Yesterday evening at Eyebeam Yochai Benkler launched his new book 'The Wealth of Networks : How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.' Benkler, who is also the author of Coase's Penguin was introduced by Jonah Peretti. He laid out the topics by talking about collaborative news voting sites like Digg, non-competitive games like Second Life, distributed computing projects like NASA's Clickworkers and folksonomy-driven photo-sharing sites such as Flickr.

What follows are a few partial and by all means incomplete notes of Yochai Benkler's lively, high-speed presentation. To get a precise, in-depth idea of Benkler's notions, read the book. His two little sons, equipped with books, sat in the first row. Yochai started off by questioning exaggerated notions of liberation attached to an operating system like Linux. He set the stage for his talk by asserting that there are between 600 million and one billion people connected to the Internet. This connectivity and access is the precondition for cooperation that becomes the very core of the economy. Commons-based peer production, a term for which Benkler is frequently cited, takes place without managerial command. It is not utopian but very real. It offers a solution space: 'Stuff flows out of connected beings.'

One of the stellar examples of successful Open Source Software projects is Apache, which captures 70 percent of the market share. In this instance it is rather clear that "the jam and butter is on our side of the bread and not on Microsoft's or IBM's." To further his argument of production power of online peer production Yochai Benkler referred to the DMOZ Open Directory Project with its many many thousand voluntary editors who outdid Yahoo's competing efforts. The author argued that commons-based peer production is a "real fact, not a fad."

He described non-market economies of social sharing and exchange and pointed to a move away from what he called "well-behaved tools" like TVs or DVD players to general purpose devices. General purpose devices, for him, are the opposite of trusted systems (trusted against their owners).

Benkler made clear that this commons-based peer production is a threat to existing business models, which in turn also threaten it. In political terms Yochai, who is professor at Yale Law School, used the term autonomy to describe the move to greater individual freedom. As example he used the Gutenberg Project. In terms of democracy he referred to the experience of a purely mass mediated public sphere. He introduced the term of see-for-yourself ethics into this context. Examples included a step-by-step account of the debate about voting machines in the last election that delineated an ecology of voices that is diverse and can't be easily stopped by shutting down the computers of people who distribute unpleasant information such as details about flaws of the mentioned voting machines. (http://blackboxvoting.org, http://www.whatreallyhappened.com, http://scoop.nz, http://freenet.sourceforge.net/, Overnet) Consequently, he claimed that the Internet allows for a critical cultural life.

The Internet democratizes despite the 'Babel objection' (nobody hears anybody else). There is an experience of fragmentation and polarization. Topical clusters of sites emerge. A Democrat may link to a Republican site but is unlikely to link to a soccer site, for example. One website focusing on a certain topic links to a site of similar topical orientation thus delivering many entry points into one field.

As examples of the malleability of remix culture Benkler showed USDAT's BushBlair video and The Grey Album by DJ Danger Mouse (download bittorrent file). Benkler went on to argue that Wikipedia, with all its many faults, introduces transparency into culture.
With regard to justice he suggested that increasingly more of what relates to human development depends on information.
He referred to open academic publishing (learning materials), the Free Software project Savanah and the scientific research initiative Hapmap. Benkler also mentioned open wireless networks and municipal broadband into this setting.

In conclusion, Yochai Benkler argued that there is greater human agency allowed in these systems of commons-based peer production. Commons-based peer production according to Benkler, is not a  victory of the left. It is rather an eqilibrium between market actors and non-market actors. He ended with the remark that leaving economic systems to the capitalist market alone is unforgivable. The brief question and answer session after the talk brought up a fleeting reference to Henry Hansmann's work.

Benkler's talk offered useful argumentation of the case for commons-based peer production. The term itself is perhaps a bit too broad. It alludes to the dream of every venture capitalist-- that of drawing the online millions with the enticing songs of sirens into their online spaces and get them to work. The users/producers are turned into work horses. His argument that deliberately used "liberal language" (i.e. references to autonomy) may be of particular importance in a business context where CEOs need to understand that these peer2peer forces will not go away and that they can't kill them either. They have to ask themselves if peer production in the commons can be more efficient than the work of hired employees. Which entrepreneur would not enjoy to line up 5000 unpaid volunteers online? Benkler called this a new solution space for collaboration, the human ecology of contribution. On the other hand, it may be naive to complete condemn such business models as a future society may be full of hybrid work spaces, hybrid identities and economic schemes. 

Corporations have to acknowledge peer production and try to make money in the cracks of this novel economy, he argued. Benkler proposed that we need to find ways to convince the corporate lions that it is worthwhile to pay people who produce Open Source Software, for example. Yochai Benkler's "The Wealth of Networks" renders the economic realities of the Internet for those who missed the day-to-day culture of sharing and exchange online.

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