Kottke has an intersting interview up with Yochai Benkler, author of the excellent book The Wealth of Networks about how peer-production, open networks, and free culture can and should revolutionize our politics and society. I worry, though, that Benkler is too optimistic about the political process. Or, rather, that his optimism may be shading into a problematic complacency. Political change is hard to do, and making it happen requires concrete plans for organizing and activism that the relevant segments of the geek community don't seem to me to be very good at engaging in.
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Benkler Interview
03 Nov 2007 09:41 am
Comments (8)
Hey kids,
You're not going to change the world by joining
'1,000,000 STRONG FOR STEPHEN T.COLBERT!' on FB.
Corporations are hierarchies - but they use leveling rhetoric as a means of enhancing their image.
A few wees ago, I was at conference for open source software in K12 education, and there was a pretty strong European contingent. They seemed to be much more oriented towards political change than American open-source types, and they've been much more successful, convincing lots of governments to adopt open source software, mandate open standards, etc. And they're every bit as geeky as we Americans.
The consensus seemed to be that Europeans are more oriented towards political rather than market solutions, and that the European governments want to stick it to Microsoft in a way that American ones don't.
Open Source adoption is a real challenge even in well-disposed municipal and institutional settings. For some case studies of why this is primarily a political and social (rather than technical) problem:
http://www.ssrc.org/wiki/posa/index.php/Main_Page
A minor correction: the interview was conducted not by Kottke, but by guest editor Joel Turnipseed.
[European geeks] seemed to be much more oriented towards political change than American open-source types, and they've been much more successful
American politics is just extraordinarily weird in recent decades - that is, irrational. Consequently, the relationship American geeks (and other Americans) have to politics tends to be dysfunctional.
I share Matthew's fear of even a very light complacency about politics in the US; that it's not viable in the medium or long terms, despite how creative decentralized structures can be and despite how much people like their freedom. When Benkler talks about the FCC in this interview, it's a strange moment, because he tends to talk about everything with a frame of rationality-of-some-kind. But American politics in the last 25 years has not been what I'd call rational, at least in the sense people in other highly developed countries would use the word. Yes, politics is grubby and hard; sometimes you simply have to deal with the hierarchical entities per se (politics).
It's actually worse - functionally, it ends up being a pretty clear classic co-option effect. That is, a huge amount of "peer production" evangelizing has a tendency to turn into digital-sharecropping businesses, that are often sold to big media entities. This is not exactly radical, more like exploitative.
There's a lot of incentive for intellectuals to promote this stuff, since it's in fact very safe and non-threatening, can be profitable from media companies, yet at the same time lets them pretend to be revolutionaries - all in all, a very seductive mix.
Semi-related, see a column I just wrote about Lessig's "corruption" studies:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2007/oct/25/comment.intellectualproperty
Comments closed November 17, 2007.
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Heads in the Sand
I remember the good old days, when Wired was new. The world was going to change in all those wired ways. It was all total BS of course.
The dominant organizing principal in the world today is hierarchical, that being corporations. Corporations and the leaders of corporations are increasingly networked but it has nothing to do with freedom. Not about freedom for anyone or any group save the corporate elites who are ever more free to increase their own power and wealth.
Posted by rapier | November 3, 2007 10:14 AM