Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 44

There never was a “tragedy of the commons”: Garrett Hardin’s overgrazing farmers were victims of a tragedy of self‐management, as they failed to collectively regulate, as equals, their common pasture. When Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, the immemorial notion that there are only two types of goods in the world – private and public, coordinated by markets or the state – was finally put to rest. In the most general terms, peer producers are people who create and manage common‐pool resources together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons are non‐rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non‐excludable (no‐one can prevent others from using them, through property rights for example). So, practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers,” however we argue that peer production has a normative dimension, so that what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). Though there are many historical antecedents, the term “peer production,” as an object of public and scientific interest, is historically situated in the early 2000s.¹ The meanings associated with a term that is deeply connected to the Internet as it was 20 years ago are bound to change. Today, “peer production” describes a vast array of self‐organized collaborative ventures and distributed work arrangements, from the collective practice of peers who advocate for an issue through a hashtag on social media or evaluate restaurants and holiday accommodation on dedicated websites, to participation in hacklabs and makerspaces. This introductory chapter to the Handbook of Peer Production focuses on peer production’s original incarnations, such as free and open source software and Wikipedia, which depended on the open Internet’s affordances for distributed communication, production, and organization. Non‐Internet mediated forms such as work in shared machine shops or the development of mesh networks are covered extensively in other chapters in this Handbook. We will refer to them if necessary, but they are not our prime concern here. In part, this is because the original forms and understandings of peer production are most relevant to a media and communication audience. But we also choose to focus on Internet‐based peer production in order to explore the term’s genesis: what kind of “production”? And why is it called “peer”?

To answer these questions, this chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production. We begin in our second section by interrogating the meaning of infrastructure for peer‐to‐peer models, and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. We next consider Yochai Benkler’s influential theorization of “commons‐based peer production,” and ask to what extent it embodies Western, first world assumptions. Our fourth section explores at length the relationship of peer production to the dominant economy. It begins by outlining claims about peer production’s transformational potential, which are inspired by Benkler’s model and often imbued with techno‐utopian overtones. It then focuses on the organizational and cultural characteristics which enabled co‐optation by, and hybridization with firms. We conclude this central section on peer production’s political economy by reviewing the literature which suggests that peer production, despite its alleged utopian potential, has been recuperated by capitalism and enabled new forms of labor‐exploitation. Our fifth and final section explains the aims of this Handbook and summarizes its structure and content.