Felix Stalder on Tue, 28 Jan 2003 00:51:20 +0100 (CET) |
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Re: <nettime> revenge of the concept |
> In his excellent paper, >"Coase's Penguin: Linux and The Nature of the Firm," Yochai Benkler >explains, not the motivation, but the technical and legal >preconditions for cooperative informational and cultural production. >The technical considerations are basically: telematically interlinked >personal computers. The legal precondition is basically: that >information be treated as what it arguably is, a "non-rivalrous >good," i.e. a resource that can't run out, that can't be destroyed in >the using, and that therefore cannot be treated as an ownable >commodity. Benkler's conclusion is that networked informational and >cultural production obeys neither the constraints of a firm (with a >bureaucratic organization), nor the price signals given by a market >("buy" and "sell" are irrelevant to non-rivalrous goods). So Benkler >is talking about a form of production which is at once >non-bureaucratic and, yes, non-capitalist, i.e. divorced from that >complex and changeable human institution which transnational state >capitalism now dominates almost entirely: the market. I think 'non-capitalism' is a missreading of Benkler's argument and of the Open Source Software phenomenon. I deliberately say OSS and not Free Software, since such a reading might apply more narrowly to FS (though I'm not even sure about that) but certainly not to the OSS in general. I think "(non)capitalism" is a category that doesn't help much explaining the practive of OSS (as supposed to some of the political theories that motivate some of the FS/OSS figures). What Benkler said in this essay, which is indeed brilliant, is that conventional economists know only of two ways how to organize production: within a closed organization (the firm, the bureaucracy) and in an open system (the market). The question is always: how to achieve efficient organization of people and resources in regard to a desired productive outcome. Signals used to achieve this coordination within the closed structure are commands relayed through hierachies. In the open structure, it's money: prices attached to goods (and services). What he claims now, and I basically agree with him, is that a third way of organizing labour has emerged, heavily relying on the Internet. He calls it 'commons-based peer production.' Now, there are capitalist firms and non-capitalist 'firms' (state bureaucracies, co-ops) and there are capitalist and non-capitalist markets. A traditional farmer's market, for example, is not a capitalist market. Just remember Fernand Braudel's distinction between markets and anti-markets which Manuel DeLanda dusted off a few years ago (check the nettime archives). In the same sense, there is capitalist 'commons-based peer production' (think of Amazon's way to recommend books, or IBM's investment in Linux, Redhat and so on). There's also non-capitalist 'commons-based peer production' (say, GNU, Debian, Wikipedia, nettime and so on). What is perhaps most interesting is how the 'capitalist' and 'non-capitalist' elements intersect and what that might tell us about the politcal dimension of these movements. I think it's exactly this hybridity (along with the limitation to non-rivalrous goods and even more, to 'functional works') that makes the OSS phenomenon very interesting but only of limited value as a political project (which is not necessarily a bad thing). Felix ----------------------|----------------- http://felix.openflows.org # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: majordomo@bbs.thing.net and "info nettime-l" in the msg body # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@bbs.thing.net