Commons-Based Peer Production in the Work of Yochai Benkler

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* Article: Commons-Based Peer Production in the Work of Yochai Benkler. By Evangelos Papadimitropoulos. tripleC 16(2): 835-856, 2018

URL = https://www.triple-c.at/index.php/tripleC


Abstract

"Yochai Benkler defines commons-based peer production as a non-market sector of information, knowledge and cultural production, which is not treated as private property but as an ethic of open sharing and co-operation, and is largely enhanced by the Internet and free/open source software. This paper makes the case that there is a tension between Benkler’s liberal commitments and his anarchistic vision of the commons. Benkler limits the scope of commons-based peer production to the immaterial production of the digital commons, while paradoxically envisaging the control of the world economy by the commons.

This paradox reflects a deeper lacuna in his work, revealing the absence of a concrete strategy as to how the immaterial production of the digital commons can connect to material production and control the world economy. The paper concludes with an enquiry into some of the latest efforts in the literature to fill this gap."


History

George Dafermos:

"The concept of commons-based peer production appears for the first time in 2002 in an article in the Yale Law Journal authored by Israeli-American law professor Yochai Benkler. In this piece, titled Coase’s Penguin or Linux and the Nature of the Firm, Benkler (2002a) detects ‘the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment,’ which is distinct from both markets and firms, as neither the motivation of the participants, nor their coordination, depends on ‘market prices or managerial commands.’ To illustrate this new mode of production, which he defines as commons-based peer production, Benkler focuses on the development of free/open source software (FOSS) projects like the Linux operating system and the Apache web server. His analysis places special emphasis on two characteristics of these projects. The first is that the majority of contributors are volunteers mobilized by intrinsic motivations like ‘the pleasure of creation’ and selffulfillment at work. Benkler does not deny that some participants are driven by the prospect of monetary rewards, yet he insists that the profit-motive is of secondary importance compared to ‘hedonic and social-psychological rewards.’ The other distinguishing feature of FOSS projects is their anti-hierarchical organizational structure: their production process is based on the self-selection of tasks by the participants, who coordinate their work without managers and bosses.

In any case, all that would be a matter of little importance, if FOSS was just a marginal phenomenon in the software industry. But, as Benkler (2002a: 371) remarks, ‘what is happening in the software world’ is actually the opposite: in fact, ‘these volunteers...beat the largest and best financed business enterprises in the world at their own game.’ Even though that may seem inexplicable at first sight, Benkler claims that it is accounted for by the fact that the rise of ‘ubiquitous computer communications networks’ has enabled a significant fraction of the world’s population to become actively engaged in the production of information, knowledge and culture. Benkler analyzes the impact of these technologies from the perspective of Ronald Coase’s economic theory of transaction costs. According to that theory, capitalist markets and hierarchical organizations are the two main institutional environments for coordinating the various tasks or stages of production. However, in the ‘networked information economy,’ as Benkler (2002a: 403) remarks, peer production emerges as a ‘more cost-effective institutional form than either markets or hierarchical organizations.’ As he explains, ‘when the object of production is information or culture, and where the physical capital necessary for that production -computers and communications capabilities- is widely distributed instead of concentrated,’ then the model of peer production has ‘systematic advantages over markets and managerial hierarchies’ (Benkler 2002b). Bluntly, the widespread availability of personal computers and Internet connections ‘have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of...a billion people around the globe’ (Benkler 2006: 3). The mass diffusion of the Internet, in particular, has made ‘communication and information exchange across space and time...much cheaper and more efficient than ever before,’ thereby permitting the coordination of geographically distributed groups of non-professional information/cultural producers and the aggregation of their individual contributions into ‘usable end products’ (Benkler 2002a: 404).

Most important of all, what we see happening in the sphere of software is bound to expand into every domain of the networked information economy. Although Benkler (2002a) illustrates the paradigm of peer production through the example of FOSS projects, he underlines at several points in that seminal paper that its application is not confined to the realm of software development. On the contrary, in his opinion, the peer production of software is ‘only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon’ that is bound to ‘scale to much larger sizes’, as computers and ‘network connections become faster, cheaper, and more ubiquitous’ (Benkler 2002a: 383). Benkler continued to work on these ideas, and four years later he published his magnum opus, The Wealth of Networks (2006), which was received with great acclaim, establishing Benkler as the leading theorist in the then-nascent field. In fact, The Wealth of Networks remains to this day the most influential work on the subject of the digital commons, having been cited more than twelve thousand times.

In its pages, Benkler (2006: 5) elaborated on his thesis that peer production constitutes a new mode of production in the ‘networked information economy,’ which has the potential to expand into ‘every domain of information and cultural production.’

The starting point of Benkler’s argument is the acknowledgment of the fact that ‘the most advanced economies in the world today’ are ‘networked information economies,’ as he calls them. This means two things. First, they are economies in which information, cultural production and the manipulation of symbols play a dominant role. Secondly, they depend on the technological infrastructure of modern communication networks. At the same time though, these networks constitute an agent of disruptive change because they allow ‘for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century’ (Benkler 2006: 3). The Internet, in other words, has given nonmarket actors the ability to produce informational and cultural goods. This being so, Benkler (2006: 3) predicts that the mode of peer production – ‘nonmarket and radically decentralized– will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies.’ To be sure, hierarchical organizations and capitalist markets may not disappear in the near future, but they are ‘destined to shrink towards playing niche roles’ in the productive matrix of advanced economies (Benkler 2006: 2). And that is a good thing, says Benkler (2006), as the mode of commons-based peer production reinvigorates core liberal-democratic values, such as individual autonomy of action and social justice." (http://heteropolitics.net/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Digital-Commons.pdf)