Michel Bauwens
Watch the livestreamWe live through planetary overshoot: a culmination of polycrises. The system is extractive and thermodynamically wasteful, using far more matter and energy moving things than making them, treating abundant knowledge as scarce and scarce matter as abundant.
Using Kojin Karatani's four modes (gift, state, market, and associationism), we are at an inflection point: the task is to transcend into Mode D, reciprocity regained at a higher level of complexity and integration.
Resilient, regenerative local production combined with a globally shared knowledge commons, trans-local protocols of cooperation, and commons-compatible capital. Distilled: what is heavy should be local, what is light should be global. Operationalised as DGML, Design Global, Manufacture Local.
The crisis is planetary. We have everything we need, but lack an integrated system. Building that integration is the Initiative's reason to exist.
After 20+ years of P2P Foundation research, a coordinated effort to bridge the on-the-ground (bioregional, regenerative communities) with the noosphere (the global knowledge commons), enabling a new trans-local social power.
Concrete technologies and protocols: open source, REA/NRP accounting for networked supply chains, Web3 public-goods funding, distributed manufacturing and 3D printing, and circularity.
Who is needed: regenerative villages, bioregional practitioners, open-source technologists, Web3 communities, researchers, policymakers, funders. A closing note: Michel is facing significant medical costs.