Another contribution to Re-public that engages with the theses in our article, Some notes on social antagonism in netarchical capitalism.

Henrik Ingo:

“The great achievement of the Web 2.0 phenomenon lies in that it has significantly grown the mass of users who are at least instinctively coming to appreciate the joys of sharing (Youtube), communication (forums, Facebook) or access to information (blogs). The time has not (yet) arrived when everyone would be an active Linux user, but through Web 2.0 the same value system is penetrating into a larger crowd.

A Web 2.0 company is typically one that facilitates some form of sharing – though in the case of say Facebook, the sharing of content, while it exists, is perhaps not its most charasteristic way of classification, it is perhaps better there to talk about rich communication. While doing so, Web 2.0 companies typically get the ownership of some central hub, such as the (proprietary) sharing technology itself (if built as a web service) or at least the common forum where the sharing takes place (should the technology or communication protocol be open).

Bauwens is further right in his assertion that the primary lines of tension are to be found here, and this will be defining in whether a company will be considered “good” or “evil” by the community. A company that can successfully resist the urge to exert too much control will be seen as an ally facilitating the sharing and communication of the community, one not in accord with the values of its community will be in trouble. In addition to the adherence to this hacker value of sharing and the commons, other values may certainly play also a part. One example would be privacy, how a company is trusted to treat the personal information of its users.

While the purely technical (de facto) openness of some service will be a crucial factor in deciding the classification of a company into good or evil, it is also somewhat a matter of public perception (or PR to be frank). One interesting example of this dynamic is Google. While it is not at all compatible with the hacker value system to store all one’s email on Google servers, approving that it is scanned for the purpose of advertising, myself and many of my friends have chosen to use GMail due to its accessibility, user friendliness and good spam filtering, even reliability. Yet, if this was Microsoft, or even Yahoo, some may have chosen not to utilise a similar service (I certainly would have).

So the lines between good and evil are not as absolute as one might think, trade offs are often made. (This does not of course include any of the millions of GMail users who use Google happily unaware of this question altogether.) For instance, it is an acceptable solution for me to store my email on Google, because I know I am able to download my email away from those servers (and actually do so for backup purposes) should I wish to change my email service. If this option wasn’t there, I would not have chosen to use GMail, it would be a showstopper. Compare this to some other platform, like Facebook, a similar service to “export” my data doesn’t exist. But, on the other hand, that data is currently not so important to me anyway. So I can afford a little innocent play with Facebook, even if it is not at all compatible with my hacker values, because the communication taking place there is not valuable to me (as data).

The social web is not, therefore, merely a web between human friends, but also a web of trust towards the companies acting in the community. And since a typical web 2.0 service will be free of charge anyway, trust is actually a dominating currency in the system and the existence of good Internet citizens an important asset to web companies.”