[-empyre-] from the personal to the political, a p2p confession

[magnus at ditch.org.uk]

Hi Michel,

Thanks for sharing this personal background with us... the positive,
sweeping view, your sense of being a 'political artist' engaged in
creative and performative acts and the constructive, bringing together of
varied individuals and paradigms.

Best wishes,

Magnus

> I'm not much of an art expert but rather the kind of person that gets
> excited about ideas and visions, but those ideas and visions are very much
> alive and present in my mind .. So I thought that I'd focus my first
> contribution on political aspects of our work at the p2p foundation. I
> will
> comment later more specifically about piracy and its political-cultural
> aspects. (well actually, after finishing this piece, it turns out I went
> in
> personal confession mode, something I have actually never done outside
> this
> forum)
>
>
>  I hope people won't feel to uncomfortable with the personal background,
> which is part of the story.
>
>
>  It all begin a first time about 14 years ago, when I had a 'annus
> horribilis' that really shook me to the core, I think we're talking about
> the period 1996-97. It was a year where my father died, my mother got
> diagnosed with Alzheimer, the love of my life broke up, I discovered some
> of
> my business associates had a criminal background and had gone off with the
> business funds; a movie I had been working on for three years,
> TechnoCalyps,
> got stalled because of a fight between the producer and the director,
> cutting off my escape from the corporate world; and I had a major row with
> my intellectual guru of the time, Ken Wilber (integral theory). Of course,
> serious health consequences also ensued. It basically totally floored me
> and
> constituted my mid-life crisis. For me this is the time when you realize
> your life is half over, and you realize that if you don't realize the
> dreams
> and ideals of your youth, you will die cynical and disappointed. It was
> now
> or never.
>
>
>  The way I saw it then, was that the major issue for me had been that I
> had
> given up on my ideals for the creation of a better world, as corny as this
> may sound. It seemed to me that the passionate energy involved in that
> desire, had been buried and was working against me, and that if I wanted
> to
> discover from the combined crisis, I had to reconnect with this source of
> energy. It was also the time when I became increasingly convinced that all
> the objective indicators of human and social life, were turning negative,
> and that our civilisational model was hitting a wall.
>
>
>  The first thing question then was really, but how do we change this
> overall
> situation as a single individual, how do we engage without actually making
> the situation worse.
>
>
>  As a youth, I had been a radical leftist, active within the rather
> sectarian Militant tendency, then rather well-known in the UK. But this
> engagement had led nowhere, was followed by the neoliberal
> counterrevolution
> of the 80s, and had personally exhausted me. Since I could not change the
> world, I had concluded, by the time I was 23 and after seven years of
> intense engagement, the only option was to change my 'self'. The problem
> though was that I had emotionally broken with that type of life, and with
> Marxism, but had not really gone through a rational process of thinking
> through what was wrong with it, I had rather rejected it as a whole, even
> ritually burning a suitcase full of my books (yes, I know, a crying
> shame!).
> Instead, I began a personal exploration that brought me in touch with,
> more
> or less in sequence, the human potential techniques, eastern spiritual
> practices and theories, the western esoteric traditions (been a
> rosicrucian,
> a mason, a templar, had a alchemy teacher and drew Tarot cards), ending
> with
> a 3 year period of self-study of western philosophy by the time I was 30.
> This may seem pretty fast, but I think I have a capacity of absorption of
> ideas and concepts that is probably beyond the average. My method was
> really
> participant observation, going into a movement fully and without
> reservation, practice the injunctions, see what it did with the bodymind
> and
> my personality structure, and when I thought I had absorbed its most
> important core elements, move on. By my thirties then, feeling
> substantially
> transformed, I embarked on my business career, not because of a love of
> the
> corporate world, but because I felt it was an area of cultural dynamism,
> in
> which I could 'create' something and make something of my life. That was
> the
> period then that ended with that big personal crisis.
>
>
>  In any case, as I decide to go back to my roots and my youthful
> engagement,
> I felt the need to study Marx again, but at the same time, I dreaded the
> effort of going through not only the primary texts, but also the major
> interpretations of where it had gone wrong. Luckily then, I stumbled upon
> Negri's Empire 
 It's not that I cannot find fault with the approach, but
> here it seemed to me was at least a work with a sweeping vision, a
> positive
> view of the potential for change, and that had gone through a critique of
> Marx 

>
>
>  It is after this reading experience, which took me about three months of
> internal struggles, that I decided to follow a basic intuition: that the
> isomorphism of peer to peer, which I literarally saw emerging everywhere,
> this great horizontalisation of human relationships through massive
> self-aggregation around common value and affinities, was te lever of
> change
> I had been looking for. That civil society had now become productive, and
> was no longer a derivative of the value creation of the corporate world,
> but
> rather the other way around, that social cooperation was becoming
> increasingly primary, and that the older vertical institution were living
> increasingly 'off' this new productivity.
>
>
>  I decided by the end of 2002, that I had to finally quit the corporate
> world, take a 90% pay cut (actually 100% at first), and try to develop
> this
> basic intuition in all its consequences. With hindsight, the great crisis
> of
> 1996-97, when all had gone wrong that could go wrong, had been a true
> 'born
> again' moment in my life, which after a period of restoration and
> maturation, led to the decision to create an autonomous life around a core
> belief and intuition. Lucky for me, I had by then met my new thai wife, a
> continual source of domestic happiness, and when I asked her if she'd
> agree
> with moving back to her home country, answered: don't worry, we will
> always
> have food and shelter, what else do we need 
 This was the final go ahead,
> I
> decided to quit my job by October 2002, taking my wife, new son, my mother
> with Alzheimer, to Thailand.
>
>
>  I took a two year sabbatical, consisting of six months of travel within
> Europe, six months of studying Thai history and culture at the local
> university and one year of full-time reading, focusing on the long haul of
> history and in particular the phase transition at the end of the Roman
> Empire .. (and finally getting to read the postmodern authors I had always
> missed out on). In 2005, I wrote my first manuscript on peer to peer; by
> 2006, I started the online ecology, gradually introducing the wiki, the
> blog, the social bookmarking 
 Somehow, though it is not at all
> financially
> sustainable, it seems to have been the good decision, and as the world
> continued to evolve, p2p emerged as more than a marginal effect, people
> were
> slowly attracted to the basic ideas of the p2p foundation, and I could
> build
> a community of some type, and this year, a cooperative to achieve some
> type
> of sustainable livelyhood for the precarious researchers which hover
> around
> us 
 At home, the experience of my thai extented family, the
> magical-mythical forms of consciousness overlayered with a whiff of
> postmodern capitalism, the 19 cats, 3 dogs, porcupine, birds and fish, the
> occasional visting monkey ; together with the online network, the
> equipotential cooperation and the lecture tours, give me a quite
> extraordinary relational wealth, not bad for a single child of two orphan
> parents 
 In some way, I feel like a 'political artist', not that I'm
> particularly creative culturally and artistically, but I have to live,
> from
> my 'creations', sell my performances, and go through the precarity that is
> the lot of most artists and creators ..
>
>
>  Anyway, what then, is the p2p foundation, it is really nothing else than
> the ambitious attempt to create a new vehicle for the world revolution,
> not
> the only one, but hopefully one that can be a positive factor; a pluralist
> organisation, that does not know the 'answers' but facilitates the ongoing
> dialogue around those answers, bringing very varied sorts of people
> together
> 
 Precisely because of my convoluted past, having touched many different
> ideological and lifeworlds, I can bring together on the same table, a
> 'zionic' social economy mormon, a conservative catholic distributist, a
> deep
> ecological permaculturist, a unrepentent marxist, a anti-capitalist 'freed
> market' mutualist, and many other strange manifestations of the human
> desire
> for change. Rather than looking for universal answers, we are looking for
> commonality of desire. But this ongoing effort is helped by the
> 'objective'
> changes in society, and by the new class realities of knowledge workers.
>
>
>  I cannot help but be truly convinced that “p2p” is the chaotic attractor
> that we need to reformulate the emancipatory vision that is appropriate
> for
> the 21st century. Technology is NOT the change, but it enables struggling
> creative minorities to find new ways to outsmart the forces that are
> against
> emancipation and that are presently literally and physically, destroying
> our
> biosphere. As the system will increasingly go in crisis mode, these
> struggling minorities will be joined by the desperate majorities, who turn
> to p2p solutions not out of any idealism, but as the necessary tool for
> resilience and survival. The key question then becomes, how do create a
> synergy between the new p2p thinking, the construction of new ways of
> life,
> and the mass mobilisations that are the inevitable result of the breaking
> of
> the social contracts on which capitalist life was based until now?
>
>
> --
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>
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