New-archy ?

David Weinberger reports on Yochai Benkler's presentation at Freedom To Connect (F2C), the conference originated by David Isenberg.

The noticeable takeaway for me ... his report that Benkler says "The Internet democratizes.  That's boring by now, but it's important".

Yochai Benkler, author of the single most important book about the Internet — The Wealth of Networks — is giving a "theme-setting" talk.

He points to the wide distribution of computer power and "insight, intuition and experience" across the population, as opposed to their concentration during the industrial revolution. The behaviors that have already been there but on the periphery — friendship, cooperation, decency — now move to the core. We see "commons-based production," i.e., production without exclusion from the inputs and outputs. This decentralizes the authority to act. "The commons locates authority to act where capacity resides."

It enables peer production and sharing: cooperation without control or the price system. It is based on social relations. (See "Sharing Nicely.") He points to the success of open source software, and to a mapping of Mars craters by a collaborative process ("Martian clickworkers"). Also, of course, Wikipedia. He asks us to imagine when Wikipedia started that someone predicted that Nature would find it about equal to Britannica in its science articles in five years. He concludes: "We're beginning to see a solution space, rather than a particular phenomenon." There's a "load balancing of motivations over time" — people can contribute when they want and for whatever reasons they have.

"Building such platforms is hard." "Coase's Penguin" says peer production tasks require modularity, granularity and integration. (He says he's been working on seeing how this works. He's looking at experimental literature on cooperation and reciprocity, game theory, evolutionary biology and anthropology. "There are more design levers than I initially thought." Factors include: Self-selection, communication, humanization, trust construction, norm creation, transparency, monitoring/peer review/discipline and fairness. Introducing money can muck things up.

So long as large-scale needed to be concentrated, we were limited to firms and governments, or we could work in decentralized form through the market. Now we're seeing a non-market decentralization via social sharing and exchange ... a parallel form of production.

[Snip ...]

But, this is a threat to incumbent business models. So there's a battle on.

Yochai shifts to politics. "The core idea is that people now as a practical matter can do more for and by themselves." And they can do more in loose association with others. When it comes to democracy, our experience "is purely with a mass mediated public sphere." We're beginning to learn what it means to have a networked public sphere. He recounts how concerns about e-voting machines from Diebold were raised by activitists, put out info, and how it spread.

The Internet democratizes. It's boring by now, but important, he says. The first generation objections are generally unfounded: "The Daily Me" fragmentation hasn't happened, and it doesn't polarize the way claimed.

For one thing, polarization is a matter of interpretation: Is 85% of links pointing to like-minded sites a sign of polarization or its opposite? And the power law misses the topology of the Net that hooks small sites to large sites as part of a community. Those large sites then can get the word out.

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