I’m continuing the reporting on the Vatican Conference on Pursuing the Common Good, still focusing on the representatives of Catholic social thinking, especially those with a detectable socially-progressive bent. After our discussions of the work of Pierpaolo Donati on the relational society and Luigino Bruno on the ecology of communion, here is a review, based on excerpts from the essay from Stefano Zamagni, which was entitled: RECIPROCITY, CIVIL ECONOMY, COMMON GOOD.

Today, we focus on his introduction of the tradition of civil humanism, a tradition of thought that was a discovery for me.

1. From the Introduction by Stefano Zamagni:

“This essay has a triple aim. First, to refresh a traditional Italian line of economic thought, which was rooted in the civic humanism of the thirteenth century and continued, with ups and downs, through the golden age of Italian Enlightenment philosophy in both its Milanese and Neapolitan variants. Second, to explain why it is not a good thing that interpersonal relations continue to be precluded from mainstream economics and why the discipline would do well to adopt a new scientific paradigm, the relational one. … Finally, I will indicate how the principle of reciprocity allows and favours the passage from the traditional welfare state to the civil welfare model.

A rupture was thus consummated between civil humanism and modernity. The experience of civil life came to an end at the threshold of modern philosophy.”

The above does not exhaust this most interesting contribution. The essay (you can ask me for a copy), continues to examine why this tradition broke down, and especially the ‘hard blows’ from Hobbes and Mandeville concerning ‘evil human nature’. Then, in the middle of the eighteenth century, again mostly in Italy (Naples), with thinkers such as Genovese, the civil oriented thinkers sought to refound the tradition, incorporating the critique. Even though Adam Smith in fact espoused many of their ideals, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, subsequent economists did not take up this strand of his thinking.

Zamagni:

“The civil economy of Leonardo Bruni, Leon Battista Alberti, Antonino of Florence, Vico, Genovesi, Romagnosi and Smith is not dead, however. Over the centuries it has continued to flow like a current in the subsoil of official economic doctrine. At times it has resurfaced in the thinking of some economists, including major ones (Alfred Marshall towers above them all). These are all chapters in a history of civil economy yet to be written.

Starting in the first half of the nineteenth century the civil vision of the market and of the economy in general began to disappear from scientific research and from political and cultural discourse. The reasons were many and varied. Let us mention just the two most important. The first was the slow but steady spread throughout high European cultural life, of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy. … The second reason was the industrial revolution and the definitive establishment of industrial society.”

It is therefore time for a new resurgence of the civil tradition:

“For some time now the discipline of economics has begun again to feel the need for the relational perspective in order to transcend the clash between the holistic and individualistic paradigms. Why is this? Actually, the focus must be on the individualistic paradigm, since for years the holistic one has been practically abandoned. Indeed the current of thought running from Ricardo and Marx to Polanyi and Sraffa, in which that paradigm is embedded, has ceased to offer a real alternative to the intellectual hegemony of neoclassical thought in its countless versions. Note that the relational perspective I am considering here is not that of exchange but that of reciprocity. Exchange is instrumental in nature: it is obvious that every time I initiate an exchange I am entering into a relation with someone, but this relation is merely instrumental, a means to my end. A relation of reciprocity, by contrast, considers the force of “between” as Buber (1972) suggests; in economics, this is captured by the concept of relational good (Zamagni, 2005).”

This resurgence is finding a way back in discourse through the controversies of human motivation, and the increasing revolt against understand as solely motivated by interest.

Zamagni:

“What route can we take, then, to overcome the paralyzing reductionism of “received economic theory”? Scholarly responses are differentiated, not convergent, but there is consensus on one point: it is urgent to abandon the assumption of homogeneous motivation for all agents. Note that this does not mean simply banishing homo oeconomicus, because there are in fact a-social persons in the world who neither “help” nor “harm” others. What we need to do is to recognize that the economic world is also inhabited by other types of subjects. Some are anti-social (the envious, for example, who in order to inflict harm or suffering on someone else is willing to sustain a cost that he knows will produce no material benefit for himself; or the malicious, who takes pleasure in other people’s ill fortune); others still are pro-social (such as the increasingly numerous consumers who support and sustain the fair trade and ethical finance movements; or the businessmen, also increasing in number, who are instituting democratic stakeholding in their firms as the practical expression of corporate social responsibility). Pro-social acts, it should be noted, are such not because they are actually in the public interest but because they are performed with the public interest in mind.

The second implication is that one can no longer keep the category of relationality outside of economic studies. The fact that human beings live partly in a symbolic dimension leads unavoidably to the idea of relationality and the notion of the relational good. The person in relation to others is what is missing in conventional economic theory, which appears not to see that what is relevant to people is not to be found only in people themselves – as in the “new social economics” of such scholars as Durlauf, Murphy and Kline (2001) – but between them.”

Zamagni then, after an analysis of the problematique of globalization, presents the new concept of a civil welfare economy, but that is for another day.

Source: Draft essay by Stefano Zamagni for the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, 2008: Reciprocity, Civil Economy, Common Good.

This is a crucially important essay by Harry Halpin, which stresses that behind the protocols that govern online social systems, there are people, and that therefore, purely technical strategies are bound to fail. Above all, Halpin warns us for strategies of retreat from the present internet.

So, in a crucial way, this is a critique of Alexander Galloway’s earlier book on Protocol and the updated version of his ideas that Galloway co-wrote with John Thackara, The Exploit, a book of which I haven’t heard yet.

His main charge is that this thinking has evolved into a form of political paranoia. According to Halpin Galloway fetichizes/idolizes the technical structure, called for an anti-Web, but that also means in a fundamental way that all hope in the present possibilities of the internet and the web have been forsaken. In this sense, calling for an anti-web is a profoundly defeatist proposition.

Here’s how Harry introduces the theme of his essay in Mute Magazine, which is entitled, The Immaterial Aristocracy of the Internet:

This ‘class’ concept refers to the groups of people that are most influential in creating democratic online realities, through their intervention in the design of social protocols, and their work in standard bodies. As protocols are the works of humans, the terrain of struggle cannot be limited to the protocols itself, but is also a struggle for human choices, either through self-organized protocol design, or through political participation in standard bodies and other instruments of what he calls digital sovereignty.

Let’s retrace his argumentation, though this does not replace the recommended full reading of the original.

Harry Halpin:

” Galloway is correct to point out that there is control in the internet, but instead of reifying the protocol or even network form itself, an ontological mistake that would be like blaming capitalism on the factory, it would be more suitable to realise that protocols embody social relationships. Just as genuine humans control factories, genuine humans – with names and addresses – create protocols. These humans can and do embody social relations that in turn can be considered abstractions, including those determined by the abstraction that is capital. But studying protocol as if it were first and foremost an abstraction without studying the historic and dialectic movement of the social forms which give rise to the protocols neglects Marx’s insight that “Technologies] are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified.”

Harry then offers an extended history and commentary on the struggle for digital sovereignty. This central part of the essay is a very important history of the forms of power that have governed the internet, and interestingly, Halpin detects 3 movements. One, an realized and successful attempt to create ‘absolute democrary’, this is very close to what I call peer governance, through the self-aggregation of volunteers in the IETF, the Internet Engineering Task Force; then a loss of control to private and state interest; and a partial recapture of more democratic power through the W3C which governs web standards, and is governed by representive, not absolute, democracy. The original loss occurred because the original ‘anarchist’ format could not create universal standards, which gave leeway to private standards to emerge, but the universal standard of the web achieved a new compromise between collective/common interests of the users and engineers, and of the corporations. It achieved this by enticing the totality of corporate interests to enter into the democratically governed universal standard body.”

This is a convincing, and very important account, in my opinion, a story which hadn’t been written as well before.

Finally, Halpin offers his conclusions:

“This inspection of the social forms, historical organisation, and finances ofthe protocol-building bodies of the net is not a mere historical excursion. It has consequences for the concrete creation of revolutionary collectivity in the here and now. Many would decry the very idea that such collectivity can be developed through the net as utopian. In the face of imperialist geopolitics masquerading behind the war on terror and rampant accompanying paranoia, such a utopian perspective is revolutionary. Clearly, a merely utopian perspective is not enough, it needs to be combined with concrete action to move humanity beyond capital. One critique of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concept of ‘the multitude’ as the new networked revolutionary agent is that its proponents have no concrete plan for bringing it from the virtual to the actual. Fashionable post-autonomism in general leaves us with little else but utopian demands for global citizenship and social democratic reforms such as guaranteed basic income. An enquiry into the immaterial aristocracy can help us recognise the social relations that determine the technological infrastructure which enables the multitude’s social form, while not disappearing into ahistoricism.

‘Hackers’ and net artists’ struggles against protocol are not the only means of liberation. The vast majority of these interventions are unknown to the immaterial aristocracy and those outside the circles of ‘radical’ digerati. Instead, we should see the creation of new protocols as a terrain of struggle in itself. The best case in point might be the creation of the Extensible Messaging and Presence Protocol, which took instant messaging out of the hands of private corporations like AOL and allowed instant messaging to be implemented in a decentralised and open manner. This in turn allowed secure technologies like ‘Off-the-Record’ instant messaging to be developed, a technology that can mean the difference between life and death for those fighting repressive regimes. This protocol may become increasingly important even in Britain, since it is now illegal to refuse to give police private keys for encrypted email. These trends are important for the future of any revolutionary project, and the concrete involvement of radicals in this particular terrain of struggle could be a determining factor in future of the net. Protocol is not only how control exists after decentralisation. Protocol is a how the common is created in decentralisation, another expression of humanity’s common desire for collectivity.”

Donati writes from within the tradition of the social doctrine of the Catholic Church and aims to push it towards a more radical relational understanding of its concept of the common good. The following are excerpts from his written contribution: For the Proceedings of THE PONTIFICAL ACADEMY OF SOCIAL SCIENCES, XIV Plenary Session, 2-6 May 2008. Prospects (working paper): Discovering the Relational Character of the Common Good. Pierpaolo Donati, University of Bologna and PASS

Donati:

“If the good is a common object, it is because the individuals who share it also have certain relations among them. If it is a good (in a moral sense), this is because people relate in a certain way to such an object and also to one another.

The common good belongs to that reality which is relational in character («Life in its true sense … is a relationship», affirms Benedict XVI in the encyclical Spe Salvi, n. 27).”

Today, we give a brief overview of our impressions, and re-introduce the main theme of the conference:

“It was an altogether strange but rich experience, to find myself for the first time inside the Vatican, for four full days. The event was organized by the Pontifical Academy of the Social Sciences, an august body that has received distinguished researchers, both as members and outside experts, including numerous politicians and Nobel Prize winners. At the meeting were present the Nobel Prize economist Stiglizt, but also a former President of Columbia (Betancur), at least two former prime ministers (one from Poland). Nevertheless, it remains a largely ‘white European’ gathering, with few women, and very few Asians or Africans, though Latin-America was well represented. I also met two fellow Belgians. But the women who are present, have important roles and contributions, with Margaret Archer, a ‘critical realist’ sociologist and author of a very ‘p2p’ theory of ‘morphogenetic society’, being the co-organizer of this year’s gathering, along with Pierpaolo Donati, who has been working for years on a explictely ‘relational’ social theory.

Here are some general remarks about the meeting. First of all, the place. The Vatican is a lot smaller than I thought it would be, I was told no more than 350 people live and work there, but it remains an overwhelming experience to be totally immersed in a medieval city-state that has no overt aspects of modernity in its entire architecture. It really seems to operate on a different temporal modality, and if you stay in the Domus Maria, a kind of internal hotel, there is no television or radio. The meeting took place in the Casina Pio, a Renaissance villa built for the last pope of the Medici family. It is a beautiful surrounding (the garden, the eating place with marvelous fresco’s, etc…) but the meeting room is cramped and leaves little room for taking notes or moving the legs. Using a computer would even be more difficult, so I didn’t bother. The days were quite long, starting at nine a.m. and we would never be back in our rooms before 9 pm.

The participants are a very varied lot, mixing U.S. neoconservatives, European continental ‘classic Catholic conservatives’ who are still very much immersed in Aristotelian and Thomist thinking, but also grassroot activists from the Philippines who work with local communities, and progressive Catholic economists and social science thinkers. In addition, the PASS is very open in its invitations to outside experts which included 2 protestants, French and Belgian secular thinkers, including ‘associational socialists’. What is interesting is the high value of the intellectual contributions, none of them were superficial or superfluous, and the trans-disciplinarity of the proceedings, something still very rare in the official scientific world (as I was told by several of the scientists who were present). In short, this is a gathering which takes thought and dialogue seriously.

Now as to the theme. Pursuing the Common Good: can solidarity and subsidiarity go together?

The social doctrine of the Church, though only developed in the 1870’s, was a reaction to the devastation that its institutions experienced through the French Revolution, when the majority of its buildings and personnel were lost, and it faced a doctrine of full state sovereignity which denied the independent existence of intermediary bodies. Though it recognizes the importance of the state, it’s aim is really to preserve a autonomous place for civil society organizations such as itself. Originally, a reaction, this turns out to be a prescient choice, especially after the world system has experience both the negatives of state totalitarianism (the giant factory of the Soviet system), and of ‘there is only the market’ neoliberalism. The doctrine is centered around four principles. Imagine first a vertical axis, with as polarities human dignity and the common good. Human dignity is a given, since we are at the image of God, and does not proceed from society. Society on the other hand is a ‘unity of order’ with the purpose of creating common goods. Then imagine a horizontal axis, with the following two polarities. One is subsidiary, and is directed as balancing mechanism against state power. It’s a way to allocate resources at the ‘appropriate’ level of civil society, and the state should only intervene as both meta-regulator, i.e. protector of the common good ‘as such’, but mostly as making sure that every individual and organization can produce its own common goods. The appropriate level is not necessarily the lowest one, since some problems should be addressed globally, but they do not need to be addressed by a global state form. Donati distinguished vertical subsidiarity (between hierarchical levels), horizontal (between organizations on the same level, i.e. national state and national NGO for example), and lateral, between the subjects of civil society proper.

What is important for me is that the social doctrine confirms the primacy of civil society, just as peer to peer theory does, and that it is anti-utilitarian in its understand, hence it goes beyond dominant market thinking and the view of the human as a homo economicus exclusively determined by his selfish interest.

Some ‘christian social thinkers’, like Donati, go further by pushing for a more radical relational understanding of the common good. That will be for tomorrow.

From a discussion on the Oekonux mailing list (list-en), Christian Siefkes refers to an important aspect of peer production projects, i.e. their stigmergic aspects, which allow to coordinate work through impersonal messaging of what needs to be done.

Christian Siefkes:

“A hinting system also serves as an informal mechanism for prioritizing tasks: the more people care for a task, the more likely it is to be picked up by somebody (since the corresponding hints tend to become more visible and explicit, and since people are more likely to pick up a task they wish to be done).

Francis Heylighen doesn’t use “hint” in the narrow sense. Every missing feature of a program that you notice is a hint indicating how/where this software could be enhanced; every bug is a hint indicating where it needs to be improved. Whenever you discover and report abug, or whenever you discover it and submit a patch for it (which I have done quite often), you have followed a hint which the developers of the program left (though they didn’t leave it intentionally).”

Example:

“I’m on the mailing list of a medium-size free software project [1] and there are regularly (not frequently, but from time to time) mails from people asking “I like the software and I would like to contribute, what can I do?” (or “I’m using the software and would like to give something back, what can I do?”) Then somebody points them to the task list [2], and, if they have the energy to follow this up, they self-select themselves for a task. Of course, there are also people who come up with their own ideas (with about the same frequency, I would guess), but even they typically refer to the agenda or the goals of the project.”

From an interesting discussion at the Oekonux mailing list, by Christian Siefkes, where he explains what his proposed effort-sharing is not, i.e. a market form.

“- Not an exchange system

A problem with LETS is that they don’t have a model of cooperation (they basically assume that everybody produces in isolation), while my model is all about cooperation. Another problem is that they still presuppose _exchange_: in order to participate in a LETS, you need to offer something that others want to have. But in my model, you don’t exchange anything with anybody, you just need to be ready to contribute your part to the overall effort (by picking up some of the tasks than need to be done). Hence the problem that every market, or LETS, participant faces (”What can I offer that the others need, and how can I convince them that they need it?”), simply does not emerge.

(Another important difference of the fact the work is merely divided up is that, while you’ll have to work a little, you probably won’t have to work very much. While in capitalism you sell your labor power, and accordingly your employer determines how much you work–you might prefer to work less, but unless you’re in a privileged position you often won’t be able to do so.)

We’ve never even talked about Clay Shirky’s landmark book Here Comes Everybody. I guess the reason is that it was already so present everywhere, that I did not feel it needed added backup from our own limited means.

Nevertheless, it is of course a hugely important book. To give you an idea, here Clay introduces the idea of the cognitive surplus, the huge amount of free cognitive time that was previously unavaillable, which becomes wasted at first, but when it comes truly into awareness, creates deep transformatory pressures in society.

The entire lecture this is coming from is a gem, we recommend reading it whole.

The cognitive surplus:

“So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

It’s also become my motto, when people ask me what we’re doing–and when I say “we” I mean the larger society trying to figure out how to deploy this cognitive surplus, but I also mean we, especially, the people in this room, the people who are working hammer and tongs at figuring out the next good idea. From now on, that’s what I’m going to tell them: We’re looking for the mouse. We’re going to look at every place that a reader or a listener or a viewer or a user has been locked out, has been served up passive or a fixed or a canned experience, and ask ourselves, “If we carve out a little bit of the cognitive surplus and deploy it here, could we make a good thing happen?” And I’m betting the answer is yes..”

Does peer production hamper the monetary economy?

With Adam Arvidsson, I have been developing the concept of a crisis of value that will increasingly affect the workings of the current money-based system. The way I interpret this trend, is that while peer production causes the creation of use value to grow exponentially, only a part of this is being transformed into monetary value.

Yes, peer production creates value, and yes, a commons usually does create an economy around it, but the kind of value created tends to escape the confines of a capitalist economy.

This is both good and bad news. Value creation is of course good for a society, and current economic players have but little choice to engage in the various forms of social innovation that are emerging, but when that value cannot be captured through the main economic mechanisms, that does create a problem.

The problem is in a nutshell that the new forms of value take an overwhelming post-monetary, and hence, post-capitalist form.

Classic companies are endangered by the new practices, and peer producers do not get adequate benefits to sustain their practice.

I feel a recent number of reports strengthen this case, so hear me out while I marshall the evidence, proving both sides of the argument.

1. On the Use Value Creation side

First of all, a recent study confirms that free and open source software is growing at an exponential rate. It’s not a fluke.

Researchers Amit Deshpande and Dirk Riehle from SAP Research find that ” find that both the growth rate as well as the absolute amount of source code is best explained using an exponential model.”

This confirms the thesis of the exponential growth in use value production. Equally on the positive side, even open source hardware business models can now be adequately explained. See Edy Ferreira’s take in the April 2008 issue of the Open Source Business Resource. We can see this as confirmation of the creation of business models around the commons

2. On the Exchange Value Crisis side

However, the crisis of value thesis seems confirmed by the two following items.

Open-source software is successfully displacing proprietary applications in many large companies and eating into the annual revenues of proprietary software vendors by $60bn (£30bn) a year!!

According to the study from the Standish Group called Trends in Open Source , released this week, the losses of proprietary software makers are disproportionate to the actual spend on open-source software, which is a mere six percent of an estimated worldwide spend of $1 trillion per year. The researchers put this difference down to the fact that a large proportion of open source isn’t paid for, an intended result of the open-source licensing structure.

This is a rather striking confirmation of the crisis of value thesis, I would think, in line with Adam and my expectations.

In an earlier intervention, we pointed out that in peer production, being an entrepreneur is divorced from the need to be a capitalist.

Boing Boing gives ammunition to this thesis , citing a Wired article , that concludes that ” Internet startups are so cheap to do these days that venture capitalists can’t find enough companies to take their money — it’s easier just to self-finance or raise the dough from friends and family”

3. Conclusion

1. Peer production creates exponential use value generation

2. This creates a certain amount of monetary value

3. But most of the created value is non-monetary

4. The monetary stream thus created may not compensate for the disruptive effects amongst pre-peer production economics

All of these points do not invalidate the law of asymmetrical competition that companies adapting various aspects of peer production will be more competitive that those who do not, and that the former will capture more of the derivative exchange value thus created, harming those who cannot.

But on a macro-scale, our societies need solutions that allow for the social reproduction of the peer producers, since the major part of the use value creation may not be naturally ‘monetized’.

In our last installment of Axel Bruns recommended book, he asks: what are the political consequences and potentialities of the produsage of politics?

Excerpt:

“A crucial step in the advance towards a more participatory, active, monitorial form of citizenship is the embedding of such practices into everyday life, and blogging and other forms of participation in continuing, produsage-based, deliberative models for discussing and debating the news provide a useful model. As Jenkins points out, this is a question of moving beyond participation in political processes only in the lead-up to elections and in the context of major political issues; “the next step is to think of democratic citizenship as a lifestyle.” This does not necessarily provide an argument against the necessarily limited issue-based action coalitions we have discussed already, however; instead, it encourages citizens to participate in a variety of such coalitions, to join a number of the communities of political produsers whose interests and concerns match their own. Much as elsewhere in produsage, to do so will give rise to loose and fluid heterarchies of participation, and ad hoc alliances organizing specific actions and coordinating the development and evaluation of new policy initiatives.

If the core characteristics of produsage are translated to the political process, then, this would lead us to the following principles:

* Open participation, communal evaluation: political produsage proceeds from the assumption that the community of informed citizens as a whole, if sufficiently large and varied, can contribute more than a closed team of politicians and policy-makers, however qualified they may be, and thereby affirms the probabilistic principle. Policies and political ideas proposed by participants and developed by the community are also evaluated collaboratively by the community.

* Fluid heterarchy, ad hoc meritocracy: citizens participate in political deliberations and policy-making processes as is appropriate to their personal skills, interests, and knowledges (their equipotentiality to do so is affirmed), and may form loose subgroups to focus on specific issues, topics, or problems; this changes as the produsage project proceeds, and is governed ad hoc, based on merit, by the community itself.

* Unfinished artefacts, continuing process: political positions and policies as artefacts of the political produsage project are continually under development, and therefore always unfinished; their development follows evolutionary, iterative, palimpsestic paths. No one political actor, no one ideology, holds all answers and is set in stone: instead, politics and policy are reconstituted as granular in structure.

* Common property, individual rewards: contributors permit community sharing, adaptation, and further development of their political and policy ideas, rather than defending them strongly as their ideas and thereby preventing participants from different political backgrounds to contribute to and collaborate in the policy development process; nonetheless, the developers and implementers of political ideas are recognized and rewarded by the status capital they gain through this process.

Perhaps these principles appear relatively modest at first glance, and perhaps they appear not to extend much beyond the bounds of citizen consultation in the political process as it has been practiced more or less effectively (and honestly) for some time already. However, on closer inspection they signal a major departure from the late-industrial model of politics.

In the first place, the shift to a community-based model of political produsage would mean that policy no longer emerges from the think-tanks and party rooms associated with political parties, but may originate just as well from citizen communities themselves. Further, the fluidity of roles in this process indicates that in order to see policy adopted by governments it would be no longer necessary for such citizen communities to align themselves with political parties, or seek election to office in their own right; instead, they would work with and alongside governments in order to gain broad acceptance of their policy suggestions. In effect, this changes both the procedures for policy generation and the ownership of political and policy ideas: where in the present late-industrial system, political positions are generated and “owned” by specific parties, and adoption of the opposition’s policy suggestions is decried and eschewed as a sign of weakness, a produsage-based system of politics would be more permeable to new ideas once they have been sufficiently vetted, debated, and deliberated on by the community of informed citizens. Put another way, where presently, political parties have a tendency to pass off new policy ideas as their own once they have incorporated them into their political agendas, in an open system based on produsage political capital is generated not mainly from being the originator of new ideas, but from the ability to identify, flesh out, and implement them.

This is analogous to the shift of parts of the software industry from closed to open source production models: for companies which have embraced open source, the business model is based not on developing new technologies exclusively in-house for later commercialization as products (whose inner workings are highly guarded trade secrets), but on allowing staff programmers to freely contribute to collaborative open source projects, thereby both building a better understanding of what users want and need, relying on a much larger community of developers, software testers, and users than is available in-house, and identifying further potential for offering commercial products and services around the free resources created in the produsage process. Produsage politics would similarly shift from the in-house production of policy, which suffers from a limited understanding of citizens’ lived experience, hopes, and expectations of government, to an open and collaborative engagement with informed citizens in developing policy, and from a “business model” based on outdoing the opposition through surprise policy announcements and government spending in swing electorates to one where approval is gained and maintained by providing the best “products and service” around the collaboratively prodused policy initiatives—that is, approval is gained from demonstrating faithful and efficient development, implementation and management of prodused policy initiatives (thus translating the “common property, individual rewards” principle to the political realm).

Finally, produsage politics like all artefacts of produsage projects must also be seen as inherently unfinished and ready for further improvement; this means that a politics based on produsage is, although not opposed to participants with strongly held ideological positions, then certainly inaccessible to those who are unwilling to engage in open and meaningful political deliberation which may ultimately change their minds. Produsage-based politics would open the pathway to a political structure in which there are constant small, granular, incremental, evolutionary changes to policies and political positions rather than lengthy periods of limited change punctuated by (apparent) political paradigm shifts when government and opposition exchange place. This constantly adjusting model of politics may also be what Lévy has in mind when he writes that

“we can’t reinvent the instruments of communication and collective thought without reinventing democracy, a distributed, active, molecular democracy. Faced with the choice of turning back or moving forward, … humanity has a chance to reclaim its future … by systematically producing the tools that will enable it to shape itself into intelligent communities, capable of negotiating the stormy seas of change.”

Such politics, and such democracy, is molecular, then, because it no longer relies on the large and (without lengthy periods of socialization and apprenticeship) relatively closed bodies of political parties to contain the majority of the political and policy-making process, in much the same way that software and encyclopedia users now no longer need to rely on the large and closed enterprises of Microsoft and Britannica and their various commercial competitors to produce the products they require. Instead, the molecular approach decentralizes and distributes the process of development into a wider, broader, and deeper network of contributors to the overall project (respectively, groups of informed citizens, open source software development communities, and the interest groups attached to any page or collection of pages in the Wikipedia), and from out of this network emerge the evolving and gradually improving artefacts of the process which can be used in place of traditional industrial products.”

Source:

Axel Bruns. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Axel Bruns asks: how safe are the achievements of participatory produsage from commercial enclosure?

Third excerpt (without notes and references) from his book: Axel Bruns. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.

Excerpt:

“The emergence of produsage itself can be seen simply as a symptom of a wider informationalization of all aspects of our everyday lives, our economy, our society. With the help of technological advances, information is being embedded ever more deeply into all aspects of life, but this is not a process driven by technology as such; indeed, perhaps it would be more correct to say that our networked information and communication technologies have helped merely to make more notable, more visible, more explicitly extractable and usable, the information and knowledge which was already always, inherently, necessarily embedded in all aspects of human existence, action, and interaction.

Technology, in this view, is merely a support mechanism serving to connect and amplify processes of information use and knowledge generation which have always been a fundamental aspect of human life; it helps address what Lévy describes as a central problem for collective intelligence, that of discovering or inventing something beyond writing, beyond language, so that the processing of information can be universally distributed and coordinated, no longer the privilege of separate social organisms but naturally integrated into all human activities, our common property.

Produsage adds to this by providing a system which enables this broad-scale participation in collective intelligence without channeling it necessarily through the processes of conventional production; removing commercial and other filters which operate through an imposition of hierarchical structures determining a priori what knowledge and what participants are to be seen as most valuable, or most likely to be valuable—by contrast, it allows such structures to emerge from within the process, from within the community, and from within the commons itself. “Building the commons has a crucial ingredient: the building of a dense alternative media network, for permanent and collective self-education in human culture, away from the mass-consumption model promoted by the corporate media.” This, too, may be understood not so much as a new development, but merely as the rediscovery of older patterns of human interaction and collective intelligence extant in a preindustrial age, of course. Ultimately, then, this new human dimension of communication should obviously enable us to share our knowledge and acknowledge it to others, which is the fundamental condition for collective intelligence. Beyond this are two major possibilities, which could radically transform the fundamental data of social life. First, we will have at our disposal simple and practical means for knowing what we are doing as a group. Second, we will be able to manipulate, much more easily than we are able to write, the instruments for collective utterance. This will … take place … in keeping with the size and speed of the enormous turbulence, deterritorialized processes, and anthropological nomadism that we are now subject to.

But we should not simply assume that such shifts to collaborative processes of produsage will continue unhindered, or that they are not themselves open to diversion through commercial or other interests. Although it remains as yet unclear exactly what direct benefits, if any, News Corporation will derive from its acquisition of MySpace, and what effects the clash of its conventional, top-down, corporate culture with the bottom-up social network of MySpace will generate, this corporate embrace (and perhaps enclosure) of social networking environments and produsage sites more generally—as we have also already seen it in our examination of corporately owned online gaming environments, for example—raises serious questions for a future in which more and more of our activities of social interaction and social networking may take place in such online environments.

Benkler suggests, for example, that the winners from a shift to what he describes as ‘commons-based peer production’ “would be a combination of the widely diffuse population of individuals around the globe and the firms or other toolmakers and platform providers who supply these newly capable individuals with the context for participating in the networked information economy” ; what remains unclear from this description, however, is the exact manner in which the corporate players in this process would be likely to extract their winnings from the social commons.

Again, here, we can envision a variety of more or less benign possibilities; it is certainly conceivable that significant corporate earnings can be generated simply from advertising and other ancillary practices which harness the level of interaction in produsage communities without directly or substantially affecting that interaction itself. In addition, and more problematically, the content generated by produsers may also be harvested and on-sold for commercial gain; this would be acceptable as long as it respects the community’s own intentions for how its work would be used, and does not operate simply under cover of legal but essentially unethical end-user license agreements.

Harboring the community itself may also be able to generate substantial income flow, where the harboring services themselves are such that community members will happily pay one-off or continuous service fees, but at the same time it also raises the specter of community hijack: fee structures may be altered, and corporate governance rules changed, without consultation with a community whose strong buy-in to an existing site might make it prohibitively difficult for it to take its contents and social networks and move on to a different, more benevolently governed environment.

[…]

Concerns over the commercial enclosure of produsage are significantly reduced, however, if we realize that the networked information technologies which have helped us to rediscover vernacular creativity and cultural engagement, and to channel such activities into produsage proper, also enable us to develop many forms of produsage which no longer require the existence of a central, unified space or environment; increasingly, as the blogosphere, filesharing networks, and folksonomic content tagging activities all demonstrate at present, produsage can also take place as a massively distributed, decentralized activity. Today, such spaces can no longer be enclosed through commercial, legislative, or other top-down processes: their contributors form loose and non-committal networks only, and may not even be fully aware of the networks to which they belong; they are connected through the use of shared technological frameworks either intentionally (through their own efforts to engage with one another) or through automatic means. Such interconnections are increasingly enabled through the further development of technologies which facilitate them, including Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and the AJAX frameworks which form the basis for Web 2.0; they enable the further disconnection of content from the spaces in which it originates. To the extent that they are effectively policed, these environments are policed by the community itself as it develops social and technological norms which facilitate the effective exchange and engagement between nodes within the overall distributed network.”