Just a quick reply to this one.<br><br>I think that the various attempts to make sense of emerging passionate and collaborative production outside the institutional frameworks of the for-profit world, such as this one, are legitimate. But indeed, I think there is a key differentiation to be made, and that is the following:
<br><br>1) between all those, and that includes both liberals such as Benkler/Tapscott, but also left commentators (does Trebor belong to this category) who believe that peer to peer is entirely immanent to the current production system, a simple appendage to the market
<br><br>2) and those, such as myself, who believe it has a 'transcendent' potential as well. Taking the latter view does not mean upholding any automaticity, nor denying the immanence, but simple accepting that the immanent aspect is not sufficient, that both the system-confirming and system-transcending aspects and potential have to be held at the same time, to make a full sense of the phenomena.
<br><br>This being said, both communities and institutions need to take account of each other, and to undertake processes of adaptation, and this is what the Wikinomics book addresses, from the point of view of the for-profit world,
<br><br>Michel<br><br><br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/20/07, <b class="gmail_sendername">pat kane</b> <<a href="mailto:scottishfutures@googlemail.com">scottishfutures@googlemail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
<div style=""><br><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div style="margin: 0px;"><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#000000" face="Helvetica" size="4">
<b>From: </b></font><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;" face="Helvetica" size="4">
pat kane <<a href="mailto:playethical@gmail.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">playethical@gmail.com</a>></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#000000" face="Helvetica" size="4">
<b>Date: </b></font><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;" face="Helvetica" size="4">
19 August 2007 21:51:29 BDT</font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#000000" face="Helvetica" size="4">
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iDC list <<a href="mailto:idc@bbs.thing.net" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">idc@bbs.thing.net</a>></font></div><div style="margin: 0px;"><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal; color: rgb(0, 0, 0);" color="#000000" face="Helvetica" size="4">
<b>Subject: </b></font><font style="font-family: Helvetica; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; font-size: 13px; line-height: normal; font-size-adjust: none; font-stretch: normal;" face="Helvetica" size="4">
<b>Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?</b></font></div><div style="margin: 0px; min-height: 14px;"><br></div> Hi all<div><br></div><div>Trebor asked me to post this - I've been reading Don Tapscott's Wikinomics for a review for the Independent, a UK 'quality' tabloid. It's not up to the usual levels of theoretical precision that abounds on iDC, and you'll all know most of the references, but it might at least be a thought-starter. It also has a reference - I think the first newspaper reference ever! - to the work of Micheal Bauwens, our resident integral net-sage. Any (and better) responses welcomed.
</div><div><br></div><div>Pk</div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-size: 13px;"><div style="font-size: 12px;">Pat Kane</div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.theplayethic.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
http://www.theplayethic.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://theplayethic.typepad.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://theplayethic.typepad.com</a></div>
<div style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.newintegrity.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.newintegrity.org</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.scottishfutures.net" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
http://www.scottishfutures.net</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px;"><a href="http://www.patkane.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.patkane.com</a></div><div style="font-size: 12px;">
<br></div><div style="font-size: 12px;">All mail to: <a href="mailto:patkane@theplayethic.com" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">patkane@theplayethic.com</a></div></span><br></div><div style="font-size: 12px;">
<p><span style="font-family: Arial-BoldMT; font-size: 16px;"><b>Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything</b></span><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial-BoldMT; font-size: 16px;">
<b> </b></span><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"></span></p><p><span style="font-family: Arial-BoldMT; font-size: 16px;"><b>By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams</b></span><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">Reviewed by Pat Kane</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">A spectre is haunting the information age – the spectre of communism. And if you don't believe me, listen to <a href="http://news.com.com/2102-1041_3-5514121.html?tag=st.util.print" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Bill Gates</span></a>. In a 2005 interview, when asked whether the idea of intellectual property was being challenged by the net generation's ingrained habit of downloading, using and sharing content for free, Gates disagreed.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">"I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer communists in the world today than there were", mused the uber-geek. "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and software makers under various guises. They don't think that those incentives should exist."
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">Gates' <a href="http://www.openoffice.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">views</span></a> have since been ridiculed widely throughout the tech community (though they recently received some elegant support in Andrew Keen's <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keen" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="font-family: Arial-ItalicMT; color: rgb(0, 47, 215);"><i>The Cult of the Amateur</i></span></a>). But the tycoon's anxieties weren't baseless. In particular, Microsoft faces a swarming battalion of services on the internet which promise to provide everything the software giant does in your computer – email, database, operating system, everything – for nothing.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">These services (<a href="http://www.openoffice.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Open Office</span></a>, <a href="http://www.ubuntu.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Ubuntu</span></a>
, <a href="http://en.www.mozilla.com/en/firefox/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Firefox</span></a> and many others) have mostly been created, and developed, by digital idealists committed to a vision of knowledge and culture which – if not communist – then at least revives the old idea of a '
<a href="http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.3/bollier.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">commonwealth</span></a>', a realm of resources available as of right to free men and women, and places it bang in the heart of the late-capitalist West.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">The flurry of brand names from web culture that we conjure with in our daily news stories – Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook, Flickr – are fuelled by the free labour, and avid attention, of the netizens of this new commonwealth. And the only sustainable way these Web giants have found to make any money is by demonstrating to advertisers that potential consumers are watching. So it would seem that, at least at the networked end of things, capitalism is parasitic upon collaboration. No wonder Bill Gates would rather try to
<a href="http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">mitigate Aids in Africa</span></a> these days, than deal with this Monday-morning head-splitter of a problem.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">If there's any group poised to profit from the bewilderment of executive managers in the midst of turbulent markets and trends, it's business consultants. And Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, as they say in these circles, are certainly built to last. The extremely gimmicky title of their book draws inspiration from one the less satisfying aspects of this digital "mass collaboration" culture, the wiki. (Apart from Wikipedia, have you ever used a real wiki? To a nineties'-era newspaper hack like myself, it sometimes seems like as if the most fiddly aspects of page-setting software has been perversely elevated to a new economic paradigm).
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">At times, Wikinomics reminds you of the famous quote from the nobleman in Giuseppe De Lampudesa's
<a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/euro/story/0,,977706,00.html" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">The Leopard</span></a>: "If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change". Meaning that if the corporate West wants to find a way to keep making money out of the circulation of information and culture, then the whole way they do business will have to turn on its head.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">Tapscott and Williams present themselves quite self-consciously as the hand-holding guides of trembling CEOs and senior managers through this scary landscape. A land where copyright can barely be protected; where powerful companies have to open up their products and services to collaboration with hackers and amateurs; where new technologies largely propelled by irrepressible geeks can threaten and unravel existing commercial markets.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">They do their best, but most of the writers' attempts to bolt the usual scarcity-and-control models of money-making on to these alarmingly collective processes are remarkably tenuous. For example, they suggest that the most active participants in YouTube or Flickr be given star status, and granted a small but proportionate share of the ad revenue that their impassioned participation helps generate.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">But can you imagine the resentment that would build among such playful enthusiasts, each currently with as much right to access and status as the other, if a lucrative star system began to appear on these platforms? The very altruism and creative spirit that vitalised these networks would quickly evaporate, and all manner of gamings and distortions of the system for profit would ensue. Talk about 'not getting it'.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">Many of Tapscott and Williams' other recommendations to big business are inspired by an ideal of scientific practice – peer-support-and review, the open sharing of knowledge – which is as much about Enlightenment as it is about capitalism. And let's not forget that the Web itself, the platform that dynamised this whole situation, came out of the purely scholarly vision of
<a href="http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/21/berners.lee.interview.idg/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Tim Berners-Lee</span></a> – a physicist who wanted to help his fellow researchers freely exchange information.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">There's a weird blindness at the heart of this book, with its gushing celebrations of how world-wide corporate collaboration might produce the next Boeing airliner, or a new kitchen surface wipe. As the peer-to-peer visionary
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_Bauwens" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"><span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">Micheal Bauwens</span></a> has eloquently written, the problem is that we regard what is truly plentiful as scarce (information), and what is truly scarce as plentiful (our finite natural world).
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">There is virtually zero consciousness in Wikinomics of the kind of limits to global corporate activity that our acute environmental crisis must necessarily impose. Indeed, with an award-winning cheesiness, the book opens with an anecdote about a goldmine – revived, of course, through wikinomical means.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">As Jeffery Sachs noted in his <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith2007/lecture5.shtml" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">BBC Reith Lectures this year</span></a>, mass collaboration through informed networks will be one of the key tools whereby we might heal the planet, environmentally and geopolitically. But you'd hardly learn of that grand ambition from this rather comically opportunistic book. The spectre of consultantism hangs over it more oppressively than anything else.
</span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;"> </span></p><p><span style="font-family: ArialMT; font-size: 16px;">Pat Kane is the author of 'The Play Ethic' (<a href="http://www.theplayethic.com/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">
<span style="color: rgb(0, 47, 215);">www.theplayethic.com</span></a>).</span></p> </div><div><div><span style="border-collapse: separate; color: rgb(0, 0, 0); font-family: Arial; font-size: 13px; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; word-spacing: 0px;">
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