P2P and a New Ecosystem of Value Creation

The authors describe how a new ecosystem of value creation is developed by implementing P2P technologies and practices. Commons-based peer production (CBPP) through P2P infrastructures may allow individuals to communicate, self-organize and, ultimately, co-create non-rivalrous use-value, in the form of digital commons of knowledge, software, and design. Explaining how CBPP is fundamentally different from value creation under industrial capitalism this chapter illustrates how motivations for participants are focused on work that is orientated around use-value not exchange-value. P2P thus encourages a new social logic of value. The authors highlight how CBPP tends to the emergence of a new ecosystem consisting of three institutions: the productive community; the commons-oriented entre-preneurial coalition(s); and the for-benefit association. They also discuss the differences between extractive and generative entrepreneurship and how the cases of Enspiral, Sensorica, Wikihouse, and Farm Hack of¬fer new perspectives on the increasing number of CBPP ecosystems. The chapter concludes with the argument that the commons can be exploited to rejuvenate revitalize radical social movements and degrowth/post-growth models of development