Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 58

Peer production occurs in distributed networks. Distributed networks are networks in which autonomous agents can freely determine their behavior and linkages without the intermediary of obligatory hubs. As Alexander Galloway highlights in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004), distributed networks are not the same as decentralized networks, for which hubs are obligatory. Peer production is based on distributed power and distributed access to resources. In a decentralized network such as the US‐based airport system, planes have to go through determined hubs. However, in distributed systems or partly distributed systems, such as the Internet (van Steen & Tanenbaum, 2016) or highway systems, hubs may exist, but are not obligatory and agents may always route around them. One should not forget that a significant amount of the Internet’s backbone is wired and thus centralized too (Starosielski, 2015). Nevertheless, although we may now be far from the early vision of the Internet as a highly distributed network, the distributed elements still allow for peer production to transcend some of the restrictions of time and space. Peer production, as we discuss below, is “cosmo‐local.”