen to what is being said.
It is also a great venue for the papers that only a handful of people wish to read. To that handful of people — those doing highly related work — such "minority interest" papers can be vitally important. Currently, however, their access is inhibited because the papers take too long to publish, and appear in obscure journals — many of which the interested reader's institution may well not have a subscription to in any case.
RP: So who exactly should be looking to publish in PLoS ONE?
CS: We want everyone to use PLoS ONE. We aren't looking at this as a competitor for "conventional" journals, but rather as an alternative to them.
So the issue for researchers is this: if you want to spend months revising and re-revising your paper to satisfy the demands of two or three experts who may or may not be the most appropriate people to judge your work (and so face a small chance of eventually being published), and if you are happy for your paper to be inaccessible to many of the readers who might wish to read it, then conventional journals are for you.
If, on the other hand, you want to share your results — as soon as possible — with the whole scientific community in a way designed to stimulate discourse and so scientific advance, then PLoS ONE will be your journal of choice.
Rates will be lower
RP: The business model utilised by PLoS journals requires authors to pay to publish their papers. Will PLoS ONE authors also be charged to publish?
CS: Yes. PLoS is a not-for-profit organisation but we still have to be self-sustaining.
RP: Will the article processing charges for PLoS ONE be the same as those applying to the journals, which I understand have just risen from $1,500, to between $2,000 and $2,500 per paper?
CS: Hopefully the rate can be lower. One of the driving forces of PLoS ONE is that we want to be able to publish lots of papers. To that end we are setting up the system in a completely scaleable way so that we can cope with as many papers as people want to publish with us. One of the advantages of doing so is that we can start getting economies of scale, and this will keep author fees as low as possible.
RP: So you expect author fees to be lower than the journals?
CS: We haven’t worked out a figure yet, but I am almost able to guarantee that the author fees will be less than the PLoS journals. This is because we expect PLoS ONE to be much less expensive to manage than the PLoS journals. And so it is fair that the journals should cost more.
RP: Why are the journals more expensive to manage?
CS: Because the PLoS journals require quite a lot of intensive editorial work in order to answer those subjective questions I talked about: establishing exactly how exciting a paper is, for instance, or how much of an immediate impact it will have. Essentially their task is to select the cream, although I hate to use that term. That means that both PLoS Biology and PLoS Medicine have a very low acceptance rate, and the selection process associated with that requires a lot of time-consuming work.
Faster and more efficient
RP: When will PLoS ONE be launched?
CS: We hope to launch at the end of the year. We have just announced the service, and we plan to start accepting submissions at the beginning of August.
RP: In conclusion then, what will PLoS ONE offer to science, and to researchers, that is not currently available?
CS: A faster and more efficient way of publishing papers. As I said, we are looking at an easier decision on whether to publish, and researchers won't have to find the right journal to publish in, since PLoS ONE has sufficient scope that it will be able to publish any paper that is worth publishing. This will also give us sufficient economies of scale to make it a far less expensive way to publish. Moreover, since we hope it will stop the problem of reviewers being asked to review the same paper for a number of different journals it should free up researchers' time.
The point is that the whole hierarchy of journals we have today is wasting huge amounts of scientists' time, whether they are authors, referees or readers. It is an inefficient system that needs replacing. PLoS ONE provides an alternative; one that will make science more efficient, and will see much more of the literature becoming available within an open access environment.
RP: OK, thank you for your time; and good luck with PLoS ONE.
Further information about PLoS ONE can be found here. A blog is also available here.
A more recent (March 2011) article about PLoS ONE is available here.
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