Kula Moola

At a time when economics implied the theories of either Karl Marx or Adam Smith, the anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski turned everything upside down; challenging conventional ideas about the nature of wealth and the purpose and meaning of exchange, even as he revealed the dynamics of a contemporary oceanic trading network, so vast and complex that it offered clues as to the very forces that ultimately led to the settlement of the Pacific Ocean.

Malinowski wanted to know how people could possibly maintain social connections across violent currents and an open ocean. While Polynesians drew their subsistence almost exclusively from the land, their commerce moved over water. On the face of it, nothing they produced could rationalize the risks even of a single voyage. Yet, they had a curious system of exchange in which nothing of evident worth or value moved at great risk and with the promise of immense prestige.

He discovered a trading network that linked scores of communities over thousands of square kilometers of ocean, small huddled clusters of humanity that clung to coral reefs and spread over the remains of sunken mountains.

Known as the Kula ring, it was a system of balanced reciprocity based on the ceremonial exchange of two items, necklaces of discs chiseled from red spondylus shells known as the soulava, and armbands of white cone shell, the mwali. These were strictly symbolic objects with no intrinsic or utilitarian value.

And yet, for at least five hundred years, men had been prepared to risk their lives to carry these jewels across thousands of kilometers of open sea. The necklaces moved clockwise through the years, while the armbands flowed in reverse, always travelling in a counter-clockwise direction. Each individual involved in the trade had at least two partners; relationships that like marriages were intended to last for life, and even be inherited by subsequent generations.

To one partner a voyager would give a necklace in exchange for an armband of equal value, and to the other he would pass along an armband and receive in return a necklace. Each contact had his second partner on another island, and thus there was a continuous distribution chain. The exchanges did not occur all at once. Once in possession of a highly valued object, one was expected to savor for a time the prestige it conferred; even as one made plans ultimately to pass it along.

As a single object made its way around the Kula, perhaps taking as long as twenty years to complete the passage, only to continue again, its value grew with each voyage; with each story of hardship and wonder, witchcraft and the wind, and with the names of all the great men whose lives it had passed through. Thus the sacred objects were in constant motion, encircling the scattered islands in a ring of social and magical power.

Malinowski understood and wrote of the functional purpose of the Kula ring. It established relationships over great distances among peoples of different languages, facilitating the ultimate movement back and forth of utilitarian objects, pigments and dyes, stone axes, obsidian, ceramics, polished ceremonial stones, woven goods and certain foods.

The Kula also provided the context for the display of prestige and status upon which the authority of the hereditary chiefs was based. Their names were associated with the most valuable armbands and necklaces, and it fell to them to organize and lead the voyages. Preparations were rigorous and costly. Men from widely separated villages had to be coordinated. Gardens had to be planted simply to grow the food to be consumed during the preparations for the journey.

Months went by and with each passing day the excitement grew about the voyage. As Malinowski so elegantly distilled in the title of his book, the voyagers really were as Argonauts sailing forth into the unknown, in search of honor and glory, uncertain whether they would ever again see home and family, driven by the thrill of adventure and the siren call of the open water.

It is this flash of the human spirit, that becomes the vehicle by which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. It forges, through connection, an integral bond between the past, present and future; making us, as a species, more than the sum of our parts. It brings into our activities connection, belonging and affirmation.

Towards The Partner State

Can we learn something about the politics of the new mode of value creation, something that would be useful not just for particular communities, but to society in general? Is there perhaps a new model of power and democracy co-evolving out of these new social practices, which may be an answer to the contemporary crisis of democracy? The answer has to be an emphatic yes, supporting the argument that society is witnessing the emergence of a new model for the state. A peer-to-peer (P2P) state, if you will.

In the emerging institutional model of peer production, most visibly in the free software industry, we can distinguish an interplay between three partners: (i) a community of contributors that create a commons of knowledge, software or design; (ii) an entrepreneurial coalition that creates market value on top of that commons; and (iii) a set of for-benefit institutions which manage the infrastructure of cooperation. There is a clear institutional division of labour between these three players. The contributors create the user value that is deposited in the shared innovation commons of knowledge, design and code.

The for-benefit institution enables and defends the general infrastructure of cooperation, which makes the project collectively sustainable. For example the Wikimedia Foundation collects the funds to support the server space without which access to the Wikipedia would become impossible. The entrepreneurial coalition makes the individual contributors sustainable by providing an income; and very often they provide means for the continued existence of the for-benefit associations as well.

Amazingly though, current contributor communities are not democracies. Why is that so? Very simply, because democracy, the market and hierarchy are modes of allocation of scarce resources. In hierarchy, our superiors decide; in the market prices decide; and in a democracy ‘we the people’ decide. But, where resources are abundant - as they are with immaterial knowledge, code and design - communities contain the type of power that is meritocratic, distributed and everyone can contribute without permission. However, such a ‘permissionlessness’ requires expertise, not communal consensus. Peer production solves this tension in an elegant way a la Wikipedia.

What is the relationship between this entrepreneurial coalition and the commons from which they derive their value? The coalition supports the individual commoners in their livelihood, and may contribute to the for-benefit institution as well. For example, IBM pays salaries to the developers contributing to the Linux pool, and it supports the non-profit Linux Foundation, with subsidies. In this way, they co-produce and sustain the commons on which their success is built. Linux has become an economic joint venture of a set of companies, in the same way that Visa is an economic joint venture of a set of financial institutions. The point is that, even with shareholder companies the community's value creation is at the core of the process; it is in other words, already an ethical economy.

Peer production also rests on the often-costly infrastructure of cooperation. There would be no Wikipedia without the funding for its servers, no free software or open hardware without similar support mechanisms. This is why open source communities have created a new social institution: the for-benefit association. It’s an important social innovation because, unlike classic non-profits or non-governmental institutions, they do not operate from the point-of-view of scarcity. The new for-benefits only have an active role in enabling and empowering the community to cooperate by provisioning its infrastructure, not by commanding its production processes. These associations exist for the sole purpose of benefitting the community of which they are the expression.

Now, what shall we call an institution that is responsible for the common good of all the participants; in this case, not the inhabitants of a territory, but of people involved in a similar project? This type of for-benefit institution has a very similar function to what we commonly assign to the state. Can we then, imagine, a new type of partner state? The Partner State, first theorized by Italian political scientist Cosma Orsi, is a state form that enables and empowers the social creation of value by its citizens. It protects the infrastructure of cooperation that is the whole of society. It does on a territorial scale, what the for-benefit institutions do on a project-scale.

Such a Partner State already exists, at least in a local embryonic form as the city of Brest. Michel Briand, assistant to the Mayor, and his team of city workers had a brilliant idea: why not use the virtual, to enhance physical social life in the city? The team created local versions of Facebook, YouTube and Flickr, helped local associations develop a online presence, invested heavily in training; and even had a physical library where citizens could borrow production material. One of their projects was the revitalization of old smuggling trails in order to attract the hiking crowd. So, they decided to 'virtually’ enrich the trails.

And here is where their social innovation comes in: the city council did not do by substituting themselves to the citizenry (i.e. state provisioning), nor did they ask the private sector to carry this out (privatization or public-private partnerships). No, what they did was to enable and empower local teams of citizens, to create added value. Locally, the town of Stellenbosch has rolled out free Wi-Fi through crowd-sourced donations. There are of course other examples to mention as well. The Austrian region of Linz has declared itself a Commons Region; the city of Naples has created "An Assistant to the Mayor on the Commons" position, and San Francisco city council has created a Commission to promote the sharing economy.

Open source models show us a new possible reality, a model where the democratic civic sphere, productive commons and a vibrant market can co-exist for mutual benefit:

⁃ At the core of value creation are various commons, where the innovations are deposited for all humanity to share and to build on.
⁃ These commons are enabled and protected through non-profit civic associations, with as national equivalent the Partner State, who then empower and enable that social production.
⁃ Around the commons emerges a vibrant commons-oriented economy undertaken by different kinds of ethical companies - whose legal structures tie them to the values and goals of the commons communities - and not absentee and private shareholders intent of maximizing profit at any cost.

Where the three circles intersect, there are the citizens deciding on the optimal shape of their provisioning systems. The only thing left to do is to have an answer to the crucial question: how does global governance look like in P2P civilization? We need to transform the global material empire, which at present dominates world affairs for the benefit of a few, and redesign the ineffectual global institutions that are presently inadequate to deal with global challenges. While peer production will undoubtedly also emerge as a drive for resilience in bad times, a really thriving commons-based society requires a Partner State: a network of democratically run for-benefit institutions that protect the common good on a territorial scale.

Hedonistic Sustainability

Bjarke Ingels' architecture is luxurious, sustainable and community driven. At TEDxEast he shows his playful designs, from a factory chimney that blows smoke rings to a ski slope built atop a waste processing plant.

Politics In The 21st Century

Jim Garrison is, among other things, the chairman and president of the State of the World Forum, which he cofounded with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1995. The State of the World Forum (SWF) is often thought of as a "shadow UN," in that it is the largest forum of world leaders outside of the United Nations. From Margaret Thatcher to Ted Turner, from the Queen of Jordan to Desmond Tutu, from Jimmy Carter to George Bush Sr., all have been part of the extraordinary dialogue that is the State of the World Forum. Jim is also the president and chairman of Wisdom University, a higher-education institution that offers a "commitment to personal and professional renewal" by "nurturing and addressing the whole person."

"The planet," Jim Garrison is fond of saying, "is on a collision course with itself." The monumental challenges of the 21st century seem dire indeed, almost insurmountable in many ways. And to make matters worse, only a portion of the population has the developmental capacity to fully recognize the complexity of our collective problems, while the majority of the world remains blissfully unaware of the impending catastrophe we seem to be heading toward. And many of those who can see feel utterly helpless to do anything about it, unable to find their own ecologically sensitive values reflected in the culture at large. And so they anxiously await what many perceive as the inevitable, a tsunami of global crises to wash over us all, rendering the fruits of human civilization undone in a single fell swoop.

And yet, isn't it too soon to write the future off to these sorts of doom and gloom scenarios? After all, aren't we finally beginning to see some sort of shift for the positive, a shift toward more progressive attitudes and more effective strategies for the future? Many in the U.S. are experiencing a real sense of rekindled hope and civic potency — especially in light of the Democratic primaries, which seems to be galvanizing a great number of people toward much deeper engagement with the political process. Researchers such as Paul Ray are reporting the rise of an exciting new demographic in the world within a population he refers to as the "cultural creatives." While there is still some debate over how to slice up this data or what conclusions to draw from Ray's statistics, it is clear that the number of "cultural creatives" is increasing at a fairly explosive rate, currently representing about 26% of the American voting populace. But many of these "bright greens" (as they are often called) continue to struggle to have their voices heard by the movers and shakers of world politics, and fear that unless they find a way to constellate themselves into a viable political voice, the slumbering giant of humanity will continue to sleepwalk ever closer to the precipice of ecological collapse.

If there is one thing to be said for certain about the human race, it is that we will always find a way to actualize every ounce of potential available to us, in whatever form that potential takes — whether it is the potential for barbarism, for savagery, for merciless destruction, degradation, and depravity; or whether it is the potential for transcendence, for compassion and idealism, for the heights of creativity and noble vision — we are all of these, simultaneously, all at once. We move in every direction possible, though always with a slight-but-significant tilt toward greater depth, freedom, and fullness. The current condition of humanity has been described as growing "better and better, worse and worse, faster and faster," which only makes some sort of breaking point seem even more inevitable, and the need for a developmental understanding of the human condition more crucial.

"All the world's a stage," history's most cherished bard tells us, "and all the men and women merely players." But what Shakespeare could not have possibly known at the time he wrote these words is that the world is not a single monolithic stage, but is in fact a graduating succession of stages, each built upon the other — each with its own set of players, its own set of shared values, and its own lens through which the world is interpreted. Likewise, the game of global politics is not to be played upon a single flat chessboard, but on many boards simultaneously — like a game of "Asimovian Hyperchess" in which moves are played across multiple geometric planes simultaneously. This is how politics in the 21st century must be approached, taking into account all of the different developmental levels human beings grow through (e.g. magic, mythic, rational, postmodern, and integral), while bringing as much healthy balance as possible to the individuals and cultures who exist at each of these particular levels. And only a genuinely integral analysis of world politics can promise the sort sanity and stability our yet-unborn progeny prays for us to find, before it's too late....