P2P and Human Happiness by Michel Bauwens

The emergence of distributed networks, defined by capacity of agents to freely determine their actions and relations, and of the internet and the social web in particular, have created a new set of technological affordances creating a broad range of open knowledge and open design communities functioning according to a ‘peer to peer’ social logic. These communities have set in motion a new set of social processes for the creation of value, which we could summarize as peer production (the ability to produce in common), peer governance (the capacity to self- organize) and peer property (the capacity to make common production universally available). The social web has created the possibility to create complex social services, and ‘productive systems’, through the global coordination and scaling of small group processes of mass participation, moving them from the periphery of social life to its very center.


The aim of this paper is to describe the characteristics of this new social process, and to see howthey are specifically related to the issue of human happiness.