Comments on: Jaron Lanier: we should monetize, not demonetize, the contributions of civil society

By: Michel Bauwens

Michel Bauwens — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 17:31:22 +0000

In reply to Jeremy.

It’s clear that many people and society gets benefits from use value creation, but, that is not sufficient to solve the ‘crisis of value’ that peer production creates, especially if the monetization is exclusively harvested by capital. The issue I’m concerned about is that simply paying people for work, is a reversal back to the commodity form, and therefore, that we need to find means of income that do not commodify, but preserve and sustain the commons and the commoners. The basic income is one such means, an economic transition income another, sortition-based support for qualit contributors and curators might be another … At the FC Forum, we demanded that platforms based on free input would re-invest 15% of their profit into the commons. I’m not sure I understand what you mean ‘keeping to that measurement’.?

By: Jeremy

Jeremy — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 12:46:48 +0000

What about the ways in which the internet has made things that used to be expensive cheaper or free? The saved time? The new information discovered that never would have been if one were researching in a library? Perhaps that is not a sufficient return on one’s investment of time and thought, but just because the benefits aren’t seen in the cash economy doesn’t mean they don’t exist. We’re getting a lot of our benefits from a form of progress that occurs without direct profit or monetary benefit — it doesn’t get recorded in the GDP, but it nevertheless is value.

The desire to monetize contributions to the internet is not necessarily misplaced, but it demands that a new phenomenon direct itself towards a certain measurement and only that measurement.

By: Lori

Lori — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 16:13:49 +0000

I suspect that the willingness of the long tail to be sharecropped is a symptom of the decimation of the solvent class rather than its cause. When no paying jobs are on offer, the opportunity cost of giving it away vanishes. Instead of monetizing the contributions of civil society, I advocate demonetizing the data whorehouses (misspelling intentional) by reverse engineering a public-domain "mirror" of, say, Walmart's global "point of view," as Lanier so elegantly puts it, using the suite of tactics I call "pubwan." At first I thought the main barriers to implementing this would be recruiting people to "volunteer information" and coordinating the activity of large numbers of people on near-zero budget (to avoid commercialism creep, or the tyranny of the business model). Now I am beginning to realize that the most obvious immediate benefit of pubwan (if implemented) to the consumer would be a sort of shop bot that is slightly more comprehensive or objective than existing commercial models. And that's a best-case estimate. The trouble with monetizing information is that I don't see any way to do it without digital rights management.