[iDC] Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?
tiziana
tterra at fastwebnet.it
Wed Aug 29 16:01:07 UTC 2007
dear michel and pat
always very interesting to drop in on the idc list to read your posts.
I think this all idea of a different type of economy based on a
peer-to-peer model is very exciting.
My problem also derives from my experience as somebody who like most of
us is involved in some kind of peer-to-peer collaboration. A
peer-to-peer collaboration by nature is not based on command or on
impersonal mechanisms such as the perfect market model, but is always a
social relation. To build such a kind of economy would be to build a
social economy. Of course such a social economy already exists and
functions within the current financial circuits (after all isn't
interest determined by what some people believe is the right interest,
even as those people are the bureacrats of a central bank? Even more
obvious with actual traders etc). What we want then is a new economy, a
theory and a practice, a social economy which is explicitly conceived in
different terms and with values other than profit.
I think the Internet is allowing us to see and experiment with such
social economy so that we can start assessing the social values that it
destroys (intellectual property, authorship) and the ones it re-creates
(the commons etc).
As I see it, this would be an economy which is fully social, which is
infused with social values and creates them. .
At this point in time such social economy functions overall within a
neoliberal governmentality. I have been convinced by Foucault and
Agamben's argument that an economy is always a mode of government,
Agamben's archaeology of the economy even brings it back to the medieval
oikonomia which defined the ways in which God immanently governed the
world... Foucault claims that the economy as the mode of government of
neoliberals grasps all social conduct as economic conduct, and that is
v. interesting as well.
Bu if social relations need to be foregrounded so as to increase the
powers of such new social economy, do we understand what social
relations are made of? As usual here, I have to refer to Maurizio
Lazzarato's work where he performs an an interesting trick. If I have
got it right, and I am still trying to figure it out, he is arguing that
a social relation (which replaces work as economic engine and source of
productivity) involves a process of capture of a kind of flow of pure
affect bifurcating into subpersonal flows of beliefs, desires, judgments
and feelings which flow between individual minds, and which individual
minds repeat or innovate (they/we are like complicated relays in this
process). Obviously his conception of the mind (or 'brain') is not
cognitivist, it is not a symbol-manipulating system, although going into
details is a bit difficult here. I think understanding this is very
important if we are to figure out how forms of peer-to-peer economy
might spread and be innovated upon beyond the wikipedia model.
For example I could not help notice the reference in some postings to
the annoyance that comes out of dealing with people's 'petty concerns'
(firmly entrenched beliefs and petty hates?) about some particular
entries on wikipedia. How do you compose widely different beliefs,
feelings (attractions/revulsions), judgments and opinions, which are
themselves in a state of affective variation or flux? I think this is
something that the peer-to-peer production model based on open source
does not address directly because it tends to make it into a kind of
automatic, procedural (protocolled?) process. I think that you really
want to expand a peer-to-peer money system, the implementation of a
protocol for something that elicits such strong, how shall we call them,
interests? feelings? attachments? desires? beliefs? such as money would
be a different thing than the production of an Internet protocol or
programme. But I might be simplifying your perspective.
best
tiziana terranova
Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Hi Pat,
>
> I'd like to offer some added perspectives on social change, based on
> your input.
>
> I think that first of all we have a very simple 'logical' ( but
> actually physical problem): can a system of infinite growth exist
> within a finite physical environment. My answer would be no, and
> therefore, capitalism as an infinite growth system is doomed eventually.
>
> The second question is: what are the drivers of such infinite growth?
> I have been convinced by the monetary reformers, that one of the key
> issue is the protocol of the monetary system, in other words the
> interest-based system. Interest cannot function in a static economy,
> it requires growth. In a static economy, you can only pay back the
> interest (which is not created by the banks) by taking it from someone
> else, while in a growth system, the pain is less as you can get it
> from the growing pie. But what if the pie can no longer grow? One of
> the key issues today is therefore to develop monetary systems with
> different protocols, and I think the best way to do this is by
> 'distributing' the money creation, and to have direct social
> production of money.l
>
> I also agree with you that at moments of deep systemic crisis, we must
> expect rather radical change. The shifts between the roman imperial
> slavery system and the feudal serf system were pretty radical, a
> breach of the fundamental logic of society, and so was the shift from
> feudalism to capitalism.
>
> Non-reciprocal peer production would seem to be the emerging logic of
> immaterial production, since we see it emerging with such force, and
> adapting open/free, participatory, and commons-oriented strategies are
> competitive advantages for for-profit institutions and state forces
> alike (apart from the natural tendency of communinities to adopt it).
> In the physical world, the realm of scarcity, non-reciprocity cannot
> work, so what I expect are peer-informed modes of production, such as
> fair trade (markets subjected to peer arbitrage), social
> entrepreneurship (abandoning money as an end, just keeping it as a
> means), trust-based resource management (see Peter Barnes). Such a
> situation would be consisting with the historical record of previous
> modes which always combined pluralism but always under the domination
> of one core logic (respectively the gift economy, the tributary logic
> and the exchange logic).
>
> One key question is how antagonistic the change will/must be. It does
> not seem that the end of the roman empire and its transformation was
> antagonist in the sense of two classes fighting each other, and many
> feudal to capitalist transitions did not take the form of bourgeois
> revolutions. More fundamental was that in both systems, the new social
> relations were slowly being built up, and then, through some
> mechanism, reached a tipping point.
>
> On 8/23/07, *pat kane* <scottishfutures at googlemail.com
> <mailto:scottishfutures at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>
> Hi Michel
>
>
> I thought Benkler regarded peer-to-peer as more than just an
> appendage to market-system and state-system allocations of
> resources, but as at least a vigorous corrective, and at best a
> viable alternative to them - indeed reconnecting resource
> allocation and generation to democracy and citizenship in a way
> that the previous two domains have insufficiently done. My problem
> with Tapscott is that his perspective on mass collaboration is so
> relentlessly (and literally) in-corporating - which is why I quoted D
> iLampedusa. Actually by way of Immanuel Wallerstein in this
> brilliant essay - http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm
> <http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm> - from which the key
> quote is this:
>
> The basic reason for concessions by persons of privilege to
> demands for democratization is to defuse the anger, to incorporate
> the rebellious, but always in order to save the basic framework of
> the system. This strategy incarnates the di Lampedusa principle
> that "everything must change in order that nothing change."
>
> The di Lampedusa principle is a very efficacious one, up to a
> tipping point. Demands for further democratization, for further
> redistribution of the political, economic, and social pie, far
> from having exhausted themselves, are endless, even if only in
> increments. And the democratization of the past 200 years, even if
> it has benefited only my hypothetical 19% of the world population,
> has been costly to the 1%, and has consumed a noticeable portion
> of the pie. If the 19% were to become 29%, not to speak of their
> becoming 89%, there would be nothing left for the privileged. To
> be quite concrete, one could no longer have the ceaseless
> accumulation of capital, which is after all the raison d'être of
> the capitalist world-economy. So either a halt must be called to
> the democratization process, and this is politically difficult, or
> one has to move to some other kind of system in order to maintain
> the hierarchical, inegalitarian realities.
>
> It is towards this kind of transformation that I believe we are
> heading today. I shall not repeat here my detailed analysis of all
> the factors that have led to what I think of as the structural
> crisis of the capitalist world-system. Democratization as a
> process is only one of the factors that have brought the system to
> its current chaotic state, and immanent bifurcation. ^(7)
> <http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm#N_7_> What I see, as a
> result, is an intense political struggle over the next 25-50 years
> about the successor structure to a capitalist world-economy. In my
> view this is a struggle between those who want it to be a
> basically democratic system and those who do not want that. I
> therefore somewhat unhappy about the suggestion of the organizers
> that democracy may be "an essentially unfinishable project." Such
> a formulation evokes the image of the tragic condition of
> humanity, its imperfections, its eternal improvability. And of
> course, who can argue with such an imagery? But the formulation
> leaves out of account the possibility that there are moments of
> historic choice that can make an enormous difference. Eras of
> transition from one historical social system to another are just
> such moments of historic choice. ^(8)
> <http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm#N_8_>
>
> Is peer-to-peer part of this struggle towards a 'successor
> structure'? Or not? The panic of Tapscott in the face of mass
> collaboration makes me think it must be.
>
> PK
>
>
>
>
> Pat Kane
> +44 (0)7718 588497
> http://www.theplayethic.com
> http://theplayethic.typepad.com
> http://www.newintegrity.org
> http://www.scottishfutures.net
> http://www.patkane.com <http://www.patkane.com>
>
> All mail to: patkane at theplayethic.com
> <mailto:patkane at theplayethic.com>
>
>
>
> On 23 Aug 2007, at 08:03, Michel Bauwens wrote:
>
>> Just a quick reply to this one.
>>
>> 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:
>>
>> 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
>>
>> 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.
>>
>> 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,
>>
>> Michel
>>
>>
>>
>> On 8/20/07, *pat kane* < scottishfutures at googlemail.com
>> <mailto:scottishfutures at googlemail.com>> wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>> *From: * pat kane <playethical at gmail.com
>>> <mailto:playethical at gmail.com>>
>>> *Date: * 19 August 2007 21:51:29 BDT
>>> *To: * iDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net <mailto: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
>>> <mailto: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
>>> <http://news.com.com/2102-1041_3-5514121.html?tag=st.util.print>.
>>> 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 <http://www.openoffice.org/> 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/
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Keen>). 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 <http://www.openoffice.org/>,
>>> Ubuntu <http://www.ubuntu.com/> , Firefox
>>> <http://en.www.mozilla.com/en/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
>>> <http://www.bostonreview.net/BR27.3/bollier.html>', 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
>>> <http://www.gatesfoundation.org/default.htm> 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
>>> <http://observer.guardian.co.uk/euro/story/0,,977706,00.html>:
>>> "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
>>> <http://www.cnn.com/TECH/computing/9910/21/berners.lee.interview.idg/>
>>> – 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
>>> <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michel_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
>>> <http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith2007/lecture5.shtml>,
>>> 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 <http://www.theplayethic.com/>).
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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