Trebor Scholz has written an important call for an ethics of participation, which I strongly recommend to read here. It’s an update to an earlier essay on the challenge of participation.

After documenting his argument mainly through the YouTube buy-out, he presents the following conclusion:

“How can our immaterial labor be turned into an autonomous act? We can start by counteracting the mentioned centralization by not (exclusively) using mainstream services.
(Many predictions for 2007 included the rise of an ocean of user-built online applications). We can re-direct our “micro-volunteerism” toward not-for-profit projects like Archive.org
or Wikipedia. Archive.org offers video upload functionality but is much slower and complicated to use. Even creating simple awareness of future dependence on mainstream
services like Flickr, YouTube, Amazon is valuable. These are admittedly micro-actions that counteract American-style convenience; they can be implemented right away. I propose
this as a modest starting point for a discussion of the ethics of participation.”

My response:

A very useful and interesting post, to which I’d like to play advocate of the devil.

I’d like to focus on the concrete choices of both individuals and ‘netarchical capitalists’.

From the point of view of the ‘individual collectivist’, i.e. the user, he has a new and emerging type of need which requires participatory platforms. It’s where he can express himself, share, eventually produce something in common (a hierarchy of needs ranging from the self to the other).

Where to do this? He/she has a choice to using a nonprofit, such as Wikipedia, or a corporate funded environment. Wikipedia is far from perfect, as I recently experienced around an entry with Ken Wilber, where entrenched advocates deleted almost all the critique. Apparently, the democratic majority of the Wikipedia has decided that blogs have no authority, which is really ironic. So, I’m just saying, Wikipedia is a fine example of peer production, but it is still problematic. Using a corporate environment like YouTube or Amazon, or delicious, I’m a very big fan of the latter, it has really changed my information habits, you have extremely useful and well-working services. In the case of delicious, there is also the potential of influencing people with your ideas, as you are inevitably networked. So you have imperfect nonprofits, well-functioning privately owned platforms. An alternative is to create your own cooperatives: it is very difficult, you have to find the funds, you have to be better than the alternatives. So that, participating in the existing nonprofit or private platforms is a natural first choice. Doing that choice, you are part of a broad social movement, you are within the contradictions of the supply, and you are part of the learning experiences who are facing the duality of those services. You are part of the user and audience communities. I find this to be a very compelling choice. This is not to say you have to acquiesce, but by sharing your opinions, you play a role. If I would instead join a small alternative, it would probably work less well, you’d be in a small incrowd of the like-minded, you’d have all kinds of problems of funding. Of course, it can work, as Linux has proven, but success is probably also dependent on the evilness of the alternative, which was very clear in the case of MS.

Now from the point of view of the producers. Once you have success, you start having to face very large costs, just to fund the access. You can go the route of user donations, a very dificult one; you can look for subsidies, a very politized game which makes you dependent on state or foundations or corporations, or you can create a business model out of it. The latter is not automatically evil: you can have cooperative business models, co-ownership, ethical or responsible business models.

I’ll add with the provocative argument around peer production. If peer production is truly non-reciprocal, i.e freely contributed labour, and universal usage on the basis of the need, then reactions of those that do not mind partial commercialization, make a lot of sense. Free software programmers know this very well, they have developed a whole ecology of support mechanisms, do not mind the derivate services by businesses, as long as within the producing community, there is no direct payment and thus unequality of rewards (this crowds out the nonreciprocal motivation, see recently the dunctanc debate within debian), and as long as the commons is not appropriated.

This means that revenue-sharing is not necessarily a good solution either, as it immediately distorts the productive process, you are no longer doing it for the use or expressive value alone, but must then chase popularity, and all its entailing compromises. Your’e no longer in non-reciprocal peer production either. Similarly, as soon as you create a cooperative business model, you exit the zone of non-reciprocal peer production, and enter another zone of a scarce market, you are part of the competive game. Just as useful in my view is to participate, but to be critical of the for-profit compromises that are going to be made by the owners, to create some kind of real but elastic limit, beyond which they would seen to be entering a betrayal zone. When that is clear, then you can go away to alternatives, and you will be followed massively (see the MySpace exodus)

Free software peer producers however, have strong links, are strong as a community. In the intermediate zone of individual collectivism, you have only weak links, since you are there in the first place for your own expressive and sharing needs. But that does not mean that they
powerless and there have been quite a few instances of backtracking by amazon and the others, whenever the community of users have been energized. The corporate platform makers are very dependent on their user communities, as dependent as they are on their shareholders. Even in those weak-link communities, many users intuitively understand that their platforms have to be sustainable, that they are the true, but non-reciprocal producers of the value, that they get all kinds of non-monetary value out of it, and that the platform organizers need equally to make a living. These users are not just naive, they are co-productive of their environment. The task, in my view, of the ethically more aware, is to move with them, learn with them, learn from them.

In conclusion, I’m all for an ethics of participation, I’m all for ethical consistency, but it provides no easy answers, can easily descend in the moral righteousness of an isolated incrowd.

So here we are, we all have a primary responsibility to feed ourselves and our families, to make our own projects sustainable, facing different choices, such as self-funding, chasing subsidies, or finding a business model. Choosing the latter part is not necessarily evil’, chasing competitively for subsidies is not necessarily ‘good’. Choosing the path of donations can be suicidal …

Michel