Archimedes' Lever

[Mazer]

Multi, I saw one of the articles you posted over at P2PC about the peermog idea. Following some of the links on the page eventually led me to a guy named David Galiel who wrote this article on the subject of online communities and virtual worlds. For someone who's never really been involved in P2P he has a great understanding of the social aspects some of us have sought since Napster croaked.

We have all heard of Open Source software. Its ubiquity, less often noted, is remarkable:

• 69% of all Web sites run on Apache software (as compared to Microsoft's 23%)
• 30% of the servers on which those sites run use the Linux operating system (Microsoft has 50% of the market, but Linux use is growing much faster, at about 50% annual growth rate according to IDC's Q3 2003 Worldwide Quarterly Server Tracker)
• 88% of Secure Shell (SSH) implementations, used to connect securely to remote computers over the Internet, are OpenSSH, up from 5% in 2000 and 50% in 2001.
• A February, 2004 Forrester Research survey found that almost 50% of businesses questioned already use open source software.

There are many other examples. Most significantly, according to CMP TSG/Insight, 41% of all development tools used are open source. Thus, open source serves as its own network-enabled bootstrapping technology.

P2P as a social concept has been around since the Internet was born and file sharing is simply the most recently added feature. Open Source software engineering is also an old idea but has picked up a lot of momentum. As a younger generation has been initiated into this already well established social sphere they've bestowed it with mass appeal, making it more accessible to everybody else. Filesharing and Open Source aren't new threats to old industries, they are incrimental improvements on a concept that has been brewing for decades.

Open Source software, however, is only one, and not even the most significant, manifestation of what Yale Law professor Yochai Benkler calls "commons-based peer production," a networked model of economic production that is not organized in either markets or businesses—as virtually all other economic activity is and always has been in capitalist societies. Peer production on the Internet has enabled distributed masses of people to share open production of complex products and services, largely for no financial compensation.

While the idea of non-market, non-corporate production is not new—science has traditionally worked this way—large-scale, decentralized, sustained open production by diverse groups of peers on a wide variety of focused projects is a new phenomenon that has been enabled and encouraged by the confluence of computers, networking, and the information economy.

Currently Galiel is working on an online community that will eventually become a full scale simulation of the future colonization of Mars, it's called 'Mars First!' It will be a 3D MMOPG in which inhabitants of Mars will found cities on the site of their choosing (they'll have the entire globe to choose from), draft laws for the citizens of these new communities, conduct scientific experements and civil engineering projects, and interact with other cities around the planet economically. Mars First! aims to educate people, mostly students, in each of these aspects in a future world with its own storyline, and it's being funded by the non-profit Public Interest Entertainment Corporation.

But here on Earth, Napsterites and other P2P users will be setting up online communities like NU and P2PC, eventually migrating to specialized software that suits our purposes nicely, combining basic filesharing with social tools that until now only bulletin boards and IRC channels could manage. We won't be the only ones doing it, simply the newest group to try in a history of online society that stretches back a quarter century.

Link

[TankGirl]

A good post, Mazer!

Originally Posted by Mazer

P2P as a social concept has been around since the Internet was born and file sharing is simply the most recently added feature. Open Source software engineering is also an old idea but has picked up a lot of momentum. As a younger generation has been initiated into this already well established social sphere they've bestowed it with mass appeal, making it more accessible to everybody else. Filesharing and Open Source aren't new threats to old industries, they are incrimental improvements on a concept that has been brewing for decades.

Yep, this is the real thing that is going on behind all the daily p2p dramas. The technical integration of the world (into a tightly wrapped high-speed communication network) is proceeding hand in hand with the social integration of the humanity (into a global network of online social contacts and relations). In a sense this social integration process is the mass movement of all times - as it will eventually involve most of world population and result in a whole new world order in terms of social bonding, communication, co-presence and co-operation.

While the idea of non-market, non-corporate production is not new — science has traditionally worked this way — large-scale, decentralized, sustained open production by diverse groups of peers on a wide variety of focused projects is a new phenomenon that has been enabled and encouraged by the confluence of computers, networking, and the information economy.

A new phenomenon, and a hugely potential one.

P2P filesharing is just one of many possible peer 'production' activities but as a spearhead application it has already demonstrated how easy and cheap it is to establish and run a global non-market and non-corporate information storage and distribution system that in many respects works much better than the pre-existing commercial alternatives. There's no problem finding enough willing peers to make the system functional, and the donated technical resources are enough to do a good job.

Skype is proving the same point in Internet telephony. Peer power gets the job done just as well as the traditional telcos with their expensive staff and facilities. Other similar revolutionary breakthroughs are certainly ahead.

- tg

Thank you for your kind words. I wrote that article for a book on Open Source, so the emphasis was on that aspect of the broad revolution in, and democratization of, our economic, political and cultural interactions.

The intent was not to ignore or diminish the importance of P2P in that trend. In fact, the development model itself for much of open source/open development, from Linux to Wikipedia, IS decentralized, collaborative, essentially P2P.

As you note, the underlying concept is not new. In 1994, Laura Filmore, founder of Open Book Systems, quoted Steve Wolff of the NSF as he described the significance of this new "World Wide Web" thang: "Every Client A Server", to which she added, "and Every Author a Publisher". The same year, in part inspired by that quote, I wrote, "Whereas print has readers, and radio has listeners, and TV has viewers, the Internet has Participants." Essential to that vision of networked, egalitarian participation is a democratization of the creation, distribution, and reward systems, and a moving of power and control to the edges, in every sense of that term.

It has been a part of our formal business plan at PIECORP from the beginning to distribute our free, open-source virtual worlds through P2P channels.

As well, using a decentralized, P2P world-engine to run our virtual worlds has been one of the architectural options under review from the beginning, ever since I read Crosbie Fitch's ideas on serverless MMO engines half-a-dozen years ago.

Crosbie is still working on serverless MMO engine concepts, among other interesting things, and you should checking out his group, Digital Productions Ltd, at http://www.digitalproductions.co.uk/ and read some of his articles on the subject (in the "Cyberspace Engine" section, originally written for Gamasutra in 2000-2001).

You all might also be interested in the Open Source TV project of the Participatory Culture Foundation at http://www.participatoryculture.org/

P2P distribution is one (critical) piece of the puzzle. What the PCF, and we at PIECORP and others are committed to doing, is to create democratic tools for open source content creation--and THEN distribute that original, "copyleft" creative content through P2P channels. The vision is of an entirely alternative, post-capitalist economic system, delivering nonproprietary creations on nonproprietary delivery channels to be experience via nonproprietary player applications, as I all-too-briefly briefly describe in the last section of my "lever long enough" article.

My commitment to value-driven, as opposed to profit-driven, models of human activity lead me to leave the corporate world and create PIECORP as a non-profit development studio, with a written constitution that requires us to release EVERYTHING we create - code, story, art, tools, everything - under open-source/creative-commons/public domain licenses (as appropriate for each type of content).

Anyone reading this who is interested in participating in our experiment in alternative creation, in any way, is welcome to email me (contact info on our site at http://www.piecorp.org/)

Thanks,

David Galiel
Executive Director
Public Interest Entertainment Corporation
"The Technology of Human Imagination"

[JackSpratts]

hi galiel and welcome to the uberground

in what for the subject and the company was a particularly neutral piece the nyt today published an article that briefly touched upon some of the conflicts and opportunities facing us in the post-information age, in this case the tug of war between profits and public service, and how those devoted to the latter are causing major headaches for those pursuing the former.

What eBay Could Learn From Craigslist lays out fairly well the very real conflict between flinty eyed big-capital and a starry eyed human mass.

"THESE days, triple-digit annual growth rates are rare among major Web sites. Meet that rarity: Craigslist.

Exceptional, too, is the ability to draw 10 million unique visitors each month without ever relying on venture capital and equity markets. Or the ability to attain fourth place among general-interest portals without ever spending a penny on marketing.

Signal accomplishments, to be sure, fit for boasting in an annual report. But Craigslist is a privately held company that has no such reports, and no burning interest in the competitive fray. It does far more shrugging than boasting. Its management regards profits, which it has earned consistently since 1999, as merely the means to remain in control of its own destiny. Free of debt, it can do as it wishes to maximize what it calls its service mission without having to maximize profits. This is good news for its customers - that is, community members - and bad news for competitors whose shareholders are unlikely to regard community service as their own companies' raison d'être."

while it may be more complicated to use the courts to upend this small company in the way the media giants have destabilized file-sharing, it's won't be difficult for them to usurp it by other means. the article mentions ebay recently purchased 25% of craigslist from a founding partner and is now copying the business model, even if it won’t clone the philosophy.

i would love to say the internet will be the vehicle we ride towards that beneficent future where all are equal and exploitation rare but it is a fact that every single journey of this type that humanity has embarked on, and there have been many, has ultimately led right back to the very darkness it was trying so desperately to escape from, which is i believe it's own conflicted self.

perhaps in a sort of spiritual bootstrap there is something so fundamentally unique about all these ones and zeros that they will actually allow us to reprogram our troubled souls, but as much as i love a noble quest i’m not holding my breath. like the rest of the really cool stuff humanity’s stumbled upon, we will have to save it, it’s not going to save us. if we drop the ball for a nanosecond our ugly proxies will gleefully trample it underfoot.

- js.

[multi]

welcome dave

great stuff
as time goes on i am drawn more and more to open source,
http://www.winfusion.org and learning to run gentoo linux
as my main OS
being 2 of the main projects i have got going at the moment
(not my site ..just helping to find programs to add)
love the idea of a big game environment that people could play 100's of online games that also enabled the players to set up their own sharing environments..and groups
or maybe a game where all you did was share files...
you could
go down one tunnel..named Mp3
and reappear in another called
software group
or maybe wind up
in the pirate cave
but...watchout
you dont get abducted by covert aliens

or stoned out by hippies
along the way...

or something :-)

Solipsis is scalable to, "millions, billions of users and entities and is meant to be as wide as the Web

the mind boggles...