We may experience social change driven by the intangible and immaterial (like P2P networks), but until social change has reached the realm of the tangible, we haven’t had any radical change, or any change has not been translated into a change in the material conditions of existence.
De Angelis, Omnia Sunt Communia, p.69
My first concern about all the P2P stuff ... is ... the fact that it depends on both other modes of labour and extraction (like digging coltan in the Eastern Congo) and other modes of enforced and very material (guns, fences, guards, borders etc.) social division within and between societies.
(Pithouse 2010; private correspondence) in De Angelis, Omnia Sumn Communia, p.73
Bollier, Benkler and Bauwens thus converge on a techno-legal and economic fix when they anticipate transitions in the direction of the commons. Despite allusions to ‘commonist’ movements, we are left completely in the dark as to how these will gather a critical mass, how they will overhaul the ‘neoliberal dominance’ and how they will reform the state and the market (Bauwens 2005; see also Bauwens 2014: 28). Instead, we are served a list of techno-economic conditions that will pro- mote peer-to-peer production (Bauwens 2005). The ‘vital condition’ for a historical transition towards a commons-based society is not political but
the existence of commons-based peer production, as proto-practices for a full mode of production. . . . These proto-practices have to evolve within the older system, first as emergent practices, then on a parity level, before they can become dominant themselves. (Bauwens 2011; emphasis added)
In the technocratic outlook that has prevailed from the beginning of the millennium in the digital commons literature, technology, economic practices, the law and vague references to ‘social movements’ are the main entries. Change society by designing a new model that makes the existing model obsolete, not by fighting ‘the system’.
Kioupkiolis, The Common and Counter-Hegemonic Policies, p.59