Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy

The aim of this book is not to provide yet another critique of capitalism but rather to contribute to the ongoing dialogue for post-capitalist construction, and to discuss how another world could be possible. It builds on the idea that peer-to-peer infrastructures are gradually becoming the general conditions of work, economy, and society, considering peer production as a social advancement within capitalism but with various post-capitalistic aspects in need of protection, enforcement, stimulation and connection with progressive social movements. Using a four-scenario approach, the authors seek to simplify possible outcomes and to explore relevant trajectories of the current techno-economic paradigm within and beyond capitalism. They postulate that the mature peer production communities pose a sustainable alternative to capital accumulation, that of the circulation of the Commons. They make some tentative transition proposals towards a Commons-based economy and society for the state, the market and the civic domain.

Michel Bauwens is the founder of the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives (P2P Foundation). Among others, he is one of three co-founders and partners of the Commons Strategies Group and, in 2014, he worked as the research director of the FLOK Society transition program in Ecuador.

Vasilis Kostakis is a political economist and founder of the P2P Lab. He is also a research fellow at the Ragnar Nurkse School of Innovation and Governance at Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia, and a collaborator of the P2P Foundation.

PART I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
1. Capitalism as a Creative Destruction System
2. Beyond the End of History: Three Competing Value Models
3. The P2P Infrastructures: Two Axes and Four Quadrants
PART II: COGNITIVE CAPITALISM
4. Netarchical Capitalism
5. Distributed Capitalism
6. The Social Dynamics of the Mixed Model of Neo-feudal Cognitive Capitalism
PART III: THE HYPOTHETICAL MODEL OF MATURE PEER PRODUCTION: TOWARDS A COMMONS-ORIENTED ECONOMY AND SOCIETY
7. Resilient Communities
8. Global Commons
9. Transition Proposals Towards a Commons-oriented Economy and Society
Conclusions