[iDC] Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?

[pat kane]

> From: pat kane <playethical at gmail.com>
> Date: 19 August 2007 21:51:29 BDT
> To: iDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net>
> Subject: Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?
>
> Hi all
>
> 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.
>
> Pk
>
> Pat Kane
> http://www.theplayethic.com
> http://theplayethic.typepad.com
> http://www.newintegrity.org
> http://www.scottishfutures.net
> http://www.patkane.com
>
> All mail to: patkane at theplayethic.com
>
> Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
>
>
>
> By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
>
>
>
> Reviewed by Pat Kane
>
>
>
> A spectre is haunting the information age – the spectre of  
> communism. And if you don't believe me, listen to Bill Gates. 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.
>
>
>
> "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."
>
>
>
> Gates' views have since been ridiculed widely throughout the tech  
> community (though they recently received some elegant support in  
> Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur). 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.
>
>
>
> These services (Open Office, Ubuntu, Firefox 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 'commonwealth', 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.
>
>
>
> 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 mitigate Aids in Africa these days, than deal with this Monday- 
> morning head-splitter of a problem.
>
>
>
> 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).
>
>
>
> At times, Wikinomics reminds you of the famous quote from the  
> nobleman in Giuseppe De Lampudesa's The Leopard: "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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 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'.
>
>
>
> 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 Tim Berners- 
> Lee – a physicist who wanted to help his fellow researchers freely  
> exchange information.
>
>
>
> 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 Micheal Bauwens 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).
>
>
>
> 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.
>
>
>
> As Jeffery Sachs noted in his BBC Reith Lectures this year, 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.
>
>
>
> Pat Kane is the author of 'The Play Ethic' (www.theplayethic.com).
>
>
>
>

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