Gift Economy and Peer to Peer

In an earlier post and comments I was reminded of a Michelle Shocked concert in 1989 at the Commodore in Vancouver. Shocked played a great show and then introduced her dad and the idea after a huge encore of a homemade jam. She said this song was written with 3 chords, any one can play. The fantasic blog of Dave Pollard introduced this article on Peer to Peer Economy(P2P) and I think it worthwhile for anyone else around here who is like me and thinks we live like idiots and waste a lot of time and spiritual energy in our culture...This is like the third time I am linking to this blog of Pollards, thats just how awesome I think he is! I think with his blog titled "How To Save The World" he is either crazy or dead right on. He just keeps on giving...

The Peer To Peer, gift Economy essay is very long long and thoughtful, here is a bit if you are in a hurry or wonder if its a concept you are interested in...

"Given the dependence of P2P on the existing market mode, what are its chances to expand beyond the existing sphere of non-rival immaterial goods?

Here are a number of theses about this potential:

P2P can arise not only in the immaterial sphere of intellectual and software production, but wherever there is access to distributed technology: spare computing cycles, distributed telecommunications and any kind of viral communicator meshwork.
P2P can arise wherever other forms of distributed fixed capital are available: such is the case for carpooling, which is the second most used mode of transportation in the U.S.
P2P can arise wherever the process of design may be separated from the process of physical production. Huge capital outlines for production can co-exist with a reliance on P2P processes for design and conception.
P2P can arise wherever financial capital can be distributed. Initiatives such as the ZOPA bank point in that direction. Cooperative purchase and use of large capital goods are a possibility. State support and funding of open source development is another example.
P2P could be expanded and sustained through the introduction of universal basic income.
The latter, which creates an income independent of salaried work, has the potential to sustain a further development of P2P-generated use-value. Through the 'full activity' ethos (rather than full employment) of P2P, the basic income receives a powerful new argument: not only as efficacious in terms of poverty and unemployment, but as creating important new use-value for the human community.

However, as it is difficult to see how use-value production and exchange could be the only form of production, it is more realistic to see peer to peer as part of a process of change. In such a scenario, peer to peer would both co-exist with and profoundly transform other intersubjective modes.

A Commons-based political economy would be centered around peer to peer, but it would co-exist with:

A powerful and re-invigorated sphere of reciprocity (gift-economy) centered around the introduction of time-based complementary currencies.
A reformed sphere for market exchange, the kind of 'natural capitalism' described by Paul Hawken, David Korten and Hazel Henderson, where the costs for natural and social reproduction are no longer externalized, and which abandons the growth imperative for a throughput economy as described by Herman Daly.
A reformed state that operates within a context of multistakeholdership and which is no longer subsumed to corporate interests, but act as a fair arbiter between the Commons, the market and the gift economy.
Such a goal could be the inspiration for a powerful alternative to neoliberal dominance, and create a kaleidoscope of 'Common-ist' movements broadly inspired by such goals."