Month: September 2004

Til the weekend, I may not have enough time to respond to the good comments on the Red Penguin series distinguishing the thoughts of Marx from the 20th century implementers of Marxism.
But wanted to add a few thoughts about the motivation behind the series. I first wrote Love and Money and Red Penguin as reflections on Benkler — and added the narrative link to Marxism because it was the Hunter article that led me down that path.
Peer production — open source software, wikipedia, weblogs and the rest — is a new way of organizing creation and people.
What’s most interesting is understanding how this wonderful thing works — what are the principles, properties, processes and passions that make the whole thing go, and that make particular things thrive.
So, the interesting avenues to follow, after the classics by Raymond and Benkler and the FSF crew, are the practitioners and observers who are doing it and figuring it out. Good references welcome.
Analogies to existing frameworks like Marxism are interesting inasmuch as they shed light on this new thing.

Yochai Benkler’s classic essay, Coases Penguin, explains peer production as a third classic means of organizing economic activity, parallel to the marketplace and the firm. Peer production has a distinct set of advantages for information products, where costs of communication and distribution are low.
Benkler notes that in the real world, of course, market and firm aren’t mutually exclusive. There are many variants and hybrids between pure market and pure managerial forms. Industry ecosystems typically include a mix of big companies, small suppliers and service providers, and market-based commodity purchasing.
Similarly, we would expect to see hybrid forms combining aspects of peer production and the other classic market and firm-based forms. Following up to Benker’s analysis, here are some thoughts on some emerging combinations.
At Socialtext, we see companies using wikis to generate peer-created internal knowledgebases to share information, replacing centralized, structured collection and publication processes. Companies are finding that removing barriers to contribution by a larger number of contributors improves the speed, quality, and amount of content.
Another hybrid of organization form is for-profit customization and service on an open source base. This isn’t just “rent-seeking” — the economist’s slur for exploitation of freely contributed work. It’s a way to fill a gap in the peer production model.
Benkler describes the traditional method of prioritization in a firm as “managerial.” Resources are allocated by a manager’s dictate. This description ignores a key factor in managerial production — the customer. Managers gather customer needs, and ensure that production is done to customer schedule.
The advantages of peer production are greatest where the developers are the customers. When customers are separated from developers, by skill set or time priorities, there needs to be some way to communicate the customer’s needs to the developers. Customers also bring deadlines, which are foreign to pure peer production. Benkler writes that peer production is more efficient over time because of its ability to marshall vast resources. “Peer production relies on making an unbounded set of resources available to an unbounded set of agents, who can apply themselves toward an unbounded set of projects.” But if a customer needs functionality by a specific moment, it won’t help that a given free software project will probably develop that capability eventually.
Agile development methods — where customers and developers work collaboratively to set priorities against deadlines — take advantage of lowered communication costs to increase customer input and reduce risk. Using these methods on an open source base allows producers and customers to take advantage of peer production low cost and high-quality for things that are generic or non-time-sensitive.
With agile development, money is a measure of practical empathy — you get paid when you understand and meet customers needs and priorities over time.
Another interesting and puzzling question is the mix of incentives in a hybrid world. Where financial and nonfinancial motivations co-exist, how can money be introduced without discouraging people who contribute for free, for fame, satisfaction, personal need, and other nonmonetary incentives.
As noted in the previous post, some activities, like sports and music, where participating for money isn’t seen as mutually exclusive to participating for social rewards and personal satisfaction. There are fields like academia and scientific research, where participants make a living, but choose to earn substantially less than their peers who work in law practice and industry. There are also fuzzy lines in artistic and academic communities between being successful and “selling out” — tilting the balance all the way toward money, and away from values respected by peers, like unbiased research.
Benkler notes that there are some areas where perceptions change over time. In Shakespeare’s time, professional actors and musicians were looked down on; in the 19th century, professional athletes were disrespected. These values have reversed.
Given the substantial economic activity surrounding open source (IBM, anyone?), there are many people negotiating the “love and money” boundary every day. Personally, I like serving customers, and think it is fortunate that it is customer focus that makes money in an open source ecosystem. Much of the innovation in social software is coming from peer production — the way to innovate is to participate in the game. And, like anyone in a business based on “commons” resources, I want those resources to thrive, for reasons of inherent value, and for self-interest.
What do y’all think?

I loved Siva Vaidhyanathan’s last book, Copyrights and Copywrongs. It’s a superb excellent intellectual and cultural history and critique of copyright policy.
His new book, Anarchist in the Library isn’t up to his standards. “Anarchist” tries to draw a connection between the spread of peer to peer file-sharing, peer cultural creation, and political anarchy.
The analogy is thin, though. Anarchism is a deliberate political philosophy that opposes central government. My guess is that most file-sharers aren’t making a political statement, they just want access to music.
The bigger problem with defining file-sharing as anarchy is that it focuses on what’s absent — central control; rather than what is present — strong and shifting networks of cultural influence.
After a brief historical period dominated by mass media, we’re seeing a revival of folk culture, with new forms of peer cultural sharing and creation — file sharing, blogging, mashups. The trend has been growing since the advent of cheap photocopiers and cheap videocameras, and accelerating with cheap distribution and improved tools for sharing taste and collaborating.
The portrayal of culture as anarchy is a Romantic notion, shaped by the ideal of the artists as lone rebels or dissident cliques. That concept itself is the result of the mass media dominance. Artists see themselves as an embattled minority, then their work gets co-opted into mass media (Lennon’s Revolution selling sneakers).
With the rise of mainstream folk culture, though, the interesting structural observation isn’t the lack of central control. It’s the emergence of networks of influence that are shaped by taste, by opinion, by identity, by personal connection, by mentorship.
Vaidhyanathan laments the lack of community formed around Napster. But that was just immaturity. We’re just inventing tools for groupforming around shared preferences and collaborative creation. Flickr has cool tools for building groups around sharing pictures. If Napster was allowed to live, if music-sharing were legal, we’d see faster growth of social software around music.
“Anarchist” segues from Napster to chapters showing science and libraries under attack by increasing corporate and political control. I found those chapters more interesting and informative, probably because I knew less about those topics than then internet copyright wars.
But the anarchist argument still wasn’t all that persuasive. There’s a strong case to be made that a balance is shifting toward control. But the converse — that science and libraries are inherently anarchistic — just doesn’t hold up. David Weinberger recently published an interesting piece on cultural bias in the Dewey Decimal system. Western science and technology has always had an alliance with military and industrial forces.
Also, the book’s politics contain a bit of kneejerk Chomskyism. Lets get this straight — third world unlicensed DVD factories are good guys, fighting US intellectual property protectionism. Meanwhile, the Brazilian domestic aerospace industry are the good guys when they implement protectionism, fighting US free trade. IP production is bad when the US does it, and good when the 3rd world does it.
In summary, Anarchist in the Library has some interesting ideas and information, but is a disappointing book overall. Beyond this book, Vaidyanathan thinks and writes well about interesting and important topics, and I look forward to reading more good books from him in the future.