Presentation made to Asia-Pacific Foresight Conference in Perth, WA, November 2012. Explores commercial and social consequences of ongoing IT development and how they may be starting to reconverge.

1. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

2. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and
Digital Curator
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

3. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and
Digital Curator
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

4. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and But what is
Digital Curator technology?
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

5. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and But what is
Digital Curator technology?
http://p2pfoundation.net/
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

6. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and But what is
Digital Curator technology?
http://p2pfoundation.net/
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

7. Towards a Peer-to-Peer Technium
http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/
OPEN
Source
Standards
Data
more
Michel Bauwens
Co-founder and But what is
Digital Curator technology?
http://p2pfoundation.net/
Tony Smith Asia-Pacific
Kororoit Institute Foresight
17 November 2012 Conference

8. What is the Technium?

9. What is the Technium?
• It is the made world

10. What is the Technium?
• It is the made world
• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware

11. What is the Technium?
• It is the made world
• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware
• Equally our processes, systems, information

12. What is the Technium?
• It is the made world
• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware
• Equally our processes, systems, information
• It is not (the rest of) the social world

13. What is the Technium?
• It is the made world
• Not just our artifacts, structures, hardware
• Equally our processes, systems, information
• It is not (the rest of) the social world
• Nor is it (the rest of) the natural world
• It is disproportionately correlated with the
measured economy
• And a disproportionate share of that economy
is devoted to servicing the Technium, rather
than human community needs, let alone nature

14. Why Peer-to-Peer?

15. Why Peer-to-Peer?
• Challenge to management/leadership mythos

16. Why Peer-to-Peer?
• Challenge to management/leadership mythos
• Open Source Software (intrinsic validation)
• Open Standards (non-discriminatory licensing)
• Open Data (especially government data)
• Open Access (reviving academic tradition)
• Community, Commons, Co-working
• Distributed File Sharing, Pirate Party, Occupy
• Alternate notions of value and wealth

17. Taking view from axis of history of
electronic information technologies
• telegraphy
• broadcast media
• mainframe computers
• personal computers
• the internet
• world wide web
• social media
• mobile apps

18. Media
InfoTech
Vannevar Bush
Doug Engelbart
Ted Nelson
Intermedia
PICA System

19. Environ Social Media Banking
Industry
mental Justice InfoTech Finance
Vannevar Bush
Community Memory Doug Engelbart
Ted Nelson
Whole Earth Catalog Intermedia
PICA System
Stewart Brand
Kevin Kelly*

20. Environ Social Media Banking
Industry
mental Justice InfoTech Finance
Vannevar Bush
Community Memory Doug Engelbart
Ted Nelson
Whole Earth Catalog Intermedia
PICA System
Stewart Brand
Kevin Kelly*
The Well/BBS
The Internet
World Wide Web
WIRED*

21. Environ Social Media Banking
Industry
mental Justice InfoTech Finance
Vannevar Bush
Doug Engelbart Commercial
Community Memory data processing
Ted Nelson
Whole Earth Catalog Intermedia as amplifier
PICA System
Stewart Brand Census
Kevin Kelly* Credit Cards
The Well/BBS Proprietary
Security
The Internet Surveillance
The Technium*
World Wide Web eCommerce
Cloud Hosting
WIRED* Apps

22. Environ Social Media Banking
Industry
mental Justice InfoTech Finance
Vannevar Bush
Doug Engelbart Commercial
Community Memory data processing
Ted Nelson
Whole Earth Catalog Intermedia as amplifier
PICA System
Stewart Brand Census
Kevin Kelly* Credit Cards
Request For Comment The Well/BBS Proprietary
Open Source Security
Copyleft
Peer-to-Peer
The Internet Surveillance
The Technium*
Digital Commons
Pirate Party
World Wide Web eCommerce
Cloud Hosting
Occupy WIRED* Apps

23. Environ Social Media Banking
Industry
mental Justice InfoTech Finance
Vannevar Bush
Doug Engelbart Commercial
Community Memory data processing
Ted Nelson
Whole Earth Catalog Intermedia as amplifier
PICA System
Entrepreneurship
Stewart Brand Census
Employment / Consumption
Kevin Kelly* Credit Cards
The Arms of Government
Request For Comment The Well/BBS Proprietary
Open Source Security
Copyleft
Peer-to-Peer
The Internet Surveillance
The Technium*
Digital Commons
Pirate Party
World Wide Web eCommerce
Cloud Hosting
Occupy WIRED* Apps

24. In the months
since this paper
was proposed,
connections
grew between
Peer-to-Peer and
The Technium,
significantly
influenced by
the community
surrounding
HubMelbourne,
including
Michel Bauwens’
September visit.

25. In the months
since this paper
was proposed,
connections
grew between
Peer-to-Peer and
The Technium,
significantly
influenced by
the community
surrounding
HubMelbourne,
including
Michel Bauwens’
September visit.

26. In the months
since this paper
was proposed,
connections
grew between
Peer-to-Peer and
The Technium,
significantly
influenced by
the community
surrounding
HubMelbourne,
including
Michel Bauwens’
September visit.

27. In the months
since this paper
was proposed,
connections
grew between
Peer-to-Peer and
The Technium,
significantly
influenced by
the community
surrounding
HubMelbourne,
including
Michel Bauwens’
September visit.

28. In the months
since this paper
was proposed,
connections
grew between
Peer-to-Peer and
The Technium,
significantly
influenced by
the community
surrounding
HubMelbourne,
including
Michel Bauwens’
September visit.

29. In the months Enter Mark Pesce
since this paper Archetypical
was proposed, Technium
connections Flown under my
grew between radar until
Peer-to-Peer and Melbourne 2012
The Technium, Singularity Summit
significantly Inventor of VRML
influenced by Now an Australian
the community Judge on
surrounding The New Inventors
HubMelbourne, Proponent of
including KickStarter project
Michel Bauwens’ MooresCloud light
September visit. (LAMP lamp)

30. In the months Enter Mark Pesce
since this paper Archetypical
was proposed, Technium
connections Flown under my
grew between radar until
Peer-to-Peer and Melbourne 2012
The Technium, Singularity Summit
significantly Inventor of VRML
influenced by Now an Australian
the community Judge on
surrounding The New Inventors
HubMelbourne, Proponent of
including KickStarter project
Michel Bauwens’ MooresCloud light
September visit. (LAMP lamp)

31. In whatʼs left of 40 minutes
• Emergence/Systems/Complexity as guide
• The Technium
‣ What is Technology?
‣ Humanity Plus
• Peer-to-Peer/OPEN
‣ Coordination, Cooperation, Collaboration
‣ Social Impact Professional
• A long way to go if we get it right

32. Emergence/Systems/Complexity

33. Emergence/Systems/Complexity
• More fundamental than physics
• Synergy; feedback; supervenience; map-territory
• Look to biology for exemplars; value diversity
• Dissipative systems, ref. Stan Salthe
• Kevin Kelly again: Out of Control (1993)
• Life, the Universe and Everything?
‣ Exploring Possibilities, ref. Cantor, Gödel
• What should we be doing?
‣ Exploring Possibilities; without limiting others

34. Emergence/Systems/Complexity
• The terminology (silo) problem
• Donella Meadows on Systems
• Melanie Mitchell on Complexity
• Ilya Prigogine and Robert Laughlin
on emergence in condensed matter
• Ralph Stacey on organisations
• Bill Hall on knowledge management
• Gradient dissipation in flow of words
• Biology still the elephant in the room

35. • Kevin Kelly: What Technology Wants (2010)
• Itʼs not just hardware + software
‣ itʼs also our organisations and our systems
• Economy serves The Technium more than us
• Cities designed for cars rather than humans
• Leaving an arguably unhealthy dependency
• Words are cheap, forming a gradient flow
‣ which self-justifying institutions dissipate

36. What is Technology?
In 1992, working with educationalist Don Tinkler and futurist Peter
Ellyard to produce a Federal Government report on the Effectiveness
and Potential of State-of-the-Art Technologies in the Delivery of
Higher Education, we set out to survey technology vendors.
H.B. Selby Australia Limited had been a leading supplier of scientific
and especially chemical equipment, with Higher Ed a big market, yet
responded that they did not consider themselves a supplier of
technologies to education.
This was a year before release of Marc Andreessen’s Mosaic graphical
World Wide Web browser and Al Gore’s information superhighway
being quoted in the New York Times, yet gave a clear message that
education technology had come to mean information technology.
Twenty years on, developing Maker and DIY Bio communities may
indicate a swing back. The map is not the territory.

37. This is one of those books that,
after you’ve read it, you wonder
how you will ever be able to
hold relevant conversations
with those who haven’t yet.

38. Wars unending
Apple v Tandy

39. Wars unending
Apple v IBM

40. Wars unending
Apple v Micro$oft

41. Wars unending
Apple v Google

42. Wars unending
Apple v Samsung

43. Wars unending
Apple v Exxon

44. Apple v Exxon
Struggles ongoing

45. 4 pillars of Transhumanism
aka Humanity+
Life extension Occupy Space
Aubrey de Grey Keith Henson
Nanotechnology Artificial
K Eric Drexler Intelligence
Humans as transitional

46. Interlewd
Switching from The Technium back to Peer-to-Peer

47. Peer-to-Peer / OPEN
• Internet Engineering Task Force RFC
‣ Request for comment: governance by peer consent
• Open Source Software as core & model
‣ Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl/Python, equivs & more
‣ Intrinsic valuation criteria: has to work & be useful
• Open anything and everything
• “Information wants to be free”
‣ Redressing recent bloat of “intellectual property”
‣ Licensing, Copyleft, Digital Commons
• Peer-to-Peer: natural internet distribution

48. Open Source Software
• Transparent, auditable, verifiable
• Maintainability, extensibility, repositories
‣ Reduced obligation on founders
‣ Foundations in lieu: Apache, Perl, Mozilla (Firefox)
• Repurposing: forking, merging
• Version control: CVS, Subversion, GIT
• Problem reporting and tracking
‣ Bugzilla, Request Tracker
• Long tail project mgmt: SourceForge

49. Extending the model

50. Extending the model
• Open Standards

51. Extending the model
• Open Standards
‣ Licensing wars; XMLʼs long and circuitous history

52. Extending the model
• Open Standards
‣ Licensing wars; XMLʼs long and circuitous history
• Open Data, Govt. stats, Public Transport
• Open Access to academic research
• Maker (Open Hardware), DIYBio
• As way of life / business
‣ crowd funding: KickStarter, Pozzible
‣ micro tasking: Airbnb, Shareable
• Revisiting (tragedy of) the Commons

53. Indefensible business models
(Though lens of emergence/systems/complexity)
• Property begets a rentier class
• Defend & grow your business model
‣ whether or not there is any fun in it
• Cultivate dependencies
‣ the overly $impli$tic come to dominate
• Invent intellectual property
• Prosperous times beget middle men
‣ creating v adding value, defend first

54. Occupy Everything
• Anonymity, trolls, flamewars
‣ neither ability to maintain nor need for secrecy,
but for societyʼs rampant censoriousness
• Peer-to-peer file sharingʼs many uses
‣ over?reaction of copyright licensing intermediaries
• Pirate (political) parties gaining traction
• Occupy Wall Street as contagion
‣ urban growth constraints, esp. sans favelas
• White collar, paternalist commentariat

55. Back in our shared world
P2P Foundation’s Michel Bauwens increasingly Tweeted about
co-operatives in the same time period the Basque Mondragon
federation of co-operatives was receiving wider attention.
Since the baseless triumphalism of Wall Street destroyed much
of living memory, the white collar urban commentariat has
developed amnesia with respect to what had been a long legal
colonisation of more democratic business ownership models.
Even as recently as 1992, Clever Country Coöperative sounded
like a really good idea but, after one consultancy for the Keating
Government had pre-occupied half our membership, the group
as a whole failed to complete its first reporting obligation cycle.
As cracks in the still oft presumed only business model widen, it
is time to look at a round of remutualisation alongside a new set
of legal fictions to legitimise more natural forms of virtual
organisation for crowd funding, micro tasking and lots more.

56. Co-working Spaces

57. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE

58. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed

59. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift

60. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled

61. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled

62. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals

63. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals
Busy event calendar

64. Co-working Spaces
HUB MELBOURNE
Heritage Repurposed
Up 3 flights or old lift
Technology-enabled
Social Impact Professionals
Busy event calendar

65. HUBʼs Green Room

66. HUBʼs Green Room
Wednesdayʼs venue for
Shareable Aust. launch

67. The Interwebs

68. The Interwebs
disintermediation

69. Stigmergic Collaboration
• Coördination Coöperation Collaboration
‣ Collabforgeʼs Mark Elliottʼs 2007 dissertation
expounds their root word differentiation
• Stigmergy as divergent/exploratory
‣ c.f. synergy, emergence, goal-directed
• Wikipedia as exemplar of target medium
‣ from perspective of musical group performance
• From eusocial insects to cities
‣ urban and environmental planning, public transport

70. To the Future, Together
• Joe expounded the Big context last night
• Our incomparably self-indulgent lives
‣ Saltheʼs maximum entropy production principle
• Intelligence in isolation vastly overrated
• Trade federation might deliver anything
• Creative tensions and synergies
‣ without seeing it, could not anticipate what a proton
and electron might achieve by getting together
• Techno power with sharing caring ethic