One of the things that makes modern life so interesting is the capacity of the Internet to accelerate and focus people’s minds.

For example – take P2P. As succeeding generations adopt it as a valid legal socially accepted methodology of obtaining entertainment content, the content protectors are forced to fight an ever more desperate losing rearguard action. They are using legislation as their principle tool, because they fail to understand the positive reinforcement potential that is created by  social networking and the P2P community.

P2P is an example of the Net prescribing a lack of moral objection by the nets moral majority to the concept of music, video and game piracy.

We are starting to see organizations too try to marshal the forces of huge numbers of people in the way that P2Pers naturally form into large groups with a unified interest. that the most recent is the state of Israel which is  generating public support for its war in, and on, Gaza by enrolling netizens to generate more public sympathy for its moves. This strategy may be successful or may backfire. We shall see. It is being described as Propaganda 2.0 by one journalist/blogger.

More broadly speaking we also are seeing a war of words and ideas with regard to the optimum solution for the global economic crisis. On the one hand we have the actions of the outgoing US President and his team to shore up the system by printing more money, which looks set to continue with the inauguration of Obama.

The growing and not strategically organized set of voices that is saying that these policies are absolutely 180 degrees wrong is not dissimilar to the P2P community. They are a self organizing, and self regulating group. As such they have greater credibility within their community of peers. (The ones that are of this mind believe that the current fiscal moves in the US in particular will lead to the US dollar crashing. )

This group of netizens is starting to think about what will happen to their countries’ currencies if the dollar devalues beyond the comprehension of anyone that didn’t live through the 1930’s. They are wondering how a currency that devalues to under a less than a quarter of its current value will be able to continue to be the standard for 128 countries. The point here is that this group of peers appears to be building critical mass in the same way that the P2P community is building.

Will a tipping point be reached at which point the numerical mass of “e-conoclasts” will be so great that their wills will prevail against that of the US government? Similarly will the numerical mass of P2P users become so great that it will be impossible for content owners/publishers to criminalize them?

I believe that the critical issue here is not just the numerical mass of people that form the crowd, but the momentum at which the crowd can be mobilized to act. The web seems to be very effectively at shortening the time span for decision-making by those who are connected. We have had electronically managed trading for years, where share trading can be managed by a program so as to ensure that there is a technical stop loss, so the idea of a technological ability to drive trading is not new. What is new is the change in velocity. Now we have a huge mass of people who are reading the same news that is not in the mainstream media in near real time, who have learned to mistrust what is in the mainstream.

This results in a positive feedback loop for the information that is not in the mainstream by a relatively easy to identify group. That group consists of the people who probably have the most to lose (or the most that has already been lost) from the financial meltdown. Maybe we might compare them to a modern day version of the wealthy bourgeousie behind the French Revolution.  This is what the US Fed is setting itself up to fight against as Obama and his new team are installed.

And here is the challenge: The people who are being appointed to manage the US economy are seen as providing conventional wisdoms (regardless of how smart they are and how out of the box their ideas are). The people who rail against those “conventional wisdoms” are building a much more vigorous support system than the administration can ever have – even if they resort to the ideal of Propaganda 2.0.  

This will lead to a continuing rusting of trust. There will be a greater amount of cynicism about politicians and their motives. It will lead inevitably to the US dollar no longer being the “international currency”.

This move against “the system” will lead inevitably to the Internet becoming the font of all perceived wisdom – regardless of the veracity of the data that is found there.

In the event that there is a significant devaluation of the greenback concomitant with the greenback no longer being the currency of global trade, what will that mean for the content industry and the way that P2P is pursued?

One scenario that we have brainstormed at Perceptric is that since all the major Hollywood studios have the affairs of IP protection arranged so that the copyrights are held in tax friendly domains such as Holland, Lichtenstein or Northern Ireland, in a negative dollar economic environment it may be better for those companies to actively hedge their positions by leaving their money in Euros in European banks.

Since the combined Entertainment and Software industries account for a very substantial amount of the US economy this would be a very negative situation for the US and could lead to further devaluation. (Imagine further that this is extrapolated to include all the manufacturing industries that offshore their production and run the revenues through an intermediary entity so as to minimise the reportable profit in the US. (This would presumably include all of the major retail clothing Brands to start with).

On the other hand, the content industries may also take the position that they need to become even more aggressive with what they class as piracy. i.e. P2P.

In an environment of massive financial dislocation combined with concern about climate change and distrust in the banking system itself it may be that the timing may be right for an alternative currency such as a tradable carbon credit.

If participants in P2P substantially embraced the idea and could also participate in it – being remunerated for aiding the superdistribution of content, who knows, perhaps the P2P community might actually create the genesis for solving the problems of the world!

Some Additional Reference Material That May Be Of Interest:

1) US Budget Gap Sets Record for Fiscal First Quarter
2) Poor Figures Raise Fear Of "Double Dip" Slump In US