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We consider first what peer producers are building right now. Many continue to focus on autonomous infrastructure in order to oppose the technological giants and offer an alternative to civil society. Examples include distributed physical infrastructure at the local level, in the form of mesh or wireless community networks (such as Guifi² in Catalonia, Freifunk³ in Berlin, and many others; see Shaffer, this volume); peer‐to‐peer encrypted messaging and forums (such as Briar;⁴ see also Velasco Gonzáles & Tkacz, this volume); hackerspaces, hacklabs, and biohacklabs (see Boeva & Troxler, this volume; Meyer, this volume) community telecommunications infrastructure such as Rhizomatica in Mexico, Columbia and Brazil (see interview with Bloom, this volume; Shaffer, this volume); free digital libraries where copyrighted material can be found and uploaded, such as Memory of the World,⁵ Library Genesis,⁶ and Monoskop;⁷ tech collectives that peer produce services geared towards activists such as VPNs, file sharing, server space, and many others. At the hardware level, peer production projects have developed open source machines, tools, and infrastructure which fight against pollution, such as precious plastic,⁸ who make available blueprints showing how to build plastic‐recycling machines (see also Braybrooke & Smith, this volume).

Many others have embraced the expansive definition of infrastructure by contributing to Wikipedia (see Haider & Sundin, this volume), project Gutenberg (a volunteer‐run text digitization project), or by uploading code commits to GitHub (a code sharing, publishing service and social networking site for programmers whose “social coding” has proved wildly popular with the FOSS community). Why has distributed collaboration between volunteers proved so successful? The promise that peer production is always radically decentralized, collaborative, and nonproprietary (Benkler, 2006, p. 60) has not eventuated: the most technologically advanced forms of peer production have hybridized with the market, as detailed in our next section. But Benkler did not just define peer production’s infrastructural characteristics: he also addressed the moral benefits of sharing resources and of self‐determination. Peer production, as a way of working collaboratively with peers, can only thrive if people treat each other with respect and dignity. The cumulative impact of non‐exploitative micro‐actions is profound; a normative model, based on autonomy and the sharing of common‐pool resources for the good of humanity, emerges (see Borschke, this volume; Nissenbaum & Benkler, this volume). Further, deliberations are meant to be based on “the authority of the better argument.” Stephen Levy ([1984]2010) showed how this was translated into hacker language in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution when he defined hacker ethical principles, such as the commitment to the free access of computers and information, the mistrust of centralized authority, and the insistence that hackers be evaluated meritocratically, and not by “bogus” criteria (age, degrees, etc.) but rather by how well they can hack (Levy, [1984]2010). In a world dominated by dispossession and exploitation, these “do‐ocratic” attributes proved attractive. This explains why the expansive definition of peer produced infrastructure has blossomed into 1,000 flowers, including peer learning (see Antoniadis & Pantazis, this volume), cartography (Fish, this volume), and collective action (Milan, this volume). The Handbook of Peer Production showcases this great diversity of peer projects. What unites them is a common practice: collective control over production and creation processes, recursively intertwined with the means and ends of this self‐governed practice, the commons.

That being said, we do not intend to suggest that peer production is truly inclusive. Despite Levy’s influential principle, “bogus” criteria have historically shut the door to women and people of color, who have in turn advocated for the importance of recognizing that barriers to entry do exist when it comes to learning how to code and to being accepted in white and male‐dominated techno‐cultures. Further, racist assumptions of deviant behaviors (such as scamming or spamming) have led various institutions to block access to both corporate and non‐corporate platforms, including Wikipedia, in several African countries (Burrell, 2012), reducing the possibility for locals to take part in such projects (Burrell argues in her book Invisible Users that the racist interaction which Africans experienced online in the mid‐2000s led, in part, to practices such as scamming). Being aware of this history helps to understand how peer production has developed, and who has the opportunity to take part without significant barriers. Verrips and Meyer (2001) describe the collective maintenance of technologies such as automobiles by all available means in a country like Ghana: while peer production, as a desire for autonomy, may occur in contexts of commodity affluence and disposable income, the reappropriation of work and technology can also stem from a need for survival, in the South or in disadvantaged sectors of the North. As influential as Benkler’s definition of commons‐based peer production was, it seems to reflect the assumptions of settler colonial worlds (see Deka, this volume; Toupin, this volume).

When dealing with social participation, it is always sound practice to ask: who can take part? In this case we should reflect on who the peer producers are, or to put it differently: where can they thrive; what are the material requisites? Specifically, we must consider the context and conditions in which peer production occurs in the North and how they might differ from the Global South, particularly outside of elite circles. Examples of these assumptions include a constant flow of electricity, minimal infrastructural breakdown, and easy access to computers (rather than only cell or mobile phones through which the majority of people access the Internet in the South). In the North, obstacles preventing entry into peer production projects do exist – for women and people of color in particular – but in terms of digital infrastructure, Internet access, and access to computers, barriers are usually low, except for Indigenous people on reserves and to some extent in remote rural areas. In the Global South access may be restricted by class to the elite and middle class; in India, by caste. Conflict might also come into play, when a government decides to cut off access to the Internet as occurred in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Ambazonia (the English‐speaking part of Cameroon) or in many other regions experiencing contestation around elections. The point here is not to delight in critical self‐flagellation (the Handbook’s editors and many of its contributors are located in the Global North), but to be aware of the situated quality of the produced knowledge. Technological development is one of the Global North’s enduring ideologies, serving to naturalize domination. The industrial revolution occurred not simply after the slave trade, but thanks to it (James, [1938]1989; Robinson, [1980]2000).

Technological power is therefore historically intermingled with processes of dispossession. In more recent cases – such as the subject of this Handbook – technologically advanced projects could be framed as constituting, in the Global North, micro‐enclaves of privilege. Beyond the reproduction of social domination through restricted access to the free time, cultural capital, and social networks necessary to take part in peer production, what role do the digital commons play in the capitalist development process? The relationship of peer production to market forces forms the subject of the next section.