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Table of Contents

Manuscript last updated: 12/05/15

Note:   This is the latest version of the Table of Contents, which has been reorganized and expanded several times since I first published it in March 2011.  It began as a very rough draft and, although decreasingly so, will remain rough until print publication. The idea is to follow Eric Raymond’s “release early” and “many eyeballs make shallow bugs” advice.  Although the date of the post will stay the same, the organization will be revised from time to time and chapter files constantly updated to include the latest edits. The date of most recent editing will always be at the end of the text or pdf file of each chapter.

This work (including any and all print versions) is licensed under Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0. It can be reproduced without limit by anyone, including for commercial sale, on condition that any such version be licensed under the same terms.

Thanks to Steve Herrick for the new format of the odt files 12/26/11.

If you’d like to support this project you can PayPal me at @free.market.anticapitalist@gmail.com or subscribe to my Patreon.

Contents

Chapter One–The Stigmergic Revolution

Reduced Capital Outlays
Distributed Infrastructure
Network Culture
Stigmergy

Chapter Two–Networks vs. Hierarchies

The Systematic Stupidity of Hierarchies
Hierarchies vs. Networks
Networks vs. Hierarchies
Systems Disruption

Chapter Three–Networks vs. Hierarchies: End Game

Transition from Hierarchies to Networks
The Question of Repression
The Question of Collapse
Conclusion

Chapter Four–The Desktop Revolution in Regulation

The Regulatory State:  Myth and Reality
Individual Super-empowerment
The “Long Tail” in Regulation
Networked Resistance as an Example of Distributed Infrastructure
Informational Warfare (or Open-Mouth Sabotage)
A Narrowcast Model of Open Mouth Sabotage
Attempts to Suppress or Counter Open Mouth Sabotage
Who Regulates the Regulators?
Networked, Distributed Successors to the State: Saint-Simon, Proudhon and “the Administration of Things”
Monitory Democracy
“Open Everything”
Panarchy
Collective Contracts
Heather Marsh’s “Proposal for Governance
Michel Bauwens’ Partner State

Chapter Five–Fundamental Infrastructures: Networked Support Platforms

Bruce Sterling:  Islands in the Net
Phyles:  Neal Stephenson
Phyles:  Las Indias and David de Ugarte
Bruce Sterling:  The Caryatids
Daniel Suarez
John Robb:  Economies as a Social Software Service
File Aesir
Venture Communism
Medieval Guilds as Predecessors of the Phyle
Transition Towns and Global Villages
Modern Networked Labor Unions and Guilds as Examples of Phyles
Virtual States as Phyles:  Hamas, Etc.
Eugene Holland: Nomad Citizenship
Producism/Producia
Emergent Cities
The Incubator Function
Mix & Match

Chapter Six–Fundamental Infrastructures:  Money

What Money’s For and What it Isn’t
The Adoption of Networked Money Systems
Examples of Networked Money Systems

Chapter Seven–Fundamental Infrastructures:  Education and Credentialing

Introduction:  Whom Do Present-Day Schools Really Serve
Alternative Models
Potential Building Blocks for an Open Alternative
Open Course Materials
Open Textbooks
Open Learning Platforms
Credentialing

Chapter Eight–The Assurance Commons

Introduction
Legibility:  Vertical and Horizontal. Graeber, Scott, etc.
Networked Certification, Reputational and Verification Mechanisms
Ostrom, Commons Governance and Vernacular Law

Chapter Nine–The Open Source Labor Board

Historic Models
Networked Labor Struggle
Open-Mouth Sabotage

Chapter Ten–Open Source Civil Liberties Enforcement

Protection Against Non-State Civil Rights Violations
When the State is the Civil Liberties Violator
Circumventing the Law
Circumvention: Privacy vs. Surveillance
Seeing Like a State, and the Art of Not Being Governed
Exposure and Embarrassment
Networked Activism and the Growth of Civil Society

Chapter Eleven–The Open Source Fourth Estate

The Industrial Model
Open Source Journalism

Chapter Twelve–Open Source National Security

The State as Cause of the Problem: Blowback
Meta-Organization
Active Defense, Counter-Terrorism, and Other Security Measures
Passive Defense
The Stateless Society as the Ultimate in Passive Defense
Disaster Relief

Bibliography

Appendix.  Case Study in Networked Resistance:  From Wikileaks to Occupy Wall Street–and Beyond

About this Book

The subject of my previous book — The Homebrew Industrial Revolution:  A Low Overhead Manifesto — was the way in which falling capital outlays required for both information and material production was eroding the rationale for large organizations, and shifting the balance of power toward individuals, small groups and networks.  In particular, I focused on the radically reduced capital outlays required for manufacturing were giving rise to a low-overhead micromanufacturing economy in which the large quantities of land and capital to which the privileged classes had access were becoming increasingly irrelevant, and the material basis for the factory system and wage employment was collapsing.

In this book, my subject is how the same phenomenon is empowering individuals against the large, powerful institutions — both state and corporate — that previously dominated their lives.  The implosion of capital outlays associated with the desktop revolution, and the virtual disappearance of transaction costs of coordinating action associated with the network revolution, have (as Tom Coates has said) eliminated the gap between what can be produced within large hierarchical organizations and what can be produced at home in a wide range of industries:  software, publishing, music, education, and journalism among them.

The practical significance of this, which I develop in this book, is that many of the functions of government can be included in that list.  The central theme of this book is the potential for networked organization to constrain the exercise of power by large, hierarchical institutions in a way that once required the countervailing power of other large, hierarchical institutions.

Traditionally, the power of the large corporation was explained by the large amounts of capital required for manufacturing, broadcasting or publishing.  Such large amounts of capital meant that only the very rich, or a very large aggregation of rich people, could afford the outlays to undertake production, and that these people had to hire wage laborers to actually work the machinery for them.  Such outlays also required a large, hierarchical, bureaucratic institution to administer the plant and equipment.  And these large institutions, in turn, required other large institutions like regulatory agencies, big establishment unions, and the big establishment media, to act as watchdogs.

Unfortunately, despite Galbraith’s theory of countervailing power, in practice government agencies, corporations and media outlets tended to cluster together in complexes of allied institutions in which the ostensible regulators and regulated were actually on the same side.  Rather than the liberal “interest group pluralism” model implicit in Galbraith’s analysis, what we actually had was an interlocking Power Elite of the sort described by Mill and Domhoff.  The large size and small number of institutional actors, and the enormous entry barriers erected against ordinary people attempting to compete with them, made such a clustering of interests based on shared bureacuratic culture inevitable.

The desktop and digital revolution, the network revolution, and the forms of stigmergic organization that they make possible, together destroy the material basis for the old mass production/bureaucratic/broadcast model described above.  Instead — just as, in my previous book, I described the increasing ability of micromanufacturers with a few thousand dollars in capital to undertake forms of production previously requiring million-dollar factories — individually affordable capital goods for information production and network organization are leading to what John Robb calls “individual superempowerment.”  The individual increasingly has at her disposal the means of taking on large, powerful bureaucratic institutions as an equal.

Networked consumer, environmental and labor activism, with its ability to subject corporate malefactors to boycotts or tort actions, and to expose them to humiliating scrutiny, offers the potential to control and punish bad corporate behavior at least as well as did the regulatory state or the traditional press, and — insofar as they are not prone to the same sorts of cross-institutional collusion — to do an even better job of it.

This includes “culture jamming” of the sort employed by the McLibel defendants and by Frank Kernaghan against Kathie Lee Gifford.  It includes labor-led boycotts and information campaigns based on “open mouth sabotage” like those of the Imolakee Workers and the Wal-Mart Workers Association, and a whole host of online “employernamesucks.com” websites.  It includes targeted campaigns to embarrass such corporate malefactors in the eyes of their suppliers, outlets, major stakeholders, and labor and consumer interest organizations.  It includes networked activism through umbrella movements of labor, consumer and social justice organizations linked together for ad hoc single issue campaigns against a particular corporate criminal.  It includes efforts like Wikileaks to promote whistleblowing and provide secure platforms for circulating embarrassing information about corporate misbehavior.  It incorporates a large element of what John Keane calls “monitory democracy.”

Networked organization offers, as well, to supplant the regulatory state’s old licensing, authentication and quality certification functions.  If Consumer Reports was pithecanthropus in this evolutionary schema, and Angie’s List is homo erectus, then the future lies with full-blown networked civil societies, organized on a voluntary basis, providing a context within which secure commercial relationships and other forms of cooperation can take place.  The future of this model has been described variously as neo-Venetianism or phyles (fictionally in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and non-fictionally in de Ugarte’s work), the Darknet in Suarez’s Freedom, and “economies as a social software service” by John Robb.

In short, networked activism offers to do to the state and the large corporation what the file-sharing movement has only begun to do to the record industry, and what Wikileaks has barely even begun to do to the U.S. national security community.