Michel Bauwens

After some 20 plus years in a corporate environment, creating 2 dotcoms and being e-business strategy manager for Belgium's leading telco Belgacom, I decided to 'downshift' and move to Chiang Mai, in the north of Thailand, the unlike centerpoint of more than 60% of the world population (check it out with an interactive populaton map!). From there, I created and work with a collective on researching and promoting peer to peer alternatives (p2pfoundation.net), as an explicit practice for social change. It aims to reverse our current reliance on pseudo-abundance in the material world (having an infinite growth system in a finite environment), and pseudo-scarcity in the immaterial world (legal and technical means to prohibit sharing of cultural content), into its opposite. Towards a social system which recognizes the limits of its support ecology, and sustains and promotes social innovation through a sharing economy.