Talk:Research Plan

Preliminary remarks on the draft

Nina Moeller
Interesting document, impressive in scope and ambition, yet peculiarly it does not touch upon the traditional minka/minga practice - a gathering of commoners / commoners working collectively - which is still common-place in the Ecuador. Even Correa is aware of its popular value.

In Ecuadorian culture and community life this still surviving form of commoning - the minga - is very important and to not touch upon that in the text and, importantly, in the research, and thus bring together existing, local forms with new, foreign ideas (to build, to evolve and to establish a form of trust) is at once an opportunity missed, and also renders the project prone to criticisms of such things as detachment, imposition, lack of regard for local customs and culture, as well as, academically speaking, it makes the project, not unjustifiably so, prone to criticisms of lacking background research and grounding in the given reality, as it were, on the ground. Indeed, this quote from the text comes to mind:

“There are scholars from the ivory tower that would have us believe that you can separate the world of reason and ideas from the world of the material and political economy that exists globally. This not only demonstrates the lack of understanding of what is currently happening on our planet but the absence of political realism to find a real social transformation.”

In that sense, one is somehow reminded of and tempted to parahrase the liberal cliche critique that "In order to save the Minga we had to destroy it"....

Why not build on local custom?

Emilio Velis
1.

This looks great. The 'wholistic' approach seems to draw from successful experiences from all over the world, whether in progress or already running, which makes of FLOK a real P2P-based effort to fit open knowledge from others into a government plan that supports it. I think it's worth mentioning also that this is the first time someone has tried it, as well as stating the expectations from the government (what they expect, or why did Correa support it).

2.

Have you considered already the problem of ownership, especially real estate or other kinds of ownerships that have a deep effect in Latin America economy? For example, in El Salvador the problem of real estate ownership was one of the triggers that drove people to a civil war, and I don't doubt that it will prove to be a be problem to tackle when you open knowledge regarding agriculture or industry to the population. Where will they grow or produce?

Protection and use of land-commons is a big part, but it may be interesting to see how open knowledge can have a real impact for production of all sorts if there is no infraestructure (or access to it).

I know that it has been discussed as part of the problems in the research, but it would be interesting to see this (huge) problem being discussed as part of the transition stages.

Emanuele Sabetta
The FLOK model is very interesting, but a little too generic. And the devil is always in the details. For example no economic and monetary reform can be considered solid without including a good plan to defend the system from the attacks of the international currency market. And what about resource distribution and basic income? The illuminati plan based on the green agenda is still the best I've seen on the matter. Everyone on earth will be given the same number of 'carbon credits' so a person living in a village in India, who doesn't even own a car, will have a 1000 carbon credits each year like one living in the USA. If a family in America wants to have two cars and heat their home in winter they will have to buy credits from poorer countries. That is a solid economic model that grants both freedom and welfare to citizens. I've seen nothing of this kind of things in the FLOK social model. Also "liquid democracy" is cited in the document instead of direct democracy, and delegation is a well known and mathematically provable weakness for any democratic system. I like the "free for non commercial use" idea extended from software to the entire economic production, but the sustainability of the redistribution between the commoners of a FLOK society of the earnings obtained selling the surplus to non FLOK companies is not mathematically modeled and there is no agent based simulation that guarantees that the FLOK model is resistant to internal corruption and external economic cartels. Too little mathematics and too much abstraction to be of any use at the moment."

Ricardo Restrepo
"An artistic freedom voucher system will be created. It will be financed by the state in order to mobilize the people's power in the management of authors rights geared towards amplifying creation and use of artistic works. In this system citizens and residents will have the right to assign a voucher each year with a monetary value provided by the state to any resident artistic worker participating in the system. Artistic workers will participate in the system by voluntarily entering the system, excercising their author rights. All artistic production of the artistic workers participanting in the system will be freely copied, modified and distributed, when done on a not-for-profit basis, without eliminating author moral rights. SENESCYT, with the counsel of IAEN, will construct and implement the design and regulations of the artistic freedom voucher system."

Mark Petz
I just read that report

from FLOK very brief comments here as I don't know where it is now to comment on it

It seems philosophy and not concrete practical steps AS IN recommendations that people can implement as I would expect to see them in a report

I think that some of the terminology is wonky

so for example club goods and other economic terms and the difference between post postmodernism and post-industrialism and mercantilism is not clear to me from that report

By its nature it has to miss some stuff out! But I feel that the idea of open and free (no cost) coudl be better explained at the begining.

I am not sure how indigenous perspectives re sacred knowledge to be shared and kept within that community is represented as the report stands at the moment it seems to encourage the state to take that knowledge and make it public so that anyone can abuse it and patent it

there is a conflation between civilization, modernism and neo-liberalism that sets up a straw man for others to then attack other aspects of the arguements

OK those are my initial reactions

Of course there is much of merit and good stuff - but you don't need comments on that - you need critiques that can help you make it stronger.

dkoukoul
Another scenario would be the state to decentralize its organisations and the powers they hold in order to empower and involve the society. For example by introducing open decision making tools. Another scenario should be that any company or other organisation that receives state funding should be recuired to give back to the Commons and thus the partner state, either by CC publications or other open research and technologies.

Marc Reichardt
Below are all the edits that I compiled as one comment, which may or may not be useful to you. If I have to, I'll go back over the same section tomorrow and select where necessary. I'm assuming one can make multiple selections in the same comment?

Last sentence, first paragraph: "...explicitly call for aN open-commons..."

I would attach the next sentence ("President Correa...") to that first paragraph.

Quotes around 'free' and 'freedom' in definition of Libre. There's a bit of trouble with identifying the the first concept as "freely available" and then suggesting that the second letter of the acronym "FLOK" is there simply to reinforce the first letter. It's a bit like calling yourself the "National Nationwide Organization for Change." If what you're saying is "freely available" then even "open" becomes superfluous, as that concept is already inherent to "freely available" and having to reemphasize that you don't mean "free of charge" muddles your message.

No comma after SENESCYT before "and carried out by the IAEN".

The Framing of the Proposal You want to avoid one sentence paragraphs because they come off as slogans, rather than a sustained argument/discussion. All of the material above the diagram can be combined to one paragraph, as it's focused around what came before.

Keep the past in the past tense: "... before the era of network and cognitive production, private capital actors investED in capital and labour and SOLD the industrial and consumer products..."

Diagram: "Private corporation captureS value" "Civil society as passive beneficiary"

The first model: Stay consistent. You use Intellectual Property, IP, and 'intellectual property' in the same paragraph. You want to give something an identity and then leave it with that unless you're radically altering its meaning to make a point, e.g. it's no longer really dangerous. Now it's just "dangerous".

Internet and Web are proper nouns, despite slipping into common usage.

"This first form of cognitive capitalism is far from dying and, in fact, is still dominant, but is nevertheless..."

"Indeed, the second era of massively networked computing, born with publicly accessible Internet, has undermined the control of the 'vectoral' class and created a new class of controllers: that of 'netarchical capital'. This type of capital investor controls proprietary social media platforms that nevertheless enable direct peer to peer communication between individuals."

"'Netarchical capitalism' is a system where capital no longer controls...":

"This model relies less on IP protection, but rather on the monetization of P2P communication through ownership of the enabling platforms for such communication."

"... but the back end is controlled, with the design of the platform, private date of the users, and the attention of the user base in the hands of the owners, who then monetize those three aspects via advertising."

"... is a hybrid form, however, because..."

"... production and exchange and sees, for example, the emergence..."; no comma after "diversity"; no comma after "which act as"

As an artistic note, I'm not sure that a Venn diagram is appropriate for the message you're bringing. Creation of value to capture of value to exclusionary financialization is a linear progression in concept. 'Exclusionary' is a term that excludes the concept of Venn diagrams altogether. You might want to make that last sphere simply "Financialization" or "Monetization", especially if you're suggesting that users are still able to retrieve value from their activities on said monetized platforms, which they often are.

The Value Crisis:

"... and the general consumer's credit became over-extended, the neoliberal system entered into a systemic crisis."

"The material value of the assets of production under neoliberalism are but a small part of the assessment of a company's value and the excess value can be considered just a form of extraction of the human immaterial cooperation."

"Since the 1990s, when civic networks..." remove all commas from this sentence until "... became possible, we observed the birth of a mixed regime." Try to avoid what is known as "passive voice". Rather than "[unknown entity] saw the birth", instead "we observed". That puts the writer/speaker behind the words and enhances communication of the ideas to the reader.

Combine those two sentences: "The period since" and "Through the different" with the next paragraph. It's all intro into another larger concept.

"In 'pure' peer production (which we can call a form of 'aggregated distribution' of labor) contributors, voluntary or paid, contribute to a common pool..." Replace the semicolons with commas. The ideas are sufficiently distinct to carry through the sentence without them.

That second sentence "In this model", however, needs to be carved up.into about three. You need to separate your connection to the previous sentence from the tangent on 'accumulation of the commons'. If it's important enough to require that much detail, it can stand on its own.

Adopt a consistent spelling of labor/labour.

"While in classic neoliberalism labor income stagnates..." "society is deproletarized (i.e. waged labor is increasingLY replaced by isolate and mostly precarious freelancers), more use value..."

Remove the extra space after "in its netarchical form"

"In this new hybrid form, netarchical capitalism" doesn't need to be identified as a sector of capital any longer.

"At the same time, use value has diminishing dependency on capital."

No comma after "mediated labor", period after "parasitical." Period after "producers." "Consequently, profits in the industrial economy diminish, as well, making the financial sector and its reliance on IP rent the increasingly dominant power." "At the same time..."

"...accumulation of capital. The feedback loop..." No comma after "creation" "payments is broken. Over-reliance...:"

"in their book The Ethical Economy."

No comma after "comes with property".

Towards a third model... will have to wait for tomorrow. Interesting stuff. My overarching thought so far is this: Don't try to cram all your ideas into one sentence. You'd be surprised how quickly most people will do that themselves as they read it (or speak it aloud, for that matter.) Semicolons are drastically overused when they could simply be periods to separate distinct (but related) ideas from each other. All of this comes from someone who is incredibly fond of compound sentences. I had to learn to stop doing it, too. More later...