This is the last of a batch of posts I've copied from my archives at the IP Democracy blog.  I apologize for their length and redundancy.  Most of them deal with net neutrality, but in these last two I try to step back from the heat of the debate and consider the broader implications and potential of the Internet in relation to the fundamental structure and evolution of our economic, cultural and political systems.  

For those who have the time, I recommend reading at least parts of all three books cited in the post.  I'd also suggest looking for ways in which they're linked, not only philosophically, but also in terms of the political issues they're tied to and their practical implications for successful political mobilization and policy development.

I believe MyDD, and the netroots in general, are helping to manifest an important step in human evolution, one that is transforming our economic, political and social systems.  One of the key dynamics of this evolutionary change is what Yochai Benkler (whose book I discuss below) calls "social production." As we've all seen, the process and the progress are not perfect (plenty of bumps and setbacks along the road), nor are any of us who take part in it.  But I'm pretty convinced it's gaining momentum and potency as it attracts more and more citizens of this country and the world, and as its tools and participants continue to evolve.

And I think MyDD community is right in the thick of it, and that the recent success of the Ned Lamont campaign (among other things) suggests that the evolutionary process is accelerating, and that the potency of the netroots is growing, even as the "old" economic and political systems--and many of their previously-powerful players--have become so corrupt and inept that they've lost virtually all their credibility with the American people.  My hat's off to all you folks that have worked so hard and in such close proximity to the ugliness of present-day politics.  You are heroes of this second American (R)evolution.

Like many of you, I'm beginning to think that the tide is turning. And, for me, it couldn't have happened at a better time, since NBC just ended the West Wing series, which I started watching after Bush got elected in 2000 as an antidote to the insanity and inanity that poses as political news in today's television media.  In the future, I hope to be watching (and maybe even creating) informative and inspiring "reality TV" on MyDD and other progressive sites, and won't need to watch TV dramas to feel proud of this country's political system and its leaders.

Anyway, here's that last archived post from IPD:

Yochai Benkler's new book, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedoms" is an important work.  Larry Lessig is especially effusive in his praise:

This is--by far--the most important and powerful book written in the fields that matter most to me in the last ten years. If there is one book you read this year, it should be this...Read it. Understand it. You are not serious about these issues--on either side of these debates--unless you have read this book.

I've been reading portions of "The Wealth of Networks," along with two other recently published books: "Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life," by Frances Morre Lappe, and "America at the Internet Crossroads: choosing the road to innovation, wealth and a supercharged economy," by Mike Bookey (disclosure: I provided feedback on several drafts of the latter and have known Mike for several years).  

Among the general themes these books appear to share is the value of voluntary, cooperative collaboration and commons-based and democracy-enhancing systems in a modern world in which the dominant economic and political systems and institutions face: rapid and dramatic change; dangerously high levels of economic, social and political imbalance and dysfunction; and mounting challenges to their status-quo modes of operation.

Aspects of this broad trend include "social production" (Benkler's main focus), invigorated grassroots democracy (a key Lappe theme), and the movement to create publicly owned and controlled commons-like "Internet road networks" that provide local communities with near-infinite connection capacity on a ubiquitous open-access basis (the thrust of "America at the Internet Crossroads").  

I believe these three trends are linked together and mutually supportive. As such, progress in any one of them is likely to benefit the other. I believe it could also help our nation develop effective policies and systems to address problems in key sectors like healthcare and education.

I recommend Lappe's book, which contains many inspiring real-world stories about bottoms-up creation of new democracy-friendly systems, organizations and practices, from which it extracts lessons and themes regarding grassroots solutions to problems not well-enough addressed or even exacerbated by established institutions.  While its focus is mainly on "human" and organizational issues and trends, Democracy's Edge does touch on technology and Internet-related developments, which Lappe cites as enabling elements for a transition from the "Thin Democracy" dominant in today's world, to a more evolved and invigorated state she refers to as "Living Democracy," a transition that is the thematic thread linking her book's many anecdotes.

I also strongly recommend Mike's book, which I think presents a strong argument and practical blueprint for a phased-in transition from today's two-pipe vertically-integrated duopoly mode of Internet access to an "Internet road" model that would serve as a 21st century parallel to the 20th century deployment of a ubiquitous public motor vehicle road network. I think the deployment of Internet roads would support both Lappe's vision of "Living Democracy" as well as Benkler's vision of new "social" modes of production.

The remainder of this post focuses on Benkler's "The Wealth of Nations" which, as Larry Lessig and others have noted, is worthy of a thoughtful read regardless of one's position on key issues it addresses and within the information economy.  While, at 473 pages, the book covers a wide range of important and timely topics, I believe its unique power and value derives in large part from the fact that its analysis is grounded in fundamental insights and assertions that, if correct, go a long way toward justifying its ambitious-sounding subtitle: "how social production transforms markets and freedom." 

In the book's first chapter, Benkler introduces his basic argument that the Internet's technology and structure is enabling increasingly efficient "nonmarket social production." This development, he suggests, promises significant and potentially dramatic benefits in economic, social and political spheres.  But, at the same time, he says, it challenges the perceived interests of incumbent entities that have aggregated significant power in what he calls the "industrial information economy."

...we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century.

The most advanced economies in the world today have made two parallel shifts that, paradoxically, make possible a significant attenuation of the limitations that market-based production places on the pursuit of the political values central to liberal societies.  The first move, in the making for more than a century, is to an economy centered on information...and cultural...production, and the manipulation of symbols...The second is the move to a communications environment built on cheap processors with high computation capabilities, interconnected in a pervasive network--the phenomenon we associate with the Internet.

It is this second shift that allows for an increasing role for nonmarket production in the information and cultural production sector, organized in a radically more decentralized pattern than was true of this sector in the twentieth century. The first shift means that these new patterns of production--nonmarket and radically decentralized--will emerge, if permitted, at the core, rather than the periphery of the most advanced economies. It promises to enable social production and exchange to play a much larger role, alongside property- and market-based production, than they ever have in modern democracies.

What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action--specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies--plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage.

Benkler offers three key observations about "the emerging information production system."

First, nonproprietary strategies have always been more important in information production than they were in the production of steel or automobiles, even when the economics of communication weighed in favor of industrial models.  Education, arts and sciences, political debate, and theological disputation have always been much more importantly infused with nonmarket motivations and actors than, say, the automobile industry. As the material barrier that ultimately nonetheless drove much of our information environment to be funneled through the proprietary, market-based strategies is removed, these basic nonmarket, nonproprietary, motivations and organizational forms should in principle become even more important to the information production system.

Second, we have in fact seen the rise of nonmarket production to much greater importance. Individuals can reach and inform or edify millions around the world. Such a reach was simply unavailable to diversely motivated individuals before, unless they funneled their efforts through either market organizations or philanthropically or state-funded efforts. The fact that every such effort is available to anyone connected to the  network, from anywhere, has led to the emergence of coordinate effects, where the aggregate effect of individual action, even when it is not self-consciously cooperative, produces the coordinate effect of a new and rich information environment. One needs only to run a Google search on any subject of interest to see how the "information good" that is the response to one's query is produced by the coordinate effects of the uncoordinated actions of a wide and diverse range of individuals and organizations acting on a wide range of motivations--both market and nonmarket, state-based and nonstate.

Third, and likely most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe, is the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts--peer production of information, knowledge, and culture. These are typified by the emergence of free and open-source software. We are beginning to see the expansion of this model not only to our core software platforms, but beyond them into every domain of information and cultural production--and this book visits these in many different domains--from peer production of encyclopedias, to news and commentary, to immersive entertainment.

Benkler suggests that 20th century economic analysis largely--and mistakenly--ignores this growing sector of the 21st century economy.  The implication is that strictly market-based analysis will become less and less relevant to the extent social production increases its share of value creation.

It is easy to miss these changes. They run against the grain of some of our most basic Economics 101 intuitions, intuitions honed in the industrial economy at a time when the only serious alternative seen was state Communism--an alternative almost universally considered unattractive today...

Human beings are, and always have been, diversely motivated beings. We act instrumentally, but also noninstrumentally. We act for material gain, but also for psychological well-being and gratification, and for social connectedness.  There is nothing new or earth-shattering about this, except perhaps to some economists.

While the above is on one hand a humorous commentary on the limitations of modern economics, it also points to a serious and potentially radical transformation in how human beings will create and exchange value in the 21st century.

In the industrial economy in general, and the industrial information economy as well, most opportunities to make things that were valuable and important to many people were constrained by the physical capital requirements of making them.  From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it. Financing the necessary physical capital, in turn, oriented the necessarily capital-intensive projects toward a production and organizational strategy that could justify the investments. In market economies, that meant orienting toward market production. In state-run economies, that meant orienting production toward the goals of the state bureaucracy. In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production.

In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society. Personal computers and network connections are ubiquitous. This does not mean that they cannot be used for markets, or that individuals cease to seek market opportunities. It does mean, however, that whenever someone, somewhere, among the billion connected human beings, and ultimately among all those who will be connected, wants to make something that requires human creativity, a computer, and a network connection, he or she can do so--alone, or in cooperation with others. He or she already has the capital capacity necessary to do so; if not alone, then at least in cooperation with other individuals acting for complementary reasons. The result is that a good deal more that human beings value can now be done by individuals, who interact with each other socially, as human beings and as social beings, rather than as market actors through the price system.

Sometimes...these nonmarket collaborations can be better at motivating effort and can allow creative people to work on information projects more efficiently than would traditional market mechanisms and corporations. The result is a flourishing nonmarket sector of information, knowledge, and cultural production, based in the networked environment, and applied to anything that the many individuals connected to it can imagine. Its outputs, in turn, are not treated as exclusive property. They are instead subject to an increasingly robust ethic of open sharing, open for all others to build on, extend, and make their own.

Benkler doesn't limit himself to economic matters.  The roughly 250 pages comprising Part II of the book address the political, social and cultural implications of the technological and economic trends laid out in Part 1.  I haven't gotten through most of this section yet, but Benkler's one-paragraph summary of it below suggests that it, like the sections I've already read, are well worth the time to read and ponder.

Part II of this book provides a detailed look at how the changes in the technological, economic, and social affordances of the networked information environment affect a series of core commitments of a wide range of liberal democracies. The basic claim is that the diversity of ways of organizing information production and use opens a range of possibilities for pursuing the core political values of liberal societies--individual freedom, a more genuinely participatory political system, a critical culture, and social justice.

The final section of the book begins with a chapter entitled "The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment." In Chapter 1, Benkler sets the stage for this later discussion:

No benevolent historical force will inexorably lead this technological-economic moment to develop toward an open, diverse, liberal equilibrium. If the transformation I describe as possible occurs, it will lead to substantial redistribution of power and money from the twentieth-century industrial producers of information, culture, and communications--like Hollywood, the recording industry, and perhaps the broadcasters and some of the telecommunications services giants--to a combination of widely diffuse populations around the globe, and the market actors that will build the tools that make this population better able to produce its own information environment rather than buying it ready-made.

None of the industrial giants of yore are taking this reallocation lying down. The technology will not overcome their resistance through an insurmountable progressive impulse. The reorganization of production and the advances it can bring in freedom and justice will emerge, therefore, only as a result of social and political action aimed at protecting the new social patterns from the incumbents' assaults. It is precisely to develop an understanding of what is at stake and why it is worth fighting for that I write this book. I offer no reassurances, however, that any of this will in fact come to pass.

The battle over the relative salience of the proprietary, industrial models of information production and exchange and the emerging networked information economy is being carried out in the domain of the institutional ecology of the digital environment. In a wide range of contexts, a similar set of institutional questions is being contested: To what extent will resources necessary for information production and exchange be governed as a commons, free for all to use and biased in their availability in favor of none? To what extent will these resources be entirely proprietary, and available only to those functioning within the market or within traditional forms of well-funded nonmarket action like the  state and organized philanthropy?

We see this battle played out at all layers of the information environment: the physical devices and network channels necessary to communicate; the existing information and cultural resources out of which new statements must be made; and the logical resources--the software and standards--necessary to translate what human beings want to say to each other into signals that machines can  process and transmit. Its central question is whether there will, or will not, be a core common infrastructure that is governed as a commons and therefore available to anyone who wishes to participate in the networked information environment outside of the market-based, proprietary framework.

...Each institutional framework--property and commons--allows for a certain freedom of action and a certain degree of predictability of access to resources. Their  complementary coexistence and relative salience as institutional frameworks for action determine the relative reach of the market and the domain of nonmarket action, both individual and social, in the resources they govern and the activities that depend on access to those resources.

...Now that material conditions have enabled the emergence of greater scope for nonmarket action, the scope and existence of a core common infrastructure that includes the basic resources necessary to produce and exchange information will shape the degree to which individuals will be able to act in all the ways that I describe as central to the emergence of a networked information economy and the freedoms it makes possible.