Читать книгу The Handbook of Peer Production - Группа авторов - Страница 59

Peer production is not a “gift economy” and it is not fully based on reciprocity. Peer production follows the adage: each contributes according to their capacities and willingness, and each takes according to their needs. Thus, any “gifting” is most often non‐reciprocal gifting, i.e., the use of peer‐produced use‐value does not create a reciprocal obligation. Peer production does not usually involve reciprocity between individuals but only between individuals and the collective resource. For example, people are allowed to develop their software based on an existing piece of software distributed under the widely used GNU General Public License, only if their final product is available under the same kind of free and open source license (in this case, GNU General Public License).

Peer production can most easily operate in the sphere of digital goods, where the main inputs are free time and the available surplus of computing resources. Reciprocity‐based schemes are necessary in the material sphere where the higher cost of capital intervenes. At present, peer production offers no coherent solution to the material survival of its participants, though as we discuss below, there are some promising solutions to such challenges. Therefore, many people inspired by the egalitarian ethos will resort to cooperative production, the social economy, and other schemes from which they can derive an income, while honoring their values. In this sense, these schemes are complementary. The open cooperative and the platform cooperative movements, however, showcase how peer producers may make a sustainable living (Bauwens et al., 2019; Scholz & Schneider, 2016).

In peer production, people voluntarily and cooperatively construct shareable resources that are governed according to the principles and norms of the productive community, i.e., a commons. The use‐value created by peer production projects is generated through free cooperation, without coercion toward the producers, and users have free access to the resulting use‐value. The legal infrastructure that we have described above creates digital commons of knowledge, software, design, and culture. These new commons are related to the older form of the commons (most notably the communal lands of the peasantry in the Middle Ages and of the original mutualities of workers in the industrial age), but they also differ from them, mostly through their largely intangible characteristics. The older commons were localized, used, and sometimes regulated by specific communities (Ostrom, 1990); the new commons are available and regulated by global cyber‐collectives, usually affinity groups. While the older forms of physical commons (air, water, etc.) increasingly function in the context of scarcity, thus becoming more regulated, the digital commons are non‐rival resources enriched through usage (thus they could even be considered “anti‐rival”).