As some of you may already know, the P2P community has a major issue
with P2P Foundation founder Michel Bauwens who has, in my view, turned
the foundations Facebook groups and other forums into potential
recruitment vectors for the "alt-right" and has created an environment
where many people feel unwelcome and unsafe, including women, people of
colour, and LGBT+ people.
As I have been involved with the P2P Foundation, Michel himself, and
other parts of the P2P community for almost two decades, I have joined
other colleagues who are alarmed by this right-wing pivot in signing
this statement of dissociation.
https://p2p-left.gitlab.io/statement/
https://p2p-left.gitlab.io/statement/appendix/
Please feel free to reach out to me if you have anything you want to
talk about with regard to this unfortunate situation.
---
LETTER OF DISASSOCIATION
In recent years the P2P Foundation has become the dominion of a single
man: its founder Michel Bauwens. Despite its stated commitment to the
“commons”, under Bauwens’ direction the P2P Foundation has increasingly
come to represent an understanding of the commons as a place of white
privilege and punitive male fragility.
Over the last few years, despite concern from long-standing members and
close associates, Bauwens has transformed the P2P Facebook and P2P
Foundation Wiki pages into what many of us perceive to be a pulpit for
reactionary and conservative politics. This is done to the extent that
members who identify as and with women, people of colour and the LGBT
community have felt unheard, demeaned, disparaged and unsafe.
Bauwens’ posts and curation in the P2P Foundation’s Facebook group have
increasingly promoted anti-left, anti-feminist, anti-justice
“Intellectual Dark Web” and even alt-right videos and talk pieces.* This
has been extended to include offshoots like the P2P Research Clusters
and P2P Politics and Policy groups. Right-wing tropes are commonly found
in the posts Bauwens curated in recent years, including: the claim that
anti-racists and feminists promote “reverse racism” and “misandry”, that
Black Lives Matter is a “neo racialist” movement seeking societal
domination, that white privilege theory oppresses whites because of
innate characteristics, that the transgender rights movement is
“anti-woman”, and that social justice movements seek “inverse status
hierarchies” or “reverse hierarchies of domination” in which white males
are permanently at the bottom.
To many, Bauwens’ posts and curation regurgitate, in various different
forms, the general reactionary trope that “those people don’t just want
to be equal, they want to be superior.” Members of the community have
repeatedly expressed dismay at this content which promotes many of the
same dangerous tropes about “SJWs”, “cancel culture”, “snowflakes” and
being “woke” that emerged from post-2014 GamerGate and Channer culture.*
As the screenshots of his activity in the Appendix demonstrate, this is
neither infrequent nor done in the spirit of advancing discussion of P2P
ideas. In fact his constant focus on fighting “identity politics” is
pursued to the near total exclusion of advancing the commons.
Bauwens claims the promotion of this content as “open curation” and
“promoting discussion”. We believe such rationale is entirely
disingenuous. The relevant articles and videos he posts are only from
the alt right and “Intellectual Dark Web”, and are published without any
critical contextualizing. On the contrary, while people are free to say
hateful things like “trans women are men”, anyone who challenges the alt
right material he presents or defends intersectional analysis, is
denounced for apparent “racialism” and banned from the group. The
curation is not “open”, but very much closed.
From our consistent observations over several years, we are concerned
that Bauwens has turned the P2P Foundation’s Facebook groups and
discourse on P2P into a reactionary and racist echo chamber. Perhaps
most alarmingly, he recently announced that he would surrender
leadership of the Facebook groups only to a leadership group that
embraced the same —explicitly “anti-woke”— ideology, whose tenets are
now being added to the P2P Foundation Wiki pages as guiding dogma.
As a result, P2P Foundation’s Facebook groups now exhibit
characteristics and promote ideas that look towards right wing,
reactionary views. We are concerned that this could potentially serve as
a radicalization group, drawing people into far right recruitment.
We are compelled to take this action and produce a public letter now out
of concern for the people who come to the P2P Foundation with a sincere
interest in alternative production and distribution models and find
themselves embroiled in what some have characterized as Michel Bauwens’
personal culture war. Furthermore, we are extremely worried that
interested and passionate people may also be subjected to alt-right
talking points which are carefully honed to sow division among people
who could otherwise more easily combine forces towards commons based
production.
As a result of this shift, Bauwens has been disinvited from high-profile
events that would otherwise have benefited both the P2P Foundation and
P2P or commons-based thought more generally. Rumours of his alt right
radicalization are spreading rapidly and have caused concern among other
organizations, Bauwens has publicly complained about being deplatformed,
his “free speech” curbed, and has encouraged his followers to swarm
those who disinvited him with mob criticism.
Michel Bauwens has done a great service to commons scholarship as an
aggregator of prevailing tendencies—but he has overstepped his role as
curator of the community. Historically, the commons always required the
magnanimity of a sovereign whose authority presided over and protected
the territory of the commons. This is perhaps the secret hegemony and
patriarchal model in Bauwens’ Commons.
We, on the P2P left, want a commons scholarship which is radically
intersectional and heterodox. Our “Left” commons is built on the
principle of commoner’s control and a comprehensive understanding —
which is race-conscious, feminist and socialist — of how power is
produced and distributed.
P2P Left members are committed to exploring a more egalitarian P2P mode
of exchange. This egalitarian approach understands that historical
forces have shaped us powerfully and created many systemic differences
that cannot be overlooked nor wished away by imagining some even playing
field that is yet to be brought into existence. The very violent forces
that have created inequity have shaped how we think and how we
experience the world; any movement that does not attend to this and
reflect the shifts required will sadly only end up replicating the very
same violence and uneven distribution of power that we are fighting to
transform.
We left to generate a group closer to the original aspirations of a P2P
movement informed by a critical consciousness, sensitivity and the
knowledge and practices of intersectional thinking forged in the
struggle by those at the front lines. We welcome heterodox perspectives
that may be less addressed in other forums including Marxist, Communist,
Anarchist, Feminist, Postcolonial, Indigenous, Abolitionist, Racial
Justice Positive, Queer, Hacker and Pirate.
This is not about Michel Bauwens being wrong, this is about safety for
people of colour, LGBT and women in the community. We emphasize that all
efforts (including personal, offline appeals) to bring Michel to a place
where reasonable, responsible discussion on these issues can safely be
had, have failed.
Therefore we the undersigned in the P2P community disassociate ourselves
from Michel Bauwens, and we ask others to consider doing the same.
See → Appendix
P2P LEFT
March 2021
Kevin Barron, ICT Director (retired) Institute for Theoretical Physics,
University of California Santa Barbara.
Joanna Boehnert, lecturer, designer, Nottingham, United Kingdom.
Kevin Carson, researcher of postcapitalist transition, northwest
Arkansas.
Rebecca Conroy, artist and independent scholar, Sydney, Australia.
Elisabeth De Laet, artist, CHT/Totalism.org hackbase, Canary Islands.
Baruch Gottlieb, artist, curator and writer, Berlin, Germany.
Dmytri Kleiner, software developer, Berlin, Germany.
Cindy Kohtala, researcher of peer production, Helsinki, Finland.
Alekos Pantazis, researcher, Tallinn University of Technology & core
member, P2P Lab.
David Potočnik, CHT/Totalism.org hackbase, Canary Islands.
Sharon Prendeville, Senior Lecturer, Loughborough University and
Co-Founder of OSCEdays.
Poor Richard, creator and first admin of P2P Facebook group.
Penny Travlou, lecturer and Co-Director Feminist Autonomous Centre for
Research, Athens, Greece.
Jayu U, translator, Brazil.
Dr. Jedediah Walls, former research practicum intern with the P2P
Foundation.
McKenzie Wark, Professor, New York, NY.
To add your name to this letter of disassociation in solidarity, please
email p2pleft [at] protonmail.com.
* The discourse mentioned includes articles from conservative media
celebrities, particularly from the US; non-academic, non-journalistic,
at times explicitly racist, videos on YouTube that researchers have
classified as belonging to or adjacent to the ‘alt right’; conservative
mass media tabloids; articles from Quillette and Areo online magazines;
and “Intellectual Dark Web” commentary videos. Figures as authors and
speakers include Bari Weiss, Jesse Singal, Lindsay and Pluckrose, Andy
Ngo, and the Rubin Report. Quillette and Areo are conservative magazines
for editorials, opinions and non-peer reviewed articles marked by
anti-feminism and concern with “anti-whiteness” and Quillette
particularly publishing on eugenics and ‘race realism’. (For more on the
IDW, see e.g. this Vox article; this Data and Society report; and Lewis
(2020).)
An excessive immersion into this online reading and video material,
which stimulates anger against women and BIPOC as “causes” of economic
deprivation, is known as being “redpilled”. (See this NYT article;
Zuckerberg (2018).)
The increasing frequency of events such as GamerGate (which involved
death threats to the women involved) and mass killings by radicalized
white nationalists, indicates that what appear to some to be mere
“online interactions” on social media have very real world consequences.
Moreover, given the reputation of Facebook as actively facilitating
election manipulation, dissemination of hate groups and unethical
practices related to citizens’ personal data, the sheer amount of time
spent on keeping P2P commons practitioners beholden to a surveillance
capitalist platform without careful moderation to protect its own
members is highly questionable. (See e.g. DiResta (2018).)
--
Dmytri Kleiner
@dmytri
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