== Englische Originalfassung == Title: Breaking the third information barrier: a trialectical approach to the cosmo-localization of our world. Abstract This essay presents the theoretical foundations of the P2P Foundation's work on civilizational transitions in the context of the Hegelian and Marxist tradition of dialectical analysis, but explains a number of departures from these methodologies: a focus on trialectics rather than dialectics, and on a new ‘revolutionary subject’: the commoner engaged in regenerative productive communities that are ‘cosmo-locally’ organized and coordinated. It argues that the current crisis of the market-state system—marked by ecological overshoot, political fragmentation, and the limits of both authority ranking (command and planning) and market pricing — opens the possibility of a post-civilizational transition toward a "Type-1 Civilization" in which extraction and regeneration are brought into balance. Drawing on a synthesis of macro-history (Karatani, Whitaker, Turchin), relational sociology (Fiske), critical realism (Bhaskar), and integral theory (Wilber), the essay introduces key P2P concepts: stigmergy as a third coordination mechanism alongside markets and command; trialectical strategies as an alternative to dialectical class struggle; the "pulsation of the commons" as a macro-historical pattern; and the "Archipelago of Regenerative Projects" as a strategic model for trans-local, commons-based coordination. The essay concludes by positioning AI as a potential enabler to make the non-human more visible to participatory decision-making, and by articulating a "Third Narrative" that integrates entropic constraints with extropic evolution. The Text Introduction The author of this article is not a Hegelian nor an expert in Hegel, but has experienced, as a former militant, the use of one of the Marxist versions of dialectics and historical materialism. As the founder of the P2P Foundation, which, since its founding in 2005, aimed to be a collective organic intellectual for the commons movement, and in that capacity, the author, (along with others) has developed a body of knowledge about the role of the commons in ‘civilizational transitions’. How does that vision of social change compare to the broadly ‘Hegelian’ (though inverted) Marxist theory of change ? We will address our own methodology in the first fur sections of this essay. The body of knowledge on which the theoretization of the P2P Foundation is based consists of a continuous observation and documentation of social change organized by actors that are either based to some degree on the new capacity for peer to peer trans-local self-organization, resulting from the invention and spread of digital networks which afford many-to-many communication, as well as the organizing of ‘productive’ collective action around a joint dependence of digital commons. This is done by the collaboration of people who are connected by a shared object that they are producing in common, and is a new form of ‘object-oriented’ sociality’ enabled by digital networks. This is done through the maintenance of a wiki, the P2P Foundation at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net, which has collected 40,000 entries on actions, movements, concepts used, etc … by such actors in nearly every domain of human activity, using a fine-grained and domain-specific topical organization, as well as sectional introductions that collected material. Regularly, reports have been produced synthesizing the findings, as well as books offer a theoretically grounded synthesis of these findings. Before reviewing the theoretical innovations, we would like to review the simple methodological steps on which this work is based. These three principles are: empirical truth, integrative capacity, and emancipatory narrative). The first principle is based on empirical truth, i.e. the expectation is that the observations are based on verifiable ‘real-world’ actions, events, organizations etc … This of course assumes that there is such a thing as a real world, and that it is knowable to some degree. This is what the integrative philosopher Ken Wilber called the ‘Eye of the Flesh’, it sees objects through its sensory apparatus, through observatory machines that extend this capacity, and through intersubjective communities of verification who have developed various methodologies to obtain scientific consensus. As explained below, we are likely closest to the insights of Critical Realism movement, initiated by Roy Bhaskar. This first principle is within the domain of interobjective verification through various apparatuses and disciplines that human science has developed. The second principle is that of the ‘maximum integrative capacity’ of the resulting narrative. The question we ask is: what is the best achievable integrative synthesis that is compatible with the empirical basis that has been collected. This part of our work looks at logical coherence, the rationality of the arguments and is more closely related to the hermeneutic tradition. Wilber calls it the Eye of the Mind. This is a domain of intersubjective verification by the humanistically oriented scholarly tradition. Georges Gusdorf if the great historian of that tradition. The third principle outlined by Ken Wilber is the ‘Eye of Spirit’. Though this is a domain we are very much interested in, we leave a direct examination of this aspect outside of our research focus. Instead, the third principle is the permanent integration of the genealogy of our work within the broad emancipatory tradition of which Marxism was also an expression. The aim of using this third principle is: what is the most hopeful emancipatory narrative that can be deduced from the first two phases of this work. To put it succinctly: how can we contribute to a ‘better world’, from the perspective of the commoners, within the constraints of the first two aspects of our methodology. Here we are of course at the level of ethical and value choices. But we extend the idea of human emancipation to the Mode D dynamics as identified by Kojin Karatani (see below), and have expanded on his insights by recognizing ‘constructive networks’ as the vital current expression of the emancipatory tradition today. This orientation towards ‘productive communities’ is quite unique to the P2P Foundation. However, the connection with this Mode D means that we respect and recognize religious movements and the historical political and social emancipation movements as part of the broader historical context of our work. Essentially, if we take our amended vision of Karatani, we can look at world history as a permanent tension between the evolution of ‘regimes of extraction’, i.e. the mode of value extraction and distribution, itself depending on the mode of societal coordination; and the reactions to its most negative aspects as ‘modes of regeneration’, which can be both social and ecological: The reaction to hunter-gathering were the communal traditions as expressed in for example ‘animism’ and ‘shamanism’; the reaction to agriculture and mining (civilization proper) were the axial religions introducing personal ethics and social duties towards strangers and the Polis, King or Empire for navigating complex class societies; the reaction to the industrial mode of extraction were the future-oriented mass ideological movements such as socialism, but today, in our view, the most potent reaction are expressed in p2p-driven, commons-based, trans-local productive communities centered around regenerative practices, and expressed in ‘network-oriented’ ideological formations. More details about these modalities will follow later in this essay. But essentially, ‘Mode D’ refers to these regenerative reactions. Note that we do not openly adhere to any specific form of spirituality as a collective. While we recognize potential truths that may be sourced through the ‘Eye of the Spirit’, we maintain a pluralistic vision on any potential existing ‘Ground of Being’. Personally, I am close to the four cardinal values that are expressed by the ‘social doctrine of the Catholic Church’, i.e. that true emancipatory structures must align with the recognition of Personhood, the Common Good, Solidarity and Subsidiarity, but that does not engage anyone else in the P2P Foundation connected collectives. We adhere to a spiritual or methodological pluralism (see ‘equiplurality’ below). It is of course impossible to even collect empirical facts without an a priori set of selection criteria and some basic theoretical understanding of the reality we are operating in. The specific version of emancipation that inspires the P2P Foundation is grounded in the three principles of equipotentiality, equiplurality and equiprimacy; concepts derived from the ‘participatory’ wing of the transpersonal psychology movement. These three concepts indicate a particular concept of the human person as a locus of diverse forms of identity. A peer can be considered as a person, the locus of integration, with a collection of intentions, skills and and capacities, which can be engaged in various projects. According to the transpersonal and relationally oriented psychologist Jorge Ferrer, equipotentiality refers to an “ I-Thou mode of encounter in which people would experience others as equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (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 trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal.” ( http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery, 1espace.doc). Equipotentiality means that differential skill level can be recognized in their proper context, but that there is no overall ranking of the worth of persons. The second principle of Equiplurality refers to the principle that there can potentially be multiple spiritual interpretations of reality that can nonetheless be equally holistic and emancipatory. As Ferrer explains: “This principle frees from dogmatic commitment to any single spiritual system and paves the way for a genuine, metaphysically and pragmatically-grounded, spiritual pluralism.” ( https://www.academia.edu/3803021/Introduction_to_Participatory_Spirituality) Finally, the principle of equiprimacy, means that “no human attribute is intrinsically superior or more evolved than any other.” Ferrer explains: “As Romero and Albareda (2001) point out,the cogni-centric (i.e., mind-centered) character of Western culture hinders the maturation of non-mental attributes, making it normally necessary to engage in intentional practices to bring these attributes up to the same developmental level the mind achieves through mainstream education. In principle, however, all human attributes can participate as equal partners in the creative unfolding of the spiritual path, are equally capable of sharing freely in the life of spirit here on earth, and can also be equally alienated from spirit." ( https://www.academia.edu/3803021/Introduction_to_Participatory_Spirituality). All of this is expressed in the production and coordination system which we will call ‘commons-based peer production’: it consists of digitally connected open ecosystems, in which the whole project is ‘holoptically’ visible to all participants, so that tasks can be freely contributed to where they are needed, and these projects are then coordinated through the massive use of social signalling, technically called ‘stigmergy’. Peer production potentially moves the overall system of work coordination from the distribution of labor that was the feature of civilizational class society, to a distribution of freely accorded tasks. While in the logic of the political economy of capital the ‘commodity’, including labor, is central, in the political economy of commons-based peer production, the ‘contribution’ to the commons is central. We will of course return to this topic. In this next section, we review the lesser-known theoretical traditions that have inspired our work. Peer to peer essentially means ‘person to person’, and the striving for a world where persons can interact with each other in a dignified way. This principle of physical proximity is extended, in our understanding, to the realm of digital interaction in the ‘noosphere’, the sphere of human knowledge exchange which takes place in the new realm made possible by digital networks. Thus ‘peer to peer’ becomes the capacity for ‘trans-local self-organization of uncoerced human groups’ which are operating in the digital realm for the coordination of their activities. The condition to this lies in the capacity to create collective and open depositories of shared knowledge and understanding: the now digitally expanded form of ‘commons’. The procedure of coordination for this new form of coordinator and collaborative work is called stigmergy. The just described peer production relies uniquely on these new knowledge commons as one of the main vehicles of coordinated contributions. We will detail this type of analysis in section 4. In the next session we will review our theoretical foundations beyond the primary methodologies we have just described. What follows is a review of intellectual traditions that imply a certain worldview with positive content, and thus sheds light on our positionality. Sources of P2P Theory An important inspiration to our work is the relational grammar developed by Alan Page Fiske, in his classic sociological/anthropological work, ‘Structures of Social Life’. This theory distinguishes four value regimes (ways of generating, recognizing and distributing value): Communal Sharing (sharing with a ‘whole’), Equality Matching (the reciprocity-based gift economy), Authority Ranking (allocation according to rank), Market Pricing (aka markets and capitalism, allocation according to common general standard). This system of analysis allows for precise determinations of the value system at play. Kojin Karatani, the Japanese ‘Kantian’ Marxist historized the relative hegemony of these ‘modes of exchange’ (rather than ‘mode of production’). Mode A, the combination of commons and gift economies, is hegemonic in tribal, kinship-based societies, with Communal Shareholding dominant in nomadic contexts, and the gift economy dynamics more dominant once humanity starts more fixed settlements, as peacemaking technology between neighbors who can no longer flee from each other. Mode B, equivalent to the state, (‘rule and protect’), which sets in after conquest makes Mode A obsolete, and Mode C, the market mode, which emerges after the pacification of the state, but only becomes truly dominant first in the West. But an important innovation compared to Fiske, is Karatani’s concept of ‘Mode D’, expressing the permanent desire of humanity, to return to Mode A, the convivial optimum, without abandoning the advantages of civilizational life. Thus Mode D, is also ‘Mode A at a higher level of complexity’. What is meant by this is that, according to Karatani, humanity is primed to prefer convivial arrangements, which civilization undermines, but that the dilemma is to maximize conviviality while maintaining the advantages brought by civilization (such as longer lifespans, etc…). Hanzi Freinacht, a metamodern author, introduced the vital dynamic between ‘coordination engines’ and ‘purification generators’. A coordination regime stands for the way that the ‘mode of extraction’ is organized, such as hunter-gathering, agriculture with mining, industry, and the current cogni-centric economy. As transitions between extractive regimes are extremely costly (civilization displaces tribes, industry displaces farmers, AI-enabled robotic production will potentially displace both blue and white collar workers), they end up generating counter-movements, which aim to make the new extraction regime livable for the popular majorities, and maintain the necessary harmony with the natural environments. The latter are what Freinacht calls ‘Purification Engines’. Respectively, animism and shamanism strived to create tribal harmony in hunter-gather societies; the ethical axial religions attempted to humanize empires, and the wide variety of mass social movements such as socialism and Marxism aimed to achieve this for industrial society. And as we indicated above, we hypothesize, based on our observation of emergent ‘seed forms’, that ‘constructive networks’ are the equivalent form of humanization for the cognitive era. Very important to us are the evolutionary understandings of Multi-Level Selection Theory, as it introduces the necessary ‘realism’, in any attempt at ameliorative utopian thinking. This set of theories stress that humans evolve in groups, through cultural means, rather than individually through genetic mechanisms. Human societies (tribes, nations, corporations, armies, etc..) compete with each other, and the ‘winners’ of the ongoing cycles of conflicts generalize their institutional superiority to others. The resulting rules mean that the groups that cooperate the best, win these conflicts, but that individuals within the group can benefit from free-riding. If the latter are too successful, they destroy their communities in the ongoing competitive game. David Sloan Wilson has merged this theory with the findings of Ostrom on commons-based governance. Critical Realism positions us on the epistemological polarity. This school of thought being an ulterior evolution from historical materialism, Roy Bhaskar and CR scholars recognize both the relatively independent existence of material reality (‘Realism’) , as well as how our mental capacities determine what and how we can see (an elaboration of Kantianism), and co-construct any reality. And thus, we have to be ‘Critical’ about reality and our own cognitive apparatus and limitations) and anything that may bias it, including the weight of social structures and class positioning. Crucially, in the third part of his evolution, i.e. Bhaskar’s so-called ‘transcendental dialectical critical realism’, also recognizes the realities of mystical and gnostic experience, thereby opening the eye of spiritual perception to recognize the importance of the evolution of human consciousness through its expression in religion, myth and ritual. This is analogous to Karatani’s work on the different ‘spirit powers’ associated with the exchange mechanisms, to the vital work of Ben Suriano (to which we will return later) <and> to the Eye of the Spirit approach of Ken Wilber mentioned in section 1. Wave Pulse theories are cyclical theories of human history, which sees societies evolving in a succession between more extractive/degradative phases, and more regenerative phases in which the commons operate as a key 'healing' mechanism. Peter Turchin's Secular Cycles is a good overview of how these cycles operate in agrarian societies, while Karl Polanyi focuses on the internal 'Kondratieff' type cycles exclusively within capitalism. In his masterpiece history of the emergence of industrial capitalism, from the end of the 17th cy., until 1945, i.e. ‘The Great Transformation, he focuses on the ‘lib-lab’ wave-pulse’. In the positive high-growth ‘A’ phase of a Kondratieff cycle, more labor is needed and this means higher wages, openness to social reforms, etc … This results in a ‘supply’ crisis of the capital sector, which therefore starts demanding a weakening of labor regulations, leading to phase B, the ‘lib’ phase, which favours more market freedom, but leads to a demand crisis for labor and consumers, bringing the full cycle to the end. It is possible to look at the combination of identified cycles to gain insights at what is happening in a particular moment in time, particularly in crisis moments. Each crisis poses particular challenges to overcome, depending on which cycle it pertains to. Mark Whitaker's stellar book on ecological revolutions in ancient China, medieval Japan and post-Roman Europe (cfr. Ecological Revolution, 2009) has been vital to arrive at our own specific conclusion on what we have called the’pulsation of the commons’. This is the P2P Foundation’s major civilizational thesis, The Pulsation of the Commons, which states that, in ‘civilizational times’, i.e. complex class societies, the commons have always existed, but that their influence ‘ebbs and flows’ according to the phases within the evolution of civilizations: they weaken when market and state institutions function well and can take care of their core populations, but they strengthen when such civilizations have reached their peak. Furthermore, in the crucial and recurring ‘dark age’ periods between civilizational forms, when modes of consciousness tend to radically change ,, new bifurcations in productive and societal forms are prepared. In these transition moments, it is the commons-based institutions, such as monastic orders, that become hegemonic, until the conditions are created for a new civilizational uptick. We can find evidence for this, in the role of Christian monastic institutions after the fall of the Roman empire, and in the role of Buddhist congregations after the fall of the Han empire, as we can in Japan. These types of examples are covered in Whitaker’s book. More recently, Mark Whitaker has performed a study of the longevity of Confederations as compared to more centralized State forms, and has concluded that they lasted longer on average, and that, in contrast to imperial forms, the role of the commons-based institutions is much more important. This is a so far largely occulted part of historiography, as the latter was largely written after the emergence and hegemony of the nation-state form after the 16th century. We are convinced that new findings will strengthen even more the recognition of the role of commons-based institutions in human history. The theoretization of the P2P Foundation is also based on a systematic study of the patterns identified by the 3 schools of macro-history that were influential in the 20th century: 1) The cultural macro-historians, ‘historical idealists’ that stress the primacy of human agency, such as Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley, Sorokin, et al. They were supplemented by the study of approaches of ‘spiritually oriented authors’ such as Aurobindo or Teilhard de Chardin, who focused on integrating evolutionary theory with traditional insights. 2) The school of world-systems analysis, with authors such as Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi, which focus on the geopolitical evolution of the world-system. 3) ‘Big History’ is the interpretative school influenced by cybernetics and complexity and systems sciences, and seeks common patterns of change in the evolution of the world of matter, life, and human culture. Their insights are based on the abstractions of change dynamics themselves. If you mix historical evolution as a trend towards increased complexity and scale, as well as the accumulation of technical-scientific knowledge, and you match them with the polarity switches indicated by wave-pulse theory, then you get to a vision of human evolution that is somewhat akin to a spiral-type development. The spiral represents an integrative form of understanding which includes various forms of temporality: includes the part of human history that fits with an evolutionary interpretation, i.e.the linear aspect Recognizes the up and down phases of these cycles, that have been identified by all major schools recognizes the bifurcation of civilizational forms which preclude the telling of a simple tale of linear progress, but also recognizes the chaotic intervals between the downward phase of disintegration and the upward phase of reintegration. The latter, the ‘phase transitions’, are the famous transition moments identified by Antonio Gramsci, as the ‘time of monsters’ when the old institutions are losing their power, but it is not clear yet what the new institutions will look like. In such a vision, the different temporalities can be integrated for an overall understanding of human history. The complexity of combining the factual, methodological, and interpretative of these various schools requires itself a new instrument: that of integration: Integrative approaches are vital to the understandings in the P2P Foundation. Integral Theory and the Cosmo-Biological Tradition Karatani’s move from ‘modes of production’ to ‘modes of exchange’ is already an attempt to go beyond the kinds of materialist determinisms that underestimate the causal effects of cultural developments. But we believe we need to go further. In other words what we propose, perhaps paradoxically, is a synthesis between Hegelian ‘idealist’ dialectics, and Marxist ‘materialist’ dialectics. Furthermore, we believe that what we need is not just a ‘synthesis’ of both historical materialism and historical idealism, but to add the insights of cybernetics/systems theory, which represents a layer of formal abstraction focused on the abstracted ‘system behaviour’, itself stripped from history and subjectivity. Notice how these three epistemological points of view correspond to the different historical methodologies represented by the three schools of macro-history we discussed earlier: Materialism → world-systems Idealism → cultural macro-historians Cybernetics → Big History Indeed, while materialist analysis looks at the material foundations as causal (the objective approach), and idealist analysis takes ideas, cultures, and ‘spirit’ as causal (i.e. essentially the recognition of individual and collective subjectivity, of human will and agency), and cybernetics focuses on abstract laws of change to which the evolution of both ‘material’ and ‘ideal’ factors are conforming. However, from the point of view of Ken Wilber’s integral theory perspective, systems alone are but a ‘flatland’ of dots in a network, and therefore, it doesn’t really take into account neither history, nor subjectivity and interiority. This means that we need approaches that combine all three. Ken Wilber, as indicated in section 2, was indeed an author that was instrumental to me, and many others who became intellectual adults in the 80s and the 90s, although it is largely unrecognized in mainstream academia His AQAL (all quadrants, all levels) schematic, combined with a holonic understanding that every level of reality strives towards higher level unification and integration, allows us to take all these different ‘dimensions’ of reality into account. His four quadrants represent subjectivity, intersubjectivity (collective culture), objectivity (bodies, machines), and interobjective (systems, organizational forms) and is an efficient hermeneutics to integrate these different dimensions while not causally favouring any one aspect. While Wilber’s integral theory is not widely validated academic and scientific theory, its AQAL methodology remains a very useful ‘rebel’ heuristic for the empirical phase of any research, since it allows a sweep through various dimensions of reality, otherwise often missed in the reductionist forms of science. It allows for the broadest possible ‘fact gathering’, before the integration phase can occur. In that way, it offers a more rich ideological flexibility as it does not a priori filter out entire dimensions of reality. As Loren Goldner has shown, the wider tradition and methodology of integralism was in fact present within Marxism and Hegelianism. For Goldner, the Renaissance still represented this integrative and more balanced hermeneutic tradition (according to his research this was the legacy of the hermetic tradition which had been transmitted since Antiquity) which brought both matter and Idea Forms together. For example, Ben Suriano mentions Eriugena as the exemplar of such thinking, while others such as John Vervaeke point to the crucial role of the Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabural. For such thinkers matter and spirit have equal value, are equally ‘real’ and ‘sacred’. As Goldner documents, after the heyday of the Renaissance, this line of the integrative tradition then went to Germany, where it evolved through the doctrine of Jacob Boehme and reached the German Idealists, and from there it influenced the philosophy of the young Marx. However, according to Goldner, this line was broken in the French Enlightenment, and the ‘Cartesian’ approach split the world in two, dead matter on one side, and a separated humanity as master and observer on the other. It was this reductive ‘Newtonian’ vision of mechanistic materialism that was taken over by the ‘engineers’ who dominated the social-democratic and communist parties would continue, to the detriment of integration!! Here’s how Goldner formulates his program: "Our starting-point must be the direct opposition between the body of doctrine which came to be known as ‘Marxism’, codified in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, and the ideas of Karl Marx. After separating these two, I want to look at the relation between ‘Marxism’ and the body of ideas known as the Enlightenment, chiefly those of the French eighteenth century thinkers. Then I should turn to the earlier tradition sometimes called ‘Hermetic’, which includes magic, astrology and alchemy. I want to show how, when modern rational science defeated this outlook, it also lost something of value: its attitudes to humanity and nature. Following the work of Magee, I would then point out the deep immersion of Hegel in that old mystical tradition, and his direct opposition to the ideas and methods of Enlightenment thinking. Finally, I should return to Marx to see how his demystification of the mystics preserved the core of their profound insights." ( http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/magic.htm ) Here is his explicit critique of contemporary (post-)Marxism: “The Foucaultian and Frankfurt School critics of the Enlightenment live off the impoverishment of the left by its extended romance with a one-sided appropriation of the Enlightenment, by the left's century-long confusion of the completion of the bourgeois revolution by state civil servants with socialism, and by the worldwide crackup of that project. The pre-Enlightenment, Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology which passed through German idealism into Marx's species-being means even less to them than it does to figures such as Habermas. Yet the usual critique of them is undermined by the tacit agreement across the board that "nature is boring", i.e. the realm of mechanism, as Hegel, articulating the ultimate state civil servant view, cut off from practice in nature, said. Both sides of this debate still inhabit the separation of culture and nature, Geist and Natur, which came into existence through the Enlightenment's deflation of cosmobiology. It is the rehabilitation, in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook of Paracelsus and Kepler, not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today for a (necessarily simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake's fallen world of Urizen and what he called "single vision and Newton's sleep". ( http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html) And although I am not necessarily an ’organicist’ myself, the hegemony of reducing nature to a mechanism since the Enlightenment, perhaps does indeed seem to call for an ‘organicist’ revival. As Otto Paans would have it, as one of the pioneers of the contemporary neo-organicist revival: "Organicism in the maximally broad sense, entails a commitment to the thesis that there is a metaphysical continuity between the natural world, life, and (human) mindedness. We are metaphysically continuous with the rest of the cosmos." ( https://www.academia.edu/80428910/Cold_Reason_Creative_Subjectivity_From_Scientism_and_The_Mechanistic_Worldview_To_Expressive_Organicism) Note the familiarity between this approach, and the currently hegemonic ‘macro-historical’ tradition of ‘Big History’. Ben Suriano’s theory of salvific labor as the gateway to a renewed ‘politics of paradise’. It is here that I want to introduce the huge importance of the insights of Ben Suriano, and his in my opinion masterly PhD?, ‘From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body’. Which promises nothing less than a ‘Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity’. Here I want to summarize my understanding of his main ideas. Suriano’s basic argument, though he remains a full ‘historical materialist’ is to take religious ideas seriously as an expression of human, and specifically, class consciousness. So imagine humanity, and specifically Hebrew humanity, as a covenant-based coalition of uprooted peoples trying to survive as a coalition in the Levant, engaged in pastoralism, horticulture and farming. For the first time, as compared to hunter-gathering, an actual and ‘investable’ surplus is produced, which can either be appropriated by a new ruling class of priests and kings, or could serve to invest in an ‘ever-perfecting series of integrating wholes’, i.e. to perfect communally organized humanity itself. It is there (and then) that the strange idea occurs of the ‘resurrection of the body’, indicating the negentropic nature of productive humanity. Collectively, humanity does indeed ‘transcend death’, but only collectively it would seem. But what if such a collective endeavour could overcome the physical and biological death of our material bodies in a more direct way! It is this idea which is then taken up by the Jewish ‘Christians’ around Jesus, and ends up with the Adamic-Edenic goals of the Christian monastics, and their ‘communism of production’. Suriano is not blind to the many distortions which occurred around this idea, and how, because of the class dynamics of the ending Roman Empire, these distortions prevailed over the new intuition. He mentions how Constantine, dealing with the end of slavery and with the ongoing process of ‘coloni-ization’ of the free farmers who needed to be increasingly tied to the land to maintain the tax base of the Empire, chose the more sacrificial version of St. Paul. In his theology, the ‘resurrection’ promise remains exclusively in the hand of the transcendent divine, not in the collective power of salvific labor. It is a very complex book, using very complex language, so I am not doing it justice with this short summary, but let’s just say that from there, Suriano develops a genealogy of ‘salvific labor’, that will be vitally needed to overcome the ‘metabolic rift’ that is hugely damaging the web-of-life in the Anthropocene. He critiques the exponents of Western Marxism and leftist postmodern authors, for abandoning this point of view of the capacity of labor. These authors, and he engages with the Frankfurt School, Foucault and Badiou for example, saw labor only as a mechanical, instrumental activity (a means to an end) rather than as a self-mediating, rational, and world-creating activity that has its own "emergent final cause"—the revolutionary transformation of nature and society. Suriano’s take on labor could be seen as a quite similar move to that of Karatani when he changed his perspective from ‘mode of production’ to that of the ‘modes of exchange’, which aimed to take the world of cultural and spiritual motivations more seriously. Similarly, Suriano's take on labor is anthropological and puts the focus on the primary role of the expression of human consciousness. Labor is the totality of the transformative intervention on the ‘natural’ world it finds itself in, it includes both physical, intellectual and ‘spiritual’ work, and cannot be reduced to the labor theory of value. Later in the conclusion of this essay, we will briefly engage the topic of what happens to labor in a world ‘dominated’ by AI and robotics. Suriano's framework for understanding salvific labor leads directly to a question: what kind of politics follows from this? It is my conviction that the P2P Foundation’s formulation could certainly be an important part of what is needed as sense-making integrative narratives for the next civilizational transition. I will make the claim, see infra, that after 1989, the ‘Left’ largely gave up on this process of continued integration in ever more perfect and complex wholes. It seems that for much of the current left, the choice is now between extinction and barbarism, rather than between barbarism/extinction vs a society based on the emancipation of labor. As Guy Standing has argued, we can’t just have a politics of grievance (expressed as the politics of victimization now so prominent in identity politics), but we need to retain a politics of paradise. The pre-1989 left married the legitimate grievances of the working class with the promise of a transformed society, presenting a ‘Mode D’ reaction to the ills of industrial society. We would argue that identity politics, which math indeed reflect legitimate grievances, most often lack this promise, and operate in a win-lose modality, without a politics of paradise able to unite humanity as a whole. By contrast, the P2P Foundation aims to offer such a politics of paradise, with some sensible ways and means to move forwards. The next section reviews some of these means and ends. Some Important Innovations as Compared to the Marxist Understandings of Social Change Before we proceed to that vital concluding section in this essay, I want to briefly review the P2P Foundation innovations as compared to the classical Marxist tradition. This will not be a detailed explanation of our theory of social change, just a short review of some key concepts, and how they relate to older Marxist interpretations of social revolution and its agents and processes. The Value Crisis First of all, if we do not use the concept of labor in our literature and theorizing, it is for a specific reason: the historical labor movement as we have known it, with its primarily socialist ideology, was a product of a phase of capitalism that we analyze as ‘less operative’ today. We are of course not claiming that capitalism has disappeared altogether, but rather that the commodity-labor form is being challenged. In that context, we believe that the context of labor has become a marker for either fighting for a larger part of the surplus within capitalism, or for other forms of industrial development. It belongs to the pre-digital, pre-cosmolocal era. The contradiction between capital and labor still exists, and is important, even crucial, just as the lord-serf polarity was still important in 14th century Europe. If it was impossible then to explain the dynamics of society while ignoring the emerging capitalism of the cities, it would be equally impossible today to analyse the workings of the economy while ignoring the new contributory dynamics. Today, there is a new contradiction between the value creators in the ‘phygitalized’ digital networks, and the digital rentier class, what we call netarchical capitalism. Phygitalized refers to the intertwining of the physical and digital domains in one integrated mechanism of value creation and distribution. In our understanding, capitalism is less and less ‘Marxist’ in terms of extracting value from commodified labor, and more and more ‘Proudhonian’ in terms of directly exploiting human cooperation in value networks. This new evolving form of capitalism extracts value from cooperation itself, and instrumentalizes rather than destroys the commons, it does not primarily rely anymore on the surplus value from the products of commodified labor. While a ‘Marxian’ capitalist firm would hire workers to produce products and services, a ‘Proudhonian’ capitalism firm extracts various tolls from the sharing and exchanges taking place between users on a platform. This new form of capitalism directly extracts value from human cooperation. It does this by organizing ‘platforms’, which often perform ‘pseudo sharing’ and ‘fake commons’, but nevertheless allow users to share and exchange with each other, independently of physical location. Yanis Varoufakis is quite right to explain how even capitalists today are exploited by the tolls demanded by the rentier capitalists of the cloud, but his concept of techno-feudalism is not adequate, as feudalism implied mutual duties between oratores, bellatores and laboratores. None of such duties are taken up by the financial rentiers of the FIRE sector, nor by netarchical ‘cloud capitalists’.Whatever the correct qualifier, it is not ‘even’ feudalism, though it is based on rent, not the extraction of surplus labor through the wage form. The label we have been using, but which has not been taken up in the literature, is that of ‘netarchical capitalism’, with net-archy referring to the ‘hierarchy of the networks’. This indicates a shift of fractions of capital from commodity production to the exploitation of various networks through access control and ‘tribute’ extraction. From Commodity Labor to Contributory Labor There is however, a positive aspect to this new reality: as value is now also created in commons-based networks using peer-to-peer mutual coordination through signaling, we believe it’s better to use ‘contribution’ to denominate any activity and factor that grows the value in and through the commons. Whether you add text, code, or design to a common knowledge pool that sits at the center of a productive community, these are all ‘contributions’. There are no commodities added to the abundant pool, though the commodified labor, and resulting added value production based on these digital commons, can be commodified ‘on the edges’; these are effectively ‘contributions’. We already have a new political economy in which contributions are central, and commodity production and sale is dependent, derivative, quite directly, of this common contributory work. The whole ecosystem of free contributors, entrepreneurs, nonprofits, and the larger user communities are all co-dependent on their common pool. Notice that while Suriano's concept for labor is negentropic world-transformation; then ‘contribution’ is its digital-era instantiation. It’s most simple potential typology would be to recognize positive and negative social and ecological contributions, and negative contributions can be linked to what is called ‘impact’ in much of current discourse. The market activities that can be created ‘on top’ and ‘around’ the shared digital (and physical) commons, can be ‘regenerative’, and benefit the commons, or they can be ‘extractive’ and deplete the commons. The extractive function is carried out by the netarchical capital. As workers engage in commodified labor, so do commoners engage in contributory labor. This pragmatic proposal for language use does not contradict the philosophical use of the concept of labor, as the negentropic activity of the human as a transformer (and potential healer or ‘improver’) of nature, as used by Ben Suriano. Contribution is the form that contemporary labor takes in a context where more and more of that labor falls out of the commodity cycle. Nick Dyer-Witheford (2006) uses a slightly different language, using common in the singular, instead of ‘contributions’, but he explains the new circularity of value quite well, he calls it the ‘circulation of the common’: "Let us extend this term ‘commons’ in a slightly unfamiliar way. Marx suggested capitalism has a cell-form, a basic building block, from which all its apparatus of commerce and command are elaborated. This cell form was the commodity, a good produced for sale between private owners. If the cell form of capitalism is the commodity, the cellular form of a society beyond capital is the common. A commodity is a good produced for sale, a common is a good produced, or conserved, to be shared. The notion of a commodity, a good produced for sale, presupposes private owners between whom this exchange occurs. The notion of the common presupposes collectivities – associations and assemblies – within which sharing is organised. If capitalism presents itself as an immense heap of commodities, ‘commonism’ is a multiplication of commons. The forces of the common and the commodity – of the movement and the market – are currently in collision across the three spheres we mentioned before: the ecological, the social and the networked." ( http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/) Thus he proposes to adapt Marx’ formula on the circulation of money into capital, as follows: “We can thus postulate a circulation of the common. This traces how associations of various types, from tribal assemblies to socialist cooperatives or open source networks organise shared resources into productive ensembles that create more shared resources which in turn provide the basis for the formation of new associations. If C here represents not a Commodity but Commons, and A stands for Association the basic formulae is therefore: A ─ C ─ A'. This can then be elaborated as: A ─ C . . . P . . . C' ─ A'; repeat ad infinitum.” ( https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlcrest/api/core/bitstreams/b1303496-3369-4ffe-903e-486aa8bf9a19/content) What Dyer-Whiteford has done here, is to "repurpose" Marx's famous “equation” about the circulation of commodities—C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) by replacing “commodity” with “commons,” so that our “social metabolism” begins and ends in the commons". From Dialectical Class Struggle to Trialectical Regenerative Alliances In terms of this new and complexified class struggle, where the capital-labor struggle is complemented and transformed through the new struggle between commoners and netarchical digital platforms, we by far prefer to use ‘trialectical’ rather than ‘dialectical’ forms of analysis, proceeding from the interplay of three sets of players rather than two. Bear in mind that we do not advocate for remaining within this contradiction of being ‘serfs’ on platforms, but rather that we believe that the new networked technologies allows for the creation of interconnected, regenerative, productive communities as well as alternatives such as platform cooperatives, DAO-type cooperations and other new prefigurative institutional forms. Here is what inspired our amendment to ‘dialectics’, as interpreted specifically to the class struggle between capital and labor. Bertrand de Jouvenel, in ‘On Power ((1948/1969)’, distinguishes the top layer (such as a monarch, or ‘the 1%’), from the bottom (the proletariat, the towns people in the Middle Ages), and finally, the middle layer (local aristocrats for example). Most political struggles are not a dialectical struggle of labor against capital, or ‘oppressed against oppressor’ in the even more simplified identitarian ideology of our day, but are in fact more pragmatic trialectical struggles where a fraction from the top layer mobilizes a fraction of the bottom, against the middle. For example, in the European ‘Middle Ages’, he sees an alliance of the monarchs and the Church leadership (the top) with the townspeople (the bottom), but against the feudal class (the aristocracy as the middle power). This means that we look, not for outright class war, but for regenerative vs degenerative jurisdictional alliances. Stigmergy is the new coordination system! Another conceptual innovation is that of stigmergy, or ‘mutual signalling’, to escape the planning-market or state-market dichotomy that was pervasive in debates of the industrial era and are still hegemonic on the (post)Marxist left. The Wikipedia defines stigmergy as “the coordination of actions through the traces of past activity." However, this may somewhat underwhelming: Stigmergy should be considered on an equal, and increasingly perhaps at the most important coordination mechanism, at the level of the pricing mechanism, or planning commands. It is the essential coordination mechanism for cooperation in open ecosystems. It has to be placed on the evolutionary arc of coordination systems. We could define it in our context as follows: Stigmergy is decentralized coordination via environmental signals left by previous actions, enabling self-organization without central command or price signals." Stigmergy <is> the coordination system of commons-based peer production! So, if we would attempt a very broad overview of the evolution of coordination systems, we would claim the following: · Human history started with kinship-based social systems, with the commons and the gift as the primary mode of exchange · As we move beyond kinship as the central organizing force, and we establish civilizations with complex division of labor, we move to a combination of ‘command’ and ‘market pricing’ as the primary determinants of value exchange. · With the emergence of digital networking however, a new mode of coordination is implemented: that of mutual coordination in open ecosystems, i.e. digital networks. We move to stigmergy and the commons as the main coordination techniques. In that context, stigmergy is the capacity to self-allocate labor and resources, by freely adapting to signals in open, holoptical networks of collaboration, such as for example, collective producing a universal encyclopedia, or developing an alternative operating system in software code (Linux), or jointly designing a computer motherboard (Arduino). With Web3 it is now routinely possible to coordinate very complex projects ‘trans-locally’, and allocating capital and labor (contributions), in collaborative digital ecosystems. What is missing in Web3 and crypto however, is the more direct connection to using such coordination tools for ‘physical production’. The aim of ‘Cosmo-Localism’, or ‘Crypto for Real’, is to extend this capacity of coordination to the physical world. In the next section we explain how we believe social change works, and why the kind of interventions we are reporting on, do matter. Our Theory of Social Change With this new conceptual toolset, coupled with fifteen years of empirical observation of emergent forms of peer production, peer governance, and peer property, it is now possible to set forth a hypothesis of the macro-historical evolution of humanity, in terms of coordination systems. Very broadly, we distinguish: The kinship-based form of coordination, with communal shareholding (the commons) and equality-matching (the gift) as the hegemonic form of exchange The civilizational, or market-state form of value exchange, This entails a view of transitions, that if we want to be even more details, would look at the transition: From the dominance of pooling in nomadic communities To the dominance of gifting in settled communities To the dominance of authority ranking in conquered agro-mining based civilizational communities To the dominance of market pricing coordination in settled state systems after industrialization Our thesis is that we are now witnessing a new potential ‘post-civilizational transition’, because ‘authority ranking’ (coordination through state bureaucracies) and ‘market pricing’ (coordination through the price mechanism) are showing their limitations in their failure to create what Chor Pharn, the Singaporean futurist from the Cutting Floor substack, calls a ‘Type One Civilization’, i.e. a form of human civilization, and a coordination system, in which the capacity to extract is in balance with the regenerative capacity to maintain the health of the world in the very long run. As he says: “a way to hold all the energy of a world without burning the world." Furthermore, in the context of Keith Chandler’s definition of civilization as a complex class society dominated by the extraction-based institutions of the market and the state, and because civilization was primarily a geographic relation between the countryside (producing the surplus) and the city (consuming the surplus), then the digital, trans-local implications of networked coordination can and should perhaps be considered post-civilizational. Keith Chandler’s justification for the title of his book, ‘Beyond Civilization’, is that indigenous societies were egalitarian in their anthropology, while civilizations are in essence hierarchical. He sees signs of the revival of the egalitarian ethos in industrial society which point to a return of a more egalitarian paradigm. While this remains a hypothesis, using ‘post-civilizational’ stresses the more radical transformative changes occurring in this transition. Here are some associated potential characterizations of what is coming, which each choose to stress different aspects of the transitions towards new organizational forms beyond market and state : Venkatesh Rao, taking the medieval Catholic Church and the Caliphate as prefigurative of what is emerging, talks about ‘Cosmopolises’: “cosmopolises organize procedural memories into widely diffused infrastructures." . Cosmopolises depended on faster and faster transportation and communication. But the current networked civilization is based on instantaneous communication. He stresses that the Pope and the Caliph were heading non-territorial communities, even if they may also have been responsible for territories. Jordan (“Greenhall”) Hall, partially inspired by the emerging pop-up villages, talks about the emerging ‘Civium’: “the invention and development of “the digital” brings an end to the cultural logic of the city that has been driving civilization since the beginning. We are now exiting the epoch of the city and entering the epoch of a new relationship. The civium.” Civium are places with highly networked populations existing outside a city context. His arguments is that cities are no longer essential to guarantee a high density of innovation processes. Primavera De Filippi and the ‘Network.Nations’ research group call it ‘Network Nations’: "translocal communities united by shared identity, purpose, and values that govern their own affairs across borders without any territorial claims". It is now possible to strive for, and to organize, post-geographic nations. Indeed, we are only partially in a geographic world and its logic, while another part of coordination is done in post-geographic digitally networked space. Though the noosphere and ‘cyberspace’ are embedded in multiple ways in geographic realities, they cannot be reduced to it. While the material and living dimensions of the human-body-mind are embedded in the geosphere and the biosphere, our mind to mind cultural expressions are now firmly organized in the noosphere. Organization is possible through the noosphere, which can change realities in the material sphere of matter and life. Earlier we mentioned the concept of the phygital to denote these intertwined realities. The limitations of the market-state system were already expressed in the 1960s, when the Russian cybernetic engineers of Gosplan attempted the first ‘internet’ to democratize planning, but also failed to implement it as it endangered central control. Vasily Pikhorovich, paraphrasing Viktor Glushkov, one of the planning leaders in the Soviet Union, formulated rather brilliantly. This is a long quote, but bear with me. Here is the key claim: "In Vitaly Moev’s book-interview “The Reins of Power”, Viktor Glushkov proposed the idea that humanity in its history has passed through two “information barriers”, as he called them using the language of cybernetics. Two thresholds, two management crises. The first arose in the context of the decomposition of the clan economy and was resolved with the emergence, on the one hand, of monetary-commercial relations and, on the other, of a hierarchical management system, in which the superior manager directs the subordinates, and these the executors.” But the evolution of the difficulties of the Soviet planning system led Glushkov to situate the change more acutely in the 1930s: “Starting in the 1930s, according to Glushkov, it becomes clear that the second “information barrier” is coming, when neither hierarchy in management nor commodity-money relations help anymore. The cause of such a crisis is the inability, even with the participation of many actors, to cover all the problems of economic management. Viktor Glushkov said that according to his calculations from the 1930s, solving the management problems of the Soviet economy required some 1014 mathematical operations per year. At the time of the interview, in the mid-1970s, there were already about 1016 operations. If we assume that one person without the help of machinery can perform on average 1 million operations a year, then it turns out that about 10 billion people are needed to maintain a well-run economy. Next, we will present the words of Victor Glushkov himself: From now on, only ‘machineless’ management efforts are not enough. Humanity managed to overcome the first information barrier or threshold because it invented monetary-commercial relations and the pyramidal management structure. The invention that will allow us to cross the second threshold is computer technology. A historical turn in the famous spiral of development takes place. When an automated state management system appears, we will easily grasp the entire economy at a single glance. In the new historical stage, with new technology, in the next turn of the dialectical spiral, we are as if “floating” over that point of the dialectical spiral below which, separated from us by millennia, was the period when the subsistence economy of man was easy to see with the naked eye." Thus, we posit a new transitional phase, during which we see a new coordination system emerging that will combine both mutual signalling in open electronic networks, i.e. stigmergy; the co-dependency of agents to digital commons that represent the shared cooperation protocols and operative knowledge, and a crucial role for a new type of commons-based transnational meta-institutions that represent the thermodynamic coordination capacity of a coordinated planetary extraction and regeneration. Based on our synthesis of the insights of the macro-historians, we believe we can propose a streamlined process of social change: The phase of crisis, in which the integrative capacity of the institutions of the previous phase, cease to function, which leads to disintegration of its coordinative capacity. The phase of atomization and fragmentation, which paradoxically leads to polarization and forms of ‘civil war’ (christians and against pagans, Neo-Confucians against Taoists and Buddhists, Catholics and Reformers, the current ‘culture war’ in the West between identitarians and others. A first exit phase, in which first the pioneers with anticipatory consciousness, leave the old institutions (and associated urban territories) and places to experiment and pioneer new forms of coordination and value creation and distribution; then, in a second more significant Exodus, they are then followed by larger masses leaving the old centers of power. These communities center on ‘seed forms’, that gradually interconnect in subsystems, until they are ready to become the new ‘core’ of a new civilizational system. The concept of Exodus stresses that the fundamental transformations start at the margins of the failing system, through people who explicitly reject the old forms and attempt to create new ones. Eventually, to become politically dominant, regenerative jurisdictional alliances are formed, which support the new regime of value, and render it in turn, ‘hegemonic’. These regenerative jurisdictional alliances are related to our ‘trialectical’ analysis, used by Mark Whitaker, that show alliances between social groups situated at the bottom, middle, or top of the status or class hierarchy. These alliances can be degenerative, leading to social and ecological deterioration, or can be in some cases and some periods, be oriented towards the regeneration of their territories and populations. An example to consider is the switch by the Frankish (Merovingian) king Clovis, from the Arian to the Catholic Church, which meant a change of focus from his own warrior elite to that of the urban Romans and the Catholic Church with its monastics and the sections of the majority population that supported them. The Vital Struggle Against Entropy In this section, I would like to introduce the idea that behind the current politics of the Anthropocene, what is at stake is ‘in fine’ a struggle between the ‘Entropy-First’ and ‘Extropy-First’ forces. Why am I using this language ? Let us recall the evolutionary scheme I have used before: Indigenous, kin-ship based peoples are relatively ‘light’ in their footprint; they can have damaging impacts on eco-systems (as well as positive ones), but these are slow-burning effects. Imperial systems, as a short-hand for extractive-oriented civilizations before the ‘machine age’, were already quite damaging for the ecosystems in their heartlands, systematically leading to environmental catastrophes over the course of a few centuries. But it is industrial modernity that creates the hegemonic idea of “Progress”, within a dualistic and separatist mindset concerning the relations between humanity and the natural world. And it is that system which created a global overshoot. The Convergence of Left and Right Utopianisms James Townsend, in his interesting work, The Singularity and Socialism, stresses that the idea of emancipating humanity from natural constraints, i.e. from the constraints of material scarcity, towards an emancipatory future of Abundance through scientific and technological development, were actually common to the political factions that emerged with modernity. (the world of Star Trek is the epitome of this vision, as it plays in a future without markets - replicators make all that is needed- yet is beloved by conservatives and free-market liberals alike.) Here is how Townsend describes his illumination on this convergence: "Suddenly I saw the entire stream of economic ideas, Marxist and classical liberal, unite into one stream leading to the same Omega Point, the event horizon of a coming economic singularity where all prices drop down an asymptote toward zero as technology advances exponentially. It was this that really inspired me to write the book. I had to share that vision, that there is a way forward using “valid” economics to reach, for lack of a better word, "utopia." ( http://www.seriouswonder.com/singularity-socialism-interview-author-c-james-townsend/) His publisher’s summary adds even more enthusiasm: “If there is one book that frames the debate between the Techno-optimists/Singularitans and Sustainatopians today and transcends the argument between them, this is it! The underlying theme that this book takes up is, “what happens to our present ideological ideas about Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Libertarianism and Conservatism when we reach the event horizon of the coming economic singularity.” When abundance breaks out, how does that change our ideas about all of our political beliefs and economic systems that were founded upon a scarcity of resources and the means to fully, efficiently produce them in a new distributed way. The almost Zero cost society is possible with the evolution of Kevin Kelly’s Technium, with a surprising convergence between the ideas found in classical liberal and traditional Marxian economics, coupled with complexity theory/economics and Techno-optimism. This work transcends the oppositional dialectics and seeks to recognize the possible convergence of all presently combative ideologies at the Omega Point we are accelerating toward." This is the attitude that we could call ‘Extropian’, the anti-entropic social contingent. It rejects the ‘dictatorship’ of the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics, and believes science and technology can surpass these natural limits. This vision was initially shared between the left and the right, between socialists and liberals, between socialist progressives and ‘capitalist’ conservatives. Marx was definitely, in that context (although he was of course very aware of the ‘metabolic rift)’, an ‘extropian', in this particular sense. Technology would free humanity from drudgery and recreate the idealized lifestyle of the artisans. The Entropy-First (Downwingers) vs. Extropy-First Struggle (Upwingers) Then, something started changing in the left field of politics. The knowledge of ecological disruptions, as dispatched from the world of science, coupled with the nascent ecological movement, started becoming hegemonic in the seventies, moving the left towards political ecology while the link with class struggles gradually weakened; perhaps, more importantly, ‘really existing socialism’ largely collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. The synthesis of a ‘politics of paradise’, the hallmark of left-wing oriented utopianism, that had successfully complemented the ‘politics of grievance’ linked to the working class, collapsed, being replaced by identity-based grievances. So here then, is my thesis: as the result of combined and complex causation, and in my view because it largely lost its linkage to the working class, the post-1968 left instead became the expression of the educated urbanized middle classes, i.e. those that live from the fruits of the material production of the farmers, industrial workers and service class, but do not themselves perform physical labor. Especially after 1989-91, and the ensuing loss of any belief in a utopia, a significant portion of the post-1968 left became oriented toward Entropy-First thinking. The focus became ‘Degrowth’, climate change adaptation, etc … The relative ‘freezing’ of the idea of technological progress, became the hegemonic idea. On the right, the opposite happened, and more and more on the right of the spectrum started denying the ecological claims made by ecological and leftist critics, opting for a Promethean if not transhuman path forward.. Musk is the epitome of this ‘extropic attitude’, and so is Peter Thiel in his campaign against the ‘degrowth-oriented’ Antichrist, and Marc Andreessen, with his Techno-Optimism. Steve Fuller describes the current political struggle as one between Upwingers, who believe we can move towards ecological transcendence through new technology, and the Downwingers, who want to adapt to these accepted limitations. "UpWingers? (or “Blacks”), above all, anticipate futures of greater energy consumption. They tend towards technological solutionism, their view of the future is in the accelerationism/singularitarian spectrum. Politically, UpWingers? tend to follow the American Right’s libertarian view of freedom, and the Left’s view of transcendent humanity. Human potential is unlimited and chaos can be tamed. UpWingers? might wave away DownWing? concerns as being surmountable. Black is the sky. DownWingers? (or “Greens”), broadly, anticipate futures of reduced energy consumption (through efficiency or destruction, if you’d like). They tend towards localization/resilience thought, their view of the future can range from declinist to hack stability (and even accelerationist in some respects). Politically, DownWingers? tend to follow the Left’s view of communitarianism and the Right’s sense of natural order. Human nature is limited and chaos should be avoided. DownWingers? might accuse UpWingers? as hand-waving away complex problems with the dismissive answer, “We’ll think of something.” Green is the Earth." ( http://www.fogbanking.com/upwing-downwing/) On the left side of the spectrum, a sometimes one-sided and uncritical and ahistorical admiration for the Indigenous lifestyles, is very widespread, although we have a lot to learn from their more balanced relationship with the natural world, which may suggest a nostalgia towards a more static form of society, which adapts to material scarcities and no longer focuses on technological development; but in the techno-abundance movement on the right, these limitations are sometimes altogether dismissed because they are deemed to be solvable through further technical and scientific knowledge and tools. The Emergence of a Third, Integrative Narrative What I am ultimately suggesting is that there is a place for a newly integrative narrative, that recognizes both the entropic constraints, but also the extropic nature of natural and social evolution over the long and deep time of Big History. In fact, this ‘Third Narrative’, which aims to be integrative, has been spreading in the last few years. First, there were specific, spiritually oriented authors who were also scientists and rationalists, which attempted a fusion between their spiritual-civilizational understandings, and the findings of evolutionary science. First and foremost were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, with his Phenomena of Man, who reconciled Darwin and Christ, so to speak. Almost simultaneously, Aurobindo attempted a similar synthesis between the Vedic tradition and scientific evolutionism. In these formulations, matter is not just an inferior fall from grace from spirit, but both spirit and matter represent ascending and descending logics of a unified reality, going into the direction of ever-more integration into spiritualised matter. This is the famous Omega Point theorized by Teilhard de Chardin. These Teilhardian insights were taken up by Thomas Berry and ultimately Brian Swimme, in an integrated third narrative. This was also taken up more recently by the Human Energy project, a fusion of evolutionary science which takes Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere absolutely seriously and is linked to the Principia Cybernetica project. One of its participants, David Sloan Wilson, has even attempted an integration of the evolutionary ‘Multi-Level Group Selection’ theory, with the Ostromian (Elinor Ostrom) theory of the commons, into a ‘Pro-Social’ theorization of a theory of social evolution centered around ever-increasing cooperation and integration. Certain authors, like Marcus Lindholm stress that before modernity, humanity was largely a biophilic species, with activities that were largely life preserving and enhancing, creating more biodiversity, not less. Humans, he insists, “are biophilic, as well. Use of flowers for ornaments, or animals as pets, are known from cultures across the world. People make nesting boxes for birds, plant trees, and dig flowerbeds, too. Biophilic behavior is universally human, known from Babylonia and ancient China to today’s suburban balconies. These two opposite faces of Homo sapiens call for a deeper exploration of human peculiarities, in order to establish a better evolutionary concept of man and environment, which even may renew hope and belief in the value of environmental education." ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) He equally stresses the role of the commons as self-regulation mechanism to maintain the balance between human communities and surrounding nature: "Self-regulation has historically characterized common resource use . … Most premodern communities managed to establish sustainable solutions to local resource use. The Sami of the Arctic share limited grazing areas for reindeers, with agreements encompassing benefits and responsibilities in order to maintain common pastures. Shared use of summer pasture, arable and meadows, has a long history across Eurasia, where resources have been regulated by common rules defining numbers of grazers, duration and associated duties, as well. … Through such agreements, sustainable use of common resources have been successfully maintained over centuries, without resource deterioration. A 'tragedy of the commons' is an exception rather than the rule ." ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) In a similar manner than Loren Goldner, cited above, he stresses how the this human-nature synthesis, based on a meaningful living world, started to breakdown in the Renaissance: "In Europe, the bio-cultural interfaces began to break up during the Renaissance, before fully collapsing after the industrial revolution. To discuss the causes in full is beyond the scope of this article, but the bio-cultural interface eroded gradually, while the Cartesian object-meaning-distinction gained dominance. Minds and bodies are principal different realms, Descartes claims in the last chapter of his Meditations. Reality hence comprises two profound aspects, the reality of the thinking mind, and the reality of matter. Solely human minds comprise thinking and conceive meaning. Things and objects, on the other hand, are mechanical bodies, and "it is not necessary to conceive of this machine as having any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life" (Descartes, in Cottingham et al., 1984, I:108). The object-meaning distinction allowed nature to be conceived as assemblages of neutral, dumb 'things'.” ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) And thus we have arrived at our current moment of almost total separation with the Living Web of the planet, with a fragmented humanity that believes itself to be a cancer on the earth. We have arrived in the ultimate age of fragmentation and meaninglessness. The need for counter-moves towards this state of affairs seems urgent. But how to change this state of affairs ? A narrative gives meaning, but we also need a strategy to make it a realizable reality. Our work at the P2P Foundation has not only focused on the description of seed forms, but on developing a positive direction for human action, which includes an infrastructural strategy, as the outcome of the coordinated networks of constructive communities. Cosmo-local infrastructures against Entropy What we have just described pertains to the struggles of world visions, and this takes place in the cultural or spiritual sphere. But any integrative approach needs to also see what happens in the material sphere of infrastructure. The approaches we have described could be interpreted as an attempt to give a newly enhanced contributory role to humanity as a whole, recognized in its role of stewarding and integrating the evolutionary developments within the natural world, and of which humanity itself is an outcome. R/Acc: Regenerative Accelerationism In peer production, every human being contributes, not just to the specific productive community, but the world as a whole, in their regenerative capacity. Benjamin Life has called this ‘Regenerative Accelerationism’. This is in fact the same debate between entropically oriented and negentropically oriented preferences, but taking place within the world of crypto technology. The discussion around the in my view nihilistically oriented accelerationist ideology of Nick Land, which proposes to accelerate capitalism and its destructive processes in order to overcome it, has also been waged within the blockchain-enabled communities. The key question here is ‘what exactly is it that needs to be accelerated’. While the right-wing accelerationist a la Nick Land believe that the ills of capitalist ‘democracy’ need to be accelerated for a return to more traditional social forms, the left wing accelerationists argue that if we can accelerate capitalist dynamics, we can hasten its demise and therefore replacement. Benjamin Life, and myself, argue that what needs to be accelerated are the constructivist alternatives. Benjamin Life explains the whole context: "Peter Thiel and Nick Land saw capitalism as an alien intelligence accelerating toward posthuman singularity. Marc Andreessen dressed this vision in optimism and called it progress. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, recognized the danger and asked what technologies might preserve freedom against technocapitalist authoritarianism. D/acc was his answer: defensive accelerationism. Build tools that protect rather than control. This was necessary but incomplete. Regenerative accelerationism, r/acc, is the complement and completion of Vitalik’s d/acc. Regenerative accelerationism means designing systems with the same compounding, recursive properties that make capitalism powerful, but oriented toward re-embedding value in relationships rather than extracting it into abstraction. Community currencies that create local feedback loops. Federated cooperatives where each one makes the next easier to form. Open protocols that accelerate through sharing. Capitalism did not invent recursive, self-amplifying dynamics. It captured them. Life itself evolves through feedback loops. Ecosystems strengthen through relationships that compound over time. What capital did was create a domain of abstraction where these dynamics could operate severed from the living systems that generated them. R/acc builds the alternatives, currencies, cooperatives, protocols, bioregional infrastructure, designed so that each departure from the extractive system strengthens the regenerative one.” ( https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/a-regenerative-accelerationist-manifesto) In the same article, he concludes: < “ This is the aikido of re/acc: we take the massive energy of the wave that is coming, the acceleration that cannot be stopped, and redirect it into feedback loops that sink and store value back into relational substrates. Not resistance against acceleration, which is futile. Not surrender to the trajectory of techno-capital, which is monstrous. But a redirection of extractive dynamics toward what Karl Polanyi called re-embedding, returning economic activity to its proper place within social and ecological relationships. “ > This is an approach that integrates human agency, and infrastructural development, and assigns once again a healing role to humanity, which has been assigned duties of care as stewards of the planet and its web of life. The Circular Humansphere Alexandre Lemille has described a similar concept, that of a Circular Humansphere, which takes into account the need for a Circular Economy, but replaces the human as an integral role the crucial role of a circular metabolic process: the biosphere processes solar energy and biological nutrients the technosphere transforms materials and energy through industrial systems the humansphere mediates, directs, and potentially regenerates these flows The latter layer includes: decision-making and intentionality cultural norms and values knowledge and design capacities care and maintenance activities It is therefore the layer where: ecological destruction can be accelerated or regeneration can be consciously organized. Perma-circularity for a resource-balanced economy But a specific and isolated peer production community cannot take on the standpoint of the ‘whole world’, even though it can see itself as part of this broader endeavor. It is the peer production system as a whole that needs to take up the task of caring for this larger whole. Helping humanity imagining this new ‘whole’, this new political economy, has been at the heart of our work at the P2P Foundation. The aim is to achieve a resource-balanced economy, characterized by perma-circularity. A resource-balanced economy, the concept is from Simon Michaux, a materials expert, indicates a shift from a monetary economy to a more direct management of resource flows (matter and energy), so that the level of ‘extractive’ expenditure, can be measured with regenerative efforts, maintaining the planet’s resource base for the very long term. Perma-Circularity is a concept developed by Christian Arnsperger: “The expression is a composite of “permaculture” and “circular economy”. In a nutshell, I use it to designate a genuinely circular economy — one that not only insists on a generalized cyclical metabolism of the economy, but also on a culture of permanence. … What we need is selective and provisional growth of those things that are valuable for ecological and human viability; what we don’t need is the across-the-board and unlimited increase of all things deemed valuable by those who see technological and financial capital as the primary drivers of social progress.” ( https://carnsperger.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/welcome-to-perma-circular-horizons/) Towards a mature technosphere In the third narrative vision that we also defend, we could summarize evolution as the ongoing addition of new layers of organization: The sphere of matter, the geosphere The sphere of life, the biosphere The sphere of human culture and consciousness, the noosphere And the noosphere is made possible by a layer of created tools and techniques, the technosphere For this overall view of subsequent phase transitions we could use the language of Adam Frank et al., and the four planetary stages they distinguish: a planet with an immature biosphere: no planetary intelligence a planet with a mature biosphere: emergence of planetary intelligence through cooperation amongst species a planet with an immature technosphere: humans produce technology that endangers the biosphere a planet where humanity is able to manage the effects of its technosphere for long-term sustainability of the biosphere We could paraphrase it as an addition of different crisis moments: The crisis moment when the material planet needs to create a stable environment for life, i.e. the self-regulated Gaian processes that occur with the Great Oxygenation The crisis moment when out of the stabilized sphere of life, human culture and consciousness emerges, and creates the technosphere The crisis moment when a more highly evolved technosphere created through human culture, starts endangering the biosphere itself, and thus, the conditions for human life and culture. This is arguably the moment we are at. The current transition is of course that between a world where human usage of matter and energy has lost the balance with the regenerative capacity of the planet, which includes us as dominant agents in the Anthropocene, and a new epoch where humanity would be able to exist for many millions of years, because it has found this balance between extraction and regeneration. This does not imply necessarily a retrogression towards the technical level of indigenous communities before the advent of humanity, it implies a reorganization and a new vision of the role of the human with his power of planetary destruction, vs the power of planetary regeneration. It is not just a new partnership with the web of life, but also an active human role in that regeneration. This is also where the work at the P2P Foundation may play a crucial role in imagining and describing, based on the observation of seed forms, what the elements are of that new role, and what the toolset is that we need to further develop. This is exemplified in the observatory of seed forms that is our wiki with 40k articles detailed actually occurring practices, and reflected in a series of reports that we publish to synthesize such learnings. This is where our stress on ‘mutualization’ comes in, interpreted as the bridge between extraction and regeneration, between the entropic and extropic impulse. Mutualization refers to the shared ownership and governance of infrastructure, which reduces redundant resource use and enables coordinated regenerative investment. It is a synonym for the concept of the commons, which can be interpreted as ‘mutually managed shared resources’. It is our contention (see below for our study demonstrating this) that mutualization drastically reduces thermodynamic usage of the planet’s resources and accelerates humanity’s regenerative capacity. But this effort cannot just be local, it has planetary coordination aspects. And this is what explains the focus on mutual coordination infrastructures. But the way we look at mutualization is very specific: it is linked to a new relation between the local and material aspects of the universe (‘what is heavy’), and the ‘light’ noospheric aspects of the human cultural and technical sphere. Cosmo-localism mutualizes both the usage of resources and the common and collaborative use of shared knowledge. The mutual coordination infrastructure for a Type-1 Civilization So now indeed is the time to take up that vital regenerative role, but how ? Our recurring question has been: what are the seedforms currently deployed by ‘human groups in exit’ (from the political economy of global capitalism) that point towards this post-civilizational order, this ‘Type One Civilization’ where extraction and regeneration are in overall balance ? Can we imagine a pathway towards a regenerative infrastructure, with commons-based institutions that can project the Web of Life, using the new ‘mutual coordination’ capacities of digital networks ? The Competing Coordination Models We have identified five contending candidates, which we will call ‘pre-crypto’ options, plus the path proposed through crypto-based (Web3) coordination tools: The more or less improved status quo of the market order: this is illustrated by the WEF ideology, which sees the world governed by 400+ domain-specific multi-stakeholder alliances, uniting weakened nation-states, financial and technology capital, and approved global NGO and ‘innovation networks’. This is a model in which the democratic sovereignty of the people has largely disappeared. The Chinese model could be conceived as the ultimate synthetic flower of modernity, combining state ownership of vital resources, state planning through five-year plans, but associated with strong market dynamics, and the active use of threshold management through cybernetic technology. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative could extend this model to the whole of the multipolar, BRICS-centric network. The ‘Trumpian’ post-imperial retreat to hemispheric control, based on the more directly power-based, extractive forms of the capitalist economy, largely ignoring any ecological and social concerns. a return to central planning modalities, but in newly democratized formats. There is a fraction of the left that is very enthusiastic about using cybernetics and various forms of algorithmic mediation to restart the tradition of societal planning; it is often called ‘Democratic Planning. This is largely an academic movement (cfr for example the INDEP network) but it is growing in influence. The central idea is that the calculation problem, the subject of passionate debates in the 20th cy. , has now been solved though the abundance of means of compute and AI. This debate involved the pro-planning economists against the pro-market economists, the latter claiming it was impossible to calculate supply and demand in planned allocation systems. bottom-up 'anarchy': this would be the localist, anarchistically or ecologically oriented ecovillage movement, which does not necessarily seek higher forms of coordination and sees localization as the answer to the ills of globalization. And finally, the crypto world has generated a neo-nomadic movement which sees itself as an exit strategy as well; it focuses on non-territorial modes of coordination. Emergence of Crypto-Based Coordination Technology Within the blockchain/crypto ecosystem, expressed in what is called Web 3 technology, and of which Ethereum is the primary infrastructural project, there are some contending forces and visions as to the form that new translocal entities would take. Web3 is the attempt to recreate a solid p2p-based global and decentralized computing infrastructure, that can not be captured by centralizing corporations or national governments, such as the original internet (Web1) was captured by the commercial, by the no longer p2p-based Web2 system. Ethereum is the project to build a new and universal computing infrastructure, on top of the blockchain, which is the universal ledger associated with the Bitcoin crypto-graphically based monetary system. With this universal ledger, applied in new types of trans-local governance institutions such as Distributed Autonomous Organizations, it is now possible to coordinate both human labor and capital flows, in globally coordinated projects, where stigmergy and the freely chosen contribution of tasks, is the standard feature of that coordination. The supporters and participants in these new techno-social networks believe that this can enable new types of non-territorial political and social communities. On the one hand there is the ‘Network State’ movement, which has been defined at first by Balaji Srivanasan’s book of the same title. This entails using crypto capital to make deals with the national governments to create maximally autonomous Special Economic Zones with strong new identities that could evolve to new forms of sovereignty. Prospera on Roatan Island in Honduras is one of the best known, but controversial, implementations. This is not just a new version of the mercantilist idea of merchant states that we know from history, but it goes further into corporatization than the merchant republics in history. In a network state, you are not a citizen but a shareholder of various corporations that perform what were previously public services. In contrast, there is a less influential but growing Network Nations movement, that is not seeking territorial sovereignty but connections between regeneratively oriented projects, which do not necessarily have to be territorial. The Network.nations research project has provided a handy comparison table outlining the differences between those two approaches: Dimension Network States Network Nations Core definition A coordinated online community that seeks territorial control and formal sovereignty through a start-up logic, aiming to exit the current system. A community-rooted, commons-driven civic fabric that builds functional sovereignty through culture, cooperation, and shared stewardship. Sovereignty model Territorial sovereignty Functional sovereignty Governance orientation Top-down, investor-driven (start-up society) Bottom-up, community-driven Path to legitimacy Exit-based (raise capital, acquire land, secede, negotiate recognition) Practice-based (legitimacy through care, participation, and belonging) Membership structure Market-based (participants aligned through investment) Stake-based (members as co-creators and stewards) Organizing logic Market logic (CEO or founder as leader) Commons logic (collective stewardship) Economic dynamics Competition and extraction Cooperation and mutual care Institutional form Corporate machine Civic imagination The P2P Foundation is operating within this latter movement, with a specific vision of ‘Archipelagos of Regenerative Projects’, in which regenerative projects can organize themselves into neo-sovereign confederations resting on trans-local digital infrastructures. More than others we stress the link that what is needed is direct access to value creation and distribution, i.e. the control of social and productive surplus, and so the Archipelago idea is more directly envisaged as an alliance of ‘productive communities’. We do not envisage the ultimate goal of operating this new system as an aspect of the continued global circulation of capital, but as the seed forms of a new system for the expanded circulation of commons-based contributory value. In essence we propose a dual structure and strategy in which local projects can be linked to their territorial and bioregional neighbours, including having strong links if possible with supportive public authorities willing to support such projects, but at the same time, they would be digitally linked to similar projects and develop a joint infrastructure <and> form of identity with them. The New Three-Layered Cosmo-Local Coordination Stack We believe this infrastructure would be based on three different interacting layers: < mutual coordination in open ecosystems, assisted by regenerative market mechanisms, and limited by thermodynamic based 'context-based sustainability'. > We are asking you to imagine the following emerging reality: a first layer of production and distribution involves direct mutual coordination, through open and shared supply chains, with integrated accounting and metrics to recognize both positive and negative social and ecological externalities, aligning a post-commodity, contributory economy at the center of the system; contributions would not need to be a priori priced in this first layer of coordination. a second layer involves generative market transactions for goods that need replacement and have a definite cost, involving the various players in entredonneurial (generative entrepreneurs working together) coalitions that share common infrastructures and circular economies; these could use market pricing but prices that recognize ‘true prices’, i.e. take into account thermodynamic realities. a third 'planning' layer that involves biophysical accountability, using tools like Kate Raworth's Doughnut, or the Global Thresholds and Allocations developed by initiatives such as Reporting 3.0 If we go back to the original Marxist distinction between ‘socialism’, which is still a society based on exchange, (though conceived as reciprocity-based ‘fair’ exchange without capitalist exploitation), in contrast with ‘communism’, an abundant society where there is no longer a tension between supply and demand,and therefore ‘no exchange’, no ‘law of value’ anymore, then our proposed synthesis is a transitional system that mixes three different layers: 1) a layer where exchange is still necessary, but it has become an ethical market; a non-capitalist market which may still have capitalist elements (the ‘socialist layer of a non-exploitative market, if you like) 2) a layer where the contribution of abundant resources are freely coordinated (actually existing communism, if you like), through mutual signalling 3) and an external layer of commonly agreed to (becoming coercive and imposed through such common agreement), thermodynamic limitations, managed by a new type of cosmo-local commons-based institutions. In other words, we leave the future open: we may or may not evolve towards more or less material abundance, the focus is on the maintenance of the balance. But we believe that this balance depends to a very large degree on ‘mutualization’, or capacity to share resources, and therefore, it points to the vital role of the commons and commons-based institutions. Towards globally protective and coordinating ‘Axial Entities of the Noosphere’ ? There is obviously a political aspect to this vision, based on our belief that the commons are a vital institution for the ecological and social balance of any society. Indigenous societies had active commons, regulated through the sacred Pre-capitalist societies recognize local commons as necessary for their overall regulation and harmonizing Capitalist societies ‘enclose’ (destroy) the commons but replace their regulatory function by the state. Hence as Karl Polanyi remarked in his ‘Great Transformation’, capitalism was marked by the ‘lib-lab’ dynamic: periods in which the market was regulated, and periods in which the market was deregulated. When the ‘people’ found that the market was too free from societal concerns, it could put pressure on the state to re-regulate, and vice versa. But in the 1980s, with the transnationalization of capital, this equilibrium was destroyed, and there can no longer be any regulation by the state on the national level (China being the sole exception). The alternatives in play today are : the creation of a multi-stakeholder global governance model as proposed by the WEF, a rejig of the nation-state, (augmented by civilizational buffers, the so-called ‘civilization state’ model) but without Western hegemony (the BRICS, ‘multipolar’ model) and the Trumpian national-populist rejig of nation-states in the West. What if we could create a new form of trans-national, trans-local power, based on the power of the neo-commons institutions? That is the bet of the P2P Foundation, that cosmo-local production becomes the process to create a new layer of trans-local cooperation, that can create a new form of social power that can interact and react to transnational finance capital and potentially hostile rejigged nation-states. We have called them ‘Magisteria of the Commons’, but David Ronfeldt calls them “axial entities of the noosphere”, i.e. AEONs : "Just as evolution has not resulted in one tectonic plate, nor one master ecology, religion or civilization, it surely will not result in a singular noospheric entity. That would contravene a “law” that evolution requires variety and flux, without which evolution will not occur. My deduction is that something like five to ten AI-derived, -endowed, and -empowered entities will emerge that resemble noospheric superorganisms, all the more so as people become attracted to associating with them. These novel noospheric entities and their AI operating systems will all be somewhat different from each other, yet united in having a sacred purpose … something not “alive” yet devoted to “life.” If so, it’ll signify another evolutionary commonality across all three planetary spheres. These noospheric entities will exist loosely atop our biosphere’s axial religions, civilizations, and ecologies, and they atop our geosphere’s tectonic plate." ( https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/updates-about-superorganisms-holospheres) 10. The vital role of mutualization: the necessary advent of a cosmo-local world order Factor 20 Reduction: Complex (Cosmo-)Localization John Thackara has introduced the principle of ‘Factor 20 Reduction’, the principle of maintaining a balanced human social life with only 5% of the actual use of matter and energy, and he gives several examples of such experiments. This illustrates the principle of humanity’s capability of managing shared resources in new ways, or in other words, digitally, or even AI-enabled, updated forms of cosmo-local mutualization. Remember that Kojin Karatani defined Mode D as the attempted return to the conviviality of Mode A, but at a higher level of complexity, i.e. while keeping to a maximum extent the innovations and techno-social advances of complex civilization. From the cosmo-local point of view: localization has a significant impact on the matter-energy cost related to transportation in global supply chains, sharing knowledge through cooperating global design communities creates accelerated regeneratively-oriented innovation, and the local mutualization of shared material resources adds yet another layer of potential thermodynamic savings. The shared knowledge, free software and open design practices have shown that there is now a powerful social movement for the mutualization of knowledge. The principle here is simply that in digitally enhanced knowledge networks, any innovation anywhere in the system is effectively available everywhere. Think of how fast OpenClaw?, the open source AI agent system, has spread. The Systematic Mutualization of Physical Infrastructures Material infrastructures can be similarly mutualized, we can take the housing ‘stack’ as an example, from the land, to the bricks, to the services within the houses: Community Land Trusts can be used for organizing land held in common, Cooperative Housing, can be used for housing stock held in common (the bricks), and Co-Housing living arrangements (mutualized services) are an example of mutualization for shelter. Many urban areas will have a mix of private housing, public housing subsidized by the state, and ‘common-based’ housing arrangements. And this situation can be extended in every domain of human services. For example co-working, hackerspaces and makerspaces are new mutualized ways to organize collective labor, and along with private and public instances, they also exist in commons-based formats. All these new forms have experienced exponential growth for at least two decades. But the potential game changer here would be distributed manufacturing, which is really at the heart of the promise of cosmo-localism as applied to production. This would entail a new strategy of (re)industrialization that no longer focuses on global supply-chains in mega-factories, but in adaptable local workshops with specialized machinery for more local production. This is not a proposal to ‘localize everything’ but it aims for ‘subsidiarity in material production’. The principle of sovereignty, a development from within the Catholic doctrine of ‘just power’, was perhaps misappropriated by political institutions such as the EU, but can be read at: decisions should be made at the lowest most appropriate level. Subsidiarity is not an argument against every instance of (global) trade, but can be used to minimize the thermo-dynamic load of humanity in a systematic way. The Three-layered Governance Infrastructure and the role of Transvestment Distributed manufacturing is a ‘high tech, high touch’ option for making, which marries the optimal mixes of localism, bioregionality, and the planetary level, with an appropriate organizing and support role for the national levels. The key ‘agent’ for this new model would be cosmo-local productive communities which ally hyperlocal productive initiatives, embedded in local geographical and cultural realities, linked in bioregional solidarity and complementary networks, aided by evolved partner-states that reflect historically evolved national cultural and political realities, but organized at the planetary scale through cooperation protocols, access to ‘patient capital’ engaged in transvestment Transvestment refers to using capital from one value sphere (say the capitalist sphere) to develop another value sphere, say, the sphere of the commons, i.e. our efforts go from opposing the enclosure and extraction from the commons (commons for capital), to using capital for the benefit of the commons. So we have 3 or 4 interconnected and nested levels, from the hyperlocal, via the bioregional and national, to the continental and the planetary. In this context, Sacha Pignot has called for a ‘multi-level competency architecture’. As he writes: "Governance should be organized across multiple nested and overlapping scales, with each scale handling exactly the competencies it is best suited for, based on empirical capacity rather than ideology or tradition. Scales are dynamically adjustable and can be non-hierarchical or heterarchical." ( https://soushi888.github.io/alternef-digital-garden/knowledge/governance-and-community/subsidiarity) Towards a new hermeneutic cycle ? Cosmo-localization also will also pose substantial problems of mutual understanding across all scales, it is as much a hermeneutical problem as a technical one. But if (post)modernity can be seen as a process of fragmentation, we believe that universal peer production can develop a ‘hermeneutics of distributed cosmo-local commons’. A full cosmolocal system can be understood as a multi-layered hermeneutic process: For simplicity: political and national territories are subsumed here under the bioregional layer. In my own view, nation-based governance structures will continue to exist, and may even be strengthened as a result of the ongoing global crisis. However, seen as ‘partner states’ that have a self-interest to promote commons-based practices, as they have had in several historical moments, means that they can be seen as an ally and promoter of sound bioregional adaptation. Layer Unit Function Hermeneutic Role Hyperlocal Individuals / small communities Lived practice Appropriation and enactment of meaning Bioregional Cultures / territories Narrative and institutional coherence Collective interpretation and stabilization Cosmolocal Global commons / networks Knowledge sharing Abstraction and circulation of meaning In conclusion: In this proposed Hermeneutic Cycle: knowledge is abstracted (cosmolocal) interpreted (bioregional) enacted (hyperlocal) This is then fed back into the commons This forms a planetary hermeneutic cycle. Mutualization <is> the bridge between Entropy and Negentropy! In our deeper view, mutualization is the bridge between the extractive necessities of human life, our needs for food, shelter, transport, and the need to maintain a balance in that expenditure. Mutualization is the secret bridge between ‘extropy’ and ‘entropy’: the better we mutualize, the more negentropic and ‘extropic’ human society can be. We move from a commodity regime to a contributory regime of value; from the economies of scale of capitalism (make more of thing by using more matter and energy to make the sold products cheaper through mass production), to the economies of scope of the commons economy: doing more with the same, both physically and immaterially. We move from an extractive mentality to a regenerative mentality, with humans as the stewards of the web of life, and the whole “Earth as our Garden”, maintained on behalf of all life. As Hanna and Paans write: “the final sentence of Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’ — we must cultivate our garden—by reformulating it as a cosmopolitan neo-utopian exhortation: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin mondial’, that is, we must cultivate our global garden." Historizing the role of humanity as the gardeners and stewards of the living world Moderns like to imagine themselves as having put ‘humans in the right (marginalized) place’, as a speck in the physical world, away from its medieval centering, but this is of course a profound misreading of the cultures of the past. Before modernity, the human was absolutely <not> the center of the world: the divine was, and the human was at the service of that divine, which included, in the best integrative cases, both the spiritual plane and the ‘Book of Nature’ as the second aspect of the divine world order. As Thomas Berry, the neo-Teilhardian Catholic author explains: “Few civilizations have been so totally integrated with the great cosmic liturgy as was Medieval Europe. This integration we see with total clarity both in the architecture and symbolism of the great cathedrals and in the colorful rituals that were enacted there almost continuously. It is seen especially in the great poem of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy. Here the natural world is seen as primordial scripture, a scripture predating the Bible. The opening language of the Bible itself repeats the creative words that brought the natural world into being. Only when there is a natural world can communication pass between the divine and the human. Indeed humans have no conscious interior spiritual world unless it is activated by the outer world of nature. The natural world and the divine, these were mutually explanatory. Thus the great medieval teachers began their writings with observations on how these two scriptures, the natural and the verbal, explain each other.” ( http://www.religionandnature.com/ern/sample/Tucker--Berry,Thomas.pdf) Pitirim Sorokin is a macro-historian which has focused on the value bifurcations in human societal systems, from what he calls Sensate civilizational forms, i.e. materially-centric societies such as ours or that of the late Roman elites, to the Ideate societies, who focus on the inner and spiritual, like the Christians and the Buddhists, who reject the centrality of the material processes. However, he describes unique moments in history, such as 5th cy. BC Greece, or 13th cy. , medieval Europe, where a declining Ideate and a growing Sensate wave, met each other in the middle to create integrative cultures. Although this is not the case today, we are in a declining Sensate wave, and we should ‘normally’ expect a potential shift to ‘Ideate’ cultures. I do, perhaps counter-intuitively, believe that there is a strong possibility for a new integrative moment in human cultural history. I believe that more seed forms point in that direction, than in the direction of the total rejection of a material civilization. 11. What becomes of human salvific labor in an AI-enabled automated machine society ? There is one more aspect we want to address in conclusion. How does AI change the situation, and the proposed ‘solutions’ that we have described so far. Isn’t it obsolete to stress the role of human labor in such a context ? There is indeed a tremendous potential for AI and Robotics to automate significant chunks of human labor. We believe AI has two major historical functions. First of all, as humanity has invented the ‘internet’ and digital networks, it has created an information and knowledge explosion that is hardly manageable by individual humans alone, and even overwhelms collectives. In this context, AI is a permanent synthetic knowledge machine that can represent the totality of the achievements of knowledge commons in digestible ways. But more particularly, we believe that AI can be a very helpful interface for cosmo-localized human productive communities in relation to the web of life In a more participatory context in which humans will manage resources recognizing the interdependent fate of a living planet, the massive complexity of managing the new ‘voices of the natural world’, would be overwhelming. AI’s can help translate ecological data into human-comprehensible narratives and recommendations but we can imagine much more than this. The key for the regenerative future is to make the needs of the non-human world visible to the human, and some human communities might go in all kinds of new directions of participatory governance, such as a ‘parliament of beings’. Here is how Austin Wade Smith, the author of a very important book on ‘Ecological Institutions’ describes the change needed, i.e. the expansion towards ‘more than human governance’: "The more than human world might be recognized as “legitimate” social actors, rather than objects and resources for extraction. The institutional forms of the future must reflect a more whole world, populated by more subjects than human beings, leading to the emergence of novel eco-social assemblages which redefine concepts like rights, ownership, identity, privacy, responsibility, and politics beyond solely the human realm. How might we create institutions which are living with and across diverse forms of life; which is to say, convivial?" ( https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/tv9z1XXrtqQxDIxE8FygZ_W39NpkQJkVfrtjCtdbzA8 ) Austin Wade Smith goes further, as he envisions commons as a three way integration of the human, the digital (hence AI) and the more-than-human web. It’s three webs in one: “"Every commons is an integration of knowledge with the bio-physical processes which comprise the living world. Always an overlay, they provide a fruitful means to discuss the interdependence of species, information and governance, because knowledge and our practices of regenerative stewardship are themselves living systems, contiguous with the biological world. From this perspective, what we describe as commons may be another way of saying that a community is at its essence, web-based. Although the term is most readily applied to internet native groups, I’d argue that communities which practice social life in an expanded sense through networks of mutualism, symbiosis and reciprocity are the original web-based communities. MMO guilds, open source developer communities, and these new thorny things called DAOs, are more recent actors in a lineage of web-based communities whose identity is actively formed relationally through networks. To undual is to reconcile the fact that the social sphere has always been web-based, and thus not exclusively a human affair." ( https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg) To ‘undual’ is a neologism by Austin Wade Smith that indicates the necessary overcoming between the human and the natural world, to undo the Cartesian split introduced by Western modernity that distinguished the live human mind from dead matter. But we can also apply to the relationship between the human and technology, by recognizing it’s an externalization of the human. Managing a global economy in the interest of privileged human groups was one thing, but managing a participatory regenerative economy in which the web of life is given a voice, requires a much higher level of coordination and integration. In the context of the needed Mode D, we believe that humanity can use AI precisely to solve this information and coordination problem. In a paradoxical way, AI could, in this context, become a facilitator for the voice of nature, a tool that facilitates our comprehension and understanding of what the natural world needs from us. In the context then, of a potential radical reduction of the need for human labor in many occupations and sectors, and the changed meaning of what human labor means in this new context, we do believe that a key new contributory role of human labor lies in ‘orchestration’. AI’s may have their emerging and relative autonomy, but they have no intentionality of their own, it has been programmed into them, and their design has been driven by private class and commercial interests, i.e. a part of humanity, without any voice of the natural world. New open source, participatory, and community driven forms of AI can be imagined that can be mobilized for the regenerative intentions of the cosmo-local productive communities. This is what we call ‘Civilizational AI’. With ‘civilizational AI’ we mean AI systems designed, owned, and governed by commons-based communities rather than corporate or state actors. In other words, AI that is not at the service of private interests, but to the civilization as a whole. That process has merely begun, but we recommend Austin Wade Smith’s work on Ecological Institutions to start such reflections and new practices of human / AI / web-of-life cooperations. Let’s think back for a moment of our introduction of the dynamics between the modes of value extraction, and the purification engines, the dynamic uncovered by the works of Kojin Karatani, Hanzi Freinacht and Mark Whitaker, which we introduced earlier on in this essay. I argued that in the current ‘cognitive’ phase of the mode of extraction, the purification engine won’t be the mass parties and ideologies of the industrial era, but constructive networks. In other words, federated and regenerative productive communities. We also spoke of the need for regenerative jurisdictional alliances, and it would seem that there will be a need not just for inter-human alliances, but for integrative mutually supportive alliances of human groups that can align with both the natural world, and the artificial world. The technosphere becomes a primary locus of social change. With this we have come to a paradoxical but still integrative conclusion: We have argued that it is important to return to a more positive interpretation of the human role as not just a steward of nature, but with a drive towards ever greater integration into coherent, negentropic wholes, using the gift of salvific labor. AI, an expression of collective humanity, which carries many dangers, especially under the political economy of capitalism, under the leadership of a technocracy with false mystical aims to subjugate common humanity to perverted transcendent goals, is paradoxically, also a way forward, on the condition it can be integrated fruitfully in this triune whole. In a documentary project I collaborated with in the late nineties, TechnoCalyps?, the Metaphysics of Technology and the End of Man, I had already diagnosed that transhumanism was a ‘false religion’, i.e. having abandoned the transcendent impulse hitherto expressed in the sacred, the leading sectors of humanity started a systematic attempt to create the transcendent in the material plane. This gives us three possibilities: The first one is what Sorokin describes as the Ideate path: the material plane is neglected, and the focus is on the interior development of a connection with the divine, the path of the Axial religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity (though as we have argued, Christianity also carries within it the integrative capacity through its vision of a sacralized nature). The second is the Sensate path of transhumanism: an abandonment of the sacred and the spirit, and a systematic attempt to develop the aims of spiritual movements, i.e. transcendence, exclusively as a technical manipulation of matter. But there is a potential third, integrative part, in which both nature and the spirit are respected as aspects of an integrated whole. This is perhaps the path indicated by authors such as Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo, and as expressed nowadays in the multiple versions of the Third Narrative, discussed above. Nicolai Berdyaev has historized that path, in his distinction between five historical periods, each one characterized by a different relation between the human and the technological: Period one) our submersion to cosmic life in which human life depended on the natural world – a time when personality was not fully developed and humans did not fully conquer nature; Period two) humans became freed from cosmic forces, from spirits and demons attributed to nature – the emergence of elementary forms of economics and serfdom; Period three) humans carried out mechanization over nature through scientific and technical control – the development of industry, capitalism, a new necessity of selling one’s labor for wages; Period four) an era marked by the disruption of cosmic order, the dissolution of organic forms of human organization and the development of various autonomous spheres – where one of them claims totalitarian recognition. An era marked by a terribly augmented power that humans have over nature and their enslavement to their own discoveries; Period five) an eschatological revolution, the decline of the realm of Caesar, the dissolution of state power, labor emancipation, spiritual transmutation Alexei Anisin explains: “The first three periods precede the twentieth century, whereas the fourth period begins with the era of WWII and spans into the twenty first century – a time which Berdyaev believed would feature the rise of an all-powerful state that would stake a total claim of objectivity over all of social and natural phenomena. This was not only the final stage of the realm of Caesar, but also the last possible stage of this realm. Berdyaev describes this meta-historical trajectory succinctly: where once man feared the demons of nature and Christ freed him from demonolatry, now man is in terror before the world-wide mechanization of nature. The power of technics is the final metamorphosis of the realm of Caesar". ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646) This shift from epoch 4 to epoch 5, illustrates the grounding intuition of our work at the P2P Foundation, and our aim at a re-integration of the human and the non-human. The P2P Foundation's documentation of seed forms and proposal for cosmo-local productive communities is intended as a practical contribution to this fifth period's emergence. Bibliography Andreessen, M. (2025). Manifesto: The techno-optimist manifesto. Substack. Retrieved from https://pmarca.substack.com/p/the-techno-optimist-manifesto Anisin, A. (2021). Humanity and the disruption of the cosmos: How Berdyaev foresaw our reliance on machines. Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, 17(3). Retrieved from https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646 Arnsperger, C. (2016, June 15). Welcome to perma-circular horizons. 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Englische Originalfassung

Title: Breaking the third information barrier: a trialectical approach to the cosmo-localization of our world. ˧

Abstract This essay presents the theoretical foundations of the P2P Foundation's work on civilizational transitions in the context of the Hegelian and Marxist tradition of dialectical analysis, but explains a number of departures from these methodologies: a focus on trialectics rather than dialectics, and on a new ‘revolutionary subject’: the commoner engaged in regenerative productive communities that are ‘cosmo-locally’ organized and coordinated. It argues that the current crisis of the market-state system—marked by ecological overshoot, political fragmentation, and the limits of both authority ranking (command and planning) and market pricing — opens the possibility of a post-civilizational transition toward a "Type-1 Civilization" in which extraction and regeneration are brought into balance. Drawing on a synthesis of macro-history (Karatani, Whitaker, Turchin), relational sociology (Fiske), critical realism (Bhaskar), and integral theory (Wilber), the essay introduces key P2P concepts: stigmergy as a third coordination mechanism alongside markets and command; trialectical strategies as an alternative to dialectical class struggle; the "pulsation of the commons" as a macro-historical pattern; and the "Archipelago of Regenerative Projects" as a strategic model for trans-local, commons-based coordination. The essay concludes by positioning AI as a potential enabler to make the non-human more visible to participatory decision-making, and by articulating a "Third Narrative" that integrates entropic constraints with extropic evolution. ˧

The Text Introduction ˧

The author of this article is not a Hegelian nor an expert in Hegel, but has experienced, as a former militant, the use of one of the Marxist versions of dialectics and historical materialism. As the founder of the P2P Foundation, which, since its founding in 2005, aimed to be a collective organic intellectual for the commons movement, and in that capacity, the author, (along with others) has developed a body of knowledge about the role of the commons in ‘civilizational transitions’. How does that vision of social change compare to the broadly ‘Hegelian’ (though inverted) Marxist theory of change ? We will address our own methodology in the first fur sections of this essay. The body of knowledge on which the theoretization of the P2P Foundation is based consists of a continuous observation and documentation of social change organized by actors that are either based to some degree on the new capacity for peer to peer trans-local self-organization, resulting from the invention and spread of digital networks which afford many-to-many communication, as well as the organizing of ‘productive’ collective action around a joint dependence of digital commons. This is done by the collaboration of people who are connected by a shared object that they are producing in common, and is a new form of ‘object-oriented’ sociality’ enabled by digital networks. This is done through the maintenance of a wiki, the P2P Foundation at https://wiki.p2pfoundation.net, which has collected 40,000 entries on actions, movements, concepts used, etc … by such actors in nearly every domain of human activity, using a fine-grained and domain-specific topical organization, as well as sectional introductions that collected material. Regularly, reports have been produced synthesizing the findings, as well as books offer a theoretically grounded synthesis of these findings. Before reviewing the theoretical innovations, we would like to review the simple methodological steps on which this work is based. These three principles are: empirical truth, integrative capacity, and emancipatory narrative). The first principle is based on empirical truth, i.e. the expectation is that the observations are based on verifiable ‘real-world’ actions, events, organizations etc … This of course assumes that there is such a thing as a real world, and that it is knowable to some degree. This is what the integrative philosopher Ken Wilber called the ‘Eye of the Flesh’, it sees objects through its sensory apparatus, through observatory machines that extend this capacity, and through intersubjective communities of verification who have developed various methodologies to obtain scientific consensus. As explained below, we are likely closest to the insights of Critical Realism movement, initiated by Roy Bhaskar. This first principle is within the domain of interobjective verification through various apparatuses and disciplines that human science has developed. ˧

The second principle is that of the ‘maximum integrative capacity’ of the resulting narrative. The question we ask is: what is the best achievable integrative synthesis that is compatible with the empirical basis that has been collected. This part of our work looks at logical coherence, the rationality of the arguments and is more closely related to the hermeneutic tradition. Wilber calls it the Eye of the Mind. This is a domain of intersubjective verification by the humanistically oriented scholarly tradition. Georges Gusdorf if the great historian of that tradition. The third principle outlined by Ken Wilber is the ‘Eye of Spirit’. Though this is a domain we are very much interested in, we leave a direct examination of this aspect outside of our research focus. Instead, the third principle is the permanent integration of the genealogy of our work within the broad emancipatory tradition of which Marxism was also an expression. The aim of using this third principle is: what is the most hopeful emancipatory narrative that can be deduced from the first two phases of this work. To put it succinctly: how can we contribute to a ‘better world’, from the perspective of the commoners, within the constraints of the first two aspects of our methodology. Here we are of course at the level of ethical and value choices. But we extend the idea of human emancipation to the Mode D dynamics as identified by Kojin Karatani (see below), and have expanded on his insights by recognizing ‘constructive networks’ as the vital current expression of the emancipatory tradition today. This orientation towards ‘productive communities’ is quite unique to the P2P Foundation. However, the connection with this Mode D means that we respect and recognize religious movements and the historical political and social emancipation movements as part of the broader historical context of our work. Essentially, if we take our amended vision of Karatani, we can look at world history as a permanent tension between the evolution of ‘regimes of extraction’, i.e. the mode of value extraction and distribution, itself depending on the mode of societal coordination; and the reactions to its most negative aspects as ‘modes of regeneration’, which can be both social and ecological: The reaction to hunter-gathering were the communal traditions as expressed in for example ‘animism’ and ‘shamanism’; the reaction to agriculture and mining (civilization proper) were the axial religions introducing personal ethics and social duties towards strangers and the Polis, King or Empire for navigating complex class societies; the reaction to the industrial mode of extraction were the future-oriented mass ideological movements such as socialism, but today, in our view, the most potent reaction are expressed in p2p-driven, commons-based, trans-local productive communities centered around regenerative practices, and expressed in ‘network-oriented’ ideological formations. ˧

More details about these modalities will follow later in this essay. But essentially, ‘Mode D’ refers to these regenerative reactions. Note that we do not openly adhere to any specific form of spirituality as a collective. While we recognize potential truths that may be sourced through the ‘Eye of the Spirit’, we maintain a pluralistic vision on any potential existing ‘Ground of Being’. Personally, I am close to the four cardinal values that are expressed by the ‘social doctrine of the Catholic Church’, i.e. that true emancipatory structures must align with the recognition of Personhood, the Common Good, Solidarity and Subsidiarity, but that does not engage anyone else in the P2P Foundation connected collectives. We adhere to a spiritual or methodological pluralism (see ‘equiplurality’ below). It is of course impossible to even collect empirical facts without an a priori set of selection criteria and some basic theoretical understanding of the reality we are operating in. The specific version of emancipation that inspires the P2P Foundation is grounded in the three principles of equipotentiality, equiplurality and equiprimacy; concepts derived from the ‘participatory’ wing of the transpersonal psychology movement. These three concepts indicate a particular concept of the human person as a locus of diverse forms of identity. A peer can be considered as a person, the locus of integration, with a collection of intentions, skills and and capacities, which can be engaged in various projects. According to the transpersonal and relationally oriented psychologist Jorge Ferrer, equipotentiality refers to an “ I-Thou mode of encounter in which people would experience others as equals in the sense of their being both superior and inferior to themselves in varying skills and areas of endeavor (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 trivializing our encounter with others as being merely equal.” ( http://www.estel.es/EmbodiedParticipationInTheMystery, 1espace.doc). Equipotentiality means that differential skill level can be recognized in their proper context, but that there is no overall ranking of the worth of persons. The second principle of Equiplurality refers to the principle that there can potentially be multiple spiritual interpretations of reality that can nonetheless be equally holistic and emancipatory. As Ferrer explains: “This principle frees from dogmatic commitment to any single spiritual system and paves the way for a genuine, metaphysically and pragmatically-grounded, spiritual pluralism.” ( https://www.academia.edu/3803021/Introduction_to_Participatory_Spirituality) ˧

Finally, the principle of equiprimacy, means that “no human attribute is intrinsically superior or more evolved than any other.” Ferrer explains: “As Romero and Albareda (2001) point out,the cogni-centric (i.e., mind-centered) character of Western culture hinders the maturation of non-mental attributes, making it normally necessary to engage in intentional practices to bring these attributes up to the same developmental level the mind achieves through mainstream education. In principle, however, all human attributes can participate as equal partners in the creative unfolding of the spiritual path, are equally capable of sharing freely in the life of spirit here on earth, and can also be equally alienated from spirit." ( https://www.academia.edu/3803021/Introduction_to_Participatory_Spirituality). ˧

All of this is expressed in the production and coordination system which we will call ‘commons-based peer production’: it consists of digitally connected open ecosystems, in which the whole project is ‘holoptically’ visible to all participants, so that tasks can be freely contributed to where they are needed, and these projects are then coordinated through the massive use of social signalling, technically called ‘stigmergy’. Peer production potentially moves the overall system of work coordination from the distribution of labor that was the feature of civilizational class society, to a distribution of freely accorded tasks. While in the logic of the political economy of capital the ‘commodity’, including labor, is central, in the political economy of commons-based peer production, the ‘contribution’ to the commons is central. We will of course return to this topic. In this next section, we review the lesser-known theoretical traditions that have inspired our work. Peer to peer essentially means ‘person to person’, and the striving for a world where persons can interact with each other in a dignified way. This principle of physical proximity is extended, in our understanding, to the realm of digital interaction in the ‘noosphere’, the sphere of human knowledge exchange which takes place in the new realm made possible by digital networks. Thus ‘peer to peer’ becomes the capacity for ‘trans-local self-organization of uncoerced human groups’ which are operating in the digital realm for the coordination of their activities. The condition to this lies in the capacity to create collective and open depositories of shared knowledge and understanding: the now digitally expanded form of ‘commons’. The procedure of coordination for this new form of coordinator and collaborative work is called stigmergy. The just described peer production relies uniquely on these new knowledge commons as one of the main vehicles of coordinated contributions. We will detail this type of analysis in section 4. In the next session we will review our theoretical foundations beyond the primary methodologies we have just described. What follows is a review of intellectual traditions that imply a certain worldview with positive content, and thus sheds light on our positionality. ˧

Sources of P2P Theory ˧

An important inspiration to our work is the relational grammar developed by Alan Page Fiske, in his classic sociological/anthropological work, ‘Structures of Social Life’. This theory distinguishes four value regimes (ways of generating, recognizing and distributing value): Communal Sharing (sharing with a ‘whole’), Equality Matching (the reciprocity-based gift economy), Authority Ranking (allocation according to rank), Market Pricing (aka markets and capitalism, allocation according to common general standard). ˧

This system of analysis allows for precise determinations of the value system at play. Kojin Karatani, the Japanese ‘Kantian’ Marxist historized the relative hegemony of these ‘modes of exchange’ (rather than ‘mode of production’). Mode A, the combination of commons and gift economies, is hegemonic in tribal, kinship-based societies, with Communal Shareholding dominant in nomadic contexts, and the gift economy dynamics more dominant once humanity starts more fixed settlements, as peacemaking technology between neighbors who can no longer flee from each other. Mode B, equivalent to the state, (‘rule and protect’), which sets in after conquest makes Mode A obsolete, and Mode C, the market mode, which emerges after the pacification of the state, but only becomes truly dominant first in the West. ˧

But an important innovation compared to Fiske, is Karatani’s concept of ‘Mode D’, expressing the permanent desire of humanity, to return to Mode A, the convivial optimum, without abandoning the advantages of civilizational life. Thus Mode D, is also ‘Mode A at a higher level of complexity’. What is meant by this is that, according to Karatani, humanity is primed to prefer convivial arrangements, which civilization undermines, but that the dilemma is to maximize conviviality while maintaining the advantages brought by civilization (such as longer lifespans, etc…). ˧

Hanzi Freinacht, a metamodern author, introduced the vital dynamic between ‘coordination engines’ and ‘purification generators’. A coordination regime stands for the way that the ‘mode of extraction’ is organized, such as hunter-gathering, agriculture with mining, industry, and the current cogni-centric economy. As transitions between extractive regimes are extremely costly (civilization displaces tribes, industry displaces farmers, AI-enabled robotic production will potentially displace both blue and white collar workers), they end up generating counter-movements, which aim to make the new extraction regime livable for the popular majorities, and maintain the necessary harmony with the natural environments. The latter are what Freinacht calls ‘Purification Engines’. Respectively, animism and shamanism strived to create tribal harmony in hunter-gather societies; the ethical axial religions attempted to humanize empires, and the wide variety of mass social movements such as socialism and Marxism aimed to achieve this for industrial society. And as we indicated above, we hypothesize, based on our observation of emergent ‘seed forms’, that ‘constructive networks’ are the equivalent form of humanization for the cognitive era. ˧

Very important to us are the evolutionary understandings of Multi-Level Selection Theory, as it introduces the necessary ‘realism’, in any attempt at ameliorative utopian thinking. This set of theories stress that humans evolve in groups, through cultural means, rather than individually through genetic mechanisms. Human societies (tribes, nations, corporations, armies, etc..) compete with each other, and the ‘winners’ of the ongoing cycles of conflicts generalize their institutional superiority to others. The resulting rules mean that the groups that cooperate the best, win these conflicts, but that individuals within the group can benefit from free-riding. If the latter are too successful, they destroy their communities in the ongoing competitive game. David Sloan Wilson has merged this theory with the findings of Ostrom on commons-based governance. ˧

Critical Realism positions us on the epistemological polarity. This school of thought being an ulterior evolution from historical materialism, Roy Bhaskar and CR scholars recognize both the relatively independent existence of material reality (‘Realism’) , as well as how our mental capacities determine what and how we can see (an elaboration of Kantianism), and co-construct any reality. And thus, we have to be ‘Critical’ about reality and our own cognitive apparatus and limitations) and anything that may bias it, including the weight of social structures and class positioning. Crucially, in the third part of his evolution, i.e. Bhaskar’s so-called ‘transcendental dialectical critical realism’, also recognizes the realities of mystical and gnostic experience, thereby opening the eye of spiritual perception to recognize the importance of the evolution of human consciousness through its expression in religion, myth and ritual. This is analogous to Karatani’s work on the different ‘spirit powers’ associated with the exchange mechanisms, to the vital work of Ben Suriano (to which we will return later) <and> to the Eye of the Spirit approach of Ken Wilber mentioned in section 1. ˧

Wave Pulse theories are cyclical theories of human history, which sees societies evolving in a succession between more extractive/degradative phases, and more regenerative phases in which the commons operate as a key 'healing' mechanism. Peter Turchin's Secular Cycles is a good overview of how these cycles operate in agrarian societies, while Karl Polanyi focuses on the internal 'Kondratieff' type cycles exclusively within capitalism. In his masterpiece history of the emergence of industrial capitalism, from the end of the 17th cy., until 1945, i.e. ‘The Great Transformation, he focuses on the ‘lib-lab’ wave-pulse’. In the positive high-growth ‘A’ phase of a Kondratieff cycle, more labor is needed and this means higher wages, openness to social reforms, etc … This results in a ‘supply’ crisis of the capital sector, which therefore starts demanding a weakening of labor regulations, leading to phase B, the ‘lib’ phase, which favours more market freedom, but leads to a demand crisis for labor and consumers, bringing the full cycle to the end. It is possible to look at the combination of identified cycles to gain insights at what is happening in a particular moment in time, particularly in crisis moments. Each crisis poses particular challenges to overcome, depending on which cycle it pertains to. ˧

Mark Whitaker's stellar book on ecological revolutions in ancient China, medieval Japan and post-Roman Europe (cfr. Ecological Revolution, 2009) has been vital to arrive at our own specific conclusion on what we have called the’pulsation of the commons’. This is the P2P Foundation’s major civilizational thesis, The Pulsation of the Commons, which states that, in ‘civilizational times’, i.e. complex class societies, the commons have always existed, but that their influence ‘ebbs and flows’ according to the phases within the evolution of civilizations: they weaken when market and state institutions function well and can take care of their core populations, but they strengthen when such civilizations have reached their peak. Furthermore, in the crucial and recurring ‘dark age’ periods between civilizational forms, when modes of consciousness tend to radically change ,, new bifurcations in productive and societal forms are prepared. In these transition moments, it is the commons-based institutions, such as monastic orders, that become hegemonic, until the conditions are created for a new civilizational uptick. We can find evidence for this, in the role of Christian monastic institutions after the fall of the Roman empire, and in the role of Buddhist congregations after the fall of the Han empire, as we can in Japan. These types of examples are covered in Whitaker’s book. More recently, Mark Whitaker has performed a study of the longevity of Confederations as compared to more centralized State forms, and has concluded that they lasted longer on average, and that, in contrast to imperial forms, the role of the commons-based institutions is much more important. This is a so far largely occulted part of historiography, as the latter was largely written after the emergence and hegemony of the nation-state form after the 16th century. We are convinced that new findings will strengthen even more the recognition of the role of commons-based institutions in human history. The theoretization of the P2P Foundation is also based on a systematic study of the patterns identified by the 3 schools of macro-history that were influential in the 20th century: 1) The cultural macro-historians, ‘historical idealists’ that stress the primacy of human agency, such as Spengler, Toynbee, Quigley, Sorokin, et al. They were supplemented by the study of approaches of ‘spiritually oriented authors’ such as Aurobindo or Teilhard de Chardin, who focused on integrating evolutionary theory with traditional insights. 2) The school of world-systems analysis, with authors such as Braudel, Wallerstein, Arrighi, which focus on the geopolitical evolution of the world-system. 3) ‘Big History’ is the interpretative school influenced by cybernetics and complexity and systems sciences, and seeks common patterns of change in the evolution of the world of matter, life, and human culture. Their insights are based on the abstractions of change dynamics themselves.

 If you mix historical evolution as a trend towards increased complexity and scale, as well as the accumulation of technical-scientific knowledge, and you match them with the polarity switches indicated by wave-pulse theory, then you get to a vision of human evolution that is somewhat akin to a spiral-type development. 

 includes the part of human history that fits with an evolutionary interpretation, i.e.the linear aspect 

Integral Theory and the Cosmo-Biological Tradition Karatani’s move from ‘modes of production’ to ‘modes of exchange’ is already an attempt to go beyond the kinds of materialist determinisms that underestimate the causal effects of cultural developments. But we believe we need to go further. In other words what we propose, perhaps paradoxically, is a synthesis between Hegelian ‘idealist’ dialectics, and Marxist ‘materialist’ dialectics. Furthermore, we believe that what we need is not just a ‘synthesis’ of both historical materialism and historical idealism, but to add the insights of cybernetics/systems theory, which represents a layer of formal abstraction focused on the abstracted ‘system behaviour’, itself stripped from history and subjectivity. Notice how these three epistemological points of view correspond to the different historical methodologies represented by the three schools of macro-history we discussed earlier: Materialism → world-systems Idealism → cultural macro-historians Cybernetics → Big History Indeed, while materialist analysis looks at the material foundations as causal (the objective approach), and idealist analysis takes ideas, cultures, and ‘spirit’ as causal (i.e. essentially the recognition of individual and collective subjectivity, of human will and agency), and cybernetics focuses on abstract laws of change to which the evolution of both ‘material’ and ‘ideal’ factors are conforming. However, from the point of view of Ken Wilber’s integral theory perspective, systems alone are but a ‘flatland’ of dots in a network, and therefore, it doesn’t really take into account neither history, nor subjectivity and interiority. This means that we need approaches that combine all three. Ken Wilber, as indicated in section 2, was indeed an author that was instrumental to me, and many others who became intellectual adults in the 80s and the 90s, although it is largely unrecognized in mainstream academia His AQAL (all quadrants, all levels) schematic, combined with a holonic understanding that every level of reality strives towards higher level unification and integration, allows us to take all these different ‘dimensions’ of reality into account. His four quadrants represent subjectivity, intersubjectivity (collective culture), objectivity (bodies, machines), and interobjective (systems, organizational forms) and is an efficient hermeneutics to integrate these different dimensions while not causally favouring any one aspect. While Wilber’s integral theory is not widely validated academic and scientific theory, its AQAL methodology remains a very useful ‘rebel’ heuristic for the empirical phase of any research, since it allows a sweep through various dimensions of reality, otherwise often missed in the reductionist forms of science. It allows for the broadest possible ‘fact gathering’, before the integration phase can occur. In that way, it offers a more rich ideological flexibility as it does not a priori filter out entire dimensions of reality. As Loren Goldner has shown, the wider tradition and methodology of integralism was in fact present within Marxism and Hegelianism. For Goldner, the Renaissance still represented this integrative and more balanced hermeneutic tradition (according to his research this was the legacy of the hermetic tradition which had been transmitted since Antiquity) which brought both matter and Idea Forms together. For example, Ben Suriano mentions Eriugena as the exemplar of such thinking, while others such as John Vervaeke point to the crucial role of the Jewish philosopher Ibn Gabural. For such thinkers matter and spirit have equal value, are equally ‘real’ and ‘sacred’. As Goldner documents, after the heyday of the Renaissance, this line of the integrative tradition then went to Germany, where it evolved through the doctrine of Jacob Boehme and reached the German Idealists, and from there it influenced the philosophy of the young Marx. However, according to Goldner, this line was broken in the French Enlightenment, and the ‘Cartesian’ approach split the world in two, dead matter on one side, and a separated humanity as master and observer on the other. It was this reductive ‘Newtonian’ vision of mechanistic materialism that was taken over by the ‘engineers’ who dominated the social-democratic and communist parties would continue, to the detriment of integration!! Here’s how Goldner formulates his program: "Our starting-point must be the direct opposition between the body of doctrine which came to be known as ‘Marxism’, codified in the First, Second, Third and Fourth Internationals, and the ideas of Karl Marx. After separating these two, I want to look at the relation between ‘Marxism’ and the body of ideas known as the Enlightenment, chiefly those of the French eighteenth century thinkers. Then I should turn to the earlier tradition sometimes called ‘Hermetic’, which includes magic, astrology and alchemy. I want to show how, when modern rational science defeated this outlook, it also lost something of value: its attitudes to humanity and nature. Following the work of Magee, I would then point out the deep immersion of Hegel in that old mystical tradition, and his direct opposition to the ideas and methods of Enlightenment thinking. Finally, I should return to Marx to see how his demystification of the mystics preserved the core of their profound insights." ( http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/smith-cyril/works/articles/magic.htm ) Here is his explicit critique of contemporary (post-)Marxism: “The Foucaultian and Frankfurt School critics of the Enlightenment live off the impoverishment of the left by its extended romance with a one-sided appropriation of the Enlightenment, by the left's century-long confusion of the completion of the bourgeois revolution by state civil servants with socialism, and by the worldwide crackup of that project. The pre-Enlightenment, Renaissance-Reformation cosmobiology which passed through German idealism into Marx's species-being means even less to them than it does to figures such as Habermas. Yet the usual critique of them is undermined by the tacit agreement across the board that "nature is boring", i.e. the realm of mechanism, as Hegel, articulating the ultimate state civil servant view, cut off from practice in nature, said. Both sides of this debate still inhabit the separation of culture and nature, Geist and Natur, which came into existence through the Enlightenment's deflation of cosmobiology. It is the rehabilitation, in suitably contemporary form, of the outlook of Paracelsus and Kepler, not of Voltaire and Newton, which the left requires today for a (necessarily simultaneous) regeneration of nature, culture and society, out of Blake's fallen world of Urizen and what he called "single vision and Newton's sleep". ( http://home.earthlink.net/~lrgoldner/renaissance.html) ˧

And although I am not necessarily an ’organicist’ myself, the hegemony of reducing nature to a mechanism since the Enlightenment, perhaps does indeed seem to call for an ‘organicist’ revival. As Otto Paans would have it, as one of the pioneers of the contemporary neo-organicist revival: "Organicism in the maximally broad sense, entails a commitment to the thesis that there is a metaphysical continuity between the natural world, life, and (human) mindedness. We are metaphysically continuous with the rest of the cosmos." ( https://www.academia.edu/80428910/Cold_Reason_Creative_Subjectivity_From_Scientism_and_The_Mechanistic_Worldview_To_Expressive_Organicism) Note the familiarity between this approach, and the currently hegemonic ‘macro-historical’ tradition of ‘Big History’. ˧

Ben Suriano’s theory of salvific labor as the gateway to a renewed ‘politics of paradise’. It is here that I want to introduce the huge importance of the insights of Ben Suriano, and his in my opinion masterly PhD?, ‘From Modes of Production to the Resurrection of the Body’. Which promises nothing less than a ‘Labor Theory of Revolutionary Subjectivity’. Here I want to summarize my understanding of his main ideas. Suriano’s basic argument, though he remains a full ‘historical materialist’ is to take religious ideas seriously as an expression of human, and specifically, class consciousness. So imagine humanity, and specifically Hebrew humanity, as a covenant-based coalition of uprooted peoples trying to survive as a coalition in the Levant, engaged in pastoralism, horticulture and farming. For the first time, as compared to hunter-gathering, an actual and ‘investable’ surplus is produced, which can either be appropriated by a new ruling class of priests and kings, or could serve to invest in an ‘ever-perfecting series of integrating wholes’, i.e. to perfect communally organized humanity itself. It is there (and then) that the strange idea occurs of the ‘resurrection of the body’, indicating the negentropic nature of productive humanity. Collectively, humanity does indeed ‘transcend death’, but only collectively it would seem. But what if such a collective endeavour could overcome the physical and biological death of our material bodies in a more direct way! It is this idea which is then taken up by the Jewish ‘Christians’ around Jesus, and ends up with the Adamic-Edenic goals of the Christian monastics, and their ‘communism of production’. Suriano is not blind to the many distortions which occurred around this idea, and how, because of the class dynamics of the ending Roman Empire, these distortions prevailed over the new intuition. He mentions how Constantine, dealing with the end of slavery and with the ongoing process of ‘coloni-ization’ of the free farmers who needed to be increasingly tied to the land to maintain the tax base of the Empire, chose the more sacrificial version of St. Paul. In his theology, the ‘resurrection’ promise remains exclusively in the hand of the transcendent divine, not in the collective power of salvific labor. It is a very complex book, using very complex language, so I am not doing it justice with this short summary, but let’s just say that from there, Suriano develops a genealogy of ‘salvific labor’, that will be vitally needed to overcome the ‘metabolic rift’ that is hugely damaging the web-of-life in the Anthropocene. He critiques the exponents of Western Marxism and leftist postmodern authors, for abandoning this point of view of the capacity of labor. These authors, and he engages with the Frankfurt School, Foucault and Badiou for example, saw labor only as a mechanical, instrumental activity (a means to an end) rather than as a self-mediating, rational, and world-creating activity that has its own "emergent final cause"—the revolutionary transformation of nature and society. Suriano’s take on labor could be seen as a quite similar move to that of Karatani when he changed his perspective from ‘mode of production’ to that of the ‘modes of exchange’, which aimed to take the world of cultural and spiritual motivations more seriously. Similarly, Suriano's take on labor is anthropological and puts the focus on the primary role of the expression of human consciousness. Labor is the totality of the transformative intervention on the ‘natural’ world it finds itself in, it includes both physical, intellectual and ‘spiritual’ work, and cannot be reduced to the labor theory of value. Later in the conclusion of this essay, we will briefly engage the topic of what happens to labor in a world ‘dominated’ by AI and robotics. Suriano's framework for understanding salvific labor leads directly to a question: what kind of politics follows from this? It is my conviction that the P2P Foundation’s formulation could certainly be an important part of what is needed as sense-making integrative narratives for the next civilizational transition. I will make the claim, see infra, that after 1989, the ‘Left’ largely gave up on this process of continued integration in ever more perfect and complex wholes. It seems that for much of the current left, the choice is now between extinction and barbarism, rather than between barbarism/extinction vs a society based on the emancipation of labor. As Guy Standing has argued, we can’t just have a politics of grievance (expressed as the politics of victimization now so prominent in identity politics), but we need to retain a politics of paradise. The pre-1989 left married the legitimate grievances of the working class with the promise of a transformed society, presenting a ‘Mode D’ reaction to the ills of industrial society. We would argue that identity politics, which math indeed reflect legitimate grievances, most often lack this promise, and operate in a win-lose modality, without a politics of paradise able to unite humanity as a whole. By contrast, the P2P Foundation aims to offer such a politics of paradise, with some sensible ways and means to move forwards. The next section reviews some of these means and ends. ˧

Some Important Innovations as Compared to the Marxist Understandings of Social Change ˧

Before we proceed to that vital concluding section in this essay, I want to briefly review the P2P Foundation innovations as compared to the classical Marxist tradition. This will not be a detailed explanation of our theory of social change, just a short review of some key concepts, and how they relate to older Marxist interpretations of social revolution and its agents and processes. ˧

The Value Crisis First of all, if we do not use the concept of labor in our literature and theorizing, it is for a specific reason: the historical labor movement as we have known it, with its primarily socialist ideology, was a product of a phase of capitalism that we analyze as ‘less operative’ today. We are of course not claiming that capitalism has disappeared altogether, but rather that the commodity-labor form is being challenged. In that context, we believe that the context of labor has become a marker for either fighting for a larger part of the surplus within capitalism, or for other forms of industrial development. It belongs to the pre-digital, pre-cosmolocal era. The contradiction between capital and labor still exists, and is important, even crucial, just as the lord-serf polarity was still important in 14th century Europe. If it was impossible then to explain the dynamics of society while ignoring the emerging capitalism of the cities, it would be equally impossible today to analyse the workings of the economy while ignoring the new contributory dynamics. ˧

Today, there is a new contradiction between the value creators in the ‘phygitalized’ digital networks, and the digital rentier class, what we call netarchical capitalism. Phygitalized refers to the intertwining of the physical and digital domains in one integrated mechanism of value creation and distribution. ˧

In our understanding, capitalism is less and less ‘Marxist’ in terms of extracting value from commodified labor, and more and more ‘Proudhonian’ in terms of directly exploiting human cooperation in value networks. This new evolving form of capitalism extracts value from cooperation itself, and instrumentalizes rather than destroys the commons, it does not primarily rely anymore on the surplus value from the products of commodified labor.

 While a ‘Marxian’ capitalist firm would hire workers to produce products and services, a ‘Proudhonian’ capitalism firm extracts various tolls from the sharing and exchanges taking place between users on a platform. This new form of capitalism directly extracts value from human cooperation. It does this by organizing ‘platforms’, which often perform ‘pseudo sharing’ and ‘fake commons’, but nevertheless allow users to share and exchange with each other, independently of physical location. Yanis Varoufakis is quite right to explain how even capitalists today are exploited by the tolls demanded by the rentier capitalists of the cloud, but his concept of techno-feudalism is not adequate, as feudalism implied mutual duties between oratores, bellatores and laboratores. None of such duties are taken up by the financial rentiers of the FIRE sector, nor by netarchical ‘cloud capitalists’.Whatever the correct qualifier, it is not ‘even’ feudalism, though it is based on rent, not the extraction of surplus labor through the wage form. The label we have been using, but which has not been taken up in the literature, is that of ‘netarchical capitalism’, with net-archy referring to the ‘hierarchy of the networks’. This indicates a shift of fractions of capital from commodity production to the exploitation of various networks through access control and ‘tribute’ extraction. ˧

http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-1/commonism/

Thus he proposes to adapt Marx’ formula on the circulation of money into capital, as follows: ˧

“We can thus postulate a circulation of the common. This traces how associations of various types, from tribal assemblies to socialist cooperatives or open source networks organise shared resources into productive ensembles that create more shared resources which in turn provide the basis for the formation of new associations. If C here represents not a Commodity but Commons, and A stands for Association the basic formulae is therefore: A ─ C ─ A'. This can then be elaborated as: A ─ C . . . P . . . C' ─ A'; repeat ad infinitum.” ( https://dlc.dlib.indiana.edu/dlcrest/api/core/bitstreams/b1303496-3369-4ffe-903e-486aa8bf9a19/content) ˧

What Dyer-Whiteford has done here, is to "repurpose" Marx's famous “equation” about the circulation of commodities—C-M-C (commodity-money-commodity) by replacing “commodity” with “commons,” so that our “social metabolism” begins and ends in the commons". ˧

From Dialectical Class Struggle to Trialectical Regenerative Alliances In terms of this new and complexified class struggle, where the capital-labor struggle is complemented and transformed through the new struggle between commoners and netarchical digital platforms, we by far prefer to use ‘trialectical’ rather than ‘dialectical’ forms of analysis, proceeding from the interplay of three sets of players rather than two. Bear in mind that we do not advocate for remaining within this contradiction of being ‘serfs’ on platforms, but rather that we believe that the new networked technologies allows for the creation of interconnected, regenerative, productive communities as well as alternatives such as platform cooperatives, DAO-type cooperations and other new prefigurative institutional forms. Here is what inspired our amendment to ‘dialectics’, as interpreted specifically to the class struggle between capital and labor. Bertrand de Jouvenel, in ‘On Power ((1948/1969)’, distinguishes the top layer (such as a monarch, or ‘the 1%’), from the bottom (the proletariat, the towns people in the Middle Ages), and finally, the middle layer (local aristocrats for example). Most political struggles are not a dialectical struggle of labor against capital, or ‘oppressed against oppressor’ in the even more simplified identitarian ideology of our day, but are in fact more pragmatic trialectical struggles where a fraction from the top layer mobilizes a fraction of the bottom, against the middle. For example, in the European ‘Middle Ages’, he sees an alliance of the monarchs and the Church leadership (the top) with the townspeople (the bottom), but against the feudal class (the aristocracy as the middle power). This means that we look, not for outright class war, but for regenerative vs degenerative jurisdictional alliances. ˧

Stigmergy is the new coordination system! Another conceptual innovation is that of stigmergy, or ‘mutual signalling’, to escape the planning-market or state-market dichotomy that was pervasive in debates of the industrial era and are still hegemonic on the (post)Marxist left. The Wikipedia defines stigmergy as “the coordination of actions through the traces of past activity." However, this may somewhat underwhelming: Stigmergy should be considered on an equal, and increasingly perhaps at the most important coordination mechanism, at the level of the pricing mechanism, or planning commands. It is the essential coordination mechanism for cooperation in open ecosystems. It has to be placed on the evolutionary arc of coordination systems. We could define it in our context as follows: Stigmergy is decentralized coordination via environmental signals left by previous actions, enabling self-organization without central command or price signals." Stigmergy <is> the coordination system of commons-based peer production! So, if we would attempt a very broad overview of the evolution of coordination systems, we would claim the following: ˧

· Human history started with kinship-based social systems, with the commons and the gift as the primary mode of exchange · As we move beyond kinship as the central organizing force, and we establish civilizations with complex division of labor, we move to a combination of ‘command’ and ‘market pricing’ as the primary determinants of value exchange. · With the emergence of digital networking however, a new mode of coordination is implemented: that of mutual coordination in open ecosystems, i.e. digital networks. We move to stigmergy and the commons as the main coordination techniques. In that context, stigmergy is the capacity to self-allocate labor and resources, by freely adapting to signals in open, holoptical networks of collaboration, such as for example, collective producing a universal encyclopedia, or developing an alternative operating system in software code (Linux), or jointly designing a computer motherboard (Arduino). With Web3 it is now routinely possible to coordinate very complex projects ‘trans-locally’, and allocating capital and labor (contributions), in collaborative digital ecosystems. What is missing in Web3 and crypto however, is the more direct connection to using such coordination tools for ‘physical production’. The aim of ‘Cosmo-Localism’, or ‘Crypto for Real’, is to extend this capacity of coordination to the physical world. In the next section we explain how we believe social change works, and why the kind of interventions we are reporting on, do matter. ˧

Our Theory of Social Change With this new conceptual toolset, coupled with fifteen years of empirical observation of emergent forms of peer production, peer governance, and peer property, it is now possible to set forth a hypothesis of the macro-historical evolution of humanity, in terms of coordination systems. Very broadly, we distinguish: The kinship-based form of coordination, with communal shareholding (the commons) and equality-matching (the gift) as the hegemonic form of exchange The civilizational, or market-state form of value exchange, ˧

This entails a view of transitions, that if we want to be even more details, would look at the transition: ˧

From the dominance of pooling in nomadic communities To the dominance of gifting in settled communities To the dominance of authority ranking in conquered agro-mining based civilizational communities To the dominance of market pricing coordination in settled state systems after industrialization ˧

Our thesis is that we are now witnessing a new potential ‘post-civilizational transition’, because ‘authority ranking’ (coordination through state bureaucracies) and ‘market pricing’ (coordination through the price mechanism) are showing their limitations in their failure to create what Chor Pharn, the Singaporean futurist from the Cutting Floor substack, calls a ‘Type One Civilization’, i.e. a form of human civilization, and a coordination system, in which the capacity to extract is in balance with the regenerative capacity to maintain the health of the world in the very long run. As he says: “a way to hold all the energy of a world without burning the world." ˧

Furthermore, in the context of Keith Chandler’s definition of civilization as a complex class society dominated by the extraction-based institutions of the market and the state, and because civilization was primarily a geographic relation between the countryside (producing the surplus) and the city (consuming the surplus), then the digital, trans-local implications of networked coordination can and should perhaps be considered post-civilizational. Keith Chandler’s justification for the title of his book, ‘Beyond Civilization’, is that indigenous societies were egalitarian in their anthropology, while civilizations are in essence hierarchical. He sees signs of the revival of the egalitarian ethos in industrial society which point to a return of a more egalitarian paradigm. While this remains a hypothesis, using ‘post-civilizational’ stresses the more radical transformative changes occurring in this transition. ˧

Here are some associated potential characterizations of what is coming, which each choose to stress different aspects of the transitions towards new organizational forms beyond market and state : Venkatesh Rao, taking the medieval Catholic Church and the Caliphate as prefigurative of what is emerging, talks about ‘Cosmopolises’: “cosmopolises organize procedural memories into widely diffused infrastructures." . Cosmopolises depended on faster and faster transportation and communication. But the current networked civilization is based on instantaneous communication. He stresses that the Pope and the Caliph were heading non-territorial communities, even if they may also have been responsible for territories. Jordan (“Greenhall”) Hall, partially inspired by the emerging pop-up villages, talks about the emerging ‘Civium’: “the invention and development of “the digital” brings an end to the cultural logic of the city that has been driving civilization since the beginning. We are now exiting the epoch of the city and entering the epoch of a new relationship. The civium.” Civium are places with highly networked populations existing outside a city context. His arguments is that cities are no longer essential to guarantee a high density of innovation processes. Primavera De Filippi and the ‘Network.Nations’ research group call it ‘Network Nations’: "translocal communities united by shared identity, purpose, and values that govern their own affairs across borders without any territorial claims". It is now possible to strive for, and to organize, post-geographic nations. ˧

Indeed, we are only partially in a geographic world and its logic, while another part of coordination is done in post-geographic digitally networked space. Though the noosphere and ‘cyberspace’ are embedded in multiple ways in geographic realities, they cannot be reduced to it. While the material and living dimensions of the human-body-mind are embedded in the geosphere and the biosphere, our mind to mind cultural expressions are now firmly organized in the noosphere. Organization is possible through the noosphere, which can change realities in the material sphere of matter and life. Earlier we mentioned the concept of the phygital to denote these intertwined realities. The limitations of the market-state system were already expressed in the 1960s, when the Russian cybernetic engineers of Gosplan attempted the first ‘internet’ to democratize planning, but also failed to implement it as it endangered central control. Vasily Pikhorovich, paraphrasing Viktor Glushkov, one of the planning leaders in the Soviet Union, formulated rather brilliantly. This is a long quote, but bear with me. ˧

Here is the key claim: "In Vitaly Moev’s book-interview “The Reins of Power”, Viktor Glushkov proposed the idea that humanity in its history has passed through two “information barriers”, as he called them using the language of cybernetics. Two thresholds, two management crises. The first arose in the context of the decomposition of the clan economy and was resolved with the emergence, on the one hand, of monetary-commercial relations and, on the other, of a hierarchical management system, in which the superior manager directs the subordinates, and these the executors.” ˧

But the evolution of the difficulties of the Soviet planning system led Glushkov to situate the change more acutely in the 1930s: ˧

“Starting in the 1930s, according to Glushkov, it becomes clear that the second “information barrier” is coming, when neither hierarchy in management nor commodity-money relations help anymore. The cause of such a crisis is the inability, even with the participation of many actors, to cover all the problems of economic management. Viktor Glushkov said that according to his calculations from the 1930s, solving the management problems of the Soviet economy required some 1014 mathematical operations per year. At the time of the interview, in the mid-1970s, there were already about 1016 operations. If we assume that one person without the help of machinery can perform on average 1 million operations a year, then it turns out that about 10 billion people are needed to maintain a well-run economy. ˧

Next, we will present the words of Victor Glushkov himself: From now on, only ‘machineless’ management efforts are not enough. Humanity managed to overcome the first information barrier or threshold because it invented monetary-commercial relations and the pyramidal management structure. The invention that will allow us to cross the second threshold is computer technology. A historical turn in the famous spiral of development takes place. When an automated state management system appears, we will easily grasp the entire economy at a single glance. In the new historical stage, with new technology, in the next turn of the dialectical spiral, we are as if “floating” over that point of the dialectical spiral below which, separated from us by millennia, was the period when the subsistence economy of man was easy to see with the naked eye." Thus, we posit a new transitional phase, during which we see a new coordination system emerging that will combine both mutual signalling in open electronic networks, i.e. stigmergy; the co-dependency of agents to digital commons that represent the shared cooperation protocols and operative knowledge, and a crucial role for a new type of commons-based transnational meta-institutions that represent the thermodynamic coordination capacity of a coordinated planetary extraction and regeneration. Based on our synthesis of the insights of the macro-historians, we believe we can propose a streamlined process of social change: The phase of crisis, in which the integrative capacity of the institutions of the previous phase, cease to function, which leads to disintegration of its coordinative capacity. The phase of atomization and fragmentation, which paradoxically leads to polarization and forms of ‘civil war’ (christians and against pagans, Neo-Confucians against Taoists and Buddhists, Catholics and Reformers, the current ‘culture war’ in the West between identitarians and others. A first exit phase, in which first the pioneers with anticipatory consciousness, leave the old institutions (and associated urban territories) and places to experiment and pioneer new forms of coordination and value creation and distribution; then, in a second more significant Exodus, they are then followed by larger masses leaving the old centers of power. These communities center on ‘seed forms’, that gradually interconnect in subsystems, until they are ready to become the new ‘core’ of a new civilizational system. The concept of Exodus stresses that the fundamental transformations start at the margins of the failing system, through people who explicitly reject the old forms and attempt to create new ones. Eventually, to become politically dominant, regenerative jurisdictional alliances are formed, which support the new regime of value, and render it in turn, ‘hegemonic’. These regenerative jurisdictional alliances are related to our ‘trialectical’ analysis, used by Mark Whitaker, that show alliances between social groups situated at the bottom, middle, or top of the status or class hierarchy. These alliances can be degenerative, leading to social and ecological deterioration, or can be in some cases and some periods, be oriented towards the regeneration of their territories and populations. An example to consider is the switch by the Frankish (Merovingian) king Clovis, from the Arian to the Catholic Church, which meant a change of focus from his own warrior elite to that of the urban Romans and the Catholic Church with its monastics and the sections of the majority population that supported them. ˧

The Vital Struggle Against Entropy ˧

In this section, I would like to introduce the idea that behind the current politics of the Anthropocene, what is at stake is ‘in fine’ a struggle between the ‘Entropy-First’ and ‘Extropy-First’ forces. ˧

Why am I using this language ? Let us recall the evolutionary scheme I have used before: ˧

Indigenous, kin-ship based peoples are relatively ‘light’ in their footprint; they can have damaging impacts on eco-systems (as well as positive ones), but these are slow-burning effects. Imperial systems, as a short-hand for extractive-oriented civilizations before the ‘machine age’, were already quite damaging for the ecosystems in their heartlands, systematically leading to environmental catastrophes over the course of a few centuries. But it is industrial modernity that creates the hegemonic idea of “Progress”, within a dualistic and separatist mindset concerning the relations between humanity and the natural world. And it is that system which created a global overshoot. ˧

The Convergence of Left and Right Utopianisms ˧

James Townsend, in his interesting work, The Singularity and Socialism, stresses that the idea of emancipating humanity from natural constraints, i.e. from the constraints of material scarcity, towards an emancipatory future of Abundance through scientific and technological development, were actually common to the political factions that emerged with modernity. (the world of Star Trek is the epitome of this vision, as it plays in a future without markets - replicators make all that is needed- yet is beloved by conservatives and free-market liberals alike.) ˧

Here is how Townsend describes his illumination on this convergence: ˧

"Suddenly I saw the entire stream of economic ideas, Marxist and classical liberal, unite into one stream leading to the same Omega Point, the event horizon of a coming economic singularity where all prices drop down an asymptote toward zero as technology advances exponentially. It was this that really inspired me to write the book. I had to share that vision, that there is a way forward using “valid” economics to reach, for lack of a better word, "utopia." ( http://www.seriouswonder.com/singularity-socialism-interview-author-c-james-townsend/) ˧

His publisher’s summary adds even more enthusiasm: ˧

“If there is one book that frames the debate between the Techno-optimists/Singularitans and Sustainatopians today and transcends the argument between them, this is it! The underlying theme that this book takes up is, “what happens to our present ideological ideas about Capitalism, Socialism, Communism, Libertarianism and Conservatism when we reach the event horizon of the coming economic singularity.” When abundance breaks out, how does that change our ideas about all of our political beliefs and economic systems that were founded upon a scarcity of resources and the means to fully, efficiently produce them in a new distributed way. The almost Zero cost society is possible with the evolution of Kevin Kelly’s Technium, with a surprising convergence between the ideas found in classical liberal and traditional Marxian economics, coupled with complexity theory/economics and Techno-optimism. This work transcends the oppositional dialectics and seeks to recognize the possible convergence of all presently combative ideologies at the Omega Point we are accelerating toward." ˧

This is the attitude that we could call ‘Extropian’, the anti-entropic social contingent. It rejects the ‘dictatorship’ of the First and Second Law of Thermodynamics, and believes science and technology can surpass these natural limits. This vision was initially shared between the left and the right, between socialists and liberals, between socialist progressives and ‘capitalist’ conservatives. Marx was definitely, in that context (although he was of course very aware of the ‘metabolic rift)’, an ‘extropian', in this particular sense. Technology would free humanity from drudgery and recreate the idealized lifestyle of the artisans. ˧

The Entropy-First (Downwingers) vs. Extropy-First Struggle (Upwingers) ˧

Then, something started changing in the left field of politics. The knowledge of ecological disruptions, as dispatched from the world of science, coupled with the nascent ecological movement, started becoming hegemonic in the seventies, moving the left towards political ecology while the link with class struggles gradually weakened; perhaps, more importantly, ‘really existing socialism’ largely collapsed after the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. The synthesis of a ‘politics of paradise’, the hallmark of left-wing oriented utopianism, that had successfully complemented the ‘politics of grievance’ linked to the working class, collapsed, being replaced by identity-based grievances. ˧

So here then, is my thesis: as the result of combined and complex causation, and in my view because it largely lost its linkage to the working class, the post-1968 left instead became the expression of the educated urbanized middle classes, i.e. those that live from the fruits of the material production of the farmers, industrial workers and service class, but do not themselves perform physical labor. Especially after 1989-91, and the ensuing loss of any belief in a utopia, a significant portion of the post-1968 left became oriented toward Entropy-First thinking. The focus became ‘Degrowth’, climate change adaptation, etc … The relative ‘freezing’ of the idea of technological progress, became the hegemonic idea. ˧

On the right, the opposite happened, and more and more on the right of the spectrum started denying the ecological claims made by ecological and leftist critics, opting for a Promethean if not transhuman path forward.. Musk is the epitome of this ‘extropic attitude’, and so is Peter Thiel in his campaign against the ‘degrowth-oriented’ Antichrist, and Marc Andreessen, with his Techno-Optimism. ˧

Steve Fuller describes the current political struggle as one between Upwingers, who believe we can move towards ecological transcendence through new technology, and the Downwingers, who want to adapt to these accepted limitations. ˧

"UpWingers? (or “Blacks”), above all, anticipate futures of greater energy consumption. They tend towards technological solutionism, their view of the future is in the accelerationism/singularitarian spectrum. Politically, UpWingers? tend to follow the American Right’s libertarian view of freedom, and the Left’s view of transcendent humanity. Human potential is unlimited and chaos can be tamed. UpWingers? might wave away DownWing? concerns as being surmountable. Black is the sky. DownWingers? (or “Greens”), broadly, anticipate futures of reduced energy consumption (through efficiency or destruction, if you’d like). They tend towards localization/resilience thought, their view of the future can range from declinist to hack stability (and even accelerationist in some respects). Politically, DownWingers? tend to follow the Left’s view of communitarianism and the Right’s sense of natural order. Human nature is limited and chaos should be avoided. DownWingers? might accuse UpWingers? as hand-waving away complex problems with the dismissive answer, “We’ll think of something.” Green is the Earth." ( http://www.fogbanking.com/upwing-downwing/) ˧

On the left side of the spectrum, a sometimes one-sided and uncritical and ahistorical admiration for the Indigenous lifestyles, is very widespread, although we have a lot to learn from their more balanced relationship with the natural world, which may suggest a nostalgia towards a more static form of society, which adapts to material scarcities and no longer focuses on technological development; but in the techno-abundance movement on the right, these limitations are sometimes altogether dismissed because they are deemed to be solvable through further technical and scientific knowledge and tools. ˧

The Emergence of a Third, Integrative Narrative ˧

What I am ultimately suggesting is that there is a place for a newly integrative narrative, that recognizes both the entropic constraints, but also the extropic nature of natural and social evolution over the long and deep time of Big History. ˧

In fact, this ‘Third Narrative’, which aims to be integrative, has been spreading in the last few years. ˧

First, there were specific, spiritually oriented authors who were also scientists and rationalists, which attempted a fusion between their spiritual-civilizational understandings, and the findings of evolutionary science. First and foremost were Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the French Jesuit paleontologist, with his Phenomena of Man, who reconciled Darwin and Christ, so to speak. Almost simultaneously, Aurobindo attempted a similar synthesis between the Vedic tradition and scientific evolutionism. In these formulations, matter is not just an inferior fall from grace from spirit, but both spirit and matter represent ascending and descending logics of a unified reality, going into the direction of ever-more integration into spiritualised matter. This is the famous Omega Point theorized by Teilhard de Chardin. These Teilhardian insights were taken up by Thomas Berry and ultimately Brian Swimme, in an integrated third narrative. This was also taken up more recently by the Human Energy project, a fusion of evolutionary science which takes Teilhard de Chardin’s notion of the noosphere absolutely seriously and is linked to the Principia Cybernetica project. One of its participants, David Sloan Wilson, has even attempted an integration of the evolutionary ‘Multi-Level Group Selection’ theory, with the Ostromian (Elinor Ostrom) theory of the commons, into a ‘Pro-Social’ theorization of a theory of social evolution centered around ever-increasing cooperation and integration. Certain authors, like Marcus Lindholm stress that before modernity, humanity was largely a biophilic species, with activities that were largely life preserving and enhancing, creating more biodiversity, not less. ˧

Humans, he insists, “are biophilic, as well. Use of flowers for ornaments, or animals as pets, are known from cultures across the world. People make nesting boxes for birds, plant trees, and dig flowerbeds, too. Biophilic behavior is universally human, known from Babylonia and ancient China to today’s suburban balconies. These two opposite faces of Homo sapiens call for a deeper exploration of human peculiarities, in order to establish a better evolutionary concept of man and environment, which even may renew hope and belief in the value of environmental education." ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) ˧

He equally stresses the role of the commons as self-regulation mechanism to maintain the balance between human communities and surrounding nature: "Self-regulation has historically characterized common resource use . … Most premodern communities managed to establish sustainable solutions to local resource use. The Sami of the Arctic share limited grazing areas for reindeers, with agreements encompassing benefits and responsibilities in order to maintain common pastures. Shared use of summer pasture, arable and meadows, has a long history across Eurasia, where resources have been regulated by common rules defining numbers of grazers, duration and associated duties, as well. … Through such agreements, sustainable use of common resources have been successfully maintained over centuries, without resource deterioration. A 'tragedy of the commons' is an exception rather than the rule ." ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) ˧

In a similar manner than Loren Goldner, cited above, he stresses how the this human-nature synthesis, based on a meaningful living world, started to breakdown in the Renaissance: "In Europe, the bio-cultural interfaces began to break up during the Renaissance, before fully collapsing after the industrial revolution. To discuss the causes in full is beyond the scope of this article, but the bio-cultural interface eroded gradually, while the Cartesian object-meaning-distinction gained dominance. Minds and bodies are principal different realms, Descartes claims in the last chapter of his Meditations. Reality hence comprises two profound aspects, the reality of the thinking mind, and the reality of matter. Solely human minds comprise thinking and conceive meaning. Things and objects, on the other hand, are mechanical bodies, and "it is not necessary to conceive of this machine as having any vegetative or sensitive soul or other principle of movement and life" (Descartes, in Cottingham et al., 1984, I:108). The object-meaning distinction allowed nature to be conceived as assemblages of neutral, dumb 'things'.” ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/1004/1657) ˧

And thus we have arrived at our current moment of almost total separation with the Living Web of the planet, with a fragmented humanity that believes itself to be a cancer on the earth. We have arrived in the ultimate age of fragmentation and meaninglessness. The need for counter-moves towards this state of affairs seems urgent. ˧

But how to change this state of affairs ? A narrative gives meaning, but we also need a strategy to make it a realizable reality. Our work at the P2P Foundation has not only focused on the description of seed forms, but on developing a positive direction for human action, which includes an infrastructural strategy, as the outcome of the coordinated networks of constructive communities. ˧

Cosmo-local infrastructures against Entropy ˧

What we have just described pertains to the struggles of world visions, and this takes place in the cultural or spiritual sphere. But any integrative approach needs to also see what happens in the material sphere of infrastructure. The approaches we have described could be interpreted as an attempt to give a newly enhanced contributory role to humanity as a whole, recognized in its role of stewarding and integrating the evolutionary developments within the natural world, and of which humanity itself is an outcome. ˧

R/Acc: Regenerative Accelerationism ˧

In peer production, every human being contributes, not just to the specific productive community, but the world as a whole, in their regenerative capacity. Benjamin Life has called this ‘Regenerative Accelerationism’. This is in fact the same debate between entropically oriented and negentropically oriented preferences, but taking place within the world of crypto technology. The discussion around the in my view nihilistically oriented accelerationist ideology of Nick Land, which proposes to accelerate capitalism and its destructive processes in order to overcome it, has also been waged within the blockchain-enabled communities. The key question here is ‘what exactly is it that needs to be accelerated’. While the right-wing accelerationist a la Nick Land believe that the ills of capitalist ‘democracy’ need to be accelerated for a return to more traditional social forms, the left wing accelerationists argue that if we can accelerate capitalist dynamics, we can hasten its demise and therefore replacement. Benjamin Life, and myself, argue that what needs to be accelerated are the constructivist alternatives. ˧

Benjamin Life explains the whole context: ˧

"Peter Thiel and Nick Land saw capitalism as an alien intelligence accelerating toward posthuman singularity. Marc Andreessen dressed this vision in optimism and called it progress. Vitalik Buterin, the creator of Ethereum, recognized the danger and asked what technologies might preserve freedom against technocapitalist authoritarianism. D/acc was his answer: defensive accelerationism. Build tools that protect rather than control. This was necessary but incomplete. Regenerative accelerationism, r/acc, is the complement and completion of Vitalik’s d/acc. Regenerative accelerationism means designing systems with the same compounding, recursive properties that make capitalism powerful, but oriented toward re-embedding value in relationships rather than extracting it into abstraction. Community currencies that create local feedback loops. Federated cooperatives where each one makes the next easier to form. Open protocols that accelerate through sharing. Capitalism did not invent recursive, self-amplifying dynamics. It captured them. Life itself evolves through feedback loops. Ecosystems strengthen through relationships that compound over time. What capital did was create a domain of abstraction where these dynamics could operate severed from the living systems that generated them. R/acc builds the alternatives, currencies, cooperatives, protocols, bioregional infrastructure, designed so that each departure from the extractive system strengthens the regenerative one.” ( https://omniharmonic.substack.com/p/a-regenerative-accelerationist-manifesto) ˧

In the same article, he concludes: ˧

 < “ This is the aikido of re/acc: we take the massive energy of the wave that is coming, the acceleration that cannot be stopped, and redirect it into feedback loops that sink and store value back into relational substrates. Not resistance against acceleration, which is futile. Not surrender to the trajectory of techno-capital, which is monstrous. But a redirection of extractive dynamics toward what Karl Polanyi called re-embedding, returning economic activity to its proper place within social and ecological relationships. “ > ˧

The Circular Humansphere ˧

Alexandre Lemille has described a similar concept, that of a Circular Humansphere, which takes into account the need for a Circular Economy, but replaces the human as an integral role the crucial role of a circular metabolic process: ˧

the biosphere processes solar energy and biological nutrients the technosphere transforms materials and energy through industrial systems the humansphere mediates, directs, and potentially regenerates these flows ˧

The latter layer includes: decision-making and intentionality cultural norms and values knowledge and design capacities care and maintenance activities ˧

It is therefore the layer where: ecological destruction can be accelerated or regeneration can be consciously organized. ˧

Perma-circularity for a resource-balanced economy ˧

But a specific and isolated peer production community cannot take on the standpoint of the ‘whole world’, even though it can see itself as part of this broader endeavor. It is the peer production system as a whole that needs to take up the task of caring for this larger whole. Helping humanity imagining this new ‘whole’, this new political economy, has been at the heart of our work at the P2P Foundation. The aim is to achieve a resource-balanced economy, characterized by perma-circularity. A resource-balanced economy, the concept is from Simon Michaux, a materials expert, indicates a shift from a monetary economy to a more direct management of resource flows (matter and energy), so that the level of ‘extractive’ expenditure, can be measured with regenerative efforts, maintaining the planet’s resource base for the very long term. ˧

Perma-Circularity is a concept developed by Christian Arnsperger: “The expression is a composite of “permaculture” and “circular economy”. In a nutshell, I use it to designate a genuinely circular economy — one that not only insists on a generalized cyclical metabolism of the economy, but also on a culture of permanence. … What we need is selective and provisional growth of those things that are valuable for ecological and human viability; what we don’t need is the across-the-board and unlimited increase of all things deemed valuable by those who see technological and financial capital as the primary drivers of social progress.” ( https://carnsperger.wordpress.com/2016/06/15/welcome-to-perma-circular-horizons/) ˧

Towards a mature technosphere ˧

In the third narrative vision that we also defend, we could summarize evolution as the ongoing addition of new layers of organization: ˧

The sphere of matter, the geosphere The sphere of life, the biosphere The sphere of human culture and consciousness, the noosphere And the noosphere is made possible by a layer of created tools and techniques, the technosphere ˧

For this overall view of subsequent phase transitions we could use the language of Adam Frank et al., and the four planetary stages they distinguish: ˧

a planet with an immature biosphere: no planetary intelligence a planet with a mature biosphere: emergence of planetary intelligence through cooperation amongst species a planet with an immature technosphere: humans produce technology that endangers the biosphere a planet where humanity is able to manage the effects of its technosphere for long-term sustainability of the biosphere ˧

We could paraphrase it as an addition of different crisis moments: ˧

The crisis moment when the material planet needs to create a stable environment for life, i.e. the self-regulated Gaian processes that occur with the Great Oxygenation The crisis moment when out of the stabilized sphere of life, human culture and consciousness emerges, and creates the technosphere The crisis moment when a more highly evolved technosphere created through human culture, starts endangering the biosphere itself, and thus, the conditions for human life and culture. This is arguably the moment we are at. ˧

The current transition is of course that between a world where human usage of matter and energy has lost the balance with the regenerative capacity of the planet, which includes us as dominant agents in the Anthropocene, and a new epoch where humanity would be able to exist for many millions of years, because it has found this balance between extraction and regeneration. This does not imply necessarily a retrogression towards the technical level of indigenous communities before the advent of humanity, it implies a reorganization and a new vision of the role of the human with his power of planetary destruction, vs the power of planetary regeneration. It is not just a new partnership with the web of life, but also an active human role in that regeneration. ˧

This is also where the work at the P2P Foundation may play a crucial role in imagining and describing, based on the observation of seed forms, what the elements are of that new role, and what the toolset is that we need to further develop. This is exemplified in the observatory of seed forms that is our wiki with 40k articles detailed actually occurring practices, and reflected in a series of reports that we publish to synthesize such learnings. ˧

This is where our stress on ‘mutualization’ comes in, interpreted as the bridge between extraction and regeneration, between the entropic and extropic impulse. Mutualization refers to the shared ownership and governance of infrastructure, which reduces redundant resource use and enables coordinated regenerative investment. It is a synonym for the concept of the commons, which can be interpreted as ‘mutually managed shared resources’. ˧

It is our contention (see below for our study demonstrating this) that mutualization drastically reduces thermodynamic usage of the planet’s resources and accelerates humanity’s regenerative capacity. But this effort cannot just be local, it has planetary coordination aspects. And this is what explains the focus on mutual coordination infrastructures. ˧

But the way we look at mutualization is very specific: it is linked to a new relation between the local and material aspects of the universe (‘what is heavy’), and the ‘light’ noospheric aspects of the human cultural and technical sphere. Cosmo-localism mutualizes both the usage of resources and the common and collaborative use of shared knowledge. ˧

The mutual coordination infrastructure for a Type-1 Civilization ˧

So now indeed is the time to take up that vital regenerative role, but how ? ˧

Our recurring question has been: what are the seedforms currently deployed by ‘human groups in exit’ (from the political economy of global capitalism) that point towards this post-civilizational order, this ‘Type One Civilization’ where extraction and regeneration are in overall balance ? Can we imagine a pathway towards a regenerative infrastructure, with commons-based institutions that can project the Web of Life, using the new ‘mutual coordination’ capacities of digital networks ? ˧

The Competing Coordination Models ˧

We have identified five contending candidates, which we will call ‘pre-crypto’ options, plus the path proposed through crypto-based (Web3) coordination tools: ˧

The more or less improved status quo of the market order: this is illustrated by the WEF ideology, which sees the world governed by 400+ domain-specific multi-stakeholder alliances, uniting weakened nation-states, financial and technology capital, and approved global NGO and ‘innovation networks’. This is a model in which the democratic sovereignty of the people has largely disappeared. ˧

The Chinese model could be conceived as the ultimate synthetic flower of modernity, combining state ownership of vital resources, state planning through five-year plans, but associated with strong market dynamics, and the active use of threshold management through cybernetic technology. The Chinese Belt and Road Initiative could extend this model to the whole of the multipolar, BRICS-centric network. ˧

The ‘Trumpian’ post-imperial retreat to hemispheric control, based on the more directly power-based, extractive forms of the capitalist economy, largely ignoring any ecological and social concerns. ˧

a return to central planning modalities, but in newly democratized formats. There is a fraction of the left that is very enthusiastic about using cybernetics and various forms of algorithmic mediation to restart the tradition of societal planning; it is often called ‘Democratic Planning. This is largely an academic movement (cfr for example the INDEP network) but it is growing in influence. The central idea is that the calculation problem, the subject of passionate debates in the 20th cy. , has now been solved though the abundance of means of compute and AI. This debate involved the pro-planning economists against the pro-market economists, the latter claiming it was impossible to calculate supply and demand in planned allocation systems. ˧

bottom-up 'anarchy': this would be the localist, anarchistically or ecologically oriented ecovillage movement, which does not necessarily seek higher forms of coordination and sees localization as the answer to the ills of globalization. ˧

And finally, the crypto world has generated a neo-nomadic movement which sees itself as an exit strategy as well; it focuses on non-territorial modes of coordination. ˧

Emergence of Crypto-Based Coordination Technology ˧

Within the blockchain/crypto ecosystem, expressed in what is called Web 3 technology, and of which Ethereum is the primary infrastructural project, there are some contending forces and visions as to the form that new translocal entities would take. Web3 is the attempt to recreate a solid p2p-based global and decentralized computing infrastructure, that can not be captured by centralizing corporations or national governments, such as the original internet (Web1) was captured by the commercial, by the no longer p2p-based Web2 system. Ethereum is the project to build a new and universal computing infrastructure, on top of the blockchain, which is the universal ledger associated with the Bitcoin crypto-graphically based monetary system. With this universal ledger, applied in new types of trans-local governance institutions such as Distributed Autonomous Organizations, it is now possible to coordinate both human labor and capital flows, in globally coordinated projects, where stigmergy and the freely chosen contribution of tasks, is the standard feature of that coordination. The supporters and participants in these new techno-social networks believe that this can enable new types of non-territorial political and social communities. ˧

On the one hand there is the ‘Network State’ movement, which has been defined at first by Balaji Srivanasan’s book of the same title. This entails using crypto capital to make deals with the national governments to create maximally autonomous Special Economic Zones with strong new identities that could evolve to new forms of sovereignty. Prospera on Roatan Island in Honduras is one of the best known, but controversial, implementations. This is not just a new version of the mercantilist idea of merchant states that we know from history, but it goes further into corporatization than the merchant republics in history. In a network state, you are not a citizen but a shareholder of various corporations that perform what were previously public services. ˧

In contrast, there is a less influential but growing Network Nations movement, that is not seeking territorial sovereignty but connections between regeneratively oriented projects, which do not necessarily have to be territorial. ˧

The Network.nations research project has provided a handy comparison table outlining the differences between those two approaches: ˧

Dimension Network States Network Nations Core definition A coordinated online community that seeks territorial control and formal sovereignty through a start-up logic, aiming to exit the current system. A community-rooted, commons-driven civic fabric that builds functional sovereignty through culture, cooperation, and shared stewardship. Sovereignty model Territorial sovereignty Functional sovereignty Governance orientation Top-down, investor-driven (start-up society) Bottom-up, community-driven Path to legitimacy Exit-based (raise capital, acquire land, secede, negotiate recognition) Practice-based (legitimacy through care, participation, and belonging) Membership structure Market-based (participants aligned through investment) Stake-based (members as co-creators and stewards) Organizing logic Market logic (CEO or founder as leader) Commons logic (collective stewardship) Economic dynamics Competition and extraction Cooperation and mutual care Institutional form Corporate machine Civic imagination ˧

The P2P Foundation is operating within this latter movement, with a specific vision of ‘Archipelagos of Regenerative Projects’, in which regenerative projects can organize themselves into neo-sovereign confederations resting on trans-local digital infrastructures. More than others we stress the link that what is needed is direct access to value creation and distribution, i.e. the control of social and productive surplus, and so the Archipelago idea is more directly envisaged as an alliance of ‘productive communities’. We do not envisage the ultimate goal of operating this new system as an aspect of the continued global circulation of capital, but as the seed forms of a new system for the expanded circulation of commons-based contributory value. In essence we propose a dual structure and strategy in which local projects can be linked to their territorial and bioregional neighbours, including having strong links if possible with supportive public authorities willing to support such projects, but at the same time, they would be digitally linked to similar projects and develop a joint infrastructure <and> form of identity with them. ˧

The New Three-Layered Cosmo-Local Coordination Stack ˧

We believe this infrastructure would be based on three different interacting layers: ˧

< mutual coordination in open ecosystems, assisted by regenerative market mechanisms, and limited by thermodynamic based 'context-based sustainability'. > ˧

We are asking you to imagine the following emerging reality: ˧

a first layer of production and distribution involves direct mutual coordination, through open and shared supply chains, with integrated accounting and metrics to recognize both positive and negative social and ecological externalities, aligning a post-commodity, contributory economy at the center of the system; contributions would not need to be a priori priced in this first layer of coordination. a second layer involves generative market transactions for goods that need replacement and have a definite cost, involving the various players in entredonneurial (generative entrepreneurs working together) coalitions that share common infrastructures and circular economies; these could use market pricing but prices that recognize ‘true prices’, i.e. take into account thermodynamic realities. a third 'planning' layer that involves biophysical accountability, using tools like Kate Raworth's Doughnut, or the Global Thresholds and Allocations developed by initiatives such as Reporting 3.0 ˧

If we go back to the original Marxist distinction between ‘socialism’, which is still a society based on exchange, (though conceived as reciprocity-based ‘fair’ exchange without capitalist exploitation), in contrast with ‘communism’, an abundant society where there is no longer a tension between supply and demand,and therefore ‘no exchange’, no ‘law of value’ anymore, then our proposed synthesis is a transitional system that mixes three different layers: 1) a layer where exchange is still necessary, but it has become an ethical market; a non-capitalist market which may still have capitalist elements (the ‘socialist layer of a non-exploitative market, if you like)

 2) a layer where the contribution of abundant resources are freely coordinated (actually existing communism, if you like), through mutual signalling

Towards globally protective and coordinating ‘Axial Entities of the Noosphere’ ? ˧

There is obviously a political aspect to this vision, based on our belief that the commons are a vital institution for the ecological and social balance of any society. ˧

Indigenous societies had active commons, regulated through the sacred Pre-capitalist societies recognize local commons as necessary for their overall regulation and harmonizing Capitalist societies ‘enclose’ (destroy) the commons but replace their regulatory function by the state. ˧

Hence as Karl Polanyi remarked in his ‘Great Transformation’, capitalism was marked by the ‘lib-lab’ dynamic: periods in which the market was regulated, and periods in which the market was deregulated. When the ‘people’ found that the market was too free from societal concerns, it could put pressure on the state to re-regulate, and vice versa. But in the 1980s, with the transnationalization of capital, this equilibrium was destroyed, and there can no longer be any regulation by the state on the national level (China being the sole exception). ˧

The alternatives in play today are : ˧

the creation of a multi-stakeholder global governance model as proposed by the WEF, a rejig of the nation-state, (augmented by civilizational buffers, the so-called ‘civilization state’ model) but without Western hegemony (the BRICS, ‘multipolar’ model) and the Trumpian national-populist rejig of nation-states in the West. ˧

What if we could create a new form of trans-national, trans-local power, based on the power of the neo-commons institutions? That is the bet of the P2P Foundation, that cosmo-local production becomes the process to create a new layer of trans-local cooperation, that can create a new form of social power that can interact and react to transnational finance capital and potentially hostile rejigged nation-states. We have called them ‘Magisteria of the Commons’, but David Ronfeldt calls them “axial entities of the noosphere”, i.e. AEONs : ˧

"Just as evolution has not resulted in one tectonic plate, nor one master ecology, religion or civilization, it surely will not result in a singular noospheric entity. That would contravene a “law” that evolution requires variety and flux, without which evolution will not occur. My deduction is that something like five to ten AI-derived, -endowed, and -empowered entities will emerge that resemble noospheric superorganisms, all the more so as people become attracted to associating with them. These novel noospheric entities and their AI operating systems will all be somewhat different from each other, yet united in having a sacred purpose … something not “alive” yet devoted to “life.” If so, it’ll signify another evolutionary commonality across all three planetary spheres. These noospheric entities will exist loosely atop our biosphere’s axial religions, civilizations, and ecologies, and they atop our geosphere’s tectonic plate." ( https://davidronfeldt.substack.com/p/updates-about-superorganisms-holospheres) ˧

10. The vital role of mutualization: the necessary advent of a cosmo-local world order ˧

Factor 20 Reduction: Complex (Cosmo-)Localization ˧

John Thackara has introduced the principle of ‘Factor 20 Reduction’, the principle of maintaining a balanced human social life with only 5% of the actual use of matter and energy, and he gives several examples of such experiments. This illustrates the principle of humanity’s capability of managing shared resources in new ways, or in other words, digitally, or even AI-enabled, updated forms of cosmo-local mutualization. Remember that Kojin Karatani defined Mode D as the attempted return to the conviviality of Mode A, but at a higher level of complexity, i.e. while keeping to a maximum extent the innovations and techno-social advances of complex civilization. ˧

From the cosmo-local point of view: localization has a significant impact on the matter-energy cost related to transportation in global supply chains, sharing knowledge through cooperating global design communities creates accelerated regeneratively-oriented innovation, and the local mutualization of shared material resources adds yet another layer of potential thermodynamic savings. ˧

The shared knowledge, free software and open design practices have shown that there is now a powerful social movement for the mutualization of knowledge. The principle here is simply that in digitally enhanced knowledge networks, any innovation anywhere in the system is effectively available everywhere. Think of how fast OpenClaw?, the open source AI agent system, has spread. ˧

The Systematic Mutualization of Physical Infrastructures ˧

Material infrastructures can be similarly mutualized, we can take the housing ‘stack’ as an example, from the land, to the bricks, to the services within the houses: Community Land Trusts can be used for organizing land held in common, Cooperative Housing, can be used for housing stock held in common (the bricks), and Co-Housing living arrangements (mutualized services) are an example of mutualization for shelter. Many urban areas will have a mix of private housing, public housing subsidized by the state, and ‘common-based’ housing arrangements. And this situation can be extended in every domain of human services. For example co-working, hackerspaces and makerspaces are new mutualized ways to organize collective labor, and along with private and public instances, they also exist in commons-based formats. All these new forms have experienced exponential growth for at least two decades. But the potential game changer here would be distributed manufacturing, which is really at the heart of the promise of cosmo-localism as applied to production. This would entail a new strategy of (re)industrialization that no longer focuses on global supply-chains in mega-factories, but in adaptable local workshops with specialized machinery for more local production. This is not a proposal to ‘localize everything’ but it aims for ‘subsidiarity in material production’. The principle of sovereignty, a development from within the Catholic doctrine of ‘just power’, was perhaps misappropriated by political institutions such as the EU, but can be read at: decisions should be made at the lowest most appropriate level. Subsidiarity is not an argument against every instance of (global) trade, but can be used to minimize the thermo-dynamic load of humanity in a systematic way. ˧

The Three-layered Governance Infrastructure and the role of Transvestment ˧

Distributed manufacturing is a ‘high tech, high touch’ option for making, which marries the optimal mixes of localism, bioregionality, and the planetary level, with an appropriate organizing and support role for the national levels. ˧

The key ‘agent’ for this new model would be cosmo-local productive communities which ally hyperlocal productive initiatives, embedded in local geographical and cultural realities, linked in bioregional solidarity and complementary networks, aided by evolved partner-states that reflect historically evolved national cultural and political realities, but organized at the planetary scale through cooperation protocols, access to ‘patient capital’ engaged in transvestment ˧

Transvestment refers to using capital from one value sphere (say the capitalist sphere) to develop another value sphere, say, the sphere of the commons, i.e. our efforts go from opposing the enclosure and extraction from the commons (commons for capital), to using capital for the benefit of the commons. ˧

So we have 3 or 4 interconnected and nested levels, from the hyperlocal, via the bioregional and national, to the continental and the planetary. ˧

In this context, Sacha Pignot has called for a ‘multi-level competency architecture’. As he writes: "Governance should be organized across multiple nested and overlapping scales, with each scale handling exactly the competencies it is best suited for, based on empirical capacity rather than ideology or tradition. Scales are dynamically adjustable and can be non-hierarchical or heterarchical." ( https://soushi888.github.io/alternef-digital-garden/knowledge/governance-and-community/subsidiarity) ˧

Towards a new hermeneutic cycle ? ˧

Cosmo-localization also will also pose substantial problems of mutual understanding across all scales, it is as much a hermeneutical problem as a technical one. But if (post)modernity can be seen as a process of fragmentation, we believe that universal peer production can develop a ‘hermeneutics of distributed cosmo-local commons’. ˧

A full cosmolocal system can be understood as a multi-layered hermeneutic process: ˧

For simplicity: political and national territories are subsumed here under the bioregional layer. In my own view, nation-based governance structures will continue to exist, and may even be strengthened as a result of the ongoing global crisis. However, seen as ‘partner states’ that have a self-interest to promote commons-based practices, as they have had in several historical moments, means that they can be seen as an ally and promoter of sound bioregional adaptation. ˧

Layer Unit Function Hermeneutic Role Hyperlocal Individuals / small communities Lived practice Appropriation and enactment of meaning Bioregional Cultures / territories Narrative and institutional coherence Collective interpretation and stabilization Cosmolocal Global commons / networks Knowledge sharing Abstraction and circulation of meaning ˧

In conclusion: In this proposed Hermeneutic Cycle: knowledge is abstracted (cosmolocal) interpreted (bioregional) enacted (hyperlocal) This is then fed back into the commons ˧

This forms a planetary hermeneutic cycle. ˧

Mutualization <is> the bridge between Entropy and Negentropy! ˧

In our deeper view, mutualization is the bridge between the extractive necessities of human life, our needs for food, shelter, transport, and the need to maintain a balance in that expenditure. Mutualization is the secret bridge between ‘extropy’ and ‘entropy’: the better we mutualize, the more negentropic and ‘extropic’ human society can be. We move from a commodity regime to a contributory regime of value; from the economies of scale of capitalism (make more of thing by using more matter and energy to make the sold products cheaper through mass production), to the economies of scope of the commons economy: doing more with the same, both physically and immaterially. ˧

We move from an extractive mentality to a regenerative mentality, with humans as the stewards of the web of life, and the whole “Earth as our Garden”, maintained on behalf of all life. As Hanna and Paans write: “the final sentence of Candide, ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin’ — we must cultivate our garden—by reformulating it as a cosmopolitan neo-utopian exhortation: ‘Il faut cultiver notre jardin mondial’, that is, we must cultivate our global garden." ˧

Historizing the role of humanity as the gardeners and stewards of the living world Moderns like to imagine themselves as having put ‘humans in the right (marginalized) place’, as a speck in the physical world, away from its medieval centering, but this is of course a profound misreading of the cultures of the past. Before modernity, the human was absolutely <not> the center of the world: the divine was, and the human was at the service of that divine, which included, in the best integrative cases, both the spiritual plane and the ‘Book of Nature’ as the second aspect of the divine world order. ˧

As Thomas Berry, the neo-Teilhardian Catholic author explains: “Few civilizations have been so totally integrated with the great cosmic liturgy as was Medieval Europe. This integration we see with total clarity both in the architecture and symbolism of the great cathedrals and in the colorful rituals that were enacted there almost continuously. It is seen especially in the great poem of Dante Alighieri (1265–1321), The Divine Comedy. Here the natural world is seen as primordial scripture, a scripture predating the Bible. The opening language of the Bible itself repeats the creative words that brought the natural world into being. Only when there is a natural world can communication pass between the divine and the human. Indeed humans have no conscious interior spiritual world unless it is activated by the outer world of nature. The natural world and the divine, these were mutually explanatory. Thus the great medieval teachers began their writings with observations on how these two scriptures, the natural and the verbal, explain each other.” ( http://www.religionandnature.com/ern/sample/Tucker--Berry,Thomas.pdf) ˧

Pitirim Sorokin is a macro-historian which has focused on the value bifurcations in human societal systems, from what he calls Sensate civilizational forms, i.e. materially-centric societies such as ours or that of the late Roman elites, to the Ideate societies, who focus on the inner and spiritual, like the Christians and the Buddhists, who reject the centrality of the material processes. However, he describes unique moments in history, such as 5th cy. BC Greece, or 13th cy. , medieval Europe, where a declining Ideate and a growing Sensate wave, met each other in the middle to create integrative cultures. Although this is not the case today, we are in a declining Sensate wave, and we should ‘normally’ expect a potential shift to ‘Ideate’ cultures. I do, perhaps counter-intuitively, believe that there is a strong possibility for a new integrative moment in human cultural history. I believe that more seed forms point in that direction, than in the direction of the total rejection of a material civilization. ˧

11. What becomes of human salvific labor in an AI-enabled automated machine society ? ˧

There is one more aspect we want to address in conclusion. How does AI change the situation, and the proposed ‘solutions’ that we have described so far. Isn’t it obsolete to stress the role of human labor in such a context ? There is indeed a tremendous potential for AI and Robotics to automate significant chunks of human labor. ˧

We believe AI has two major historical functions. First of all, as humanity has invented the ‘internet’ and digital networks, it has created an information and knowledge explosion that is hardly manageable by individual humans alone, and even overwhelms collectives. In this context, AI is a permanent synthetic knowledge machine that can represent the totality of the achievements of knowledge commons in digestible ways. But more particularly, we believe that AI can be a very helpful interface for cosmo-localized human productive communities in relation to the web of life ˧

In a more participatory context in which humans will manage resources recognizing the interdependent fate of a living planet, the massive complexity of managing the new ‘voices of the natural world’, would be overwhelming. AI’s can help translate ecological data into human-comprehensible narratives and recommendations but we can imagine much more than this. The key for the regenerative future is to make the needs of the non-human world visible to the human, and some human communities might go in all kinds of new directions of participatory governance, such as a ‘parliament of beings’. Here is how Austin Wade Smith, the author of a very important book on ‘Ecological Institutions’ describes the change needed, i.e. the expansion towards ‘more than human governance’: ˧

"The more than human world might be recognized as “legitimate” social actors, rather than objects and resources for extraction. The institutional forms of the future must reflect a more whole world, populated by more subjects than human beings, leading to the emergence of novel eco-social assemblages which redefine concepts like rights, ownership, identity, privacy, responsibility, and politics beyond solely the human realm. How might we create institutions which are living with and across diverse forms of life; which is to say, convivial?" ( https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/tv9z1XXrtqQxDIxE8FygZ_W39NpkQJkVfrtjCtdbzA8 ) ˧

Austin Wade Smith goes further, as he envisions commons as a three way integration of the human, the digital (hence AI) and the more-than-human web. It’s three webs in one: ˧

“"Every commons is an integration of knowledge with the bio-physical processes which comprise the living world. Always an overlay, they provide a fruitful means to discuss the interdependence of species, information and governance, because knowledge and our practices of regenerative stewardship are themselves living systems, contiguous with the biological world. From this perspective, what we describe as commons may be another way of saying that a community is at its essence, web-based. Although the term is most readily applied to internet native groups, I’d argue that communities which practice social life in an expanded sense through networks of mutualism, symbiosis and reciprocity are the original web-based communities. MMO guilds, open source developer communities, and these new thorny things called DAOs, are more recent actors in a lineage of web-based communities whose identity is actively formed relationally through networks. To undual is to reconcile the fact that the social sphere has always been web-based, and thus not exclusively a human affair." ( https://mirror.xyz/austinwadesmith.eth/J2Ac0fFG1XbEHLch5c_TQy2OxfFjebK6BnJpHJKbgFg) ˧

To ‘undual’ is a neologism by Austin Wade Smith that indicates the necessary overcoming between the human and the natural world, to undo the Cartesian split introduced by Western modernity that distinguished the live human mind from dead matter. But we can also apply to the relationship between the human and technology, by recognizing it’s an externalization of the human. ˧

Managing a global economy in the interest of privileged human groups was one thing, but managing a participatory regenerative economy in which the web of life is given a voice, requires a much higher level of coordination and integration. In the context of the needed Mode D, we believe that humanity can use AI precisely to solve this information and coordination problem. In a paradoxical way, AI could, in this context, become a facilitator for the voice of nature, a tool that facilitates our comprehension and understanding of what the natural world needs from us. In the context then, of a potential radical reduction of the need for human labor in many occupations and sectors, and the changed meaning of what human labor means in this new context, we do believe that a key new contributory role of human labor lies in ‘orchestration’. AI’s may have their emerging and relative autonomy, but they have no intentionality of their own, it has been programmed into them, and their design has been driven by private class and commercial interests, i.e. a part of humanity, without any voice of the natural world. New open source, participatory, and community driven forms of AI can be imagined that can be mobilized for the regenerative intentions of the cosmo-local productive communities. This is what we call ‘Civilizational AI’. With ‘civilizational AI’ we mean AI systems designed, owned, and governed by commons-based communities rather than corporate or state actors. In other words, AI that is not at the service of private interests, but to the civilization as a whole. ˧

That process has merely begun, but we recommend Austin Wade Smith’s work on Ecological Institutions to start such reflections and new practices of human / AI / web-of-life cooperations. Let’s think back for a moment of our introduction of the dynamics between the modes of value extraction, and the purification engines, the dynamic uncovered by the works of Kojin Karatani, Hanzi Freinacht and Mark Whitaker, which we introduced earlier on in this essay. I argued that in the current ‘cognitive’ phase of the mode of extraction, the purification engine won’t be the mass parties and ideologies of the industrial era, but constructive networks. In other words, federated and regenerative productive communities. We also spoke of the need for regenerative jurisdictional alliances, and it would seem that there will be a need not just for inter-human alliances, but for integrative mutually supportive alliances of human groups that can align with both the natural world, and the artificial world. The technosphere becomes a primary locus of social change. ˧

With this we have come to a paradoxical but still integrative conclusion: We have argued that it is important to return to a more positive interpretation of the human role as not just a steward of nature, but with a drive towards ever greater integration into coherent, negentropic wholes, using the gift of salvific labor. AI, an expression of collective humanity, which carries many dangers, especially under the political economy of capitalism, under the leadership of a technocracy with false mystical aims to subjugate common humanity to perverted transcendent goals, is paradoxically, also a way forward, on the condition it can be integrated fruitfully in this triune whole. ˧

In a documentary project I collaborated with in the late nineties, TechnoCalyps?, the Metaphysics of Technology and the End of Man, I had already diagnosed that transhumanism was a ‘false religion’, i.e. having abandoned the transcendent impulse hitherto expressed in the sacred, the leading sectors of humanity started a systematic attempt to create the transcendent in the material plane. ˧

This gives us three possibilities: ˧

The first one is what Sorokin describes as the Ideate path: the material plane is neglected, and the focus is on the interior development of a connection with the divine, the path of the Axial religions, such as Buddhism and Christianity (though as we have argued, Christianity also carries within it the integrative capacity through its vision of a sacralized nature). The second is the Sensate path of transhumanism: an abandonment of the sacred and the spirit, and a systematic attempt to develop the aims of spiritual movements, i.e. transcendence, exclusively as a technical manipulation of matter. But there is a potential third, integrative part, in which both nature and the spirit are respected as aspects of an integrated whole. This is perhaps the path indicated by authors such as Teilhard de Chardin and Aurobindo, and as expressed nowadays in the multiple versions of the Third Narrative, discussed above. Nicolai Berdyaev has historized that path, in his distinction between five historical periods, each one characterized by a different relation between the human and the technological: ˧

Period one) our submersion to cosmic life in which human life depended on the natural world – a time when personality was not fully developed and humans did not fully conquer nature; Period two) humans became freed from cosmic forces, from spirits and demons attributed to nature – the emergence of elementary forms of economics and serfdom; Period three) humans carried out mechanization over nature through scientific and technical control – the development of industry, capitalism, a new necessity of selling one’s labor for wages; Period four) an era marked by the disruption of cosmic order, the dissolution of organic forms of human organization and the development of various autonomous spheres – where one of them claims totalitarian recognition. An era marked by a terribly augmented power that humans have over nature and their enslavement to their own discoveries; Period five) an eschatological revolution, the decline of the realm of Caesar, the dissolution of state power, labor emancipation, spiritual transmutation ˧

Alexei Anisin explains: “The first three periods precede the twentieth century, whereas the fourth period begins with the era of WWII and spans into the twenty first century – a time which Berdyaev believed would feature the rise of an all-powerful state that would stake a total claim of objectivity over all of social and natural phenomena. This was not only the final stage of the realm of Caesar, but also the last possible stage of this realm. Berdyaev describes this meta-historical trajectory succinctly: where once man feared the demons of nature and Christ freed him from demonolatry, now man is in terror before the world-wide mechanization of nature. The power of technics is the final metamorphosis of the realm of Caesar". ( https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/916/1646) ˧

This shift from epoch 4 to epoch 5, illustrates the grounding intuition of our work at the P2P Foundation, and our aim at a re-integration of the human and the non-human. The P2P Foundation's documentation of seed forms and proposal for cosmo-local productive communities is intended as a practical contribution to this fifth period's emergence. ˧

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