4AAVC101 - week 4

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These are my notes from October 17 for 4AAVC101 at King's College London for the 2017-2018 school year. The lecturer, Nick Srnicek, is the author of two excellent books at the intersection of technology and leftist politics: Inventing the Future (with Alex Williams), and Platform Capitalism.

The usual disclaimer: all notes are my personal impressions and do not necessarily reflect the view of the lecturer.

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Peer Production

Readings

The Wealth of Networks (PDF) by Yochai Benkler, chapter 3

Summarised in the lecture.

The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society

Using Max Weber’s theories on bureaucracy to confront weaknesses in contemporary views on the power of peer production to challenge hierarchical structures.

Recommended readings

Only including the ones I’ve read or want to read.

• Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism: this book has its flaws (he’s a little too optimistic about the power of technology, imo) , but it’s worth reading. It was the first thing I’d ever read on the topic and so I still have a soft spot for it.
• Cory Doctorow’s Walkaway: I went through a brief Cory Doctorow phase back when I was still mostly in the dark about the wonders of literary fiction and thus spent most of my time reading sci-fi, thinking that was the pinnacle of literary achievement. This book didn’t come out until after I had left that phase, so I haven’t read it yet (though I plan to, at some point). If you like sci-fi/Doctorow you’ll probably enjoy this.
• Massimo De Angelis’ Omnia Sunt Communia: I remember seeing this intriguing-looking book at the London Radical Book Fair in June. I didn’t end up buying it, which is a shame because I now want to read it (I’ll probably just order it from Hive at some point since it’s not available at the LSE library).

Lecture

• today: how to organise disparate group of people & coordinate progress towards a common cause
  • historically, this has been done via a market (using the mechanisms of supply and demand + the profit motive)
  • or, via firms (centralised, managerial command, bureaucracy)
  • or, volunteer self-organisation, mostly commonly in disaster response; historically limited & only ever small-scale
• an obvious question to tackle first: why do firms even exist? why not just let the market coordinate everything?
  • Ronald Coase (famous British economist and LSE grad whose name adorns one of the lecture rooms at LSE, incidentally) had a theory
  • firms emerge to save on transaction costs that show up along the supply chain (legal fees, transport, probably marketing as well)—basically when there are cost savings that result from centralising command
• but peer production (the subject for today) is neither truly hierarchical like a firm or anarchic like a market; it’s a new form of organisation
  • can view it as a consequence of recent changes in our economy, with knowledge production assuming an increasingly key role (cognitive capitalism)
  • plus, w/ the rise of Internet, we can now cheaply create & reproduce information goods
  • collaborative, decentralised, non-profit-driven means of producing non-tangible goods
  • often done for psychological as opposed to purely monetary benefits (though the two can co-exist, ofc—many open source programmers are aware that it might help them get a job later on)
  • not all projects are suitable for this type of production, though
    • must be decomposable—people must be able to contribute small pieces and have them fit cohesively into the larger whole
    • so Wikipedia fits, while writing a novel, not so much
• peer production isn’t quite the same as peer networks—in a network, you assume participants interact with each other, but peer production doesn’t require this (they can and often do just interact with a central server)
• Benkler’s take on peer production
  • allows for the rise of the “amateur”
  • lots of fears in early literature that decentralised amateurs could replace centralised professionals (like Wikipedia alleviating need for domain experts), which haven’t really been realised
  • often results in the creation of the commons, which is a particular institutional way of structuring access to resources (as opposed to property)
  • so peer production is often about using, and producing, commons (free software as another example)
  • (purported) benefits: freedom, democracy, justice, critical culture, autonomy, new ways of working together
    • democracy: users can (at least theoretically) create their own news, thus wider range of views available than through centralised media
    • economic justice: OSS can reduce economic inequality between people, countries, corporations by giving everyone access to the same tool for free (though ofc there are limits to this—other inequalities, like that of time or communication ability, can be countervailing forces)
    • critical culture: as more people participate in the production of culture, they should thus become more critical recipients of it
  • transition from mass, mediated public sphere to a networked one, one that doesn’t have to be dominated by centralised and commercial interests (though I’d argue that you can never escape those, since they’re so fundamental to how society is organised, and you can see this happening in the open source community)
  • Srnicek mentions Paul Mason’s Postcapitalism, which he characterises as quite optimistic (I would readily agree)
    • Mason seems to think that a commons-based model of peer production will take over from the historically profit-oriented managerial firm paradigm of capitalism
• now on the limits of peer prodution
  • does it work for physical goods? so far, not really, though maybe as 3D printing technology develops further that will change
  • doesn’t work for non-decomposable projects, and its efficacy diminishes as the need for hierarchy goes up
  • does it produce better products? sometimes; open source software can be quite good (though ofc quality varies for a bunch of other reasons)
• Carr-Benkler wager made in 2006 over whether the market, or commons, would dominate the Internet in 5 years time
  • question for the audience: do we think platforms are more dominated by amateurs or by professionals nowadays?
    • one take: things are more market-based today as power is concentrated among large tech firms
    • another take: other way around, since we all contribute to the content of the Internet
    • my take: we’ve seen a weird blurring of the amateur-professional dichotomy, where even self-proclaimed amateurs are likely to be motivated by profit (think basically all Internet celebrities)
  • in 2011, both Benkler and Carr thought they had won lol
  • Benkler cites social media, which is primarily driven by free, user-driven content
  • Carr’s rebuttal: that peer production has been co-opted into the market economy
    • the best “peer” producers are paid professionals (or are on their way to becoming so)—for example, see YouTube videos that are just professionally-produced music videos, and even organic YouTube celebrities who are now paid to produce content
• case study of Napster (launched in 1999, shut down a few years later), which contributed to a massive revenue decline for the music industry (~50%)—good example of Benkler’s thesis
  • but ofc in the past 2 years, streaming services have grown drastically, while sales have declined
  • results in consolidation of record labels (they centralise in order to have more negotiating power w/ streaming services)
  • outcome: the market has won in this case
• the sad truth about Benkler’s theory is that he was kind of right, in the sense that peer production is increasingly important
  • but the world we live in is probably not the world he imagined (or would have wanted)
  • peer production is, by and large, NOT producing a commons that’s available all—instead, our work is being exploited by a few large corporations

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