Peer2Politics

"The decentralized digital currency Bitcoin—and its underlying “blockchain” technology—has created much excitement in the technology community, but its potential for building truly empowering social and solidarity-based finance has yet to be tested. This paper provides a primer on the basics of Bitcoin and discusses the existent narratives about the technology’s potential to facilitate remittances, financial inclusion, cooperative structures and even micro-insurance systems. It also flags up potential points of concern and conflict; such as the tech-from-above “solutionism” and conservative libertarian political dynamics of some of the technology start-up community that surrounds Bitcoin. As a way of contrast the paper considers “blockchain 2.0” technologies with more overtly communitarian ideals and their potential for creating “cooperation at scale”. It concludes with suggestions for future research."

We have today the emergence of 'ethical' entrepreneurial coalitions around Commons-Based Peer Production, like Sensorica and Enspiral, but obviously these emerging and nice projects are embedded in a dominant system which has another logic, so the questions emerges, how does the new ethical economy deal with mainstream forces, especially in the context of needing capital for development. Two obvious choices are: 1) full separatism , i.e. some parts of the solidarity economy refuse any dealings with the for-profit world 2) cooptation, in which the generative ethical players start behaving extractively, echocing the old logic

 Point A is a developing network of urban, income sharing, egalitarian, democratic, ambitious, and engaged intentional communities in the cities of the American East Coast.