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Social peer-to-peer processes are interactions among humans with a peer-to-peer dynamic. Peer-to-peer (P2P) is a term that originated from the popular concept of the P2P distributed computer application architecture which partitions tasks or workloads between peers.[1][better source needed] This application structure was popularized by file sharing systems like Napster, the first of its kind in the late 1990s.
The concept has inspired new structures and philosophies in many areas of human interaction. P2P human dynamic affords a critical look at current authoritarian and centralized social structures. Peer-to-peer is also a political and social program for those who believe that in many cases, peer-to-peer modes are a preferable option.
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P2P is a specific form of relational dynamic, based on the assumed equipotency[2] of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network.
There are several fundamental aspects of social P2P processes:
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Many of the characteristics of P2P processes emerged in the open source movement.
P2P processes are not structureless but are characterized by dynamic and changing structures that adapt themselves to phase changes. We can describe this by invoking self organization. Stigmergy is also cited by some practitioners in P2P as their principal mode of coordination, as an alternative to planning (see more on the Open value network model).
Its rules are not derived from authority, as in hierarchical systems. It does not deny ‘authority’, but only fixed forced hierarchy, and therefore accepts forms of influence that based on expertise, initiation of the project, etc.[4] P2P may be the first true meritocracy[citation needed].
P2P eliminates most, if not all, barriers to entry. It is assumed that ‘anybody’ can contribute and does not use formal rules in advance to determine its participating agents. The threshold for participation is kept as low as possible, to being permissionless at the extreme, for example in mining for the Bitcoin network or in opening a wallet and perform transactions on the same network. Participants are expected to self-select the module that corresponds best to their expertise. Equipotency means that it is the immediate practice of collaboration which determines the expertise and level of participation. Validation of knowledge, acceptance of processes, are determined by the collective through the use of digital rules which are, in some cases, embedded in the project's basic protocol.
Communication is not top-down and based on strictly defined reporting rules, but feedback is systemic, integrated into the protocol of the collaborative system. Techniques of 'participation capture' and other social accounting make automatic collaboration the default scheme of the project. Personal identity becomes partly generated by the contribution to the common project. P2P characteristics have been studied by Howard Rheingold et al.'s Cooperation Project.[5]
The organizational topology in P2P is a network, not a linear or 'pyramidal' hierarchy (though it may have transient elements of it); it is 'distributed' or 'decentralized'; intelligence is not located at any center, but everywhere within the system.
P2P processes start from the premise that ‘we don't know where the needed resource will be located’. Thus, most processes are crowdsourced.
Collaboration must be free, not forced, and not based on an exchange (i.e. time vs money).
These P2P interactions are geared to produce something, enabling the widest possible participation.
Whereas participants in hierarchical systems are subject to the panoptism of the select few who control the vast majority, in P2P systems, participants have access to holoptism, the ability for any participant to see the whole.
These are a number of characteristics that we can use to describe P2P systems ‘in general’, and in particular as it emerges in the human lifeworld.
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There are two important aspects to the emergence of P2P in the economic sphere. On the one hand, as a format for peer production processes, it is emerging as a 'third mode of production' based on the cooperation of autonomous agents. Indeed, if the first mode of production was laissez-faire based capitalism, and the second mode was the model of a centrally-planned economy, then the third mode does not use market and pricing mechanisms, or managerial commands, but instead uses social relations and socially-defined goals, motivations and incentives.
As a new mode of production, peer production is still largely dependent on the mainstream economy to reproduce itself. Recently, with the advent of web 3.0 and Web3 we are seeing breakthroughs in developing its own incentive mechanisms, using various coins and tokens, showing promising signs of bootstrapping itself as an independent and self-sufficient mode of production. As the influence of P2P grows larger, hybrid models have started to emerge. At play are coaptation attempts from institutions that subscribe to both, socialism and capitalism ideologies. For example, initiatives like The Network State, which coming out of the Silicon Valley, are the adaptation of Platform capitalism (itself an adaptation of Capitalism to new capabilities introduced by Web 2.0) to newer capabilities introduced by Web3. On the other side of the spectrum we find the Coordi-Nation as an adaptation from Platform Cooperative, as proposed by Primavera De Filippi and others.
The market and capitalism are also dependent on P2P. Capitalism has become a system relying on distributed networks, in particular on the P2P infrastructure in computing and communication.
Moreover, practices that have been developed within P2P networks have been adopted by private and public institutions, to the extent that capitalism has become highly reliant on cooperative teamwork. See for example agile development and extreme manufacturing, influenced by open source development. Other examples of partial implementations of P2P practices by for-profit enterprises are various forms of crowdsourcing or user-generated data or content. For instance, Amazon built itself around user reviews,[citation needed], while eBay lives on a platform of worldwide distributed auctions, and Google is constituted by user-generated content.
One hybrid business model is that businesses use the P2P infrastructure (the Internet for example, or even their computing cloud which may run on Linux, an operating system issued from peer production), and create a surplus value through services, which can be packaged for exchange value.
Another hybrid model is the creation of two-sided markets. One form of this was improperly called the "sharing economy",[6] also termed "access economy" or "peer exchange economy.".[7] More properly speaking, this is better described as a "micro-services economy", instantiated by businesses like Uber, Lyft, and Airbnb, which are proprietary platforms that mediate coordination among people who can engage in transactions. This new practice is also called Platform Capitalism, or the adaptation of Capitalism to the new possibilities introduced by web 2.0, in which the firm doesn't own the means of production and doesn't even engage in production, but coordinates a network of producers and consumers. In this context peer production is contained within a private domain (a proprietary platform for coordination) and subject to with will of whose who control the platform. The Platform Coop arrangement also exists, where the platform that insures the coordination among producers and consumers is owned by a cooperative with a more democratic governance. The P2P movement proposes fully decentralized alternatives of these type of economic coordination systems, where the platform is in the hands of participants, like in the Bitcoin network.
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Governments of countries are composed of a specialized and privileged body of individuals, who monopolize political decision-making. Their function is to enforce existing laws, legislate new ones, and arbitrate conflicts via their monopoly on violence. Legislation can be open to the general citizenry through open source governance, allowing policy development to benefit from the collected wisdom of the people as a whole.
Michel Bauwens has stated, that current society is not a peer group with an a priori consensus, but rather a decentralized structure of competing groups and representative democracy, and as such it cannot be replaced entirely by peer governance.[8] In a recent Substack post [9] Michel Bauwens reiterates his idea of the Magisteria of the Commons
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Many new movements are taking on P2P organizational formats, such as the alter-globalization movement and the "Occupy" movement (i.e. Occupy Wall Street). The movements see itself as a network of networks that combines players from a wide variety of fields and opinion, who, despite the fact that they do not see eye to eye in all things, manage to unite around a common platform of action around certain key events.
They are able to mobilize vast numbers of people from every continent, without having at their disposal any of the traditional news media, such as television, radio or newspapers. Rather, they rely almost exclusively on the P2P technologies described above. Thus, Internet media are used for communication and learning on a continuous basis, prior to the mobilizations, and also during the mobilizations.
Independent Internet media platforms such as Indymedia, as well as the skillful use of mobile phones, are used for real-time response management, undertaken by small groups that use buddy-list technologies, and sometimes open-source programs that have been explicitly designed for political activism such as TextMob.
Many reports have appeared, including those described in Howard Rheingold's Smart Mobs, about the political significance of SMS in organizing successful protests and ‘democratic revolutions’. The network model allows for a more fluid organization that does not fix any group in a permanent adversarial position. Various temporary coalitions are created on an ad hoc basis depending on the issues.
The following is a list of individuals who have made contributions to the peer-to-peer paradigm.