The Rise of the P2P SocietyBy Anonymous, Political Ecology, Lunds University

“The history of civilization is a story of evolution in our ability to build complex ‘multicellular minds.

Speech allowed us to communicate and coordinate. Writing allowed that coordination to span time

and space. Twentieth century mass communications allowed shared information and culture to

blanket the world. In the 21st century, memes spread mind to mind in nearly real time. “

-Tim O’Reilly, 2012

Introduction

Political ecology studies the complexinteraction between economics, politics,technology, social tradition and thebiological environment. This paper willfocus on technological developments in thepast 20 years, and spanning a decade into the future. The paper looks at how technology created an era of inequality, and how contemporary technologies and the decentralization movement are ending that era.

1.1 The Evolution of Inequality

Inequality is always a conscious act. To paraphrase myself in my work with what is now Bitnation’s (SVT, 2015) favorite basic income system,

The origin of labour exploitation and inequality can be found in the evolutionary psychology of dominance hierarchies. These hierarchies evolved for small tribes, small and familial enough for people to find means to claim their right one way or another. Even if people lacked barter resources, there was always gossip, sympathy and other social means. The tribes upheld fairness somewhat like modern families, relying on social means rather then economic ones to secure fairness. But society grew bigger, and under the rules of mass-civilization capitalism, there is no longer any empathy or sympathy to appeal to, no social means to claim ones right.

Technology allowed us to create bigger and bigger societies, but our brains were still hardwired for small tribes of about 150 people (Dunbar, 1992). As Christopher Nolan says in Interstellar, Empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight. Technology had allowed us to expand our society, and to populate the earth, but as technology signaled the endof the hunter-gatherer era, it gave rise to an era of slavery and inequality. In The Original Affluent Society (Sahlins, 2006), Sahlins writes about how hunter-gatherer people enjoy a sort of ‘material plenty’, and goes on and on about the paradoxical nature of this. But the paradox is an illusion, hunter-gatherer tribes traditionally have huge geo-political capital, they own vast areas of land, and have access to huge markets of un-domesticated livestock and plantations. The pattern that Sahlin observes, and the discourse throughout the subject of political ecology, is instead the unequal distribution of the commons in post-hunter gatherer societies.

1.2 Technology and the evolution of inequality

Cyborg Anthropology (Case, 2011) as a subject notes that technology acts as a sort of augmentation, and that we are in fact better understood as a cyborg-species. In this paper, I look at how technology created an era of inequality, and how technology is ending that era. The era could be called ‘the great transition’. Again, as Sahlins argues in The Original Affluent Society, poverty is a result of inequality - there has always been enough resources for affluence, but the emergence of a technological elite created an era of inequality. Pinker argues in his work The Better Angels of Our Nature:Why Violence Has Declined (Pinker, 2011) that ‘the world has never been less violent’, and this he argues is the result of technological evolution and the internet. The human story is about the reach a new era, andknowing this, we can look back at how we got here.

The slavery in egypt, ancient greece, and in the feudal society, and in the industrial society, and during the 20th century, was a result of technological inequality, and an elite that used technology to coerce the public. War has never been in the interest of the common man. War has been waged between technological elites, and ‘the public’were never part of the conversation. They were less valuable.

1.3 Ending Technological Inequality - David vs Goliath - The Activists

Change doesn’t happen by itself. Hale notes in his work What is Activist Research ? (Hale, 2001) that non-traditional research can have tremendous value in terms of impact. Many politically important Ideas, such as the democratizing power of the personal computer, or the value of social media to fight dictators and to end the oppressionby an elite, came from people on the fringes. Outsiders, whose work weowe our freedom to. Jamie Wheal notes in his work with The Flow GenomeProject (Wheal, Kotler, 2013) that ‘innovation can only happen on a substrate of theta waves’, meaning that any true change and disruptiveIdea cannot occur from within the system. It’s neurologically

impossible to fight the system from within the system, and this is in short because of how our frontal lobe responds to social fear. Fear ofrepercussion inhibits our ibility to create new Ideas, and we become tools, literarilly. This is not some activist mumbo-jumbo, but years old truths and facts.

I’m an activist, and I’ve fought the system from outside the system, and I’m winning, and my work was recently featured in Swedish State Television, and coming from a background of medical science, and as anelite ranger of the Swedish Army, and with my experience from activistfield work, I know about the neuroscience of inequality as good as anyone. And I second Hale’s opinions, and I see how they may have contributed value 14 years ago when he choose that path. In 2001, the internet was still in its early stages, and the elite still had media dominance. The social media revolution happened much more recently, and I see signs of it still happening as more and more people are standing up for their emotions.

2.1 Political Ecology and The Decentralization Revolution

Traditional cultural-ecological studies explored the intricate, complex interactions between peoples and their environments in the context of resource use (Grossman, 2009). The field itself emerged as a response and a sublime protest to how earth’s resources were being managed, what Garrett Hardin might have called ‘the tragedy of the commons’ (Hardin, 1968). As Bryant and Bailey writes, the unequal distribution of costs and benefits and the reinforcing or reducing of pre-existing inequalities holds political implications in terms of the altered power relationships that now result.

If Political Ecology as a subject emerged to research the consequencesof an unequal distribution of power - what happens to the subject itself it we suddenly solve that problem ? The same thing that has happened to other meta-subjects in social sciences, obsolescence, or

evolution.

Chagani argues in The Journal of Political Ecology (Chagani, 2015) forneither obsolescence nor evolution, but for revolution and a paradigm shift. He writes that,

“"Posthumanist" theories have become increasingly popular among scholars in political ecologyand other fields in the human sciences… ...a critical political ecology would best be served by preserving a tension between humanist and posthumanist methods.”

and in my mind, he’s implying that we need a new narrative, and he’s trying to bootstrap on the metaphor space that emerged as political ecology to be able to reach an audience. I believe that political ecology, like any philosophy, like the philosophy of Marx or Platon, has reached an expiration date, and that this paper and this author might be the last generation in a 100 year long legacy. Using Google-n-gram, you can see a small trend in the decline of the word politicalecology.

This is not a bad thing. The philosophy political ecology emerged to deal with real-world problems. We owe a great deal to it. It guided usthrough the 20th century, and into the internet-era.

2.2 Technologies of democracy

Alf Hornborg notes in his work Redesigning Money to Curb Globalization: Can We Domesticate the Root of all Evil? (Hornborg, 2015), that

“...the advent of electronic money in 1971 certainly unleashed an unprecedented fetishization ofthe global economy, but it also opens completely new possibilities to design currencies that promote equality, democracy, and sustainability (Hart 2000). Two thousand years ago, St. Paul was no doubt right in that money is the root of all evil, but at this point in history Bernhard Lietaer (2001:7) is also right in that it is “the root of all possibilities.”

and goes on to note the democratizing potential of electronic

currencies and the web,

“...but money inevitably becomes an end in itself when it is attributed with intrinsic value, as when precious metals or bills are hoarded or stolen, or when interest accrues on bank accounts.This is money fetishism. However, money that is both electronic and interest-free has no intrinsic value. In this form, it can finally serve its makers, rather than make them its servants.3.1 The internet and the democratization of communication

The TCP/IP protocols that underlie the internet gave people a tool to communicate person-to-person, without a central authority, and to senddigital information of any kind. Multi-media was the buzzword of the 90s, MMS. The cost per byte of information has decreased at an exponential rate, from the printing press where you had to have accessto one of those, which meant going through all sorts of hierarchies, and the television network that was state-regulated, to the TCP/IP protocols that allowed individuals to communicate peer-to-peer. The democratization of access has had historical impact on the world we live in, from wikileaks in 2006 and the arab spring in 2010, to 2014 and the decentralized ledger Ethereum becoming an 18 million dollar business (Alisie , 2015 ) and the biggest crowdfunded project in history.

The decrease in cost is the democratizing factor. The founder of TED.com, recently spoke of how increased bandwidth disrupted communication, (Andersson, 2014)

Back in 2004, the cost of sending a lecture from person A to person B on the other side of the world was effectively $2 just for one piece of communication. You'd have to copy it onto a DVD, mail it across the world and then they'd view it. And then internet bandwidth plummeted in costand suddenly it was possible to do this thing called online video. And so within literally not much more than a year, the real-world cost of sharing 15 minutes of spoken information plummeted from a couple dollars to about a penny or two.

This is incredible. The cost of sending thoughts from one person to another has decreased so much that lectures and ideas could be

broadcasted rather than lectured. This memetic revolution (Dawkins, 1994), a revolution in how we communicate, is the spring-board of the global spring. As ideas - social tradition - where democratised in the00s, the economic and political traditions were bound to catch up, bootstrapping on technology.

3.2 The arab spring and what comes next

TED, Twitter and the social media revolution invigorated a generation and inspired them to overthrow their authorities. This was wonderful, they knew they wanted to change the system, but there was no real alternative back then in 2010. They were left with a new government and a system much similar to their previous one. The social media revolution alone could not engineer the technical solutions of how to govern, it could but empower communication.

It might seem like nothing much has happened since, and that the arab spring and Occupy led to nothing but violence, and that activists around the world with their utopic visions are ignorant of reality. That they’re dreamers without real solutions. But that belief is commonly associated with a lack of knowledge about current technology and the IT sphere. The truth is that there’s been a tremendous amount of progress, but that that progress is beyond most people’s attention scope. It’s too complicated to be sexy.

Arab Spring, Occupy, a generation of dreamers, and, enter 2008 and Bitcoin. While many elder people’s remarks to the Arab Spring was thatthere were no realistic alternatives, the youth of the revolution, who’d educated themselves through the online media revolution and phenomena like TED.com, were already years ahead of them. The potential of Bitcoin was apparent to millions of young people around the world, but they were scattered, and harassed and suppressed by theauthorities. The inventor of Bitcoin even published the technologies through pseudonym, to avoid threats. But the solutions have been there, online, for anyone to study, and they were around 5 years ago

when Generation Y and the YouTube generation took the streets of Teheran.

3.3 Distributed ledgers and the decentralization of authority

The core technologies of Bitcoin evolved into Ethereum. To narrate this from a contemporary perspective, Ethereum won the Technology of the Year Award 2014, and led the most successful crowdfunding campaignever (Buterin, 2014), and has been forked by major corporations such as IBM.

Ethereum lets us store legal documents on a distributed ledger, where everyone who’s part of a society stores a copy of the public record. This means that no one can forge information, and that no one is needed to play the role of the authority who manages the information. This changes the politics of how information is managed. Distributed ledgers are authority-less, and each person takes the role as one authority amongst many. The legal information is validated peer-to-peer, meaning that if I trust you to trust X, then I also trust X. This democratized legal information and removes the potential to claimauthority through ‘sitting on legal documents’.

Distributed ledgers give the legal documents back to those who they concern, and remove any middleman. The peer-to-peer network that emerges is much less prone to corruption, since multiple nodes would have to corrupt. (Buterin, 2014)

3.4 Networks theory and corruption

It’s very hard for an individual node to take down a distributed

network. The middlemen in network (B) still have potential to corrupt

and ruin for everyone else, but in network C it’s near impossible. The

democratization of power that we see in network C makes it very hard

for a single node to claim any form of power. That’s why network C is

the popular choice in engineering, and the choice when we build our

electrical grids.

The distributed ledger that Ethereum is building, powered by their 18

million dollars in revenue, is of the network C type. They use

multiple innovations to make it as distributed as they possibly can.

The entire network even runs on distributed hardware - if you join,

your mobile phone and your computer could power part of the network.

You would not only own your legal documents and your democratic right

to validate legal documents in your community, you would also own part

of the infrastructure.

This has profound impacts on our human ecology. Common assumptions

across the field of political ecology are: (Bryant and Bailey 1997).

“...costs and benefits associated with environmental change are distributed unequally. Changes

in the environment do not affect society in a homogenous way: political, social, and economic

differences account for uneven distribution of costs and benefits.”

“...this unequal distribution inevitably reinforces or reduces existing social and economic

inequalities. In this assumption, political ecology runs into inherent political economies as “any

change in environmental conditions must affect the political and economic status quo.”

“...the unequal distribution of costs and benefits and the reinforcing or reducing of pre-existing

inequalities holds political implications in terms of the altered power relationships that now

result.

But with Ethereum (and Bitcoin as an early version of Ethereum), thoseassumptions need to be questioned and updated to reflect the current state of human ecology (see section 2). Section 3 in this paper spans a period of 30 years, the past 25 years and the next 5 years up to the2020s, and though distributed ledgers are still rare, Ethereum is currently a multi-million dollar industry with millions of volunteers around the world, and Bitcoin as an Ethereum 0.1 has millions of userswho all enjoy the benefits of equal governance power. There’s a commonsaying that ‘the future is already here, it’s just not evenly distributed’, and for someone who’s been using Ethereum-technology for years now (as in Bitcoin), it’s a very real phenomena that has real political power.

3.5 The democratization of power - what comes next ?

Ethereum are launching next month, and the global Bitcoin community will upgrade once that happens. Legal documents will be validated peer-to-peer, where every ‘citizen’ owns a copy of that ‘nations’ legal record, and no person has authority or supremacy. These are hugechanges that transform our political ecology. The idea of ‘banks’ go extinct as each node becomes a ‘bank’. These peer-to-peer technologiesdistribute power across society. These tools are an evolution of the TCP/IP protocols and the web 1.0, that evolved into the social media web and the web 2.0, that’s currently becoming the web 3.0 with distributed ledgers and the democratization of power. (Buchanan, 2013)

There are huge lobbyist movement that are propagating for the use of these tools. Bitnation is one of the loudest in the past year, and founded by the individual who gave rise to the global pirate party movement a decade earlier, and like with Bitcoin, they’re already using these tools to give power to those who need it the most, with focus on Ghana and the developing world. Why Ghana ? Susanne TarkowskiTempelhof, the founder of Bitnation, worked with different governmentsin conflict zones, and set up a research and communications firm in Libya during the civil war. She then expanded the company to Egypt andGhana, and when she started Bitnation a couple of years later, it was natural to return to where she had roots. (Tarkowski Tempelhof, 2014)

In her Whitepaper, Tarkowski Tempelhof echoes the ideas of Chagani andhis publication in the Journal of Political Ecology,

“Technology is changing human interaction almost faster than scholars,pundits and journalists can keep up with, resulting in the uniting of humans around the globe in an unfathomably complex web of relationships.” (Tarkowksi Tempelhof, 2014)

Tarwkoski Tempelhof is a politician and an activist, Chagani is a published academic writing for the Journal of Political Ecology. They are two sides of the same coin, and they both try to send the same message.

3.6 The blockchain and the post-nation-state society

Ethereum and the blockchain should be understood as an evolution of the TCP/IP protocols. The first internet allowed people to reclaim communication, and then the media with the second internet in the 00s,and this third internet will allow people to re-claim their right to governance power. I could think of nothing more relevant for someone who studies our human ecology. These technologies will usher in a global revolution, and it’s already happening. The social media revolution would not have happened without the TCP/IP protocols, and so too with the current Governance 2.0 revolution. Distributed ledgersand distributed hardware are a stepping stone into a more distributed government structure, and Bitcoin has already been around for nearly adecade. These technologies and these revolutionary changes deserve a bigger focus amongst those who aim to understand our contemporary political ecology, as the notion of unequal distribution of power and resources (Bryant and Bailey 1997) is questioned now that power could be in everybody’s hands.

We all want our loved ones to have an equal share of the power, right ? It’s in every story, in every conflict at every schoolyard, inevery family. The era of capitalism is not a result of our collective emotions, but a result of military coercion. And with the blockchain, we can bypass that, in the same way that Twitter led to the arab spring, the blockchain is creating the global spring. There is no way for an authority to stop this, because we are dealing with the medium of emotions. With free communication, truly free inter-subjective communication, the oppressor always loses. There is no way for them tocontrol people any more. Their power - fear - has been taken away from

them.

Conclusion

These ideas have moved from activist pipe-dreams to becoming a 400 million USD industry. The movement is now, as measured by capital, where the internet was in 1995. The whistleblower movement, WikiLeaks,the arab spring, where all the results of an internet for communication, and that which I have outlined in this paper is now theresult of an internet for value, with value being broadly defined. We geeks call this the web 3.0, decentralized power, with the web 2.0 being the social web, decentralized communication that came with better bandwidth, and the web 1.0 being the web back in the 90s, an underutilized and unexplored platform that some people used occasionally to send an ‘e-mail’. To paraphrase Jeffrey Tucker from Foundation of Economic Education, in his interview on FOX news, may 10th 2015, about Nasdaq opening up for Bitcoin,

‘This is absolutely awesome’

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