Distributed Capitalism

Thoughts on Jeremy Rifkin’s speech at Urbania Festival (Bologna)

In his January 2009 lecture in Bologna (Italy), Jeremy Rifkin states that the world is suffering from the progress of the recent past decades. He says that We underestimated the speed , of things that are changing today. We are facing now the second law of thermodynamics; the entropy-wrath is distributed in three parameters of a global crisis.

1. 1 Global Economic Meltdown

2. 2 Global Energy Security

3. 3 Real Time Impact of Climate Change

The Global Economic Meltdown is sustained by the concepts of “credit” and later that of the “mortgage”. The American Economy’s final collapse comes out of the 1989 and 2009 housing crisis and after a repetitively ambiguous economical administration throughout the last two decades the “super power” has eventually a 12.5 trillion dollars total depth.

Global Energy Security problem rises in a moment when the American Industry depends absolutely on the energy price since the first and second Industrial Revolutions. We are currently in the era of the “peak oil” where the price of $140 per barrel defines the upper limit of a surreal economic inflation. At the same time even if new oil sources are discovered all round the world, the exponentially increase of the energy demanding population (i.e. the industrialization of China and India) enhances the problem of the “peak oil per capita”. War is used as the absolute means to “secure” the precious energy and that’s more than harming for the humanity.

Contemporary western societies underestimate that everyday commodities like the buildings, the meat consumption and the mass transportation are the three emission pillars of the contemporary Climate Change. 40% of the CO₂ fuels come out of the built architecture. The issue of meat consumption is not even an issue in contemporary discussions. Optimistic analyses talk about an increase of temperature around the world of 3 degrees Celsius. 30-70% of the species are facing extinction. Exaggeration of natural phenomena like hurricanes and floods is now happening.

At this point Jeremy Rifkin argues that the aftermath of latter observations is the recovery of the planet through a sustainable globalization process coming out of what he calls “Third Industrial Revolution”. The latter will emerge only after a parallel idea in the way we communicate information and energy is created. Telecommunications run collaterally with steam and later oil energy in 19th and 20th century as a top bottom distribution of services. In other words both energy and communication were centrically organized around specific axis - nation-states along with supranational institutions - around the world. On the other hand, information and telecommunication networks, totally accessible and distributed do not coincide with the static form of old energy distribution systems. Energy is stored in specific pockets around the world while information travels high-speed throughout a global network.

Distributed communications (internet) along with distributed energy (smart platforms) create the so called distributed capitalism. It is a political matter of the household where data and energy can be stored and transferred freely in an internet-style platform. Free market based on networks that can derive from everywhere, i.e. households, institutions, governments. Imagine energy in a “shared folder” where everybody has access. The notion of distributed capitalism substantiates the “ultimate suburbia” in the 21^st century globalized world.

The umbrella of distributed globalization will be the very context of our investigation. Inside the era of “flat” urbanization, of the idea of a distributed network community with total accessibility, of the call for the “ultimate suburbs”, from Geo-politics to Biosphere-politics^*, architecture is not perceived as morphology anymore but as ecology. Everything belongs into a sustainable cycle, every single entity of this cycle is a Deleuzian Desert Island: absolute separate, absolute creator, a prototype. As Manuel deLanda observes there are some cultural-structural networks (units) that fit in the description of self-consistent aggregates. These networks might be igneous rocks, ecosystems or local markets. In other words they are self organizing-sustained aggregates that can absorb information and release energy and vice versa.

* Biosphere politics, which "envisions the earth as a living organism, and the human species as a partner and participant, dependent on the proper functioning of the biosphere and at the same time responsible for its well-being," seeks to unite democratic principles and a concern for the natural world in a modus operandi capable of healing the earth and securing a life for future generations.

Harris Biskos, Yannis Kitanis