Re: <nettime> Disassociation from Michel Bauwens

[mp <mp@aktivix.org>]

Things are shifting, tectonic plates are sliding, sides are being chosen:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/mar/12/far-right-open-source-technology-censorship

Left and right (derived from the seating arrangements of two elitist
factions centuries ago) have lost meaning and a fundamental struggle is
perhaps emerging, the endgame it may be:

“There are two sides: the agents of waste and the lovers of the wild.
Either for life or against it. And each of us has to choose.” (Jay
Griffiths, Wild, 2008: 9)


On 12/03/2021 17:25, Dmytri Kleiner wrote:
> 
> 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).)
> 
> 
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