I’m thinking of attending Network Civilization: Peer-to-Peer and the Rise of Green Capitalism tonight at NYU; they’ve had some pretty good talks there, including the one I attended two weeks ago with Larry Lessig which was similar to  Larry Lessig Defends Copyright, Loves Charlie Rose Remixes as reported in TechCrunch.

I didn’t talk to Larry after his talk, maybe I should have.   Anyway, here’s the information about tonight, in case anyone is interested. If I attend, I will write about it - probably live blog from the session.   There’s so much good stuff happening in NYC, and a I missed a few of those events, like the Is Google is Good or Evil - last Tuesday over at Rockefeller University  - that I feel something, like this talk, is probably too good to pass up, even on a cold Sunday.

Hey, isn’t that why it’s still worth living in NYC - with all the stuff we put up with, the world still comes here, most of the time, first.

About the talk:

Network Civilization: Peer-to-Peer and the Rise of Green Capitalism

Just as the three quarters of oil engineers now agree that Peak Oil is in
sight within the next decade (after that, oil production can only
decline), can we also posit that we may have reached a moment of Peak
Hierarchy, a moment in history in which it is no longer large centralized
organizations that are most efficient or productive, but rather those that
are organized as distributed networks and can draw on peer producting
communities?

This is the thesis explored by the P2P Foundation, a global network of
researchers investigating the emergence of peer production, governance and
property, showing how this new ‘hyperproductive’ mode of producing value
is out-competing and out-collaborating traditional organizations. Such a
change will have huge implications for society, business, and education.
The election victory of Barack Obama, and his program of green capitalism,
opens up, because it cannot succeed without huge strides in participation,
the possibility of a ‘high road’ transition towards a peer to peer
society, based on the voluntary aggregation of productive communities
united around the creation of common value.

How would our society function, if Linux and Wikipedia were not just
emergent, but the model of a new type of institutions residing in the core
of our economy and politics?

The last talk of this semester’s Computers and Society series will be held
in room 109 WWH (251 Mercer) this Sunday, November 23rd at 7:00pm.  I hope
you can join us.

e.

Michel Bauwens is an active writer, researcher and conference speaker on
the subject of technology, culture and business innovation. He is the
founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives and works in
collaboration with a global group of researchers in the exploration of
peer production, governance, and property. He has been an analyst for the
United States Information Agency, knowledge manager for British Petroleum,
eBusiness Strategy Manager for Belgacom, as well as an internet
entrepreneur in his home country of Belgium. He has co-produced the 3-hour
TV documentary Technocalyps with Frank Theys, and co-edited the two-volume
book on anthropology of digital society with Salvino Salvaggio. Michel is
currently Primavera Research Fellow at the University of Amsterdam and
external expert at the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences (2008). He
currently lives with his family in Chiang Mai, Thailand.