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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

wealth of networks « Previous | |Next »
April 24, 2006

Back to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press), which I began to explore in this post. I note that John Quiggin is reading the book.

In the earlier post I had got as far as introducing the category of a non-market mode of production. Benkler says this results in a:

... flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own.

Benkler adds that, though the presence and importance of nonmarket production has become counterintuitive to people living in market-based economies at the end of the twentieth century, the emergence of precisely this possibility and practice lies at the very heart of my claims about the ways in which liberal commitments are translated into lived experiences in the networked environment and forms the factual foundation of the political-theoretical and the institutional-legal discussion that occupies the book.

I have no problems with a non-material mode of production as I accept that a social formation (Australia) can have diverse modes of production; and I can readily accept the existence of a networked information economy that shapes and organizes how we make information, how we get it, how we speak to others, and how others speak to us. Benkler says that his basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies---individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice. Therein lies the wealth of networks.

How does this work?

Benkler's answer makes an appeal to individual autonomy. He says:

The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere. This enhanced autonomy is at the core of all the other improvements I describe. Individuals are using their newly expanded practical freedom to act and cooperate with others in ways that improve the practiced experience of democracy, justice and development, a critical culture, and community.

That's pretty right about autonomy. Moreover, writing for the public by becoming part of the blogosphere helps us to connect and co-operate with others in the public sphere.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 05:54 PM | | Comments (1)
Comments

Comments

Opensource software is a new form of production - the first of the abundance technologies. It actually creates a new point of commoditisation where the cost of any competing software cannot be higher than zero.

With the blogosphere we are starting to see the rise of the same form of commoditisation. It is the baby-steps toward government ending up commoditised where political professionals and specialists are not as important as they were under a scarcity based government structure (ie what we have now).

So yeh, I agree with that article.