Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 56

As capitalism faces a series of structural crises, a new socio‐technical dynamic is emerging from its ashes: peer‐to‐peer (P2P). First, P2P is a type of social relation in human networks, where participants have maximum freedom to connect. Second, P2P is a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible. Thus, P2P gives rise to a mode of production, i.e., peer production that includes new governance mechanisms and property frameworks.

P2P is not something new. It has existed since the dawn of humanity and initially was the dominant form of relationship in nomadic hunter‐gathering societies. In industrial capitalism (and later in the state‐socialist systems), the P2P dynamics were driven to the margins. However, with the affordance of P2P‐based technologies, P2P dynamics can now scale up to a global level and create complex artifacts that transcend the possibilities of both state‐ and market‐based models alone.

So, what are the infrastructural requirements that facilitate the re‐emergence of peer production? In his original article, Michel Bauwens (2005) posited that the first requirement is access to the technological infrastructure, i.e., to individual computers that are interconnected and thus enable a universal machine capable of executing any logical task. The Internet, as a point‐to‐point network, was designed for participation “from the edges” without the use of obligatory hubs such as telephone exchanges for example. Although not fully in the hands of its participants, the Internet is controlled through distributed governance, and outside the complete hegemony of particular private or state actors.

On the one hand, the current Internet might be the product of decisions made four to five decades ago. On the other hand, it has been subsequently shaped by commercial interests after the invention of the Web and the browser, and by governments intent on controlling it. But it has also been taken up by the hacker movements and user communities adapting and changing it to their benefit. The community wi‐fi movement, the open spectrum advocacy, and alternative meshwork‐based telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of the latter efforts. However, the future of the Internet, and of the Web that runs on the Internet, is a terrain of struggle, in which different interests are striving for supremacy.

The second requirement, according to Bauwens (2005), is the existence of a “software” infrastructure for autonomous global cooperation. A growing number of collaborative tools, such as wikis, facilitate the creation of trust and social capital, making it possible to create global groups that can create use‐value without the intermediary of for‐profit enterprises.

The third requirement is a legal infrastructure that enables the creation of use‐value and protects it from private appropriation. For example, the General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code) and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role. They enable the protection of common use‐value and use viral characteristics to spread. The General Public License and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their source code in the public domain.

The fourth requirement is cultural. The diffusion of mass intellectuality, (i.e., the distribution of human intelligence) and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology), and value constellations (axiology) have been instrumental in creating the type of cooperative autonomy needed to sustain an ethos that can enable peer production (Bauwens, 2005).