Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 25

Adam Fish

An investigation into participatory cartography – amateur and collaborative mapmaking – exhibits how theories of peer production often neglect how collective collaboration is dependent upon the state and fuels corporate technological development. This chapter investigates four case studies of participatory cartography, using theories of new materialism and technological power to expose the links between volunteerism and capitalism. For example, the participatory mapping project OpenStreetMap and its links to technology companies such as Bytemark and CloudMade, the early days of the US drone hacker network transforming into the for‐profit companies 3DR and DJI, and the problems of inequality related to the Indonesian Dayak community countermapping projects offer vivid examples of how the autonomy of peer production can be limited by elite technological power. Also, the Global Positioning System, the most important technology for participatory mapping, is a highly costly platform financed by the state. The new materialistic approach taken in this chapter emphasizes the entanglements of technology, culture, and politics and the movement of power across these different domains. That peer production is dependent on extant forms of technological power does not extinguish its political potential. On the contrary, the materialism approach invites proponents of peer production to better respond to the inequities associated with elite domination of technological power.