The Seeds of The Commons: Peer-to-Peer Alternatives for Planetary Survival and Justice

• Published in: Postdigital science and education Vol. 3; no. 2; pp. 575 - 591
• Main Authors: Bauwens, Michel, Jandrić, Petar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Cham Springer International Publishing 01.04.2021; Springer Nature B.V
• Subjects: Advisors; Capitalism; Collaboration; Collegiality; Cooperation; Education; Educational Philosophy; Educational Technology; Evolution; Feudalism; Interviews; Intuition; Knowledge Economy; Phase transitions; Printing; Productivity; Research Directors; Revolutions; Seeds; Social Change; Social Systems; Society; Startups; Technology and Digital Education; Verbal communication; Seed forms; Blockchain; Bitcoin; Michel Bauwens; Religion; History; Market; P2P; Capitalism; Transhumanism; Cosmo-local; Commons; Postdigital; Peer-to-peer; Peer-to-peer Foundation; P2P accounting
• ISSN: 2524-485X; 2524-4868; 2524-4868
• DOI: 10.1007/s42438-021-00218-8

Introduction Michel Bauwens1 is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives2 and works in collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of peer production, governance, and property. After he switched career to P2P, Michel was Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008, 2012). In 2014 Michel was the research director of the governmental transition project towards the social knowledge economy in Ecuador.4 In 2016 Michel was Honorary Fellow/Visiting Scholar with the Havens Center at UW-Madison, as an ‘activist in resident’ funded by the Link Foundation, to produce a major rewrite of P2P and Human Evolution (Bauwens 2005). Michel Bauwens (MB): P2P is a relational dynamic that allows any individual in the world to connect to any other individual through digital networking in order to self-organize or create new value streams. Yet, it is only when the bourgeoisie was strong enough to say, ‘feudalism is not letting us work in ways we want, and we want a new form of society’, that these seed forms came together to stir real social change from feudalism to capitalism.