Hi Trebor,<br><br>Thanks for that very interesting challenge.<br><br>I believe that in the end, it all comes down to a matter of balance, but slightly tipped over to the side of 'empowering hope'.<br><br>I haven't read Fred's book, but heard many echoes, and though I came just after the boomers, I started the game of life in 1958, but I still lived through most of the post-sixties period from a position of awareness.<br>
<br>The sixties were a mixed affair, yes the back to landers are one particular example, but was it really a total failure? I don't think so.<br><br>I think at the root of it, it's a question of psychological make-up. Either you are a gnostic, with a dualistic vision, and the kingdom of God is out there, perfect but unattainable, and this world is beyond repair, the domain of a false and ultimately evil God. <br>
<br>Or you see the universe as one, and your dreams and activism is part of it, and you are constantly incarnated, repairing it and improving it.<br><br>So my view of the sixties is that is failed in some areas, not in others, and many things we take for granted today, are rooted in the struggles and creations of that generation. Was the back to land movement not connected to deep experiences of those that lived it, was it not connected to the birth of environmentalism and of organic agricultural, both strong realities today. The thing is, that struggle, that creation, that incarnation never stops, as you improve some part, another part starts decaying. As you do something good, some other force incorporates it; as you intent something good, you actually obtain the opposite result.<br>
<br>The real question is: what happens if you don't do it? My answer is: it would be immeasurably worse, as we can see whenever progressive social forces are really defeated (think of Nazism).<br><br>So in the case of peer to peer, sharing and producing, it is simply happening, under the mixed and hybrid conditions that we are discussing.<br>
<br>So the options are not rocket science: where we can we develop autonomy, where we cannot we establish social contracts that are maximally to our advantage. The role of critique is to show us where we have to be active, but if it is merely to stand on the sidelines, to say how bad things are, and that "there is no autonomy possible", or "that we shouldn't fight the platform owners" (christian fuchs), then it is ultimately disempowering, and worse than the disease itself.<br>
<br>The key I think, is to be integrative, because let's face it, we don't know in advance whether and how things will work out and change.<br><br>This means sustaining and integrating all the different efforts that go in right direction, to closely observes what seems to work in order to potentially emulate it. Capitalism emerged out of feudalism because several successful subpatterns, like the invention of double entry book-keeping, the spiritual Lutheran reforms, the acceptance of interest by Calvin, etc... etc... started coalescing into a new way of being in the world, which at the end of a long process, found the old organization of the world inimical and therefore changed it. I suspect that the peer to peer transition will function in much the same way. As we coalesce different successful patterns, and we already know a lot about what works and not, (for example, I would suggest that "we know that sharing communities are generally too weak to produce their own infrastructures"), we become stronger and I would suggest, at one point, perhaps strong enough to become the organizational framework for a future political economy.<br>
<br>This is not 100% related to the debate, but here is a little analysis of the new age movement. I choose it as a topic because I'm sure this community of I suppose mostly staunch secularists would find it a rather distateful movement. Well, I would argue that a lot of good came out of it, and I offer it as a type of analysis that embraces positive developments, whereever they occur, as long as they bring something useful on the table.<br>
<br>So to answer your question:<br><br>1) we won some of the things that we wanted, i.e. the ability to produce and distribute our own content<br><br>2) but we did so in mostly hybrid realities, such as corporate platforms etc ...<br>
<br>so:<br><br>3) while we celebrate our gains, we critically engage with platform owners, and where we can, we build our own distributed infrastructures that work on principles that are different from the present political economy, and are the seed forms of what we want to establish as the core logic of society<br>
<br>Michel<br><br>Excerpt:<br><br>"<br><p class="postTitle"><a href="http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/p2p-spiritual-narcissism-and-post-new-age-spirituality/2009/06/07" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to P2P, spiritual narcissism, and post “new age” spirituality">P2P, spiritual narcissism, and post “new age” spirituality</a></p>
Douglas Rushkoff wrote:<br>
<div class="entry">
<blockquote><p>“What we think of
as “spirituality” today is not at all a departure from the narcissistic
culture of consumption, but its truest expression. Consumer materialism
and spirituality coevolved as ongoing reactions against the seemingly
repressive institutions of both state and church.”</p></blockquote>
<p>I’m a big fan of Douglas Rushkoff, author of the above quote, which comes from <a href="http://www.realitysandwich.com/i_am_god">a provocative article in the Reality Sandwich</a>. However, I believe the analysis in this article is too one sided a condemnation of contemporary spiritual forms.</p>
<p>Just below, I’m republishing my own analysis, published here in
March 2006, which is a evaluation of the ‘new age’ movement from a peer
to peer point of view.</p>
<p><strong>Michel Bauwens:</strong></p>
<p><em>Despite the many misgivings about this broad phenomena that was
once called the “new age” movement, I think that overall it played a
very necessary role in the evolution of human culture of the late 20th
century, as necessary as the Romantic movement a century before.</em></p>
<p><em>Defining the new age is of course a very difficult thing, since
to many different people it means different things, it has been
appropriated by all kind of cults, and has of course become a permanent
marketing concept in bookshops, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world.</em></p>
<p><em>Essential to the new age is in my view that it was a corrective
reaction against an excessive rationalization and mechanization of
western life, a reaction on the dissociation between desire and reason
that is at the basis of Western civilization. As a reaction it was both
necessary, and contained many exaggerated features. I would define it
first of all as a general kind of sensibility that one can find in:
alternative and complementary medicine, ecological sensibility, an
openness to non-traditional spiritual paths be it Eastern or Western
esoteric, alternative methods and lifestyles in the fields of
education, architecture, communal living; an attention to both healing
of the self and an attempt to re-enchant the world through connections
with both the natural world and the world of subtle-spiritual
experiences.</em></p>
<p><em>The flowering of the new age coincided with the political defeat
of the 1968 movements, that resulted in a turning inward of many people
who felt at the same time obliged to adapt to a world in which they
could not recognize themselves, while attempting to nevertheless live
their values, and change their life concretely, on a smaller scale, as
individuals, families, or communities. The time in which it arose, the
end of a long boom, coincided with the continuation of the
mechanization and commodification of life in a global capitalist
system, a loss of efficiency of the traditional social technologies of
control (the institutional framework of school, army, prison, and the
like), but especially in the traditional Western Christian traditions
which were becoming empty shelves.</em></p>
<p><em>One of the first tangible benefits of the new age was to
reintroduce the consciousness in the Western world, that spirituality
was not a matter of belief, but one of personal experience, that the
various traditions contained a vast array of psychotechnologies that
could open up new vistas of being and experiencing. It created a
possibility for many people to re-integrate this vast body of knowledge
and experience, and in a way that individuals could experiment and
choose their own combination, rather than following a conventional
tradition.</em></p>
<p><em>It was also a vehicle to rediscover the dissociated aspects of
Western man prior to 1968: the integration of the body, the use of
groups with techniques to facilitate authentic communication without
the social mask. It was in many ways what Freud would term a
“regression in service of the ego”, a return to the repressed areas of
the soma (bodily energies), the instinct, emotions, mind and
consciousness. Unfortunately, because it proceeded from a total lack of
experience, as well as had no grounding in tradition, it frequently
stayed in that regressive mode, as a reaction, it was too anti-mind,
and disdainful of the critical subjectivity that was one of the hard
won features of the western tradition. But to paraphrase Lenin, it
probably was a necessary infantile stage of development. In any case,
for many it offered many avenues of integrative work on their selves, a
positive orientation of self-work and change, in a otherwise dark
period of negative social change.</em></p>
<p><em>In other ways, it was an heir to Utopian Socialism, given the
seeming inability to change society as a whole, countless individuals
starting changing their life concretely: first of all by abandoning a
blind trust in the mechanistic approaches to the human body espoused by
Western medicine; through leaving aside the knowledge-stuffing rote
learning in education in view of regarding the child as a whole; and
these kind of changes have made the world unrecognizable from what it
was 30 years ago. Whatever the negative features of the neoliberal age,
many institutions have become more humane, more egalitarian, more
respectful, more attuned to the whole person. Individuals changed,
institutions evolved, and many small scale communal experiments, even
if many failed, yielded valuable learning experiences. To those who
fear irrationality, I would answer that most of the people involved
were from the top layers in terms of intelligence and education. In a
time frame where the left disintegrated and many social acquisitions
were undone, the new age sensibility was a guarantee that millions of
individuals were continuing concrete efforts. In another important
contribution, I see the new age sensibility as also responsible for
having forged a new kind of human being that was more apt to survive in
a knowledge-based network society.</em></p>
<p><em>Of course, now that we have seen the glass half full, it is
necessary to attend the glass half empty. As we have said, the new age
was reactionary in its exaggerated rejection of cognicentrism, it went
often too far in rejecting the role of the mind and of critical
intelligence. Instead of integrative, it was often regressive, a
“liberation from below”, where selfish desire could reign unchecked.</em></p>
<p><em>It fell prey in many instances to cultism, mindless anti-modern
reactions, extreme radicalism in food and medical matters that could
not recognize anything positive in western science. Spiritually, it had
often a rosy outlook, that served as a compensation for living through
a dreary reality in which hyper-competition was in many ways degrading
the quality of life.</em></p>
<p><em>Finally, being born itself in an age of hypercommerce, it didn’t
take on the feudal trappings of the earlier spiritual movements, but
the trappings of the market, and started functioning in many ways as a
series of capitalist enterprises, following a market and a marketing
logic, and from the point of view of the users, generating a
consumerist attitude of pick and choose. It stayed into an interiorist
mode of changing individuals, neglecting social change processes, and
got recuperated by cognitive capitalism. Many of these trappings, which
sometimes verged on extreme exploitation by scumbag gurus and cults,
are now in my view incompatible with a authentic spirituality, which
now must be open-ended and participative, and not based on a market
model of for-paid experiences. In addition, we must now both reject
cognicentrism, but also the regressions of the new age to pre-cognitive
levels, and instead opt for an integrative understanding and
development of soma-instinct-body-mind-consciousness, where each layer
can develop transparently following its own logic, with critical
subjectivity intact, but also without any dictatorship of the mind
which supposes it already knows where we are heading in these processes
of individual, organizational, and societal change. Following Ferrer’s
critique in his book Revisioning Transpersonal Psychology, we must also
reject viewing the spiritual in terms of individual experience and
rather see it as a function of relationality</em></p>
<p><em>In conclusion, while we are now definitely beyond a positive
role for the new age, it has outlived its usefulness, and its many sub
areas are now integrated in the fabric of self, organization, and
society, it was a historically important neo-Romantic movement, which
served to balance the excessive rationalization and/or mechanization of
society, and despite its own excesses, it was a vehicle of change for
individuals, communities, and institutions/society.”</em></p>
</div><br>