Ed Felten reports on a blog entry by Nicholas Carr:

“What’s being concentrated, in other words, is not content but the economic value of content. MySpace, Facebook, and many other businesses have realized that they can give away the tools of production but maintain ownership over the resulting products. One of the fundamental economic characteristics of Web 2.0 is the distribution of production into the hands of the many and the concentration of the economic rewards into the hands of the few. It’s a sharecropping system, but the sharecroppers are generally happy because their interest lies in self-expression or socializing, not in making money, and, besides, the economic value of each of their individual contributions is trivial. It’s only by aggregating those contributions on a massive scale – on a web scale – that the business becomes lucrative. To put it a different way, the sharecroppers operate happily in an attention economy while their overseers operate happily in a cash economy. In this view, the attention economy does not operate separately from the cash economy; it’s simply a means of creating cheap inputs for the cash economy.”

To which Ed Felten replies by separating use value from exhange value:

“The most interesting assumption Carr makes is that MySpace is capturing most of the value created by its users’ contributions. Isn’t it possible that MySpace’s profit is small, compared to the value that its users get from using the site?

Underlying all of this, perhaps, is a common but irrational discomfort with transactions where no cash changes hands. It’s the same discomfort we see in some weak critiques of open-source, which look at a free-market transaction involving copyright licenses and somehow see a telltale tinge of socialism, just because no cash changes hands in the transaction. MySpace makes a deal with its users. Based on the users’ behavior, they seem to like the deal. ”

I would like to add the following commentary on my own. If we accept a hierarchy of sharing engagement, starting from 1) doing things for your own benefit alone (collective side effects are secondary); 2) sharing is icing on the cake (as in Delicious tagging); 3) it is a community project building a common resource (Linux and free software, Wikipedia), then the attitude might be different. In the first two cases, the users have very atomized (case 1) or weak (case 2) links, and their motivation for recognition obviates the need to profit in any other way. But in the third case, though the logic is nonreciprocal, meaning usage is free, there are strong links between the user community, and they do not lightly aspect profiteering that is at the expense of the commons. However, when the company contributes in a positive manner to the open ecology of peer production, such companies are well accepted.

In my P2P lectures, one of the point I discuss, and generates controversy in the business audience, is the ‘crowding out’ phenomemon. It means two things: that in community-based peer production (as opposed to crowdsourcing by unconnected individuals), paying out money to producers may have the opposite effect of discouraging voluntary labour. And secondly, that the need for recognition and equipotentiality, argues against a privileged role of experts.

Slashdot refers to a recent case which demonstrates this issue, in the Debian development community:

“Debian GNU/Linux 4.0 was supposed to be due by December 4 and development is currently frozen. Apparently the saga was triggered by disenchantment towards funding of $6,000 for each of the 2 release managers to work full-time in order to speed up the development. Many unpaid developers simply put off Debian work to work on something else.”

More details in ZDNet Asia:

“Barth and his fellow release manager, Steve Langasek, have been at the center of a controversy over the last few months, having accepted up to $6,000 of funding each for working full-time on Debian version 4, which is code-named Etch.

The funding for Barth and Langasek has been raised by an “experiment” called Dunc-Tank, which aims to speed the release of Etch.

But the establishment of the group may have backfired, as it has angered many unpaid developers. They argue that Dunc-Tank is turning Debian into a two-class system, which could have a negative effect on the distribution. Some have called for the resignation of the two release managers.

A group of 17 developers, led by well-known Debian maintainer Joerg Jaspert, issued a position statement in October citing its disenchantment with Dunc-Tank. It read, “This whole affair already hurts Debian more than it can ever achieve. It already made a lot of people who have contributed a huge amount of time and work to Debian reduce their work. People left the project, others are orphaning packages…system administration and security work is reduced, and a lot of otherwise silent maintainers simply put off Debian work (to) work on something else.”

We continue to explore the funding issue through a tag at Delicious: P2P-Funding

Benjamin Mako Hill has a thoughtful essay on the issue as well.

Unmediated mentions an interesting art experiment which demonstratest that Google Ads are not part of public space, but part of private space, like shopping malls.

“A public space or a public place is a place where anyone has a right to come without being excluded because of economic or social conditions, although this may not always be the case. One of the earliest examples of public spaces are commons. For example, no fees or paid tickets are required for entry, nor are the entrants discriminated based on background.”

Here’s the description of the experiment of Christophe Brunos:

“Christophe BrunoÂ’s online work: The Google Adwords Happening. He tried to answer the question: “how do you make money from net.art?” that had popped up on the rhizome mailinglist. He decided that heÂ’d start by losing money. So he bought some advertisement slots on google. They were not related to the key word he had bought the space for and were not mentioning any URL.

Many people saw his work. But after some time, he received a letter from Google saying something like “We think that you can do your work better, hereÂ’s a few tips: put the keyword on the title; add a clear description of your website and of course, please add the URL of your website. Bruno ignored the letter and left the ads as they were. He got another letter from google threatening him of taking down his adverts if he didnÂ’t conform to the rules. The ads went off and BrunoÂ’s attempt to create public art on the web with the pages of Google ended there. His example shows that google is a very private space.”

We have recently updated the P2P Encyclopedia entry on Protocollary Power,which indicates how power is now hidden/exhibited in the design and architecture of social software, where it can constrain the freedom of individual agents.

Related to this is a blog entry which discusses homophyli, defined as the phenomenon where we associate with like individuals because we share like experience. This logic of affinity is not always a good thing, since it can promote inequality, as in housing or schooling choices, where the rich congregate in private schools and gated communities.

In a social software context, designers should decide whether they consider homophyli to be a feature or a bug … Read the whole entry for an idea of such counter-homophyli design possibilities, here’s just an introductory quote.

Excerpt:

“Life is easy when you’re unchallenged: this is why people read the New York Times or watch Fox News or even just watch the 5pm news (the one with the deaths taken out) instead of the 7pm (the one that’s all death). Do you accept that your audience wants to be around people like them and that your job is to make that as easy as possible? NYT and Fox News show that it can certainly be a path to financial success.

If you don’t buy into homophily completely, what can you do? Recommendations increase your pool of interest in very short steps. To break homophily, recommend something for reasons other than “this meshes very tightly with your profile”. This seems heretical at first: the whole logic behind recommendations is to guess at items the user will probably like. But it has to happen. For you to identify their complete region of interests, you necessarily have to show them things in and out of that region. If you prematurely narrow in, you’ll end up only showing them stories about melting Antarctic ice shelves without connecting to the rest of environmental, travel, or scientific stories that they’re really interested in. The best way to make those connections is to mix it up.”

Reblogged from the Transitioner:

“The Aristotelean intellectual virtue of phronesis along with the related term episteme a are very important notions to consider in the context of “transitioning,” i.e. developing collective intelligence and wisdom.

Episteme is the scientific rationality we are all quite familiar with. Phronesis is usually translated “practical wisdom” and is the kind of rational skill doctors and entrepreneurs have that is based on experiential knowledge and provides the ability to take the best action in particular circumstances. We are much less likely to have thought of this as a separate kind of rational capacity.

Proposition: Whereas the printing press was an episteme engine, the Internet is a phronesis engine.

Alternative long phrasing: The printing press and the Internet are cognitive technologies that provide people and cultures with “mechanical advantage” or leverage for the development of the Aristotelean intellectual virtues of epistome and phronesis respectively.

It’s pretty easy to see how the printing press is responsible for the massive scaling of epistome into the general culture. It’s a bit harder to see how what the Internet is doing is the same for phronesis because our first viewing of the Internet (the web at least) has been that it’s just one giant sales brochure/advertising billboard/encyclopedia/etc, i.e. that it is a global source of knowledge. My proposition is that the key thing going on with the Internet is not access to knowledge, but rather access participation in knowledge processes. Three examples:

1. Wikipedia. What really matters about it is not that we have access to a massive knowledge font, but rather that each of us can become encyclopedists and have to face the questions of ontological classification, neutral voice, objective/subjective reality, etc, that that entails.

2. Blogs. A word perhaps for at least three information processes moved out mass culture: journalism, publishing, political analysis. Again the key shift is not that there is all this reporting/publishing/political analysis available for our consumption, but that that each of us can become journalists/publishers/political analysts.

3. The online-writing workshop. People come to the site thinking that they will get reviews of their writing which will improve it. They invariably discover that reviewing the work of others is how they end up learning to improve their own writing.

In each of these cases the key thing is the shift from access to static information, to active participation in an information process. The Internet is providing a “mechanical advantage” for putting people together in a place where they can jointly engage in the kind of information processes and processing that I think leads to the developing of phronesis.”

We continue our exploration of the blog of Jeff Vail.

For context, see our P2P Encyclopedia entry on Swarming, with theory and examples.

From his own analysis of concrete cases and recent defeats of this tactic, we choose the concluding excerpt:

“The success of a rhizome swarm depends in large part on its ability to communicate and affect the “pulse” of swarm operations coherently. Hierarchal forces that utilize swarm tactics (i.e. most historical examples) utilize hierarchal command and control to decide and communicate when and where to swarm, to mass forces. However, dependence on such hierarchal methods presents a great risk to any rhizomatic structure: the potential to involuntarily transition to hierarchy. Even the clearly rhizomatic Black Block in Seattle relied upon the hierarchy of cellular phone networks to affect their rhizome command and control. Word of mouth networking and other rhizome means of communication are effective, but potentially too slow and exposed for use in swarm warfare. The dependence on existing hierarchal communications systems is, at present, the Achilles ’ heel of any rhizome swarm—I know from personal experience just how easy it is for hierarchal militaries to deny such communications networks at will. In fact, it may not be an exaggeration to state that the future potential of rhizome militaries will rest on the need to identify and utilize a non-hierarchal communications vehicle… However, this need also represents an opportunity: due to the nature of swarm warfare, it is an ideal candidate for using a completely open communications network. It doesn’t matter if a hierarchal force intercepts the communications that result in the pulse of a swarming opponent—they will neither be able to process the rhizomatic nature of the information (i.e. flash mobs), nor will they be able to react fast enough to counter the pulse before it has disbursed.”

Thanks to Alan Kazlev and other friends,who seemed to have saved me from an impending
cyber-death. See here for details.

Happy festivities to all who have supported the work of the P2P Foundation in the past year.

As readers will have noticed, it has now become a truly collective endeavour.

Just some random thoughts, as I’m returning from a lecturing trip in Europe, which I combined with reading a remarkable book by Lawrence Taub, The Spiritual Imperative, Sex, Caste and the Last Age. Some other things that prompted my thoughts below, was an incredible lecture by Menno Van Doorn (Sogeti) on the rapid growth of crowdsourcing, reading an article in Business Week on the open source car project, and recent coverage of the explosion of the Asian blogosphere.

Taub has written the type of book you may find many details wrong with, but which overall, sets you thinking, and its immense value lies in generating so many questions. In short, as we will return on this book as Book of the Week later, he argues that rather than see the world as an evolution of class, we should look at it as an evolution of caste, with caste referring to deep seated preferences for a particular way of doing things and of conceiving the world. In short, he claims, as the Hindus would agree, we moved from the prevalence of the spiritual caste, to an evolution towards the subsequent dominance of warriors, merchants, and workers (the bureaucratic-technocratic structures of today), with a coming return of the spiritually-inclined.

An interesting points he makes is the following. In any transition, three phases can be recognized: 1) the pioneering phase which takes place in the dominant countries of the old sphere (example: emergent of merchants in feudal/imperial Spain and Portugal); 2) a revolutionary/evolutionary phase: the revolution takes place at the periphery (i.e. the merchants take power in Holland and England), while in the former dominant countries, an evolutionary caste merger takes place. But the countries where the revolution takes place, become the new dominant power centers. Example: the workers revolution’s took place at the periphery in Russia and China, but in the West,the elite of the worker’s caste merged with the merchant class to form social-welfare with technocratic capitalism.

Now to my own point. Think of the new OSCAR open source solar car project. Who in the West would be interested? It seems unlikely as workers would take a pay cut, and capital would be weary of operating without the IP projection that guarantees state-protected extra profits. But what of the Asian capital owners, who are in any case already illegaly copying many IP-protected designs. Why would they not be interested in taking up such copyright free designs? I see such an evolution as a distinct possibility.

A recent study of the Asian blogosphere pinpoints another important trend. It shows the enormous growth of blogs, but also that they are taken up by youth and women, and disdained by the older masculine elites which are still so dominant in the more authoritarian post-feudal cultures of Asia. The youth, already educated in the new ways, with access to the internet, are using blogs for expression and to bypass social limits, creating a new culture that is in headlong conflict with the older culture. Such an evolution could be a seed for a generation gap, and resulting social revolution, a kind of Asian 1960′s, that would enormously speed-up the uptake of the open/free, participatory and commons-oriented paradigms. Following Taub though, we should acknowledge that China for example, as an expression of the worker caste dominance, would be unlikely places for such radical change, and that we should look more to the Asian periphery, see Iran, or Malaysia?

What the future will bring is unknown, but I think it is important to open our minds to the possibilities that the major P2P evolutions, after the pioneering phase in the West and East Asia, may in fact emerge in full force elsewhere.

We continue our discovery of Jeff Vail’s stimulating ideas.

In this blog entry on anti-economies, he first outlines the assumptions of neoclassical economy:

Economy of place is the concept that some things are more efficiently done in certain places. Economy of scale is the concept that it is more efficient to do lots of one thing rather than trying to do a little of everything.

He then offers 2 alternatives directions:

1) replacing economies of place by economies of independence and diversity:

Economy of Independence: There is a certain, undeniable efficiency of not depending on things beyond your control. If Lampedusa’s primary economic product is capers, and if they depend on a strong market for capers to be able to purchase other fundamentals like food, clothing, shelter, etc., then they may reap the advantage of economy of scale, but they certainly also incur the disadvantage of diseconomy of dependence. Their prosperity–that is, the value of their economy of scale production–is dependent on the fickle demand for their one product. In addition, the diseconomy of dependence also demands that they incur increasing transaction costs for all the products that they must import…

Economy of Diversity: There is also a certain, undeniable efficiency found in diversity. No two environments are the same, no two sets of initial conditions are the same, and therefore there is no single solution to these diverse problems. While paying an architect to produce just one home design and then duplicating that design across endless tracts of land is efficient due to economy of scale, it is also inefficient due to failure to exploit economy of diversity. Every home site is slightly different, with different sun exposure, microclime, prevailing winds, views, etc. Not to mention that every occupant has different needs. The efficiency of designing each home to meet the exact demands of its site and occupant is an example of economy of diversity.

2) replacing economies of scale by economies of simplicity and ontogeny:

Economy of Simplicity: Economy of place and scale create massive information processing burdens–that is, the burden to coordinate the production of specialized elements (economy of scale) and distant elements (economy of place). The larger the hierarchal organization, the greater the percentage of its effort that must be dedicated to internal information process, command and control, etc. While small localized production faces diseconomies of place and scale, it also reaps economy of simplicity: One guy going out to check his chickens doesn’t have to allocate much of his time to HR concerns, vision statements, planning meetings, etc. He just goes out and checks his chickens. So while his time may be less efficiently spent, he spends nearly 100% of his time on that task. In a major corporation, let’s say Tyson, a significant portion of their cumulative time is spent on tasks other than their direct production of chickens.

Economy of Ontogeny: Finally, while spending your entire life attaching button B to sleve hole A may be amazingly efficient from the perspective of economy of scale, it isn’t exactly fulfilling. It might even make you go insane. This isn’t just whining–our genetic ontogeny creates certain inflexible limits on the tolerances of human activity. These limits are murky and far-reaching, but one pretty clear example is that a person who gets to make an entire shirt will enjoy better mental health than someone who just attaches button B–and from a purely economic standpoint, that superior mental health makes them a more efficient, more reliable, longer lasting human asset. It may seem like an insensitive analysis, but the point is actually quite humane: keeping people happy will also make them more economically efficient. So even if it comes at the cost of economy of scale, economy of ontogeny may be worth the cost…

Here’s a very interesting answer to the above question, in an essay by Jeff Vail called Energy, Society and Hierarchy, worth reading in full. It really drives home the importance of choosing distributed energy forms.

Excerpt:

“A quick review of economic relationships will demonstrate the central role of energy choices in an economy. Control over economic activity translates directly into political power (politics being generally defined as the decision process of how to distribute finite resources within a context of infinite desires). Similarly, control of certain energy resources needed to engage in economic activity translates directly into control over economic activity, which translates into political power.

Certain energy, for example small-scale wind turbines or solar-conscious home designs, are inherently decentralized. They are produced and controlled by the end consumer, and inherently focus political power and economic efficacy in the hands of the individual. Other energy resources, such as petroleum-derived energy, and especially nuclear power, do just the opposite — they take that control away from the individual and focus it in the hands of large corporations and central governments.

Historically, patterns of energy useage can effectively predict, and are a useful tool in understanding societal structure and hierarchy. Ancient China and Egypt, home to the earliest and most centralized/despotic civilizations, can be explained in terms of an energy-dependence dynamic. The energy that drove both these systems was control of the periodic flooding of the nile and yellow rivers, used to irrigate the agricultural systems of the respective societies. The individual land control of farmers in both societies has mystified many historians as to why such despotic political systems were allowed to develop. This can, however, be easily explained by the fact that it required huge, often 100,000+ man work details to keep these “hydraulic” (see Wittfogel) agriculture systems functioning — something that could only be accomplished by a powerful, centralized authority.

Conversely, tribal political structures, epitomized by autonomy and individual freedom (if not material wealth) are examples of highly de-centralized energy systems — mainly firewood gathered by individuals at a sustainable rate.”