Session 1: Networks, Peers & the Virtual Class
This Saturday is the first session of the GOAT Book Club that we’ve been talking about since approx. forever. To kick it off, we’ll look at a couple classic texts from the first couple decades of the Internet era, plus one slightly more recent excerpt.
The first “classic” is from Yochai Benkler, legal scholar and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard. In The Wealth of Networks, Benkler lays down the canonical definition of commons-based peer production, a kind of third way for 21st century political economies, made possible by ubiquitous computing and the world wide web.
Then we’ll take in a less sanguine view of the emerging “dotcom neoliberalism” of the 1990s with Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s 1995 article for Mute magazine, “The Californian Ideology.” They take dead aim at the prevailing techno-determinism of the age and its assumed liberatory (or right-libertarian) potential. They point out how what some were hailing as the new “virtual class” of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and innovators was a pipe-dream that overlooked the hidden social costs of utopia.
Finally, we’ll read an excerpt from Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto published by Michael Bauwens, et al. from the P2P Foundation. Written in 2019, it can be seen as an effort to reclaim the ideal of Benkler’s commons-based peer production from the wreckage of surveillance capitalism and the ever greater consolidation of tech monopolies.
Prompts
I hope we can just get into some organic conversation, but to prime the pump a lil, here’s some things to think about:
- How do these authors define “the commons” and where do their definitions diverge/converge? E.g.:
- What types of resources can be part of the commons and who decides?
- What role do “the state” and “the market” play in the creation and maintenance of “the commons”?
- According to each of the authors, to what degree and in what ways does technology determine society, and vice versa?
How to Join
- When: 2024-05-18T18:00:00Z→2024-05-18T19:00:00Z
- Where: Jitsi Meet
- Who: Anyone! Try to do the reading, at least one, but don’t let it stop you if you don’t have time.
For those who make it, we’ll try to schedule another one for next month, so if you can’t make this one, stay tuned! The recommended readings for the next 5 sessions are listed in the original post, though it’s always open to changes and suggestions.
Recommended Reading
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Yochai Benkler, Chapter 3, “Peer Production and Sharing,”, from Wealth of Networks, pp. 1 - 7 in the PDF covering the “Introduction” and the section “Free/Open-Source Software.” (~22 min. read).
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Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, “The Californian Ideology” (~17 min. read).
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M. Bauwens, et al., Peer to Peer: The Commons Manifesto, excerpt from the Introduction (~17 min. read).
Read-time estimates via thereadtime.com.
Further Resources
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The larger context of Barbrook and Cameron’s “The Californian Ideology” is presented in the Logic(s) Magazine article, “Specter in the Machine”, from December 2020. It tells the wonderfully bizarre history of nettime, a mailing list started in 1995. As the article’s author puts it, “Drawing on various contemporary anti-capitalist currents, from the anti-globalization movement to Italian autonomism to Berlin’s lively squatter movement, Nettime aimed to synthesize an alternative to the techno-determinist optimism oozing out of Silicon Valley.” The original essay has appeared in a few updated forms since 1995, most recently in a collection published in 2015 by the Institute of Network Cultures, titled Internet Revolution: From Dot-Com Capitalism to Cybernetic Communism.
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Any or all of the rest of The Wealth of Networks. Chapter 3 is also a reworking of Benkler’s earlier essays, such as “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm” and “Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints to Enclosure of the Public Domain”. All of these can be found on his website.
