Yochai Benkler

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pages: 494 words: 142,285

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World by Lawrence Lessig

AltaVista, Andy Kessler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Bill Atkinson, business process, Cass Sunstein, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, dark matter, decentralized internet, Dennis Ritchie, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, Donald Davies, Erik Brynjolfsson, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, George Gilder, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, history of Unix, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, Innovator's Dilemma, invention of hypertext, inventory management, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kenneth Arrow, Larry Wall, Leonard Kleinrock, linked data, Marc Andreessen, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, smart grid, software patent, spectrum auction, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systematic bias, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Chicago School, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

During times of great congestion, the price would go up; during times of low usage, the price would fall. This market would be competitive, so the prices would be neutral, and hence the proposal still fits my definition of a commons. But it is different from Gilder's and Reed's in that it requires money to get access. In the middle is Yochai Benkler, who is agnostic about the technology but clear about the constitutional norm. See Yochai Benkler, “Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law,” New York University Law Review 76 (2000): 23, 81, where he talks about constitutionality. If spectrum is effectively unlimited, or if it could be organized to be effectively unlimited, then it should be structured to permit free access.

Nimelman, “Of Common Carriage and Cable Access: Deregulation of Cable Television by the Supreme Court,” Federal Communications Law Journal 34 (1982): 167, 173; Robert Means and Deborah Cohn, “Common Carriage of Natural Gas,” Tulane Law Review 59 (1985): 529. As Yochai Benkler writes, however, “after the internal combustion engine was invented, it was not a better system for awarding railroad franchises that was needed, but a well-regulated commons like our national highway system.” Yochai Benkler, “The Commons as a Neglected Factor of Information Policy” (paper presented at Telecommunications Policy Research Center conference, October 3-5, 1998), 68. And indeed, the revenue from rail transportation was $28,348,895,000 in 1992, compared with $135,437,000,000 for local and long-haul trucking services.

The MPAA estimates the average cost of a feature film (including studio overhead and capitalized interest) was $51.5 million in 1999. See MPAA, “MPAA Average Negative Costs,” slide 14 of 44 (visited June 21, 2001), http://www.mpaa.org/ useconomicreview/2000Economic/slide.asp?ref=14. 10 As Yochai Benkler writes, “[M]ainstream economics very clearly negates the superstition that if some property rights in information are good, then more rights in information are even better.” Yochai Benkler, “A Political Economy of the Public Domain: Markets in Information Goods Versus the Marketplace of Ideas,” in Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Innovation Policy for the Knowledge Society, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss and Diane Leenheer Zimmerman, eds.


pages: 629 words: 142,393

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andy Kessler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, c2.com, call centre, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clayton Christensen, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, Hacker Ethic, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, illegal immigration, index card, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, license plate recognition, loose coupling, mail merge, Morris worm, national security letter, old-boy network, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), OSI model, packet switching, peer-to-peer, post-materialism, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, radical decentralization, Ralph Nader, RFC: Request For Comment, RFID, Richard Stallman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Robert X Cringely, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, software patent, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Ted Nelson, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

, http://www.bittorrent.com/what-is-bittorrent (last visited May 16, 2007); see also Wikipedia, BitTorrent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent (as of Mar. 28, 2007, 16:30 GMT). 61. JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY AND OTHER ESSAYS 75 (John Gray ed., 1998). 62. Id. 63. YOCHAI BENKLER, THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS 275 (2006). 64. Id. at 277; see also Yochai Benkler, Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information, 52 DUKE L.J. 1245, 1248—49 (2003) (“Together these shifts can move the boundaries of liberty along all three vectors of liberal political morality. They enable democratic discourse to flow among constituents, rather than primarily through controlled, concentrated, commercial media designed to sell advertising, rather than to facilitate discourse.

They allow passive consumers to become active users of their cultural environment, and they allow employees, whose productive life is marked by following orders, to become peers in common productive enterprises. And they can ameliorate some of the inequalities that markets have often generated and amplified.”). 65. Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, 114 YALE L.J. 273 (2004). 66. See Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum, Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue, 14 J. POL. PHIL. 394 (2006) (arguing that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods, but also serve as a context for positive character formation, as a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals, and suggesting that the practice of effective, virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting the virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self-definition). 67.

Freedom Found., to Senators Fritz Hollings and Ted Stevens (Nov. 5, 2001), available at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20011105_eff_sssca_letter.html (discussing the proposed SSSCA). 47. See Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U. L. REV. 354 (1999) (asserting that expansive intellectual property rights constrain the availability of information); Yochai Benkler, Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain, 66 LAW& CONTEMP. PROBS. 173, 216—18 (2003) (criticizing the NET Act and DMCA for expanding copyright protection in such a way that will chill expression); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein, 54 STAN.


pages: 515 words: 126,820

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World by Don Tapscott, Alex Tapscott

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Airbnb, altcoin, Alvin Toffler, asset-backed security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Bitcoin Ponzi scheme, blockchain, Blythe Masters, Bretton Woods, business logic, business process, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency risk, decentralized internet, digital capitalism, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, failed state, fiat currency, financial innovation, Firefox, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, future of work, Future Shock, Galaxy Zoo, general purpose technology, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Google bus, GPS: selective availability, Hacker News, Hernando de Soto, Higgs boson, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, intangible asset, interest rate swap, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lean Startup, litecoin, Lyft, M-Pesa, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microcredit, mobile money, money market fund, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, performance metric, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, prediction markets, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, QR code, quantitative easing, radical decentralization, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, search costs, Second Machine Age, seigniorage, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, smart grid, Snow Crash, social graph, social intelligence, social software, standardized shipping container, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Nature of the Firm, The Soul of a New Machine, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Turing complete, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, wealth creators, X Prize, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2007). Wikinomics defined seven such business models. The list has been extended here. 18. Commons-based Peer Production is a term developed by Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in the seminal article “Coase’s Penguin,” The Yale Law Journal, 2002; www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf. 19. http://fortune.com/2009/07/20/information-wants-to-be-free-and-expensive/. 20. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 21. Interview with Dino Mark Angaritis, August 7, 2015. 22. Andrew Lih, “Can Wikipedia Survive?,” The New York Times, June 20, 2015; www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html. 23. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 24. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/ascribe-raises-2-million-to-ensure-you-get-credit-for-your-art/. 25. www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html?

,” The New York Times, June 20, 2015; www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html. 23. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 24. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/ascribe-raises-2-million-to-ensure-you-get-credit-for-your-art/. 25. www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html?_r=0. 26. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 27. www.verisart.com/. 28. http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/07/verisart-plans-to-use-the-blockchain-to-verify-the-authencity-of-artworks/. 29. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 30. Interview with David Ticoll, August 7, 2015. 31. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 32. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&. 33. Sarah Kessler, “The Sharing Economy Is Dead and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it#1. 34.

—Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings “This is a book with the predictive quality of Orwell’s 1984 and the vision of Elon Musk. Read it or become extinct.” —Tim Draper, Founder, Draper Associates, DFJ, and Draper University “Blockchain is a radical technological wave and, as he has done so often, Tapscott is out there, now with son Alex, surfing at dawn. It’s quite a ride.” —Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School “If you work in business or government, you need to understand the blockchain revolution. No one has written a more thoroughly researched or engaging book on this topic than Tapscott and Tapscott.” —Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT; coauthor of The Second Machine Age “An indispensable and up-to-the-minute account of how the technology underlying bitcoin could—and should—unleash the true potential of a digital economy for distributed prosperity.”


pages: 281 words: 95,852

The Googlization of Everything: by Siva Vaidhyanathan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data acquisition, death of newspapers, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full text search, global pandemic, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Howard Rheingold, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information retrieval, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, libertarian paternalism, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pirate software, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, single-payer health, Skype, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Thorstein Veblen, Tyler Cowen, urban decay, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

For critical perspectives on Habermas and public-sphere theory, see Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Bruce Robbins and the Social Text Collective, The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 53. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 212–61. 54. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Some media theorists like Mark Poster and Jodi Dean are critical of efforts to associate a print-centered nostalgic phenomenon with the cacophony of cultural NOTES TO PAGES 137– 41 245 and political activities in global cyberspace. Others, like Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold, see the practice of “peer production” and the emergence of impressive and efficient organizational practices as a sign that Habermas’s dream could come true in the form of digital signals and democratic culture.

., The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, Technical Report, Digital Libraries Project, Stanford University, 1999, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/. 18. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005). 19. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 20. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002): 369–446. 21. Daniel O. O’Connor and Henry Voos, “Laws, Theory Construction and Bibliometrics,” Library Trends 30, no. 1 (1981): 9–20; see also Christine Kosmopoulos and Denis Pumain, “Citation, Citation, Citation: Bibliometrics, the Web and the Social Sciences and Humanities,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography 411 (December 17, 2007), www.cybergeo.eu.

At the festival, Page and Brin would have encountered a radically decentralized social structure, one that facilitates creativity, collaboration, and experimentation with little or no “command and control.” Burning Man, Turner concludes, is a distillation of the “cultural infrastructure” that nurtures Google, a spiritual manifestation of what Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production.”51 As the sociologist Dalton Conley has described, many of the most highly rewarded workers—those on the creative side of the technology industries—are either trapped in something like a velvet goldmine or struggling to get into one. They are decontextualized from their localities, overconnected to their mobile, cosmopolitan communities, and constantly striving to improve the speed and quality of those connections.


pages: 598 words: 134,339

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, Airbnb, airport security, AltaVista, Anne Wojcicki, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, behavioural economics, Benjamin Mako Hill, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brewster Kahle, Brian Krebs, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, congestion charging, data science, digital rights, disintermediation, drone strike, Eben Moglen, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, experimental subject, failed state, fault tolerance, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Firefox, friendly fire, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, informal economy, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Laura Poitras, license plate recognition, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, Nash equilibrium, Nate Silver, national security letter, Network effects, Occupy movement, operational security, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, payday loans, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit motive, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, recommendation engine, RFID, Ross Ulbricht, satellite internet, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, South China Sea, sparse data, stealth mode startup, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, telemarketer, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, undersea cable, unit 8200, urban planning, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero day

Once they are in place: Bruce Schneier (6 Jun 2013), “What we don’t know about spying on citizens: Scarier than what we know,” Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/what-we-dont-know-about-spying-on-citizens-scarier-than-what-we-know/276607. The clever thing about this: Yochai Benkler delineated criteria that the courts can use to decide this. Yochai Benkler (Jul 2014), “A public accountability defense for national security leakers and whistleblowers,” Harvard Review of Law and Policy 8, http://benkler.org/Benkler_Whistleblowerdefense_Prepub.pdf. Someone like Snowden: Yochai Benkler makes the case that the smartest thing the US could do is to give Edward Snowden immunity and let him return to the US. Yochai Benkler (8 Sep 2014), “Want to reform the NSA? Give Edward Snowden immunity,” Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/want-to-reform-the-nsa-give-edward-snowden-immunity/379612/2.

This notion of making certain crimes: Michael L. Rich (Mar 2013), “Should we make crime impossible?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 36, http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/36_2_795_Rich.pdf. Yochai Benkler said: Yochai Benkler (4 Dec 2013), “System and conscience: NSA bulk surveillance and the problem of freedom,” Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University, http://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/event/yochai-benkler-crcs-lunch-seminar and https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=6EUueRpCzpw. secrecy is necessary: William E. Colby (1976), “Intelligence secrecy and security in a free society,” International Security 1, http://people.exeter.ac.uk/mm394/Intelligence%20Secrecy%20and%20Security.pdf.

NSA: Why freedom of association matters,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/deep-dive-first-unitarian-church-v-nsa-why-freedom-association-matters. Today, the church is worried: Joshua Eaton (15 Aug 2014), “Challenging the surveillance state,” UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/297088.shtml. Yochai Benkler likens NSA surveillance: Yochai Benkler (13 Sep 2013), “Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-trampling-rights. Even the politically conservative: Economist (16 Nov 2013), “The recorded world: Every step you take,” Economist, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21589862-cameras-become-ubiquitous-and-able-identify-people-more-safeguards-privacy-will-be.


Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy by Lawrence Lessig

Aaron Swartz, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Benjamin Mako Hill, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Brewster Kahle, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, collaborative editing, commoditize, disintermediation, don't be evil, Erik Brynjolfsson, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Larry Wall, late fees, Mark Shuttleworth, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, optical character recognition, PageRank, peer-to-peer, recommendation engine, revision control, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Saturday Night Live, search costs, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, transaction costs, VA Linux, Wayback Machine, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

By invoking Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” I don’t mean to say that policy makers have nothing to worry about here. Smith’s 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 49 8/12/08 1:54:46 AM 50 REMI X Wealth of Nations teaches us about the phenomenal power of markets to adjust. But these markets adjust, as Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks powerfully teaches, in light of the baseline allocation of rights. Policy makers must assure that rights are not allocated in a way that distorts or weakens competition. A costly overlay of spectrum rights, for example, or an inefficient market of copyrights, can stifle competition and drive markets to unnecessary concentration.

But if the same question were asked of newspapers on average, then great skepticism about newspapers would be merited as well. The point with both is that we have effective tools for assessing quality. And more important, we have increasingly famous examples of blogs outdoing traditional media in delivering both quality and truth. Yochai Benkler catalogs a host of cases where bloggers did better than mainstream media in ferreting out the truth, such as uncovering the truth about Trent Lott’s affection for racist statements, or the lack of veracity in Diebold’s claims about its voting machines.19 And even a cursory review of key political blogs—Instapundit or Michelle Malkin on the Right, the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post on the Left—reveals a depth and an understanding that are rare in even the best of mainstream media.

“Economies” in this sense differ in many ways. In the story that follows, however, I radically and crudely simplify these differences to speak about three types of economies only: a commercial economy, a sharing economy, and a hybrid of the two. Following the work of many, but in particular of Harvard professor Yochai Benkler,1 by a “commercial economy,” I mean an economy in which money or “price” is a central term of the ordinary, or normal, exchange. In this sense, your local record store is part of a commercial economy. You enter and find the latest Lyle Lovett CD. You buy it in exchange for $18. The exchange is defined in terms of the price.


pages: 476 words: 125,219

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy by Robert W. McChesney

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, access to a mobile phone, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, American Legislative Exchange Council, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, AOL-Time Warner, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, company town, creative destruction, crony capitalism, David Brooks, death of newspapers, declining real wages, digital capitalism, digital divide, disinformation, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Dr. Strangelove, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, fake news, Filter Bubble, fulfillment center, full employment, future of journalism, George Gilder, Gini coefficient, Google Earth, income inequality, informal economy, intangible asset, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, Occupy movement, ocean acidification, offshore financial centre, patent troll, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, Post-Keynesian economics, power law, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Nader, Richard Stallman, road to serfdom, Robert Metcalfe, Saturday Night Live, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, single-payer health, Skype, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, technological determinism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, the long tail, the medium is the message, The Spirit Level, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, transfer pricing, Upton Sinclair, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

“Will we one day see,” he asks, “Nobel Prizes won by huge collaborations dominated by amateurs?” Nielsen concedes this revolution in “how knowledge is constructed” faces some speed bumps—not the least of which comes from commercial interests’ desire to patent everything—but the general trajectory is irreversible.19 In his 2011 The Penguin and the Leviathan, Yochai Benkler sees the Internet as driving a fundamental shift in human nature, one very much for the better: All around us we see people cooperating and working in collaboration, doing the right thing, behaving fairly, acting generously, caring about their group or team, and trying to behave like decent people who reciprocate kindness with kindness.

Short-term thinking and the single-minded pursuit of profit are increasingly subverting an economic system that otherwise has the capacity to benefit everyone. He concludes that because of social media, “we can transform the role of the private sector, including both corporations and consumers, to build a better world.”54 The problem is that celebrants often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy. “What I found,” Yochai Benkler writes, “was that the Internet has allowed social, nonmarket behavior to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global, networked economy.”55 “We are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy,” Don Tapscott and Anthony D.

Although the policy battles were won decisively by capital, it is important to acknowledge that there remained plenty of space for people to use the Internet as they wished, so this was not a case like radio broadcasting, wherein the system was turned over to a small number of commercial interests as a monopoly. There has been a tremendous burst of nonprofit and noncommercial Internet sites and free or open software and applications—Yochai Benkler puts the number in the thousands—that have become a central part of the digital realm as experienced by many online.49 Wikipedia is the most striking example. As John Naughton puts it, amateurs “have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.”50 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales understood from the outset that it could not be credible and successful if it was commercial, and Wikipedia still has a stance toward advertising that conjures up the Net’s salad days.51 At their best, these noncommercial cooperative ventures hark back to what Internet celebrants have most extolled about the technology’s virtues and potential.52 The most prominent of these developments have found a niche that sits comfortably with the dominant commercial players.


pages: 416 words: 100,130

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You by Jeremy Heimans, Henry Timms

"Susan Fowler" uber, "World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, battle of ideas, benefit corporation, Benjamin Mako Hill, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, British Empire, Chris Wanstrath, Columbine, Corn Laws, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, game design, gig economy, hiring and firing, holacracy, hustle culture, IKEA effect, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, job satisfaction, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Jony Ive, Kevin Roose, Kibera, Kickstarter, Lean Startup, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Occupy movement, post-truth, profit motive, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, rolling blackouts, rolodex, Salesforce, Saturday Night Live, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Snapchat, social web, subscription business, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, TED Talk, the scientific method, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

“nonmarket-based cooperation”: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). “techno-anarcho-utopian magnum opus”: Matthew Ingram, “The Carr-Benkler Wager and the Peer-Powered Economy,” Gigaom, May 9, 2012. “amateur activity springing up”: Olivier Silvian, “Contingency and the ‘Networked Information Economy’: A Critique of The Wealth of Networks,” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society 4 (2008): 7. “We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu.

“We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu. “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler!”: Nicholas Carr, “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler,” Rough Type (blog), May 1, 2012. www.roughtype.com. “For investors, no less than”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” The early flourish of something like: Couchsurfing International, July 2017. www.couchsurfing.com. “I’m thrilled that you’re writing”: Yochai Benkler, discussion with authors, December 2, 2016. “What’s interesting is that if you teach”: Ibid. “Benkler’s dream”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” “Kickstarter is not a store”: Strickler, Chen, and Adler, “Kickstarter Is Not a Store.”

But we should reject the idea that our destiny is to end up either being replaced by robots or treated like them. We believe there’s a practical advantage—and a moral imperative—to designing platforms that prove more human: ones that offer worker protections and security, provide freedom and dignity, and release creativity and ultimately value. 12 THE FUTURE: A FULL-STACK SOCIETY Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard who has spent the past twenty years writing and thinking about the possibilities of technology-enabled collaboration and mass participation. He has, for most of his career, been an articulate cheerleader for the potential of the internet to distribute power—culturally, politically, and economically.


pages: 533

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech by Jamie Susskind

3D printing, additive manufacturing, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Robotics, Andrew Keen, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, automated trading system, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Boeing 747, brain emulation, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business process, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, cellular automata, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, continuation of politics by other means, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, digital map, disinformation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, end-to-end encryption, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, future of work, Future Shock, Gabriella Coleman, Google bus, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, industrial robot, informal economy, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, machine translation, Metcalfe’s law, mittelstand, more computing power than Apollo, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, night-watchman state, Oculus Rift, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, payday loans, Philippa Foot, post-truth, power law, price discrimination, price mechanism, RAND corporation, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Mercer, Satoshi Nakamoto, Second Machine Age, selection bias, self-driving car, sexual politics, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, smart contracts, Snapchat, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, tech bro, technological determinism, technological singularity, technological solutionism, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas L Friedman, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, universal basic income, urban planning, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, work culture , working-age population, Yochai Benkler

See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2007). 9. Karl Marx, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works Vol. 3. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 187. 10. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 130. 11. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 168. 12. Yochai Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power’, Daedalus 145, no. 1 (Winter 2016), 21. 13. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. (London: John Murray, 2014), 82. 14.

It has been a pleasure to work with the fine teams at Oxford University Press and Peters Fraser + Dunlop: Tim Binding, Alexandra Cliff, Tessa David, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, Dan Herron, Erin Meehan, Laurie Robertson, Sarah Russo, and Olivia Wells. Chris Summerville expertly copy-edited the final text. I am grateful to Luciano Floridi, Vicki Nash, and Susannah Otter, whose early guidance helped to get the project off the ground. Fred Popplewell’s research was enormously useful. I have benefitted deeply from conversations with Yochai Benkler, Alex CanforDumas, Amber Case, Matt Clifford, David Cox, Primavera De Filippi, Gabriella Fee, Howard Gardner, Josh Glancy, Philip Howard, Laurence Lessig, Andrew Perlman, Michael Sandel, Bruce Schneier, Carina Namih, Beth Simone Noveck, David Weinberger, Owain Williams, Ellen Winner, Tom Woodward, and Jonathan Zittrain.

Together, tens of thousands of contributors from around the world have produced the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled, working cooperatively, not for profit, outside the market system, and not under the command of the state. Similarly, file-sharing websites like Tor are increasingly popular, and in 2015 there were more than 1 billion uses of Creative Commons, a collaboration-friendly copyright system that encourages the use and adaptation of content by others without further permission by the originator. As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks (2006) and The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), it’s not that human nature has changed in the last twenty years to make us more cooperative. Rather, it’s that this scale of cooperative behaviour would have been impossible in the past. Connective technology has made it possible.23 The last few years have seen the emergence of another technology with potentially far-reaching implications for connectivity and cooperation.


pages: 742 words: 137,937

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts by Richard Susskind, Daniel Susskind

23andMe, 3D printing, Abraham Maslow, additive manufacturing, AI winter, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, Atul Gawande, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Bill Joy: nanobots, Blue Ocean Strategy, business process, business process outsourcing, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Clapham omnibus, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, death of newspapers, disintermediation, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, full employment, future of work, Garrett Hardin, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lump of labour, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Metcalfe’s law, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, optical character recognition, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Shoshana Zuboff, Skype, social web, speech recognition, spinning jenny, strong AI, supply-chain management, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, telepresence, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Turing test, Two Sigma, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, world market for maybe five computers, Yochai Benkler, young professional

<http://www.data.gov> for the USA, <http://data.gov.uk> for the UK, and <http://www.data.go.jp> for Japan. 14 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2014), ch. 12. 15 Most notably, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted 30 July 2002), known also as the ‘Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act’. This is part of the federal law of the USA. 16 See e.g. Glasgow Herald, 18 Nov.1985, p. 15. 17 <http://www.ey.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 18 Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2010), 34. 19 Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, 36. 20 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006). 21 <http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk>. 22 See Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now (2015), on driverless cars and doctorless patients. 23 Penelope Eckert, ‘Communities of Practice’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed.

More, it also seems to challenge classical economic thinking, which presumes that people strive to maximize their own self-interest alone, and are not inclined to contribute to others where there is no obvious and direct payoff to themselves. One of the leading academic commentators on the Internet, Yochai Benkler, in his book The Penguin and the Leviathan, strives to make sense of this apparent generosity, of the way in which ‘co-operation triumphs over self-interest’. As he puts it: the Internet has allowed social, nonmarket behaviour to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global, networked information economy.

Information and news, knowledge and culture, computer-mediated social and economic interactions form the foundation of everything in all aspects of our lives—from the pursuit of democracy and global justice, to the latest trends in business and media, to the best innovations in the most advanced economies. The Internet has revolutionized how we produce information and the knowledge foundations of our society.97 What motivates people to exhibit this ‘nonmarket’ behaviour? Yochai Benkler’s explanation is a useful starting-point: ‘people contribute their time and effort, for free, because they think it’s the right thing to do, because they think contributing is fair, because it enhances their sense of identity and community and, quite simply, because it’s fun.’98 Not all networks, however, support cooperation.


pages: 283 words: 85,824

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age by Astra Taylor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, Alan Greenspan, American Legislative Exchange Council, Andrew Keen, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, big-box store, Brewster Kahle, business logic, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, Community Supported Agriculture, conceptual framework, content marketing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital Maoism, disinformation, disintermediation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, Gabriella Coleman, gentrification, George Gilder, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, hive mind, income inequality, informal economy, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Laura Poitras, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, Naomi Klein, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, oil rush, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, post-work, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, recommendation engine, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, Snapchat, social graph, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, vertical integration, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Works Progress Administration, Yochai Benkler, young professional

David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 67 and 10. 12. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2006), 93. 13. The talk is called “The New Open-Source Economics,” http://www.ted.com/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html. 14. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, “File-Sharing and Copyright” (working paper, Harvard Business School, May 15, 2009), http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf.

Barriers to entry have been removed, gatekeepers have been demolished, and the costs of creating and distributing culture have plummeted. New tools not only have made cultural production more efficient but have equalized opportunity. NYU professor Clay Shirky, perhaps the leading proponent of this view, calls this process “social production.” Harvard’s Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production,” business writer Jeff Howe calls it “crowdsourcing,” and Don Tapscott and his coauthor Anthony D. Williams say “wikinomics.” Whatever term they use, the commentators agree that a revolution is unfolding, with the potential to transform not just culture but also politics and the economy.

“Amateurs,” Shirky writes, “are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation; the term itself derives from the Latin amare—‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.” Making a similar case, Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.12 “Remember, money isn’t always the best motivator,” Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. “If you leave a fifty dollar check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back.


pages: 237 words: 67,154

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Anthology selection © 2016 Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. The following authors have placed their contributions under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license: Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, Yochai Benkler, Francesca Bria, Miriam A. Cherry, Ra Criscitiello, Max Dana, Joshua Danielson, Joel Dietz, John Duda, Enric Duran, Matan Field, Noemi Giszpenc, Mayo Fuster Morell, Marina Gorbis, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Seda Gürses, Peter Harris, Steven Hill, Pedro Jardim, Francis Jervis, Mary Jo Kaplan, Dmytri Kleiner, Brendan Martin, Rachel O’Dwyer, Rory Ridley-Duff, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushkoff, Nathan Schneider, Trebor Scholz, Juliet B.

David Bollier - From Open Access to Digital Commons PART 3 AN INTERNET OF OUR OWN Showcase 1 - Platforms Stocksy United Fairmondo Coopify Gratipay FairCoop Member’s Media, Ltd. Cooperative TimesFree Snowdrift.coop Resonate Loconomics Cooperative NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative Robin Hood Collective Seed.Coop 14. Yochai Benkler - The Realism of Cooperativism 15. Janelle Orsi - Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative 16. Caroline Woolard - So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative… 17. Melissa Hoover - What We Mean When We Say “Cooperative” 18. David Carroll - A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible 19.

The Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, formulated a Good Work Code in hopes that policy makers would endorse their guidelines and that platform owners would follow them. Seattle imposed a tax on Uber and gave drivers the right to unionize, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City made attempts to curb the number of Uber cars, and the city of San Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. A third pathway is to move production outside of the market altogether. Yochai Benkler labeled this “non-market peer production,” with the most successful example being Wikipedia. And, finally, for the compensated labor market, there is a fourth approach, which is platform cooperativism, a model of social organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially change what you don’t own.


pages: 678 words: 216,204

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

affirmative action, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Brownian motion, business logic, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, clean water, commoditize, commons-based peer production, dark matter, desegregation, digital divide, East Village, Eben Moglen, fear of failure, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, game design, George Gilder, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, informal economy, information asymmetry, information security, invention of radio, Isaac Newton, iterative process, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kenneth Arrow, Lewis Mumford, longitudinal study, machine readable, Mahbub ul Haq, market bubble, market clearing, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, New Journalism, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, power law, precautionary principle, pre–internet, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, radical decentralization, random walk, Recombinant DNA, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, software patent, spectrum auction, subscription business, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, transaction costs, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," Nature, December 14, 2005, available at ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html›. 25. ‹http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html›. 26. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (2001): 369. 27. IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), ‹http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm›. 28. For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287.

Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," Nature, December 14, 2005, available at ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html›. 25. ‹http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html›. 26. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (2001): 369. 27. IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), ‹http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm›. 28. For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287.

Using Networked Communication to Work Around Authoritarian Control Toward a Networked Public Sphere Chapter 8 - Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical Cultural Freedom in Liberal Political Theory The Transparency of Internet Culture The Plasticity of Internet Culture: the Future of High-Production-Value Folk Culture A Participatory Culture: Toward Policy Chapter 9 - Justice and Development Liberal Theories of Justice and the Networked Information Economy Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge Industrial Organization of Hdi-Related Information Industries Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development Software Scientific Publication Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion Chapter 10 - Social Ties: Networking Together From "Virtual Communities" to Fear of Disintegration A More Positive Picture Emerges over Time Users Increase Their Connections with Preexisting Relations Networked Individuals The Internet As a Platform for Human Connection The Emergence of Social Software The Internet and Human Community Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation Introduction Chapter 11 - The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment Institutional Ecology and Path Dependence A Framework for Mapping the Institutional Ecology The Physical Layer Transport: Wires and Wireless Devices The Logical Layer The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics The Browser Wars Free Software Software Patents The Content Layer Copyright Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) Trademark Dilution Database Protection Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity International "Harmonization" Countervailing Forces The Problem of Security Chapter 12 - Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy Blurb Endnotes Index Copyright © 2006 Yochai Benkler. All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license; it can be accessed through the author's website at http://www.benkler.org.


pages: 296 words: 83,254

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In 2016 Kathleen Thelen and Peter Hall organized a Radcliffe Ventures meeting on the Politics of Work and Welfare in the Platform Economy, which significantly expanded my understanding of the sector. A third was the Sharing Cities Summit in Barcelona. Most recently, it has been a privilege to participate in the Political Economy and Justice Workshop at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, organized by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, and Rebecca Henderson. Many thanks to all the participants in those gatherings. I have presented this research to colleagues at many universities and conferences, where I received valuable feedback and encouragement. I am grateful to participants in seminars and workshops at Harvard, Harvard Business School, the Berkman Center, MIT, Northwestern, Boston College, Bentley University, Microsoft Research, Berkeley, Barnard College, New York University, Michigan, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Boston University, CUNY Graduate Center, Connecticut College, University of Toronto, University of Massachusetts, Northeastern University, New School for Social Research, University of Maine, University of Central Arkansas, Tellus Institute, Utrecht University, Hamburg University, and University of Paris-Dauphine.

For many years I have wanted to publish a book with Naomi Schneider and am privileged to have had the opportunity. It has been a great pleasure to work with her. There are a few people whose work and colleagueship has been especially important and to whom I have a special debt—Jean Rhodes, Veena Dubal, Krishna Dasaratha, Steve Vallas, and Yochai Benkler. Yochai’s writings have been inspirational for me, and our conversations no less so. Yochai, Jean, Krishna, and Prasannan Parthasarathi read the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for doing so. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who are always a source of love and support—David, Jon, Jim, Sharon, Indira, Niranjana, Dan, Lizzie, and Josh.

The successes, over hundreds of years, of some of Ostrom’s cases led to enthusiasm for expanding “commons” to realms such as art, culture, scholarship, and of course, the digital world.65 The intellectual foundations for sharing also got a boost from a pair of pathbreaking contributions by legal scholar Yochai Benkler (“Sharing Nicely” from the Yale Law Review and his influential book The Wealth of Networks).66 Benkler argued against the conventional view that there are only three choices for organizing economic life—markets, firms, and the state. He made the case that a fourth—“social sharing”—was not only widespread but was becoming more efficient on account of digital technology.


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We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production by Charles Leadbeater

1960s counterculture, Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, c2.com, call centre, citizen journalism, clean water, cloud computing, complexity theory, congestion charging, death of newspapers, Debian, digital divide, digital Maoism, disruptive innovation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, folksonomy, frictionless, frictionless market, future of work, game design, Garrett Hardin, Google Earth, Google X / Alphabet X, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Hernando de Soto, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jean Tirole, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, lateral thinking, lone genius, M-Pesa, Mark Shuttleworth, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microcredit, Mitch Kapor, new economy, Nicholas Carr, online collectivism, Paradox of Choice, planetary scale, post scarcity, public intellectual, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social web, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

They see in the Internet the possibility of community and collaboration, commons-based, peer-to-peer production, which will establish non-market and non-hierarchical organisations. It is not opening a new stage of capitalism and the market but laying the seeds for alternatives to both. We Think stands in this camp along with Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone. The most comprehensive statement of this collaborative point of view is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. The real measure of the Internet’s impact and value is whether it provides radically different options for how we organise ourselves: generating knowledge, sharing ideas, creating culture, making decisions together. People want meaningful opportunities to participate and contribute, to add their piece of information, view or opinion.

The web’s best known self-governing communities do seem to bear this out: they rely on responsible self-governance, in which decision-making is relatively transparent and power held to account. The outcome should be that citizens will become more engaged and the political process more legitimate and creative. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor, argues that as the web allows more views to be aired, so citizens will become more critically engaged in debating and choosing between a wider range of proposals. Benkler’s approach echoes Hannah Arendt’s view that citizens should be the ‘craftsmen of democracy’, inquiring into how things work, getting their hands dirty, challenging the power of experts and professionals who dominate policymaking.

What that means is that the rise of We-Think culture among affluent teenagers in California might be justified on grounds of social justice if provision of the same tools could make an even bigger difference to the lives of the poorest. Then we could say the spread of We-Think potentially makes the world more socially just. There are grounds for guarded optimism, in theory. As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks, Information, knowledge and culture are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities.


pages: 236 words: 66,081

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, behavioural economics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, citizen journalism, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, Dean Kamen, experimental economics, experimental subject, fundamental attribution error, Great Leap Forward, invention of movable type, invention of the telegraph, Kevin Kelly, lolcat, means of production, meta-analysis, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, seminal paper, social contagion, social software, Steve Ballmer, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game, work culture , Yochai Benkler

Creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal than consuming something made by others, even something of high quality. I was wrong about Geocities because I bet that amateurs would never want to do anything other than consume. (That was the last time I ever made that mistake.) MEMBERSHIP AND GENEROSITY Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar at Harvard, and Helen Nissenbaum, a philosopher at NYU, wrote a paper in 2006 with a mouthful of a title: “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Commons-based peer production is Benkler’s term for systems that rely on voluntary contributions to operate—systems that rely on cognitive surplus.

As with the Ultimatum Game, the default human behavior relies on mutual regard for other participants, even when there’s money to be made. The second thing that has happened is that the emergence of a medium that makes group coordination cheap and widespread caused many of the old limits on social production to recede. This is the mechanism of production that Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler has called “commons-based peer production,” work that is jointly owned or accessed by its participants, and created by people operating as peers, without a managerial hierarchy. The inclusion of millions of new participants in our media environment has expanded the scale and scope of such production dramatically.

Chris Anderson, Lili Cheng, Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Stolli, and Kevin Werbach all provided their own observations, as well as offered public platforms for the development of this work. Long-running conversations with many colleagues have provided material and insights for this book, including Sunny Bates, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Caterina Fake, Scott Heiferman, Tom Hennes, Liz Lawley, Beth Noveck, Danny O’Brien, Paul Resnick, Linda Stone, Martin Wattenberg, David Weinberger, and Ethan Zuckerman. My agent, John Brockman, helped me clarify what I wanted to say, and Eamon Dolan and Helen Conford of Penguin Press helped me say it.


pages: 375 words: 88,306

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism by Arun Sundararajan

"World Economic Forum" Davos, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset light, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, book value, Burning Man, call centre, Carl Icahn, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, corporate social responsibility, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, distributed ledger, driverless car, Eben Moglen, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, future of work, general purpose technology, George Akerlof, gig economy, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, job automation, job-hopping, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Kula ring, Lyft, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, megacity, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer model, peer-to-peer rental, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, rent control, Richard Florida, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, Snapchat, social software, supply-chain management, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, total factor productivity, transaction costs, transportation-network company, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, WeWork, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Some that were quite influential early on were with Odile Beniflah, Lauren Capelin, Shelby Clark, Sunil Paul, Jessica Scorpio, Erica Swallow, Molly Turner, and Hal Varian. Some of the others that were especially notable and/or frequent were with Bhavish Aggarwal, Alisha Ali, Douglas Atkin, Michel Avital, Emily Badger, Mara Balestrini, Yochai Benkler, Rachel Botsman, danah boyd, Nathan Blecharczyk, Jennifer Bradley, Erik Brynjolfsson, Valentina Carbone, Emily Castor, David Chiu, Marc-David Chokrun, Sonal Choksi, Peter Coles, Chip Conley, Ariane Conrad, Arnab Das, Cristian Fleming (and his team at the Public Society), Richard Florida, Natalie Foster, Justin Fox, Liz Gannes, Lisa Gansky, Marina Gorbis, Neal Gorenflo, Alison Griswold, Vijay Gurbaxani, Tanner Hackett, Aassia Haroon Haq, Scott Heiferman, Jeremy Heimans, Sara Horowitz, Sam Hodges, Milicent Johnson, Noah Karesh, Stephane Kasriel, Sarah Kessler, David Kirkpatrick, Marjo Koivisto, Karim Lakhani, Kevin Laws, Michael Luca, Benita Matofska, Andrew McAfee, Ryan McKillen, Lesa Mitchell, Amy Nelson, Jeff Nickerson, Melissa O’Young, Janelle Orsi, Jeremy Osborn, Jeremiah Owyang (to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for his remarkably selfless sharing of ideas and data), Wrede Petersmeyer, Ai-Jen Poo, Andrew Rasiej, Simone Ross, Anita Roth, Chelsea Rustrum, Carolyn Said, Marcela Sapone, Marie Schneegans, Trebor Scholz, Swati Sharma, Clay Shirky, Dane Stangler, Alex Stephany, James Surowiecki, Jason Tanz, Marie Ternes, Henry Timms, Viv Wang, Cheng Wei, Adam Werbach, Jamie Wong, Caroline Woolard, and numerous members of the OuiShare collective (including Flore Berlingen, Julie Braka, Albert Cañigueral, Simone Cicero, Javier Creus, Arthur De Grave, Elena Denaro, Diana Fillipova, Marguerite Grandjean, Asmaa Guedira, Ana Manzanedo, Bernie Mitchell, Edwin Mootoosamy, Ruhi Shamim, Maeva Tordo and especially Francesca Pick).

It is useful to step back here and consider the perspectives of several earlier thinkers on the sharing economy, exploring in the process some of the sharing economy’s historical precedents, and its connection to even earlier thought on the gift economies that human societies have relied on for centuries. In 2004, the NYU professor Yochai Benkler (now at Harvard) published “‘Sharing Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.” Motivated in part by the rapid growth of Wikipedia since 2001, Benkler observed the ascendance of social sharing and exchange, and predicted that sharing would soon be at “the very core of the most advanced economies—in information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors.”18 He argued that the change has much to do with the growing availability of free software, distributed computing, and population-scale digital networks.

He writes: “There exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is regulated not by price but by a complex set of social relations.”24 Later in the same chapter, Lessig qualifies his point: “Of all the ways in which the exchange within a sharing economy can be defined—or put differently, of all the possible terms of the exchange within a sharing economy—the one way in which it cannot be defined is in terms of money.”25 Lessig himself then draws a parallel between his thinking and Benkler’s. “As Yochai Benkler puts it, in commercial economies ‘prices are the primary source of information about, and incentive for, resource allocation’”; in sharing economies “non-price-based social relations play these roles.”26 However, he argues, this “is not because people are against money (obviously)” but rather because “people live within overlapping spheres of social understanding.


pages: 565 words: 151,129

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism by Jeremy Rifkin

3D printing, active measures, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, benefit corporation, big-box store, bike sharing, bioinformatics, bitcoin, business logic, business process, Chris Urmson, circular economy, clean tech, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commons-based peer production, Community Supported Agriculture, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, crowdsourcing, demographic transition, distributed generation, DIY culture, driverless car, Eben Moglen, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, general purpose technology, global supply chain, global village, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, industrial robot, informal economy, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, Internet of things, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Elkington, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, longitudinal study, low interest rates, machine translation, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, mass immigration, means of production, meta-analysis, Michael Milken, mirror neurons, natural language processing, new economy, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, phenotype, planetary scale, price discrimination, profit motive, QR code, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, rewilding, RFID, Richard Stallman, risk/return, Robert Solow, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search inside the book, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, smart meter, social web, software as a service, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, urban planning, vertical integration, warehouse automation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, working poor, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Mike Bergan, “The American Commons,” 10,000 Birds, August 6, 2007, http://10000birds .com/the-american-commons.htm (accessed July 2, 2013). 43. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112(369) v.04.3 (August 2002): 1–2, http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF (accessed June 26, 2013). 44. Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006), xiv. Chapter 12 1. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 470. 2.

After all, much of the communication that goes on today in the United States and around the world is via e-mail, smartphones, and tablets. In the Collaborative Age, social media like Facebook and Twitter are the indispensable means by which people increasingly communicate with each other. A new generation of scholars like Eli Noam of Columbia University, Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found common cause with the traditional market economists. All of them argued that the FCC command and control of the radio bands was, at best, inefficient and wasteful. The new activists disagreed, however, with Coase’s disciples, who argued that market management was the only viable alternative to government control.

The communication/energy matrix of the Third Industrial Revolution—the Internet of Things—is facilitated more by social capital than by market capital, scales laterally, and is organized in a distributed and collaborative fashion, making Commons management with government engagement the better governing model. Yochai Benkler says that while an inordinate amount of attention is being placed on free software, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment.


pages: 216 words: 61,061

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed by Alexis Ohanian

Airbnb, barriers to entry, carbon-based life, cloud computing, crowdsourcing, digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Hacker News, Hans Rosling, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, Internet Archive, Justin.tv, Kickstarter, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, Occupy movement, Paul Graham, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social web, software is eating the world, Startup school, TED Talk, Tony Hsieh, unpaid internship, Wayback Machine, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Fifteen years earlier, the US Supreme Court talked about the potential for anyone using the Internet to “become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox,” but until this watershed moment, we’d never seen that voice actually resonate among millions of people.7 The social web changed that, and the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was, poetically, enabled by the very technology those bills threatened. Israeli-American legal scholar Yochai Benkler researched what he calls the “networked public sphere” using eighteen months of text and link analysis to identify the most-linked-to online sources as the voice of the “town crier” resonated across the web.8 At this point it shouldn’t surprise you that there wasn’t just one source, but rather a chorus.

Now imagine this part in slow motion with dramatic music playing in the background: Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) put a hold on the bill, saying, “The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet.”10 Epic. The bill was not gone, however. A year later it returned—still awful—with a new name: the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would follow in the House. Fortunately for us, when it comes to the speed of innovation, that’s a long time in Internet years. As Yochai Benkler’s research shows, Senator Wyden declared in a widely linked release in May of 2011 that he would also place a hold on this new bill. But this release also served as a call to the Internet public for help.11 Content began to surface and websites emerged that called for even more action. One of these sites, AmericanCensorship.org, was organized by the group Fight for the Future, which proved to be a powerful mobilizing force in the months that followed.

And after a day of protest, phone calls, and petitions, the American people triumphed over tens of millions of lobbying dollars. Turns out the Supreme Court, in its 1997 “town crier” decision (where the Internet enables anyone to be a “town crier,” only with far more impact), wasn’t far off, as Yochai Benkler says: “Not everyone is a pamphleteer, but… what you see is a complex relationship between NGOs and commercial organizations; between VCs and activists; between traditional media and online media; between political media left and right; and tech media; all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking.


pages: 274 words: 75,846

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You by Eli Pariser

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, A Pattern Language, adjacent possible, Amazon Web Services, An Inconvenient Truth, Apple Newton, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, Black Swan, borderless world, Build a better mousetrap, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, disintermediation, don't be evil, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, fundamental attribution error, Gabriella Coleman, global village, Haight Ashbury, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Metcalfe’s law, Netflix Prize, new economy, PageRank, Paradox of Choice, Patri Friedman, paypal mafia, Peter Thiel, power law, recommendation engine, RFID, Robert Metcalfe, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, social software, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, technoutopianism, Ted Nordhaus, The future is already here, the scientific method, urban planning, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

But the trust we place in them to handle it with care is not always warranted, and when decisions are made on the basis of this data that affect you negatively, they’re usually not revealed. Ultimately, the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you’re letting the companies that construct it choose which options you’re aware of. You may think you’re the captain of your own destiny, but personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next—a Web history you’re doomed to repeat.

If a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false definition of the world that through one’s actions becomes true, we’re now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities, in which the Internet’s distorted picture of us becomes who we really are. Personalized filtering can even affect your ability to choose your own destiny. In “Of Sirens and Amish Children,” a muchcited tract, information law theorist Yochai Benkler describes how more-diverse information sources make us freer. Autonomy, Benkler points out, is a tricky concept: To be free, you have to be able not only to do what you want, but to know what’s possible to do. The Amish children in the title are plaintiffs in a famous court case, Wisconsin v.

(New York: 2009), accessed July 19, 2010, www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html. 15 “strategically time” their online solicitations: “Ovulation Hormones Make Women ‘Choose Clingy Clothes,’” BBC News, Aug. 5, 2010, accessed Feb: 8, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10878750. 16 third-party marketing firms: “Preliminary FTC Staff Privacy Report,” remarks of Chairman Jon Leibowitz, as prepared for delivery, Dec. 1, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2011, www.ftc.gov/speeches/leibowitz/101201privacyreportremarks.pdf. 16 Yochai Bentler argues: Yochai Benkler, “Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law,” New York University Law Review, Apr. 2001. 17 tap into lots of different networks: Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 17 “make us all next door neighbors”: Thomas Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, After All,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 2005, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?


pages: 234 words: 67,589

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future by Ben Tarnoff

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic management, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, business logic, call centre, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, decentralized internet, deep learning, defund the police, deindustrialization, desegregation, digital divide, disinformation, Edward Snowden, electricity market, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial intermediation, future of work, gamification, General Magic , gig economy, God and Mammon, green new deal, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Leo Hollis, lockdown, lone genius, low interest rates, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Menlo Park, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, pets.com, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, smart grid, social distancing, Steven Levy, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, techlash, Telecommunications Act of 1996, TikTok, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, undersea cable, UUNET, vertical integration, Victor Gruen, web application, working poor, Yochai Benkler

The Answers Are Deeply Weird,” Washington Post, August 18, 2021, and Shoshana Wodinsky, “Facebook’s ‘Widely Viewed Content’ Report Promises Ben Shapiro Isn’t That Popular,” Gizmodo, August 18, 2021. 141, What’s more, it is figures … NYU study: Laura Edelson et al., “Far-Right News Sources on Facebook More Engaging,” Cyber-security for Democracy, March 3, 2021. No measurable effect from Russian influence operations: Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 235–68, and Yochai Benkler, “Cautionary Notes on Disinformation and the Origins of Distrust,” MediaWell, October 22, 2019. “Mostly took the …”: Yochai Benkler, “The Danger of Overstating the Impact of Information Operations,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020. 142, These forces have … Right-wing media ecosystem: Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 75–99. Fox as most-viewed US cable network: Amy Watson, “Top Cable News Networks U.S. 2021, by Number of Viewers,” Statista, June 7, 2021.

Researchers at New York University found that far-right news sources receive the highest levels of engagement per follower, and that such sources are actually more popular if they spread false information—which is not the case for news sources in the political center or on the left. Meanwhile, despite the amount of attention devoted to the role of Russian influence operations in the 2016 election, they had no measurable effect, according to research by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Further, such operations “mostly took the form of jumping on the bandwagon” of the Right, Benkler writes, boosting false narratives initially manufactured by domestic forces. These forces have a wide range of outlets at their disposal. They can circulate propaganda not just through social media but across an entire right-wing media ecosystem, from talk radio to cable TV to news sites.

Shapiro, “Greater Internet Use Is Not Associated with Faster Growth in Political Polarization among US Demographic Groups,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 40 (October 3, 2017): 10616. See also Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020, and Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 296–339. 141, But the Right has immeasurably … The journalist Kevin Roose compiles the ten top-performing link posts by public US Facebook pages every day and publishes them on Twitter at twitter. com/FacebooksTop10.


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Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age by Steven Johnson

Airbus A320, airport security, algorithmic trading, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Cass Sunstein, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, cognitive dissonance, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dark matter, Dava Sobel, David Brooks, Donald Davies, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, future of journalism, Great Leap Forward, high-speed rail, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, HyperCard, Jane Jacobs, John Gruber, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mark Zuckerberg, mega-rich, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, pre–internet, private spaceflight, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social graph, SpaceShipOne, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, techno-determinism, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, Tim Cook: Apple, urban planning, US Airways Flight 1549, WikiLeaks, William Langewiesche, working poor, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, your tax dollars at work

Ultimately I realized there was a word that had been staring me in the face all along: peer. It was a word that traveled nicely between high-tech and low-tech domains. The Internet and the Web (and almost all social networks that have been built on them) are peer-to-peer networks. The scholar Yochai Benkler had written eloquently of open-source projects such as Linux or Wikipedia as models of what he called “peer production.” But peer in the social sense was an evocative and powerful word in its own right: your equals, the ones whose respect and judgment you seek. So this is now what I call myself—and many of my friends and heroes—when asked about our political orientation.

A few years later, in a casual e-mail exchange, the political scientist Henry Farrell encouraged me to write a book documenting the new politics that seemed to be coalescing around the online world. It took me a while, but eventually all these nudges came together to form Future Perfect. My thinking on these issues has been greatly expanded—if not downright borrowed—from conversations with Beth Noveck, Yochai Benkler, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Larry Lessig, Denise Caruso, John Mackey, John Geraci, Paul Miller, Roo Rogers, Rachel Botsman, Reid Hoffman, Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jon Schnur, Raj Sisodia, Gordon Wheeler, Nick Grossman, Jay Haynes, Eric Liftin, John Battelle, and my mother, Bev Johnson.

For more on Marian Zeitlin’s original work, see Positive Deviance in Child Nutrition (with Emphasis on Psychosocial and Behavioural Aspects and Implications for Development), coauthored with Hossein Ghassemi and Mohamed Mansour. The key books and essays that have shaped my thinking on the power of peer networks and the framework of peer-progressive values include Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks; Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment; Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century; Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs; Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations; Tim O’Reilly’s “The Architecture of Participation”; Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s “Cognitive Democracy”; and just about everything written by Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society.


pages: 1,136 words: 73,489

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software by Nadia Eghbal

Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), Big Tech, bitcoin, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, commoditize, commons-based peer production, context collapse, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Heinemeier Hansson, death of newspapers, Debian, disruptive innovation, Dunbar number, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Ethereum, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Induced demand, informal economy, information security, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kubernetes, leftpad, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, node package manager, Norbert Wiener, pirate software, pull request, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Ruby on Rails, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social graph, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, tacit knowledge, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, urban planning, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler, Zimmermann PGP

While certain members occupy distinct roles, the primary mode of social interaction in these communities is distributed, or many-to-many. WHY WE PARTICIPATE IN THE COMMONS Ostrom’s work on the commons helps us understand the conditions in which people produce software collaboratively: the clubs and federations of open source. In the early 2000s, Yochai Benkler expanded upon Ostrom’s model by applying her findings to the online world. He terms this communal structure commons-based peer production (CBPP) in a 2002 essay called “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm.’” (The title is a reference to Linux’s mascot, which is a penguin; in the paper, Benkler leans heavily upon the example of open source software to make his case.)

Sean Larkin, the webpack maintainer, found that his skills doing outreach and user support complemented those of webpack’s author and lead developer, Tobias Koppers: When I first became a maintainer, I was too terrified to make code changes. I didn’t know how it worked. So I asked myself what I could do that I could kick ass at. I essentially just got on Twitter and started spending hours a day searching “Webpack.”150 Yochai Benkler suggests that all members in a peer production model are intrinsically motivated to participate. While intrinsic motivation explains why developers create software, as well as why they might casually participate, it doesn’t fully explain why developers continue to maintain projects over time.

If I shoot fireworks from my house, all my neighbors can enjoy them, because I can’t stop them from viewing the fireworks. However, I might eventually get a little tired of buying materials, organizing the show, and absorbing the legal risks. Early open source advocates and scholars like Eric S. Raymond and Yochai Benkler point out that the problem is not quite that simple. In the physical world, the cost of providing material goods often makes it prohibitively difficult to provide public goods “for the fun of it.” The United States spends nearly $700 billion per year on national defense, for example.262 But online, it’s not that expensive to write code, record a video, make music, or publish one’s thoughts.


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The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest by Yochai Benkler

Abraham Maslow, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, business process, California gold rush, citizen journalism, classic study, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, do well by doing good, East Village, Everything should be made as simple as possible, experimental economics, experimental subject, framing effect, Garrett Hardin, informal economy, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, loss aversion, Murray Gell-Mann, Nicholas Carr, peer-to-peer, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, scientific management, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, social contagion, Steven Pinker, telemarketer, Toyota Production System, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Also by Yochai Benkler The Wealth of Networks Copyright © 2011 by Yochai Benkler All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benkler, Yochai. The penguin and the Leviathan: the triumph of cooperation over self-interest/Yochai Benkler. p. cm. 1. Cooperation. 2. Self-interest. 3. Altruism. 4.


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They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy by Lawrence Lessig

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, Columbine, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Brooks, disinformation, do-ocracy, Donald Trump, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, illegal immigration, income inequality, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Gilmore, Joi Ito, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parag Khanna, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Skype, speech recognition, Steven Levy, surveillance capitalism, Upton Sinclair, Yochai Benkler

But it is to say that we should stand skeptical about the capacity of cable news to stay focused in a way that advances understanding, or at least the understanding a democratic public would require. Truth or significance may be a by-product; it may as well not. The 2016 election is a perfect example of this more general point. At Harvard, Yochai Benkler and his colleagues have done extraordinary work to understand the pattern of news consumption during the 2016 presidential election. After the 2016 election, they mapped the flow of stories and information across both cable television and the Internet. The strong conclusion that they draw is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the problem with news in America is not symmetrical.

See Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, “Political Polarization and the Rational Public,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 18–21, 2006, available at link #95. 44.The optimistic: Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). The dark: Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). 45.The quote is from John Gilmore, one of the founders of EFF.

But it is different from the idea that Americans are becoming more extreme. See Morris Fiorina, “Americans Have Not Become More Politically Polarized,” Washington Post, June 23, 2014, available at link #104; Morris P. Fiorina, “The Political Parties Have Sorted,” a Hoover institution essay on contemporary American politics, series no. 3, 2016. 66.Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 73–74. 67.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 75-6. 68.Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 69.Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), Kindle edition, loc. 4048. 70.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 17. 71.For a related view—that the media “must embrace their solemn duty and educate the population about our great challenges—ratings be damned”—see Rob Cohen, “TV News Is As Much to Blame for Democracy’s Decline as Trump Is,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2018, available at link #105. 72.Among the most comprehensive analysis of the news coverage during the 2016 campaign is that conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.


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Collaborative Futures by Mike Linksvayer, Michael Mandiberg, Mushon Zer-Aviv

4chan, AGPL, Benjamin Mako Hill, British Empire, citizen journalism, cloud computing, collaborative economy, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, Debian, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Firefox, informal economy, jimmy wales, Kickstarter, late capitalism, lolcat, loose coupling, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Naomi Klein, Network effects, optical character recognition, packet switching, planned obsolescence, postnationalism / post nation state, prediction markets, Richard Stallman, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Slavoj Žižek, stealth mode startup, technoutopianism, The future is already here, the medium is the message, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Most of these stories are well known, so we decided to keep them short. They are all very well documented, so these descriptions should be great starting points for further research. 12 Anarchism in the Collaboratory Anarchist theory provides some of the background for our framing of autonomy and self organization. This is recapitulated by Yochai Benkler, one of the leading modern theorists of open collaboration, in his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom: “The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

Hundreds of millions of Internet users speak multiple languages; some percentage of these users are capable of translating between these. These users could be the backbone of a powerful, distributed peer production system able to tackle the audacious task of translating the Internet. We are at the very early stages of the emergence of a new model for translation of online content—“peer production” models of translation. Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production” to describe new ways of organizing collaborative projects beyond such conventional arrangements as corporate firms. Individuals have a variety of motives for participation in translation projects, sometimes motivated by an explicit interest in building intercultural bridges, sometimes by fiscal reward or personal pride.

Networked Solidarity “There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.” —Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Postnationalism Catherine Frost, in her 2006 paper Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity A er the Internet evaluates the prospects for the emergence of postnational solidarities abe ed by Internet communications leading to a change in the political order in which the responsibilities of the nation state are joined by other entities.


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One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic by Lawrence Lessig

collapse of Lehman Brothers, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, jimmy wales, Occupy movement, Ronald Reagan, Yochai Benkler

We believe in: rough consensus and running code.20 This is the age of open-source—in technology, in culture, and now in politics. It is the distinctive character of social movements, enabled by networked technology, that enables the “we” to live differently. It is the “wealth of networks” that Yochai Benkler described five years ago.21 And as it flourishes almost everywhere, it is time, finally, for people to recognize it for what it is: It is power, today. Which brings me to the second reaction that I predicted would be a result of putting these stories together, at least for some: anger. If you’re the sort of citizen I’ve described here—if you’ve “Meetup-ed” with other Tea Partiers or pitched a tent with the Occupiers—then this chapter may well have upset you.

Occupy Boston seemed the most diverse, from drug addicts (living in a No Drugs Zone) to students to professionals, with a health clinic and stage with a mic thrown into the bargain. 16 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 15. 17 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008), 24–25. 18 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 19. 19 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 19–20. 20 Paulina Borsook, “How Anarchy Works,” Wired 3.10 (October 1995): 110. 21 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2007). 22 As an ABC News polling unit found, “views on extent of racism as a problem are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.” See “The NAACP, the Tea Party and the Question of Racism,” ABC News, July 12, 2010; http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/07/the-naacp-the-tea-party-and-the-question-of-racism. 23 Pew Research Center, “Network by the Numbers” (2011); http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/network-essay/data-page-5. 24 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Beyond Red vs.


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Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science by Michael Nielsen

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, barriers to entry, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, conceptual framework, dark matter, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Easter island, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Freestyle chess, Galaxy Zoo, Higgs boson, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, machine readable, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, means of production, medical residency, Nicholas Carr, P = NP, P vs NP, publish or perish, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, selection bias, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Skype, slashdot, social intelligence, social web, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tacit knowledge, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, University of East Anglia, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 406(1):342–353, July 2010. eprint arXiv:0908.2033. [11] J. Battelle. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Boston: Nicholas Brealey, 2005. [12] Yochai Benkler. Coase’s penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. The Yale Law Journal, 112:369–446, 2002. [13] Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. [14] Tim Berners-Lee. Weaving the Web. New York: Harper Business, 2000. [15] Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler. Publishing on the semantic web. Nature, 410:1023–1024, April 26, 2001

Its only drawback is that it’s becoming a little dated (2004), but there is much in the book that is relatively timeless. Going even further back, there is Eric Raymond’s famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” [178]. Raymond’s essay is what first got me (and many others) interested in open source, and it remains well worth reading. Yochai Benkler’s insightful “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm” [12] and The Wealth of Networks [13] have strongly influenced much thinking about open source, especially in the academic community. Finally, I recommend Ned Gulley and Karim Lakhani’s fascinating account [87] of the Mathworks programming competition.

p 37 What makes prices useful is that . . . they aggregate an enormous amount of hidden knowledge: [93]. p 38: The “dumb question” was posed by Polymath participant Ryan O’Donnell: [159]. p 39: On the point that online tools are subsuming and extending both conventional markets and conventional organizations: a related point has been made by the theorist Yochai Benkler in his article “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm [12].” Benkler has a different focus, being concerned not so much with the solution of creative problems as with the production of goods. He proposes that online collaboration has enabled a third form of production, beyond markets and conventional organizations, which he calls “peer production.”


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Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom by Rebecca MacKinnon

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Berlin Wall, blood diamond, business cycle, business intelligence, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Deng Xiaoping, digital divide, digital Maoism, don't be evil, Eben Moglen, Evgeny Morozov, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Global Witness, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Julian Assange, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, national security letter, online collectivism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pre–internet, race to the bottom, real-name policy, Richard Stallman, Ronald Reagan, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

But when governments or corporations abuse their power, the commons can act as a counterweight and support network through which citizens can carve out the necessary spaces to speak and organize, and thus defend their rights and interests. In his book The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler describes how the Internet is both the product and the incubator of “commons-based information production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms.” Without their efforts, neither the Internet nor the World Wide Web—with their tremendous commercial value and political power—would exist.

But through subsequent reporting in newspapers and research by civil liberties lawyers, it has also become clear that the companies were influenced by government statements and opinions. These included a letter by State Department legal adviser Harold Koh, in which he wrote that the “violation of the law is ongoing” as long as WikiLeaks continues to publish the leaked diplomatic cables. As Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler pointed out in a group e-mail discussion with colleagues about WikiLeaks and the State Department’s actions (which I am quoting with his permission), Koh’s assertion was patently “false, as a matter of constitutional law.” The Justice Department has not managed to bring a viable case to a court of law against WikiLeaks or any other entity involved with publishing the cables.

Parag Khanna, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (New York: Random House, 2011). 13 Communication Power: Manuel Castells, Communication Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 346–362, 431–432. CHAPTER 2: RISE OF THE DIGITAL COMMONS 17 In his book The Wealth of Networks: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 472. 18 The World Wide Web, invented two decades after the Internet: For Berners-Lee’s firsthand account, see Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperOne, 1999). 20 In 1989, the computer scientist Richard Stallman got the ball rolling: Though the distinction may seem arcane to nonprogrammers, there are important philosophical differences between developers of open-source software—a much broader set of people—and adherents of the free software movement.


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The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson

1960s counterculture, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Apollo Guidance Computer, Apple II, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, beat the dealer, Bill Atkinson, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Buckminster Fuller, Byte Shop, c2.com, call centre, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, commons-based peer production, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, Debian, desegregation, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Dynabook, El Camino Real, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, en.wikipedia.org, eternal september, Evgeny Morozov, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial engineering, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Gary Kildall, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, HyperCard, hypertext link, index card, Internet Archive, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Leonard Kleinrock, Lewis Mumford, linear model of innovation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, PageRank, Paul Terrell, pirate software, popular electronics, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, punch-card reader, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Rubik’s Cube, Sand Hill Road, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, slashdot, speech recognition, Steve Ballmer, Steve Crocker, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, Susan Wojcicki, technological singularity, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, Teledyne, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, value engineering, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Whole Earth Catalog, Whole Earth Review, wikimedia commons, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, Yochai Benkler

Linus Torvalds, “Free Minix-like Kernel Sources for 386-AT,” posting to Newsgroups: comp.os.minix, Oct. 5, 1991, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html. 135. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 87, 93, 97, 119. 136. Gary Rivlin, “Leader of the Free World,” Wired, November 2003. 137. Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown, 2011); Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793. 138. Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999), 30. 139. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (originally published 1835–40; Packard edition), Kindle location 3041. 140.

Larry Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism,” Dec. 31, 2004, www.LarrySanger.org. 105. Wikipedia press release, Jan. 15, 2002, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/January_2002. 106. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 107. Shirky, “Wikipedia—An Unplanned Miracle.” 108. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793; Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown, 2011). 109. Daniel Pink, “The Buck Stops Here,” Wired, Mar. 2005; Tim Adams, “For Your Information,” Guardian, June 30, 2007; Lord Emsworth user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lord_Emsworth; Peter Steiner, New Yorker cartoon, July 5, 1993, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog. 110.

“This is an unplanned miracle, like ‘the market’ deciding how much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free.”107 The result has been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history. So why do people contribute? Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler dubbed Wikipedia, along with open-source software and other free collaborative projects, examples of “commons-based peer production.” He explained, “Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.”108 These motivations include the psychological reward of interacting with others and the personal gratification of doing a useful task.


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What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live by Rachel Botsman, Roo Rogers

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Apollo 13, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bike sharing, Buckminster Fuller, business logic, buy and hold, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, commoditize, Community Supported Agriculture, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, disintermediation, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, Ford Model T, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, global village, hedonic treadmill, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall, information retrieval, intentional community, iterative process, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late fees, Mark Zuckerberg, market design, Menlo Park, Network effects, new economy, new new economy, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, Parkinson's law, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, peer-to-peer rental, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, pre–internet, public intellectual, recommendation engine, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Simon Kuznets, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, South of Market, San Francisco, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, TED Talk, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, the strength of weak ties, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, Torches of Freedom, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, traveling salesman, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, web of trust, women in the workforce, work culture , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

As these projects are voluntary, they attract only participants passionate about the subject and motivated to engage with a group of people to help solve real challenges. The same principle applies to SETI@home, which stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” set up in 1999 by Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In the essay “Sharing Nicely,” Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler pointed to the world’s largest distributed computer network to highlight the trend toward sharing and to prove the potential of a distributed network. The goal of SETI was to apply collective power to look for intelligent life outside Earth. To date 5.2 million global volunteers have downloaded a small screensaver that identifies when their home computer is idle.

We hope it sparks conversation, debate, and a swarm of positive endeavors. From Rachel Botsman For me, this is a book about the possibilities and powerful reconnections that can help reshape our future for the better. I am indebted to the brilliant thought leaders whose ideas have inspired me to think in this way. These include Yochai Benkler, Robin Chase, Jeff Howe, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Bill McKibben, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Putnam, Jeremy Rifkin, Clay Shirky, and James Surowiecki. Personal thanks to Gillian Blake for transforming the way I write, and to Ben Loehnen for masterfully shepherding this project. This book would not have been remotely possible without my fantastic coauthor and wonderful friend, Roo Rogers.

orderby=users#table. 39. Statistics taken from Clickworkers Web site. Retrieved October 2009, http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. 40. “Clickworkers Results: Crater Marketing Activity” (July 3, 2001), http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. As quoted in Yochai Benkler, “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.” Published under a Creative Commons License,.http://yupnet.org/benkler/. 41. Statistics taken from Facebook’s FarmVille Application Page. Retrieved April 22, 2010, http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/FarmVille. 42.


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#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media by Cass R. Sunstein

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alvin Toffler, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, digital divide, Donald Trump, drone strike, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, friendly fire, global village, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, John Perry Barlow, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Oklahoma City bombing, prediction markets, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, stem cell, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The basic tale is less one of change than of continuity, with differences of degree rather than kind. What do we actually know about use of the Internet? A picture is already emerging, and I will be offering many more details. But let’s begin with a careful and illuminating analysis, now dated but still unsurpassed, in which law professor Yochai Benkler describes and celebrates the “networked public sphere.”11 Benkler shows that the prediction of continuity is essentially inconsistent with the current reality. To be sure, some sites are exceedingly popular, and others are seen by very few people. At the same time, the new model is different from that of the old mass media.

Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2015): 8788, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full (accessed August 29, 2016). 14.The point is emphasized in Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), from which I have learned a great deal, and many of whose concerns, including fragmentation and self-insulation, are the same as those stressed here. 15.Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5. 16.See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 17.See Sunstein, Infotopia. 18.For a valuable general discussion, see C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 19.See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Benkler, Wealth of Networks. 2.

This is a joint article, but the central idea is Ullmann-Margalit’s. 9.See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, (2000), 18–24. 10.See Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 11.Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 241–61. 12.Ibid., 242. 13.Ibid., 215. 14.Ibid., 247. 15.Ibid., 253, 257. 16.For a valuable discussion showing the complexity and diversity of networked public spheres in different nations (with attention to Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain), see Robert Faris, John Kelly, Helmi Noman, and Dalia Othman, “Structure and Discourse: Mapping the Networked Public Sphere in the Arab Region,” 2016, http://www.arabnps.org/files/2016/03/ArabNPS.pdf (accessed September 7, 2016).


Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution by Howard Rheingold

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", A Pattern Language, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, business climate, citizen journalism, computer vision, conceptual framework, creative destruction, Dennis Ritchie, digital divide, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, experimental economics, experimental subject, Extropian, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Ethic, Hedy Lamarr / George Antheil, Herman Kahn, history of Unix, hockey-stick growth, Howard Rheingold, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Lewis Mumford, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, more computing power than Apollo, move 37, Multics, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, PalmPilot, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, pez dispenser, planetary scale, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, Renaissance Technologies, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Robert X Cringely, Ronald Coase, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, seminal paper, SETI@home, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, slashdot, social intelligence, spectrum auction, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, urban planning, web of trust, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Lessig noted, in light of the railroad/highway comparison, “Regulation of spectrum could move from the world of railroads, where central coordinators have to figure out who uses the track when, to the world of highways, where smart devices figure out how to use their common resource as they actually want.”82 New York University law professor Yochai Benkler proposed in a 1998 article that current technology puts the present rationale for licensing spectrum into question. The central institutional choice regarding wireless communications is whether to rely on centralized control by identifiable organizations, or on multilateral coordination among numerous users.

Most people aren’t clear about what is at stake in this game, and those who could inform us, journalists, work for enterprises now owned by the dinosaurs. The rights of citizens to consume a large variety of information as well as to disseminate their own information widely are held to be fundamental public goods in the United States. Yale professor Yochai Benkler wrote in 2000 about the importance of diverse media to First Amendment rights: In a series of cases in which the Supreme Court reviewed various media regulations, the Court has steadily developed an understanding that decentralization of information production is a policy that serves values central to the First Amendment.

Isenberg, “The Dawn of the Stupid Network,” ACM Networker 2.1, February/March 1998, 2431, <http://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html > (29 March 2002). 80. Hughes, telephone interview by author. 81. GNU Radio, <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/gnuradio.html > (29 March 2002). 82. Lessig, interview by the author. 83. Yochai Benkler, “Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 287, 1998, <http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery/agoraphobia.pdf > (18 November 2001). 84. Kevin Werbach, “Open Spectrum: The Paradise of the Commons,” Release 1.0, 19, 10 (November 2001), <http://release1.edventure.com/abstracts.cfm?


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The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth by Jonathan Rauch

2021 United States Capitol attack, 4chan, active measures, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Ayatollah Khomeini, Black Lives Matter, centre right, classic study, Climategate, company town, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, experimental subject, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, framing effect, hive mind, illegal immigration, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, Jon Ronson, Louis Pasteur, market bubble, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Peace of Westphalia, peer-to-peer, post-truth, profit motive, QAnon, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Russian election interference, social software, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Tragedy of the Commons, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Only rarely can it directly attack and infest the core institutions of the reality-based community: the lab, the classroom, the college curriculum, the mainstream newsroom, the court of law.21 What troll epistemology can do is degrade the information environment around the reality-based community. It can induce (in the words of the Harvard University researchers Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts) “a condition that some propaganda seeks to induce, in which the target population simply loses the ability to tell truth from falsehood or where to go for help in distinguishing between the two.”22 The concept of truth, the philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked, contains within itself an element of coercion.23 If you believe something is true, you also believe you must believe it.

After a news cycle or two, it would fade away. Conservative media might behave the same way toward a left-leaning conspiracy theory. But inject a right-leaning conspiracy theory, and the conservative system would tend to amplify it. That was the finding of an exhaustive analysis of media networks and behavior published in 2018 by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “The consistent pattern that emerges from our data is that … there is no left-right division, but rather a division between the right and the rest of the media ecosystem,” they wrote in Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics.60 In 2016, they found, conspiracy theories and fake news were widely available to Clinton voters and to Trump voters, and both groups were comparably interested in hearing them.

Profiteers learned to create realistic-looking fake academic journals with pretend peer review, for example, and state-sponsored trolls showed interest in fake-science activity. See Alex Hern and Pamela Duncan, “Predatory Publishers: The Journals that Churn Out Fake Science,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018; Alden Fletcher, “Is the Threat of ‘Fake Science’ Real?,” Lawfare, August 5, 2019. 22. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 24. 23. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin, 1954), p. 239. 24.


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Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

PART 4 WHAT WE’VE LEARNED In this section, we reflect on what made the SOPA/PIPA victory possible. Professor Yochai Benkler and his team map the networks that helped defeat the legislation; Dave Karpf speaks to why this activism was different from all other activism; and David Segal looks at what happened from the perspectives of an activist and former politician. GLIMPSES OF A NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE YOCHAI BENKLER, HAL ROBERTS, ALICIA SOLOW-NIEDERMAN, BRUCE ETLING, ROB FARIS Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

DAVE DAYEN The Internet Beat SOPA and PIPA: And Mean the Entire Damn Thing DAVID MOON A Political Coming of Age PATRICK RUFFINI This Time, the System Actually Mostly Worked PART 3: Some Activism Since SOPA DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Cyber Security and Party Platforms DEREK KHANNA Fallout from the Copyfight JOSHUA BAUCHNER The Seizure of Dajaz1 NICOLE POWERS An Interview with Julia O’Dwyer DEMAND PROGRESS Raps with Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom PART 4: What We’ve Learned YOCHAI BENKLER ET AL Glimpses of a Networked Public Sphere DAVID KARPF Reflecting on the SOPA Blackout: Why Did It Work, and What Does It Mean? DAVID SEGAL That Was Amazing. Can We Do It Again Sometime? PART 5: Where Do We Go from Here? RON PAUL The Battle for Internet Freedom Is Critical for the Liberty Movement ERIN MCKEOWN A Case for Digital Activism by Artists BRAD BURNHAM On the Freedom to Innovate MARVIN AMMORI SOPA and the Popular First Amendment CORY DOCTOROW Blanket Licenses: One Path Forward in Copyright Reform LAWRENCE LESSIG The Internet Can Help Strike at the Root Conclusion Aaron Swartz speaks at the New York City anti-SOPA rally on January 18th, 2012 A MOMENT FOR AARON: 1986-2013 This book was constructed over the course of the fall, and we intended to release it earlier this winter, but then tragedy struck: our friend and colleague Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, while under federal indictment for downloading too many academic articles housed by the online cataloguing service called JSTOR.

Short of such likely rare events, however, it is the adaptation and adoption of traditional lobbyist tools like vote counting—through whip sheets—and coordination of communications—through social media and tools like Contact Congress—that will help level the playing field between the body politic and the lobby. To quote one of Prof. Yochai Benkler’s presentations on his ongoing research on the SOPA strike actions: “What you see is a complex relationship between NGOs and commercial organizations, between V.C.’s and activists, between traditional media and online media, between political media left and right and tech media, all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking [SOPA].


Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Monopolies built up around proprietary software are believed to be axed soon by FOSS start-ups. The advantage of FOSS businesses is partly that they are closely allied with free market forces, partly that they are integrated into a network that includes the hacker community. In recent years, the law professor Yochai Benkler has come forward as the chief interpreter of the FOSS development model in terms of a networked mode of production. In his view the network is distinct from both the market and firm. Benkler’s argument builds on the theories of the economist Ronald Coase. In 1937, Coase put his finger on the fact that the agents operating on the free market were firms.

The idea that networks is a novel mode of organising businesses and that it is distinct from markets has been in vogue since the 1990s. According to the argument, networks are supposed to be superior for sharing tacit know-how, in adapting to a volatile environment, and for perpetual learning processes.8 Unfortunately, Yochai Benkler’s decision to follow Ronald Coase and confine himself to an analysis of transaction costs puts a limitation on his thinking. The observations on networks ought instead to be framed in the debate about markets versus central planning that was waged between neoclassical and socialist economists in the first half of the twentieth century.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (USSR: Progress Publishers, 1981), 37, italics in original; hereafter cited in text as 1844. 5. Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher, “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy” Harvard Business Review (September 1, 1998). 6. ed. Oliver Williamson and Sidney Winter, The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm”, The Yale Law Journal vol.112 no.3 (December 2002), and The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 8. Walter Powel, in ed. Barry Staw & Larry Cummings, Research in Organizational Behavior (London: Jai Press, 1990), 303. 9.


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Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

Andrew Keen, Andy Carvin, Berlin Wall, bike sharing, bioinformatics, Brewster Kahle, c2.com, Charles Lindbergh, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, digital rights, en.wikipedia.org, Free Software Foundation, Garrett Hardin, hiring and firing, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Joi Ito, Kuiper Belt, liberation theology, Mahatma Gandhi, means of production, Merlin Mann, Metcalfe’s law, Nash equilibrium, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Picturephone, place-making, Pluto: dwarf planet, power law, prediction markets, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, Richard Stallman, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, supply-chain management, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, Yochai Benkler, Yogi Berra

Encyclopedias used to be the kind of thing that appeared only when people paid for them, yet Wikipedia requires no fees from its users, nor payments to its contributors. The genius of wikis, and the coming change in group effort in general, is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance. Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar and network theorist and author of The Wealth of Networks, calls nonmarket creation of group value “commons-based peer production” and draws attention to the ways people are happy to cooperate without needing financial reward. Wikipedia is peer production par excellence, set up to allow anyone who wants to edit an article to do so, for any and all reasons except getting paid.

Articles written for Chris Anderson for Wired and Thomas Stewart for Harvard Business Review did likewise. Long-running conversations with many colleagues have provided material and insights for this book. This list, of all, is both long and incomplete. Researchers, academic and corporate, who have provided critical insights include Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Elizabeth Churchill, Susan Crawford, Richard Hackman, David Johnson, Valdis Krebs, Frank Lantz, Beth Noveck, Paul Resnick, Linda Stone, Jon Udell, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Ethan Zuckerman. Other writers and thinkers with whom I’ve had illuminating conversations include Cate Corcoran, Cory Doctorow, Ze Frank, Dan Gillmor, Adam Greenfield, Bruno Guissani, Jeff Howe, David Isenberg, Joi Ito, Xeni Jardin, Steven Johnson, Matt Jones, Quinn Norton, Danny O’Brien, Kevin Slavin, Alice Taylor, and David Weinberger.

Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, also has a weblog on the subject at thelongtail.com. Page 129: fame I made earlier drafts of these arguments in the essays, “Communities, Audiences, and Scale”, www.shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html, and “Why Oprah Won’t Talk To You. Ever.”, in Wired Magazine (August, 2004.) Page 133: Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press (2006) links economics with political and legal theory, sketching out a vision of a world where “commons-based peer production” is allowed to flourish. Page 136: Wikipedia deletion and restoration Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B.


pages: 201 words: 21,180

Designing for the Social Web by Joshua Porter

barriers to entry, classic study, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fail fast, Howard Rheingold, late fees, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Milgram experiment, Paradox of Choice, Paul Buchheit, Ralph Waldo Emerson, recommendation engine, social bookmarking, social software, social web, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Indeed, the overwhelming success of Amazon’s reviews is evidence of a way in which the web has produced a dramatic change in the world’s economy. In traditional economic terms the mere existence of reviews just doesn’t compute. Few existing economic models can accurately describe the value being given (or received) on Amazon. Yochai Benkler, author of Wealth of Networks, a wonderful book describing these new economic changes in detail, notes: A new model of production has taken root; one that should not be there, at least according to our most widely held beliefs about economic behavior. It should not, the intuitions of the late-twentieth-century American would say, be the case that thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate...

And yet, this is precisely what is happening…2 The Social Web Of course Amazon isn’t the only one designing for and supporting the activity of its audience in this way: it is merely one of countless examples of social design on the web. For the purposes of this book, we define social design in the following way: Definition: Social design is the conception, planning, and production of web sites and applications that support social interaction 2 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press, 2006. 5 6 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB We’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to designing social software. I’m confident we’ll be discussing social software (and how to design it) for decades to come. It is the future of the web.


pages: 263 words: 75,610

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger

digital divide, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, full text search, George Akerlof, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, information trail, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, John Markoff, Joi Ito, lifelogging, moveable type in China, Network effects, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, power law, RFID, slashdot, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systematic bias, The Market for Lemons, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Vannevar Bush, Yochai Benkler

As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler has argued so persuasively, the participation of millions of Internet users around the world in creating content has unleashed innovative and beneficial forms of information production that would not have been possible in a world of digital abstinence.4 Plus, John Seely Brown’s digital bricolages—offering powerful combinations and recombinations of information to produce creative works (also mentioned in chapter 3)—would be much harder to build. If such steps mean giving up the social innovations of production and sharing that Yochai Benkler and John Seely Brown talk about, perhaps the idea of digital abstinence itself is too radical, too binary, forcing us to become digital recluses and forego many of the valuable benefits of the digital age.


pages: 444 words: 130,646

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest by Zeynep Tufekci

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, 4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, algorithmic bias, AltaVista, Alvin Toffler, Andy Carvin, anti-communist, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, bread and circuses, British Empire, citizen journalism, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, context collapse, crowdsourcing, digital divide, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, end-to-end encryption, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, Future Shock, gentrification, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, index card, interchangeable parts, invention of movable type, invention of writing, John Gilmore, John Perry Barlow, loose coupling, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, pre–internet, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, real-name policy, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rosa Parks, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, Streisand effect, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Twitter Arab Spring, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Ian Hutchby, “Technologies, Texts and Affordances,” Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 441–56; and Sandra K. Evans, Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem, “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, December 2016. 4. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 5. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 69; Medhi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt, “Collective Action with Uncertain Payoffs: Coordination, Public Signals, and Punishment Dilemmas,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011): 829–51. 6.

Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959). Chapter 5. Technology and People 1. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 2. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 3. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Michael Rapport, Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 4.

For lengthy discussions, see José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’” New Media and Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347–64; and Kate Crawford and Catharine Lumby, “Networks of Governance: Users, Platforms, and the Challenges of Networked Media Regulation,” International Journal of Technology Policy and Law 1, no. 3 (2013): 270–82. 6. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Steven Johnson, “Can Anything Take Down the Facebook Juggernaut?,” WIRED, May 16, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/05/mf_facebook/. 7. Sheera Frenkel, “This Is What Happens When Millions of People Suddenly Get the Internet,” BuzzFeed, November 20, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world; Hereward Holland, “Facebook in Myanmar: Amplifying Hate Speech?”


pages: 518 words: 107,836

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy) by Benjamin Peters

Albert Einstein, American ideology, Andrei Shleifer, Anthropocene, Benoit Mandelbrot, bitcoin, Brownian motion, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, commons-based peer production, computer age, conceptual framework, continuation of politics by other means, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Davies, double helix, Drosophila, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gabriella Coleman, hive mind, index card, informal economy, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, mandelbrot fractal, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, power law, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Coase, scientific mainstream, scientific management, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, transaction costs, Turing machine, work culture , Yochai Benkler

For example, sociologist Manuel Castells has developed an extensive argument detailing how the Soviet Union failed to enter the information age, which this book is in some ways a sideways response to, and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig used his experience observing the rapid deregulation and privatization in post-Soviet economic transition in the early 1990s as a formative analog for what he felt was an equally disastrous attitude about the supposed unregulability of cyberspace common in the late 1990s.10 Since then, scholars have recognized that the summary experiences of perhaps the last two great information frontiers of the twentieth-century—the rise of post-Soviet economic transition and the Internet—present not, as Francis Fukuyama infamously claimed, the end of history so much as a new chapter in it. Leading cyber legal scholar Yochai Benkler has argued for a middle way by observing how online modes of “commons-based peer production” sustain capitalist profit margins through collectivist forms of reputational altruistic communities that do not depend on individual self-interest.11 From the final chapters of Soviet history, we may begin to observe and puzzle through the perennial fact that, for many Western technologists and scholars, the promise of socialist collaboration shines brightest online today—a promise that the Soviet OGAS designers were among the first to foresee.

For sample references, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Fourth Edition (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2004), chap. 4; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: O’Reilly, 1999); and Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927) (London: New Park Publications, 1973), especially “The Agrarian Question and Social Construction.” 10. Manuel Castells, End of the Millennium: The Information Age—Economy, Society, and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 5–68; Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3–8. 11. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 12. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27 (3) (1986): 544–560. 13. For Latour’s aphorism, see Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed.

Recent technology commentators and scholars have enthused about the analog update of “cognitive surplus” that can be made available over collaborative peer-based computer networks. See, for example, Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 35–132. 8. Anatoly Kitov, Electronnie tsifrovie mashini [Electronic Ciphered Machines] (Moscow: Radioeletronika Nauka, 1956). 9. Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 64, 96–97. 10.


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WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency by Micah L. Sifry

1960s counterculture, Amazon Web Services, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Buckminster Fuller, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Climategate, crowdsourcing, digital divide, digital rights, Evgeny Morozov, Gabriella Coleman, Google Earth, Howard Rheingold, Internet Archive, Jacob Appelbaum, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Network effects, RAND corporation, school vouchers, Skype, social web, source of truth, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

Different kinds of institutions serve those different values; they may be centralized, like firms and government entities or nonprofit organizations, or they may be decentralized, like the anarchic marketplace or the face-to-face worlds of our local communities and ad hoc self-organizing. This last sector, the fourth one, has until recently been too small to matter. Church suppers and rent parties and social clubs have always existed, but only at local scale. Now, thanks to the Internet, we are seeing fourth sector entities at national, even global scale. (I am indebted to Yochai Benkler and his book, The Wealth of Networks, for this analysis.) For example, Wikipedia started in 2001. The nonprofit site, which describes itself as a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” is written collaboratively by online volunteers. The English version has more than 3.5 million articles that have been edited more than 435 million times by more than thirteen million registered users.

Sifry, “The Rise of Open Source Politics,” The Nation, November 22, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/rise-open-source-politics. 2 Interview with the author, June 2004. 3 See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 Jay Rosen, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” PressThink. org, June 27, 2006, http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr. html. 5 Howard Rheingold, “Crap Detection 101,” SFGate.com, June 30, 2009, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805. 6 Micah L. Sifry, “The Deaning of America,” The Nation, March 25, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/deaning-america. 7 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Chapter Seven: “Political Freedom, Part Two: The Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere,” for a detailed exploration of the Diebold case. Chapter 3 1 See, for example, news-filtering communities like Digg.com, Reditt.com, and Metafilter.com, or specialized hubs like the Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com). 2 See, for example, @jetblue, @dellcares, @wholefoods, and @comcastcares, for Jet Blue, Dell, Whole Foods, and Comcast’s respective social media presences on Twitter. 191 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 192 This is, in fact, how the House and Senate currently make the financial disclosure statements of members and their staff, which are required to be public, available.


pages: 265 words: 69,310

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy by Tom Slee

4chan, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bike sharing, bitcoin, blockchain, Californian Ideology, citizen journalism, collaborative consumption, commons-based peer production, congestion charging, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, data science, David Brooks, democratizing finance, do well by doing good, don't be evil, Dr. Strangelove, emotional labour, Evgeny Morozov, gentrification, gig economy, Hacker Ethic, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, invisible hand, Jacob Appelbaum, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kibera, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Max Levchin, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, openstreetmap, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, Peter Thiel, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, software is eating the world, South of Market, San Francisco, TaskRabbit, TED Talk, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas L Friedman, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ultimatum game, urban planning, WeWork, WikiLeaks, winner-take-all economy, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Who would have thought even five years ago that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet? 2 The success of Linux and other open source software projects spurred a wave of optimism about a fundamentally new way of creating complex products by relying on networks of peers. Yochai Benkler made an academic case for peer networks in his essay “Coase’s Penguin: Linux and the Nature of the Firm” and then in his influential book The Wealth of Networks, holding up Linux as the archetype of a new form of production that could reshape economies.3 The traditional economy is driven, in this view, by markets and by hierarchical firms or state organizations, but Benkler saw a third possibility, which he labeled “commons-based peer production.”

One of the most articulate analyses of how the anti-copyright movement has lost touch with those it claims to support is delivered by film-maker and activist Astra Taylor in her 2014 book, The People’s Platform.30 As someone who makes a living from her art, Taylor has grown increasingly skeptical of those who identify artistic creation with amateurism, and who advocate making artistic creations available for free to gain exposure, looking for money-making opportunities elsewhere (concerts, conferences, T-shirts, consulting depending on your kind of creation). Opposition to copyright conveniently pushes questions of payment to one side, but those who make the arguments are often not short of a penny or two. Law professor Yochai Benkler tells us that “money isn’t always the best motivator,” and media professor and successful author of copyrighted books Clay Shirky reminds us that “the essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.” A publication of the Harvard Business School argues that a decline in industry profitability “won’t hurt production because artists’ unique motivations will keep them churning out music even if they are operating at a loss.” 31 Taylor’s book vividly captures the problem for artists in a world of openness and sharing.


pages: 312 words: 93,504

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia by Dariusz Jemielniak

Andrew Keen, barriers to entry, Benevolent Dictator For Life (BDFL), citation needed, collaborative consumption, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, continuous integration, crowdsourcing, Debian, deskilling, digital Maoism, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Filter Bubble, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Google Glasses, Guido van Rossum, Hacker Ethic, hive mind, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Julian Assange, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Menlo Park, moral hazard, online collectivism, pirate software, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Stewart Brand, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, The Nature of the Firm, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, Wikivoyage, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

I am also grateful for comments, ideas, and feedback I received from the participants of the open-collaboration seminar at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, especially Shun-Ling Chen, B. Mako Hill, Brian Keegan, and Joseph J. Reagle, whose comments on the manuscript or its parts were very helpful. Discussions of the project with Yochai Benkler and Andreea D. Gorbatai were also enlightening. Other scholars also kindly gave me constructive feedback. I am greatly indebted to Małgorzata Ciesielska, Davydd J. Greenwood, Piotr Konieczny, Tomasz Raburski, and Sebastian Skolik. Also, the reviewers, Jan English-Lueck and Gerald C. Kane, gave me many useful suggestions.

This indicates that in participative management organization, group conflict resolution in the absence of an impartial facilitator is difficult and introducing ad hoc facilitators is hardly possible. In addition, the discourse of collaboration and consensus seeking, extremely popular when talking about Wikipedia and other open-collaboration communities, does not reflect the reality of everyday editing. Yochai Benkler’s definition of collaboration as cooperating “without relying on either market signals or managerial commands” (2006b, p. 60) is broad, covering almost any communal activity conducted outside traditional structures and hierarchies. Wikipedia article development is, in this sense, collaborative, but in the same way that adding bricks to a wall by individual passersby is or any other 8 4    C o n f l i c t R e s o l u t i o n o n W i k i p e d i a task “chunked out into bite-size pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independently of other producers” (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 70).

Lanier’s and Keen’s critique of Wikipedia assumes that the multiple authorship of Wikipedia articles dilutes authors’ intellect and individuality and reduces them to a sort of a smart mob, composed of anonymous, chaotic, and contingent passersby, heavily relying on free-riding (R. Levine, 2011). While this argument sounds reasonable, it does not hold water in practice (Tumlin, Harris, Buchanan, Schmidt, & Johnson, 2007). It is obviously not true of Wikipedia, which relies equally on single-edit authors and on a stable, highly active community. As Yochai Benkler observes, “Wikipedia is not faceless, by and large. Its participants develop, mostly, persistent identities (even if not by real name) and communities around the definitions” (2006a). Similarly, objections to the dispersed authorship model, expressed also by people sympathetic to Wikipedia’s design, which depict Wikipedia as a “publish then filter” endeavor, as opposed to a traditional encyclopedia that relies on the “filter then publish” principle (Shirky, 2009, p. 98), may be considered at least partially inadequate, since “publishing” means fundamentally different things in the age of the Internet.


Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression by Geoff Cox, Alex McLean

4chan, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, bash_history, bitcoin, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, crowdsourcing, dematerialisation, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Everything should be made as simple as possible, finite state, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Conference 1984, Ian Bogost, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, Larry Wall, late capitalism, means of production, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, packet switching, peer-to-peer, power law, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, Slavoj Žižek, social software, social web, software studies, speech recognition, SQL injection, stem cell, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, The Nature of the Firm, Turing machine, Turing test, Vilfredo Pareto, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

There is indeed heady speculation on the social implications of peer production and the way it poses problems for traditional understandings of organizational structures and the productive activities of publics. Information technologies may have made some of these Coding Publics 77 processes pervasive and more efficient, but these are hardly new ideas, as historians and anthropologists reveal. In Yochai Benkler’s pragmatic view, peer production works because it best matches human capital to projects and the public realm is good for innovation.43 The Foundation for P2P Alternatives also investigates some of the changing business models and the challenges to definitions of social wealth: “a distinction between revenue and benefit sharing that the commons is founded upon (on the one hand, extracting monetary value from social processes and on the other imagining more sustainable alternatives to capitalist economy that have collective benefit).”44 Its founder, Michel Bauwens, optimistically thinks, “A peer to peer system in this respect might be considered ‘post-capitalist’ in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good.”45 He argues for a better understanding not simply of revenue sharing but of benefit sharing through peer production and commons-created platforms, and recognizes the antagonisms between the different social contracts of Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License, as well as the different business models these suggest.

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 38. James Leach, “Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership,” in Ghosh, Code. 39. Ibid., 33–34. 40. Ibid., 35. 41. GNU General Public License; available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. 42. Leach, “Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership,” 41. 43. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in Ghosh, Code, 169. He is referring to the economist Ronald Coase’s essay “The Nature of the Firm,” of 1937. 44. Michel Bauwens, “The Social Web and Its Social Contracts: Some Notes on Social Antagonism in Netarchical Capitalism,” Re-Public (2008; available at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?


pages: 398 words: 86,023

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia by Andrew Lih

Albert Einstein, AltaVista, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, Bill Atkinson, c2.com, Cass Sunstein, citation needed, commons-based peer production, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, Ford Model T, Free Software Foundation, Hacker Ethic, HyperCard, index card, Jane Jacobs, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, jimmy wales, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, optical character recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Stallman, side project, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, social software, Steve Jobs, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tragedy of the Commons, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush, wikimedia commons, Y2K, Yochai Benkler

Credentials and central control, once considered the most important parameters for generating quality content, now yield to new terms: crowdsourcing, peer production, and open source intelligence. What was once only done top-down is now being viewed bottom-up. Books and essays have addressed the impact of projects freely driven by communities of scattered individuals: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Infotopia by Cass R. Sun-stein, and Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This book, however, goes in with a deeper focus on Wikipedia, explaining how it evolved to become the phenomenon it is today, and showing the fascinating community behind the articles and the unique online culture the site has fostered.

When non-Wikipedians hear of folks like Ram-man and SethIlys, they often ask, “Who would choose to do such things on their own time?” If they’re not paid for what they are doing, what is the motivation? Why would so many folks converge on this strange project to do what they do? Peer Production Noted Yale law professor Yochai Benkler has a theory. In a widely circulated and famous essay on the Internet called “Coase’s Penguin,” he offered his thinking on why people participate in efforts such as Linux and other “free” projects. There was already a culture, before Wikipedia, of folks donating their time, effort, and skills to the collective good for no monetary gain or immediate compensation.


pages: 287 words: 86,919

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization by Alexander R. Galloway

Ada Lovelace, airport security, Alvin Toffler, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Bretton Woods, Charles Babbage, computer age, Computer Lib, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Dennis Ritchie, digital nomad, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, easy for humans, difficult for computers, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Free Software Foundation, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, informal economy, John Conway, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, linear programming, macro virus, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, mutually assured destruction, Norbert Wiener, old-boy network, OSI model, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, phenotype, post-industrial society, profit motive, QWERTY keyboard, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Reflections on Trusting Trust, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, semantic web, SETI@home, stem cell, Steve Crocker, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Ted Nelson, telerobotics, The future is already here, the market place, theory of mind, urban planning, Vannevar Bush, Whole Earth Review, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, uses a 13. Braden, “Requirements for Internet Hosts,” pp. 6–7. 14. Jonathan Postel, “Transmission Control Protocol,” RFC 793, September 1981, p. 7. Physical Media 39 slightly different four-layer model consisting of “the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and the content.” Yochai Benkler, from whom Lawrence Lessig has drawn, uses instead a three-layer model consisting of a physical layer, a code layer, and a content layer. Lev Manovich uses an even simpler, two-layer model consisting of a “cultural” layer comprised of “the encyclopedia and the short story; story and plot; composition and point of view; mimesis and catharsis; comedy and tragedy,” and a “computer” layer comprised of computer languages, variables, functions, packets, and other code elements.15 Consider an average telephone conversation as an analogy.

The application layer is a semantic layer, meaning that it is responsible for preserving the content of data within the network transaction. The application layer has no concern for larger problems such as establishing net- 15. For these references, see Jonathan Postel, “Internet Protocol,” RFC 791, September 1981, p. 5; Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 129–130; Yochai Benkler’s “From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access,” Federal Communications Law Journal 52 (2000), pp. 561–579; and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 46. The critical distinction is that the OSI model, my preferred heuristic, considers everything to be code and makes no allowances for special anthropomorphic uses of data.


pages: 254 words: 76,064

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future by Joi Ito, Jeff Howe

3D printing, air gap, Albert Michelson, AlphaGo, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Burning Man, business logic, buy low sell high, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, commons-based peer production, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data acquisition, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital rights, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, double helix, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Ferguson, Missouri, fiat currency, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, frictionless, game design, Gerolamo Cardano, informal economy, information security, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Harrison: Longitude, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, move 37, Nate Silver, Network effects, neurotypical, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, pirate software, power law, pre–internet, prisoner's dilemma, Productivity paradox, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Coase, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Simon Singh, Singularitarianism, Skype, slashdot, smart contracts, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, the strength of weak ties, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Two Sigma, universal basic income, unpaid internship, uranium enrichment, urban planning, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Wayback Machine, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

The first, obviously, is the development of the Internet, which unlike any previous communication technology provided connections from many-to-many as well as one-to-many. The British economist Ronald Coase famously described how the firm could allocate and manage resources better than independent agents in an open market—in “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yochai Benkler shows that when collaboration costs are reduced, as in projects like Linux and Wikipedia, allowing people to allocate themselves to projects can create assets and organizations more effectively than top-down and structured companies. He calls this “commons based peer production.”14 This off-the-balance-sheet, below-the-radar, not-part-of-our-GDP explosion of creativity is taking over more and more of our world.

Frank Pallotta and Brian Stelter, “Super Bowl 50 Audience Is Third Largest in TV History,” CNN Money, February 8, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/08/media/super-bowl-50-ratings/. 12 Baek Byung-yeul, “Lee-AlphaGo Match Puts Go Under Spotlight,” Korea Times, March 10, 2016, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/04/663_200122.html. 13 Iyad Rahwan, “Society-in-the-Loop: Programming the Algorithmic Social Contract,” Medium, August 13, 2016. http://medium.com/mit-media-lab/society-in-the-loop-54ffd71cd802#.2mx0bntqk. 14 Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002): 369–446. 15 Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ix. Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.


pages: 503 words: 131,064

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together by Bruce Schneier

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Brian Krebs, Broken windows theory, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, commoditize, corporate governance, crack epidemic, credit crunch, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, desegregation, don't be evil, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Douglas Hofstadter, Dunbar number, experimental economics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, Future Shock, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, hydraulic fracturing, impulse control, income inequality, information security, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, iterative process, Jean Tirole, John Bogle, John Nash: game theory, joint-stock company, Julian Assange, language acquisition, longitudinal study, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, microcredit, mirror neurons, moral hazard, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, Network effects, Nick Leeson, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Oklahoma City bombing, patent troll, phenotype, pre–internet, principal–agent problem, prisoner's dilemma, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, rent-seeking, RFID, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Coase, security theater, shareholder value, slashdot, statistical model, Steven Pinker, Stuxnet, technological singularity, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, traffic fines, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, ultimatum game, UNCLOS, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Y2K, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Jeffrey Conklin (2006), Dialog Mapping: Building a Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, John Wiley & Sons. ubiquity of data Charles Stross (2011), “Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061–2561 AD,” paper presented at USENIX Security. better off spending Bruce Schneier (2009), “Beyond Security Theater,” New Internationalist, 427:10–13. Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler (2011), The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Trumphs Over Self-Interest, Crown Business, 25–6. security is a process Bruce Schneier (2000), Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, John Wiley & Sons, 273, 395. Chapter 17 Trust in things Bart Nooteboom (2002), Trust: Forms, Foundations, Functions, Failures and Figures, Edward Elgar, 45.

Remember, parasites need society to be there in order to benefit from defecting; and being a parasite is a successful strategy only if you don't take too many resources from your host. On the other hand, we're also in a period of history where the ability for large-scale cooperation is greater than it ever has been before. In 2011, law professor Yochai Benkler published a book that is in many ways a companion volume to this one: The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest. Benkler writes that the Internet can and has enabled cooperation on a scale never seen before, and that politics—backed by science—is ready to embrace this new cooperation: I am optimistic in thinking that we are not ripe to take on the task of using human cooperation to its fullest potential—to make our businesses more profitable, our economy more efficient, our scientific breakthroughs more radical, and our society safer, happier and more stable….


pages: 515 words: 143,055

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads by Tim Wu

1960s counterculture, Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AltaVista, Andrew Keen, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bob Geldof, borderless world, Brownian motion, Burning Man, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, colonial rule, content marketing, cotton gin, data science, do well by doing good, East Village, future of journalism, George Gilder, Golden age of television, Golden Gate Park, Googley, Gordon Gekko, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, informal economy, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Live Aid, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, mirror neurons, Nate Silver, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, Pepsi Challenge, placebo effect, Plato's cave, post scarcity, race to the bottom, road to serfdom, Saturday Night Live, science of happiness, self-driving car, side project, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, slashdot, Snapchat, Snow Crash, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, telemarketer, the built environment, The Chicago School, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Tim Cook: Apple, Torches of Freedom, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, Virgin Galactic, Wayback Machine, white flight, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Now people say, I just look up what I’m interested in on the Internet.”16 Also as before, the change was so strong and apparent that seriously questioning it became mainly the province of cynics, naysayers, and Luddites. The reasonable pundit’s challenge was to capture in adequately epic terms what was happening. Yochai Benkler explained that “the removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.”17 Clay Shirky, for his part, compared the “radical spread of expressive capabilities” to “the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.”18 But few could compete with Jeff Jarvis’s penchant for proclamation.

The political blogs also professionalized: the Daily Kos, a one-man left-leaning Talking Points Memo, hired staff to run more ambitious coverage. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, assigned experienced journalists to blog full-time, leveraging all of the authority and prestige of the old media to go after the new audience. Whatever power lay in what Yochai Benkler had called the “wealth of networks,” the old media’s trick of paying people still had some power as well. More work for the journalists, perhaps, but it did stem the flow of attention away from legacy media. In 2008, Wired magazine offered the following advice to those interested in launching a blog: Don’t.

See Greg Miller, “Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In with Timothy Leary’s Long-Lost Video Games,” Wired, October 1, 2013, http://www.wired.com/​2013/​10/​timothy-leary-video-games/. 16. C. W. Nevius interviewed Dave Barry after Barry came to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. C. W. Nevius, “Podcasts, Blogs, and Dave Barry,” SFGATE, January 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/​bayarea/​nevius/​article/​Podcasts-blogs-and-Dave-Barry-2523537.php. 17. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 5. 18. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 66. 19. Jeff Jarvis, “My Testimony to Sen. Kerry,” Buzz Machine, April 21, 2009, http://buzzmachine.com/​2009/​04/​21/​my-testimony-to-sen-kerry/​.


The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do by Erik J. Larson

AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, Big Tech, Black Swan, Bletchley Park, Boeing 737 MAX, business intelligence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ernest Rutherford, Filter Bubble, Geoffrey Hinton, Georg Cantor, Higgs boson, hive mind, ImageNet competition, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of the wheel, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Hawkins, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, machine readable, machine translation, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, retrograde motion, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, TED Talk, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yochai Benkler

Clay Shirky, a writer and con­sul­tant who is now a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, once penned Web 2.0 era best sellers like ­Here Comes Every­one and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, portending the rise of an uber-­informed, socially conscious citizen, a new persona.2 A ­little jingoistic, his message was still clarion: web denizens ­were poised to rewrite the rule books, ridding the world of stodgy “gatekeepers” like mainstream press and media, who unfairly controlled the production and flow of news and knowledge. “Power to the ­people” was the trope of the mid-2000s, a meme that copied and spread itself endlessly in blogs, commentary, and on bookshelves (and in e-­books). Yochai Benkler, Harvard University professor of Entrepreneurial ­Legal Studies, proclaimed in his widely read The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom in 2006 that a new era was upon us, a kind of revolution where large numbers of networked p­ eople would take on collaborative proj­ects online, all for the public good, without requirements like paychecks.3 Wikipedia seemed to buttress his point, a case of collaborative production without expectation of financial recompense.

Charles Sanders Peirce, “Logical Machines,” American Journal of Psy­ chol­ogy 1, no. 1 (1887): 165. 17. Ibid., 168. 18. Ibid., 169. 19. Ibid., 169. Chapter 15: Myths and Heroes 1. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 2. 2. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). 3. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 4. Ibid., Epigraph. 5. Clay Shirky, ­Here Comes Every­body: The Power of Organ­izing Without Organ­izations (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 6. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 1. 7.


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The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future by Kevin Kelly

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, augmented reality, bank run, barriers to entry, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, bitcoin, blockchain, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, Computer Lib, connected car, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Filter Bubble, Freestyle chess, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, lifelogging, linked data, Lyft, M-Pesa, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, means of production, megacity, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, old-boy network, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, placebo effect, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, Project Xanadu, recommendation engine, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, robo advisor, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, slashdot, Snapchat, social graph, social web, software is eating the world, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The future is already here, the long tail, the scientific method, transport as a service, two-sided market, Uber for X, uber lyft, value engineering, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WeWork, Whole Earth Review, Yochai Benkler, yottabyte, zero-sum game

The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom. The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more about the politics of networks than anyone else. “I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems,” he writes, noting that these activities “can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom.”

running free Apache software: “July 2015 Web Server Survey,” Netcraft, July 22, 2015. 3D Warehouse offers several million: “Materialise Previews Upcoming Printables Feature for Trimble’s 3D Warehouse,” Materialise, April 24, 2015. community-designed Arduinos: “Arduino FAQ—With David Cuartielles,” Medea, April 5, 2013. Raspberry Pi computers: “About 6 Million Raspberry Pis Have Been Sold,” Adafruit, June 8, 2015. “alternative to both state-based”: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 650,000 people: “Account Holders,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015. more than half a million projects: “Projects,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015.


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Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace by Ronald J. Deibert

4chan, air gap, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Brian Krebs, call centre, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, connected car, corporate social responsibility, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, digital divide, disinformation, end-to-end encryption, escalation ladder, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Firefox, Gabriella Coleman, global supply chain, global village, Google Hangouts, Hacker Ethic, Herman Kahn, informal economy, information security, invention of writing, Iridium satellite, jimmy wales, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kibera, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low earth orbit, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, new economy, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, planetary scale, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart grid, South China Sea, Steven Levy, Streisand effect, Stuxnet, Ted Kaczynski, the medium is the message, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, unit 8200, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

For instance, after Anonymous’s Operation Tunisia – largely mounted by hacktivists in North America and Europe – it was Tunisian bloggers and activists who were the ones arrested and had their computers confiscated). More importantly, with the tools to cause havoc so cheap and readily available, and the consequences so potentially low, is it wise to actually encourage DDOS attacks as a form of political protest? Yale University’s Yochai Benkler thinks so: “Except in extreme cases akin to the real-world burning of cars and smashing of windows (e.g., had PayPal’s payment systems been disrupted and customers lost money, rather than the company’s homepage being unavailable), they should simply be absorbed as part of the normal flow of the Internet.

The relationship between the Occupy Movement and Anonymous is detailed in Sean Captain, “The Real Role of Anonymous in Occupy Wall Street,” Fast Company, October 17, 2011, http​://www.f​astcompa​ny.com/​178839​7/th​e-real-ro​le-of-anon​ymo​us-at-occ​upy-wa​ll-str​eet. 8 is it wise to actually encourage DDoS attacks: Yochai Benkler explains why Anonymous should not be viewed as a threat to national security in “Hacks of Valor,” Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2012, http​://ww​w.forei​gnaffa​irs.com​/arti​cles​/1​3738​2​/​yocha​i-benk​ler​/​hack​s-of-val​or. 9 One of the few to study this question in depth: Gabriella Coleman’s work offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman “Our Weirdness Is Free: The Logic of Anonymous – Online Army, Agent Chaos, and Seeker of Justice,” Triple Canopy (2012), http​://canop​ycano​pycan​opy.com​/​15​/our​_​weir​dness​_​is​_​free; and “Peeking Behind the Curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012,” TED Blog, June 27, 2012, http​://blo​g.ted.c​om/20​12/06​/27​/peeki​ng-behi​nd-the-cur​tain-at-an​onymo​us-gabr​iell​a-colem​an-at-te​dglob​al–201​2/. 10 MIT Museum Hack archivist: A history of MIT hacks is detailed in T.F.


The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy by Matthew Hindman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, AltaVista, Amazon Web Services, barriers to entry, Benjamin Mako Hill, bounce rate, business logic, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, computer vision, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death of newspapers, deep learning, DeepMind, digital divide, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, fault tolerance, Filter Bubble, Firefox, future of journalism, Ida Tarbell, incognito mode, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the telescope, Jeff Bezos, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, lake wobegon effect, large denomination, longitudinal study, loose coupling, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, New Economic Geography, New Journalism, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, Pepsi Challenge, performance metric, power law, price discrimination, recommendation engine, Robert Metcalfe, search costs, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Skype, sparse data, speech recognition, Stewart Brand, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, The Chicago School, the long tail, The Soul of a New Machine, Thomas Malthus, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Audience Building a more rigorous version of attention economics makes us rethink many “obvious” things about the web. It even challenges the single most important assumption about the digital age: the belief that the internet makes distributing content nearly free. 12 • Chapter 1 In the opening pages of The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler argues that the internet has abolished the “industrial” economics that pertained to older communication technologies: The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication . . . required ever-larger investments of physical capital.

Loose collections of citizens would be able to function as media outlets, publishing civic information, political opinions, and even original reporting. Wikipedia and political blogs have both been invoked repeatedly as successful examples of distributed content creation. 170 • Chapter 8 Yet as work by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill has noted, the question is not whether peer production is possible, but instead under what conditions is peer production likely to succeed?18 Again and again, real-world peer production of content has been unable to compete with traditional corporate models.


pages: 1,065 words: 229,099

Real World Haskell by Bryan O'Sullivan, John Goerzen, Donald Stewart, Donald Bruce Stewart

bash_history, database schema, Debian, distributed revision control, domain-specific language, duck typing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, functional programming, general-purpose programming language, Guido van Rossum, higher-order functions, job automation, Larry Wall, lateral thinking, level 1 cache, machine readable, p-value, panic early, plutocrats, revision control, sorting algorithm, SQL injection, transfer pricing, type inference, web application, Yochai Benkler

Tuples, Algebraic Data Types, and When to Use Each There is some overlap between tuples and user-defined algebraic data types. If we want, we can represent our BookInfo type from earlier as an (Int, String, [String]) tuple: ghci> Book 2 "The Wealth of Networks" ["Yochai Benkler"] Book 2 "The Wealth of Networks" ["Yochai Benkler"] ghci> (2, "The Wealth of Networks", ["Yochai Benkler"]) (2,"The Wealth of Networks",["Yochai Benkler"]) Algebraic data types allow us to distinguish between otherwise identical pieces of information. Two tuples with elements of the same type are structurally identical, so they have the same type: -- file: ch03/Distinction.hs a = ("Porpoise", "Grey") b = ("Table", "Oak") Since they have different names, two algebraic data types have distinct types even if they are otherwise structurally equivalent: -- file: ch03/Distinction.hs data Cetacean = Cetacean String String data Furniture = Furniture String String c = Cetacean "Porpoise" "Grey" d = Furniture "Table" "Oak" This lets us bring the type system to bear in writing programs with fewer bugs.


pages: 606 words: 157,120

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism by Evgeny Morozov

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Automated Insights, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big data - Walmart - Pop Tarts, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, classic study, cloud computing, cognitive bias, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data acquisition, Dava Sobel, digital divide, disintermediation, Donald Shoup, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, frictionless, future of journalism, game design, gamification, Gary Taubes, Google Glasses, Ian Bogost, illegal immigration, income inequality, invention of the printing press, Jane Jacobs, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, license plate recognition, lifelogging, lolcat, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, moral panic, Narrative Science, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, packet switching, PageRank, Parag Khanna, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, pets.com, placebo effect, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Thaler, Ronald Coase, Rosa Parks, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Slavoj Žižek, smart meter, social graph, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the medium is the message, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas L Friedman, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, urban decay, urban planning, urban sprawl, Vannevar Bush, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler

(New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 195. 41 “share a propensity to engage in method-driven research”: Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 68. 41 “it may be shaped by enthusiasm for the collective objectives”: ibid., 76. 42 “a dispassionate search for the causes”: ibid., 88. 43 Yochai Benkler also draws heavily on Coase: Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm,’” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 369–446. 43 “the Internet not only drops transaction and collaboration costs in business”: “Don Tapscott: Four Principles for the Open World,” TED, June 2012, http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html?

Shirky’s veneration of Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm—and its accompanying discourse on transaction costs—may seem harder to dismiss, not least because Coase is a Nobel Prize–winning economist. References to Coase pop up regularly in the work of our Internet theorists; in addition to Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler also draws heavily on Coase to discuss the open-source movement. There is nothing wrong with Coase’s theories per se; in the business context, they offer remarkably useful explanations and have even helped spawn a new branch of economics. But here is the problem: thinking of a Californian start-up in terms of transaction costs is much easier than pulling the same trick for, say, the Iranian society.


pages: 309 words: 78,361

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The meteoric rise of open-source platforms, with examples such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and Wikipedia, is eroding the rationale for costly and exclusionary information. As activity migrates to the open-access and collaboration model, the case for accessibility is strengthening. On a mass scale, individuals are collaborating and making their contributions freely available to others. Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler, author of the influential The Wealth of Networks, argues that social sharing and exchange has become common across a wide swath of the economy—in the information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. The desirability of open access is one way the economics of knowledge differs from that of ordinary private goods.


pages: 407 words: 103,501

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking by Mark Bauerlein

Alvin Toffler, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Andrew Keen, business cycle, centre right, citizen journalism, collaborative editing, computer age, computer vision, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, digital divide, disintermediation, folksonomy, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, late fees, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, meta-analysis, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, PageRank, PalmPilot, peer-to-peer, pets.com, radical decentralization, Results Only Work Environment, Saturday Night Live, scientific management, search engine result page, semantic web, Silicon Valley, slashdot, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, technology bubble, Ted Nelson, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thorstein Veblen, web application, Yochai Benkler

MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008), pp. 161–188. 16 See Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media, 2004), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006) for two variants of this story. 17 Michael Cornfield, Presidential Campaign Advertising on the Internet, Pew Internet and American Life Project. 18 Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others, have made the case for this trend from consumers to creators of digital media. 19 See Terry Fisher, “Semiotic Democracy,” http://www.lawharvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/music/Semiotic.html.


Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City by Richard Sennett

Anthropocene, Big Tech, Buckminster Fuller, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, double helix, Downton Abbey, driverless car, East Village, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Frank Gehry, gentrification, ghettoisation, housing crisis, illegal immigration, informal economy, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Lewis Mumford, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, megaproject, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, open borders, place-making, plutocrats, post-truth, Richard Florida, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban planning, urban renewal, Victor Gruen, Yochai Benkler

The two geniuses in search of the undefinable did not, moreover, seek to enlighten their staff; they expected those below to grasp intuitively the inspiration and then carry it out. Thus the open, cutting-edge experiment teetered on the edge of dysfunctional. Mitchell died of cancer in 2010 and so did not live to see his vision play out, but even in the last years of his life, the tech-world was in transition. It was moving from an open to a closed condition. Yochai Benkler writes, ‘what typified the first quarter century of the Internet was an integrated system of open systems … resisting the application of power from any centralized authority’ whereas today ‘we are shifting to an Internet that facilitates the accumulation of power by a relatively small set of influential state and non-state actors’.

Aristotle, The Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair (1962); revised translation by Trevor J. Saunders (1981) (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 11. William James, ‘Pragmatism, Action and Will’, in Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1982), p. 181. 12. Yochai Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power’, Daedalus 145, no. 1 (2016): 20, 23. See also Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of Information Civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89, and Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, 2010). 13.


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Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future by John Brockman

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Asperger Syndrome, availability heuristic, Benoit Mandelbrot, biofilm, Black Swan, bread and circuses, British Empire, conceptual framework, corporate governance, Danny Hillis, disinformation, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Emanuel Derman, epigenetics, Evgeny Morozov, financial engineering, Flynn Effect, Frank Gehry, Future Shock, Google Earth, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, index card, information retrieval, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Large Hadron Collider, lifelogging, lone genius, loss aversion, mandelbrot fractal, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Neal Stephenson, New Journalism, Nicholas Carr, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, Paul Samuelson, peer-to-peer, pneumatic tube, Ponzi scheme, power law, pre–internet, Project Xanadu, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, satellite internet, Schrödinger's Cat, search costs, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Skype, slashdot, smart grid, social distancing, social graph, social software, social web, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telepresence, the medium is the message, the scientific method, the strength of weak ties, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, trade route, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog, X Prize, Yochai Benkler

Everett The Virtualization of the Universe: David Gelernter Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder: Rodney Brooks Present Versus Future Self: Brian Knutson I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be: Paul Bloom My Perception of Time: Marina Abramović The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock: Stanislas Dehaene I Must Confess to Being Perplexed: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic: Yochai Benkler Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much: Ernst Pöppel internet is wind: Stefano Boeri Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space: Galia Solomonoff The Power of Conversation: Gloria Origgi A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule: Nick Bilton Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale: Jesse Dylan A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind: Mahzarin R.

Like all technologies, this one has both positive and negative consequences. I’m not sure I’d bet on the first two (negative) hypotheses being closer to the truth—or on the next two, which are more positive. And of course, both sets could be true at the same time. Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic Yochai Benkler Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; codirector, Berkman Center for Internet and Society; author, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Answering this question requires us to know what you mean by “the Internet” and what you mean by “the way you think.”


pages: 579 words: 160,351

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now by Alan Rusbridger

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Airbnb, Andy Carvin, banking crisis, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, country house hotel, cross-subsidies, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, death of newspapers, Donald Trump, Doomsday Book, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Etonian, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, folksonomy, forensic accounting, Frank Gehry, future of journalism, G4S, high net worth, information security, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Julian Assange, Large Hadron Collider, Laura Poitras, Mark Zuckerberg, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, natural language processing, New Journalism, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, open borders, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-truth, pre–internet, ransomware, recommendation engine, Ruby on Rails, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social web, Socratic dialogue, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, traveling salesman, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

For most of the twentieth century the opposite was usually believed to be true. But in a networked world the collective endeavours of many would win. AOL’s walled garden proved no match for the open Web. ‘An open product can also take advantage of collective, voluntary contributions of the masses, a point emphasized by [Harvard law professor] Yochai Benkler. Consequently, an individual Wikipedia entry might be lousy and contain errors, but the entire corpus will remain impressive.’33 This was what Emily wanted to talk about. She had come down from a meeting with a couple of engineers and the head of advertising. It was a decision every company was going to have to take.

And then there were the other external digital thinkers I came across in many contexts, all of whom tutored me in ways big and small. They include Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, Peter Barron, Madhav Chinnappa, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Louis Rossetto, Frederic Filloux, Nicholas Negroponte, Ricken Patel, Richard Gingras, Ethan Zuckerman, Jonathan Zittrain, Melissa Bell, Yochai Benkler, Craig Newmark and Eric Schmidt. We were, over 20 years, seldom out of legal hot water and I came to depend on a good many of m’learned friends. The best of them were not only hugely resourceful in finding ways to publish – rather than (as some lawyers prefer) not publish – but were passionate about defending freedom of expression.


pages: 161 words: 44,488

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology by William Mougayar

Airbnb, airport security, Albert Einstein, altcoin, Amazon Web Services, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, business logic, business process, centralized clearinghouse, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, cryptocurrency, decentralized internet, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fault tolerance, fiat currency, fixed income, Ford Model T, global value chain, Innovator's Dilemma, Internet of things, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, market clearing, Network effects, new economy, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer lending, prediction markets, pull request, QR code, ride hailing / ride sharing, Satoshi Nakamoto, sharing economy, smart contracts, social web, software as a service, too big to fail, Turing complete, Vitalik Buterin, web application, Yochai Benkler

The concept of a Distributed Autonomous Organization/Corporation (DAO/DAC) is an idealistic outcome of the crypto-tech revolution. Its roots originate in themes on organizational decentralization that were depicted by Ori Brafman in The Starfish and the Spider (2007), and ones about “peer production,” aptly described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks (2007). But these two themes were recently joined by the advent of cryptocurrency-related technologies by Dan Larimer who observed that Bitcoin is the original DAC, and Vitalik Buterin who expanded on that construct by generalizing it further as a DAO, noting that the DAO has “internal capital.”


pages: 418 words: 128,965

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andy Rubin, AOL-Time Warner, Apple II, barriers to entry, British Empire, Burning Man, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, Clayton Christensen, commoditize, corporate raider, creative destruction, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eben Moglen, Ford Model T, Howard Rheingold, Hush-A-Phone, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Menlo Park, open economy, packet switching, PageRank, profit motive, radical decentralization, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, seminal paper, sexual politics, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, the market place, The Wisdom of Crowds, too big to fail, Upton Sinclair, urban planning, vertical integration, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Those who grew up in the late twentieth century have known the latter sort of idealism mainly as it manifests itself on the Internet in grand collaborative projects such as the blogosphere or Wikipedia and also in such controversial undertakings as Google’s digitization of great libraries. This impulse is part of what has attracted thinkers like Lawrence Lessig, originally a constitutional theorist, to Internet studies, examining the anthropological and psychological consequences of complete openness and the promise it holds. Scholars such as Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, Eben Moglen, and many others have devoted considerable attention to understanding what moves men and women to produce and share information for the sake of some abstract good. Of course the human urge to speak, create, build things, and otherwise express oneself for its own sake, without expectation of financial reward, is hardly new.

The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of those consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. “We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy,” prophesied Yochai Benkler. “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.” Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn’t consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had—in fact, have—a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests.


pages: 398 words: 107,788

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking by E. Gabriella Coleman

activist lawyer, Benjamin Mako Hill, commoditize, Computer Lib, crowdsourcing, Debian, disinformation, Donald Knuth, dumpster diving, Eben Moglen, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, Free Software Foundation, Gabriella Coleman, ghettoisation, GnuPG, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Hacker News, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, information security, Jacob Appelbaum, Jaron Lanier, Jason Scott: textfiles.com, Jean Tirole, knowledge economy, laissez-faire capitalism, Larry Wall, Louis Pasteur, machine readable, means of production, Multics, Neal Stephenson, Paul Graham, peer-to-peer, pirate software, popular electronics, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Stallman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, software patent, software studies, Steve Ballmer, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Hackers Conference, the scientific method, The Soul of a New Machine, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, web application, web of trust, Yochai Benkler

In other words, historical outcomes proved to be more unpredictable, complex, and ultimately ironic than anyone could have ever imagined. As Linux and open source gained more visibility in the public sphere, corporations were not the only entities and actors to learn about as well as embrace F/OSS. Influential academic lawyers like James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, and Lawrence Lessig, who were all concerned with diminishing public access to knowledge, were studying the dynamics of F/OSS, and using them as the prime example to argue persuasively for alternatives and moderation in intellectual property law. Debian, the free software project with the largest number of members, had by this time committed to the idea of free software, a morality enshrined in its Social Contract (a list of promises to the F/OSS community) and Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG, clarifying the legal meaning of freedom for the project).


pages: 552 words: 168,518

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, airport security, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, barriers to entry, Ben Horowitz, bioinformatics, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, business climate, business process, buy and hold, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Charles Lindbergh, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, clean water, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, cloud computing, collaborative editing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, commoditize, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, demographic transition, digital capitalism, digital divide, disruptive innovation, distributed generation, do well by doing good, don't be evil, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, energy transition, Evgeny Morozov, Exxon Valdez, failed state, fault tolerance, financial innovation, Galaxy Zoo, game design, global village, Google Earth, Hans Rosling, hive mind, Home mortgage interest deduction, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, medical bankruptcy, megacity, military-industrial complex, mortgage tax deduction, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nicholas Carr, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, oil shock, old-boy network, online collectivism, open borders, open economy, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, personalized medicine, radical decentralization, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, scientific mainstream, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, smart meter, social graph, social web, software patent, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, text mining, the long tail, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, transfer pricing, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, value at risk, WikiLeaks, X Prize, Yochai Benkler, young professional, Zipcar

This means that individuals needn’t rely on markets or capital-intensive firms to make or trade all of the goods and services they desire. In fact, a growing proportion of the things we value (including newspapers, mutual funds, jetliners, and motorcycles) can now be produced by us or in cooperation with the people we interact with socially—simply because we want to. Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School professor and author of The Wealth of Networks, estimates that the current crop of one billion people living in affluent countries has between 2 billion and 6 billion spare hours among them, every day! If even a small fraction of this creative capacity could be harnessed to produce high-quality information-based goods, the output of these voluntary efforts would dwarf the output of today’s knowledge-intensive industries.

Yoni Cohen, “Coda Automotive to launch all-electric vehicle in the fourth quarter,” Los Angeles Times (March 1, 2010). 4. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, “Hack This Product, Please!”, BusinessWeek (February 23, 2007). 5. SEMA Show. See: http://www.semashow.com/main/main.aspx?ID=/content/SEMASHOWcom/HomePage. 6. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006). 7. Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab, “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter and Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review (March 2006). 8. “GE adds green ‘Odyssey’ to its India center,” Business Standard (March 13, 2009). 9.


pages: 379 words: 99,340

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium by Martin Gurri

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Ayatollah Khomeini, bitcoin, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Burning Man, business cycle, citizen journalism, Climategate, Climatic Research Unit, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, currency manipulation / currency intervention, dark matter, David Graeber, death of newspapers, disinformation, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, facts on the ground, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of writing, job-hopping, military-industrial complex, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nate Silver, Occupy movement, Port of Oakland, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Skype, Steve Jobs, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, too big to fail, traveling salesman, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, War on Poverty, We are the 99%, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional

I’d been enthralled by the astronomical growth in the volume of information, but the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human activity. I Christen the New Age And Other Definitional Illusions This book is not a history of the revolution, since it’s much too early for that. Thoughtful interpretations of the genesis and nature of the change have been written by Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, and Glenn Reynolds, among many others.[3] If you wish to understand the world being formed outside your windowpane, let me introduce you to this growing body of work, then step aside. Nor am I propounding some world-historical argument for or against the new order. Using terms for analytic style coined by Isaiah Berlin and borrowed by Joseph Tetlock in his famous study of expert political judgment, I’m afraid that I am a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.”


pages: 210 words: 65,833

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain by William Davies

Airbnb, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, central bank independence, centre right, Chelsea Manning, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, credit crunch, data science, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Edward Snowden, fake news, family office, Filter Bubble, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, ghettoisation, gig economy, global pandemic, global village, illegal immigration, Internet of things, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, liberal capitalism, loadsamoney, London Interbank Offered Rate, mass immigration, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Northern Rock, old-boy network, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, prediction markets, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, web of trust, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might have once brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases. The threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As the scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the American right, through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled, between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media.10 Meanwhile, the anti-vax movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science.


The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy by Bruce Katz, Jennifer Bradley

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, benefit corporation, British Empire, business climate, carbon footprint, clean tech, clean water, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion pricing, data science, deindustrialization, demographic transition, desegregation, Donald Shoup, double entry bookkeeping, edge city, Edward Glaeser, financial engineering, global supply chain, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, intermodal, Jane Jacobs, jitney, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, lone genius, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Masdar, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, place-making, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, Quicken Loans, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart grid, sovereign wealth fund, tech worker, TechCrunch disrupt, TED Talk, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the market place, The Spirit Level, Tony Hsieh, too big to fail, trade route, transit-oriented development, urban planning, white flight, Yochai Benkler

And they are able to form and expand all over the main streets and back alleys of the global economy because of their reliance on the information power provided by the new technological paradigm.” Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 168; emphasis in the original. The legal scholar Yochai Benkler cites several examples of networked production. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006). Henry Chesbrough of the Harvard Business School echoes Powell and Grodal, finding that interorganizational ties are an element that enables firms to innovate by increasing patenting rates, improving existing products, creating new products, and quickening the time to market of products.


pages: 391 words: 105,382

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The virtual world, they argue, provides an escape from repressive social, corporate, and governmental constraints; it frees people to exercise their volition and creativity unfettered, whether as entrepreneurs seeking riches in the marketplace or as volunteers engaged in “social production” outside the marketplace. “This new freedom,” wrote law professor Yochai Benkler in his influential 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, “holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.”


pages: 518 words: 49,555

Designing Social Interfaces by Christian Crumlish, Erin Malone

A Pattern Language, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-pattern, barriers to entry, c2.com, carbon footprint, cloud computing, collaborative editing, commons-based peer production, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, en.wikipedia.org, Firefox, folksonomy, Free Software Foundation, game design, ghettoisation, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, if you build it, they will come, information security, lolcat, Merlin Mann, Nate Silver, Network effects, Potemkin village, power law, recommendation engine, RFC: Request For Comment, semantic web, SETI@home, Skype, slashdot, social bookmarking, social graph, social software, social web, source of truth, stealth mode startup, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, telepresence, the long tail, the strength of weak ties, The Wisdom of Crowds, web application, Yochai Benkler

The critical defining feature of these “enterprises” is that they rely primarily on social information flows, motivations, and relations to organize the group. Individuals self-identify, mostly, for tasks, and through a variety of peer-review mechanisms contributions get recognized by the group and incorporated into what emerges as the collaborative output. —Yochai Benkler interview in OpenBusiness (about his book The Wealth of Networks) Keeping Up As with “Web 2.0” and “synergy,” the buzzphrase “social media” has taken on a life of its own, and has already spawned its own mutant bastard: “social media marketing.” As with those other terms, and much Internet jargon, “social media” means different things to different people.


pages: 343 words: 91,080

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work by Alex Rosenblat

"Susan Fowler" uber, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, big-box store, bike sharing, Black Lives Matter, business logic, call centre, cashless society, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cognitive load, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death from overwork, digital divide, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, future of work, gender pay gap, gig economy, Google Chrome, Greyball, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, information security, Jaron Lanier, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, Lyft, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, obamacare, performance metric, Peter Thiel, price discrimination, proprietary trading, Ralph Waldo Emerson, regulatory arbitrage, ride hailing / ride sharing, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, social software, SoftBank, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, strikebreaker, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, Tim Cook: Apple, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, urban planning, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

The language of freedom captures the openness of entry but also implies that direct sellers may be ‘free’ from assets.” 49. Juliet B. Schor, “Collaborating and Connecting: The Emergence of the Sharing Economy,” in Handbook on Research and Sustainable Consumption, ed. Lucia Reisch and John Thogersen (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015). 50. Yochai Benkler, “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 2 (November, 2004): 273–358. 51. Alexandra Mateescu, “Who Cares in the Gig Economy?” Points, July 12, 2017, https://points.datasociety.net/who-cares-in-the-gig-economy-6d75a079a889.


Beautiful Visualization by Julie Steele

barriers to entry, correlation does not imply causation, data acquisition, data science, database schema, Drosophila, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, global pandemic, Hans Rosling, index card, information retrieval, iterative process, linked data, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, no-fly zone, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, performance metric, power law, QR code, recommendation engine, semantic web, social bookmarking, social distancing, social graph, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, the long tail, web application, wikimedia commons, Yochai Benkler

Chromogram: Visualizing One Person at a Time In 2006, we revisited Wikipedia. The encyclopedia was thriving, and we wanted to find out more about the people involved—especially the small core of active users who contributed many edits. What were their strategies for allocating time and energy? We were particularly interested in whether the data matched Yochai Benkler’s model of “peer production,” which unified activities ranging from Wikipedia to the creation of Linux. Working with a talented intern, Kate Hollenbach, we decided to analyze the edit histories of the site administrators (“admins”), superusers with special privileges such as the ability to block other users and delete pages.


pages: 324 words: 96,491

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News by Clint Watts

4chan, active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Chelsea Manning, Climatic Research Unit, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, Filter Bubble, global pandemic, Google Earth, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, Julian Assange, loss aversion, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, mutually assured destruction, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, operational security, pre–internet, Russian election interference, Sheryl Sandberg, side project, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, the long tail, The Wisdom of Crowds, Turing test, University of East Anglia, Valery Gerasimov, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook,” Buzzfeed News (November 16, 2016). https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.fw8MNAMD0#.wf9qNQqdz. 2. Jacob Poushter, “Not Everyone in Advanced Economies Is Using Social Media,” Pew Research Center (April 20, 2017). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/20/not-everyone-in-advanced-economies-is-using-social-media. 3. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review (March 3, 2017). https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. 4. Ned Parker, Jonathan Landay, and John Walcott, “Putin-Linked Think Tank Drew Up Plan to Sway 2016 US Election—Documents,” Reuters (April 19, 2017). http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-election-exclusive-idUSKBN17L2N3. 5.


pages: 493 words: 98,982

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? by Michael J. Sandel

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, coronavirus, COVID-19, Credit Default Swap, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, ending welfare as we know it, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, global supply chain, helicopter parent, High speed trading, immigration reform, income inequality, Khan Academy, laissez-faire capitalism, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, open immigration, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Rishi Sunak, Ronald Reagan, smart grid, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yochai Benkler

Acknowledgments I am grateful for having had the opportunity to try out some themes of this book with my colleagues on several occasions: in the Harvard University Department of Government’s political theory colloquium, where I had the benefit of a searching critical commentary by Jonathan Gould; in the Harvard Law School’s summer faculty workshop, which prompted challenging responses and follow-up exchanges with Richard Fallon, Terry Fisher, Yochai Benkler, and Ben Sachs; and in Art, Popular Culture, and Civic Life, the faculty seminar I co-chair with my wife, Kiku Adatto, at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. During the fall semester of 2019, I taught a seminar on Meritocracy and Its Critics with one of the most spirited and intellectually engaging groups of undergraduates I have encountered.


pages: 346 words: 97,330

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

Casilli, Jessica Champagne, Nick Couldry, Steven Dawson, Paul Dourish, Natalie Foster, Walt Gantz, Lilly Irani, Dean Jansen, Henry Jenkins, Airi Lampinen, Rochelle LaPlante, Margaret Levi, Kristy Milland, Gina Neff, Tim O’Reilly, Shani Orgad, Anders Schneiderman, Julie Schor, Palak Shah, Rebecca Smith, Max Toth, and David Weil; and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, particularly the thoughtful Yochai Benkler, Rebecca Tabasky, David Weinberger, and the fabulous Ethical Tech Working Group, with an extra shout-out to co-conspirator Kathy Pham. One and all read and/or suffered through listening to me talk through draft chapters. Thank you. Lastly, to my extended chosen family, particularly T. L. Taylor, for your reads, our walks, and all the love and care you offered me, Andrew Brosnan, for coaching me through the darker mornings at my writing desk, and the Davis Women’s Circle and their families, for reiterating that friendships are a powerful way to keep work in its place.


pages: 743 words: 201,651

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Aaron Swartz, activist lawyer, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrew Keen, Apple II, Ayatollah Khomeini, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Clapham omnibus, colonial rule, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, digital divide, digital rights, don't be evil, Donald Davies, Douglas Engelbart, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, Firefox, Galaxy Zoo, George Santayana, global village, Great Leap Forward, index card, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of writing, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Laura Poitras, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Mary Meeker, mass immigration, megacity, mutually assured destruction, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Netflix Prize, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, Open Library, Parler "social media", Peace of Westphalia, Peter Thiel, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Simon Singh, Snapchat, social graph, Stephen Fry, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Streisand effect, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tipper Gore, trolley problem, Turing test, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, Yochai Benkler, Yom Kippur War, yottabyte

We have the possibility of listening and speaking online to billions, but in practice more and more people are making their own individual versions of the Daily Kiosk. The space of shared deliberative discourse is at once theoretically larger and practically often smaller, but those smaller spaces are themselves more diverse and cosmopolitan. This should be no cause for fatalism. We can realistically hope for what Yochai Benkler has called a ‘networked public sphere’ and one that, for the first time ever, stretches across most of the planet.90 There will not be a single global pnyx, but there can be multiple, overlapping ones, which those of us who enjoy the preconditions for internet use can visit as we please, both listening and speaking as we go.


pages: 378 words: 110,518

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’29 A NEW MODE OF PRODUCTION? In 2006 Yochai Benkler, then a law professor at Yale, concluded that the network economy was ‘a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world’.30 Benkler had been trying to define a legal framework for Open Source publishing, known as the ‘Creative Commons’. In The Wealth of Networks, he described the economic forces that were undermining intellectual property, causing common ownership models and unmanaged production to spread.


pages: 370 words: 107,983

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All by Robert Elliott Smith

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, affirmative action, AI winter, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, animal electricity, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Black Swan, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, citizen journalism, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, corporate personhood, correlation coefficient, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Flash crash, Geoffrey Hinton, Gerolamo Cardano, gig economy, Gödel, Escher, Bach, invention of the wheel, invisible hand, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, John Harrison: Longitude, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Linda problem, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, p-value, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Pierre-Simon Laplace, post-truth, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, stochastic process, Stuart Kauffman, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, Turing machine, Turing test, twin studies, Vilfredo Pareto, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

Guardian, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook 27Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, 2017, Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda. Columbia Journalism Review, www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php 28Robert M. Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, 2017, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/2017-08_electionReport_0.pdf Chapter 11 1R.E. Smith and B.A. Dike, 1995, Learning Novel Fighter Combat Manoeuvre Rules Via Genetic Algorithms.


pages: 388 words: 111,099

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

These numbers prove it’, Wired, May 2019. 46 William Davies, ‘They don’t even need ideas’, London Review of Books, June 2019. 47 Darren Loucaides, ‘Inside the Brexit Party’s general election war machine’, Wired, October 2019. 48 Ibid. 49 Mark Di Stefano, ‘A Hyperpartisan Pro-Tommy Robinson News Website Has Been Permanently Banned From Facebook’, Buzzfeed, May 2019. 50 Saska Cvetkovska, Aubrey Belford, Craig Silverman and J. Lester Feder, ‘The Secret Players Behind Macedonia’s Fake News Sites’, OCCRP, July 2018. See also www.occrp.org/en/spooksandspin/the-secret-players-behind-macedonias-fake-news-sites; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 51 Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, ‘Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, August 2017. See also https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/2017-08_electionReport.pdf; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 52 Ibid. 53 Priyanjana Bengani, ‘Hundreds of “pink slime” local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points’, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, December 2019.


pages: 265 words: 15,515

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike by Eugene W. Holland

business cycle, capital controls, cognitive dissonance, Colonization of Mars, commons-based peer production, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, deskilling, Eben Moglen, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Free Software Foundation, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, informal economy, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, Jane Jacobs, Kim Stanley Robinson, Lewis Mumford, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, peak oil, post-Fordism, price mechanism, Richard Stallman, Rochdale Principles, Ronald Coase, scientific management, slashdot, Stuart Kauffman, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wisdom of Crowds, transaction costs, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, wage slave, working poor, Yochai Benkler

Problems and possibilities are posted more or less anonymously, and whoever is willing and able to take up the challenge responds and submits solutions, which are freely available to everyone. All Torvald does is subsequently decide whether a given solution is worth incorporating into the next standard release of the GNU-Linux package. Any items he decides against includ­ ing in a general release remain available to all and can be incorporated into future releases by others. Yochai Benkler puts it this way: Torvalds’s authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and adding it to their kernel, nor from distributing that alternative version of the kernel.


pages: 587 words: 117,894

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know by P. W. Singer, Allan Friedman

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, air gap, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, borderless world, Brian Krebs, business continuity plan, Chelsea Manning, cloud computing, cognitive load, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, data acquisition, do-ocracy, Dr. Strangelove, drone strike, Edward Snowden, energy security, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fault tolerance, Free Software Foundation, global supply chain, Google Earth, information security, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Khan Academy, M-Pesa, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, mutually assured destruction, Network effects, packet switching, Peace of Westphalia, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, ransomware, RFC: Request For Comment, risk tolerance, rolodex, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, SQL injection, Steve Jobs, Stuxnet, Twitter Arab Spring, uranium enrichment, vertical integration, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day, zero-sum game

crucial dots unconnected Stewart Baker, Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2010), PDF e-book, http://www.hoover.org/publications/books/8128, accessed April 2013. FOCUS: WHAT HAPPENED IN WIKILEAKS? “ive made a huge mess” Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” Threat Level (blog), Wired, July 13, 2011, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/. “exposing corruption and abuse” Yochai Benkler, “A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 46, no. 1 (2011): p. 315, http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Benkler.pdf. evidence of their wrongdoing online Alasdair Roberts, “WikiLeaks: The Illusion of Transparency,” International Review of Administrative Sciences 78, no. 1 (March 2012): p. 116, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?


pages: 538 words: 121,670

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It by Lawrence Lessig

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, banking crisis, carbon tax, carried interest, circulation of elites, cognitive dissonance, corporate personhood, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, David Brooks, Edward Glaeser, Filter Bubble, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, invisible hand, jimmy wales, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, moral hazard, Pareto efficiency, place-making, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, Savings and loan crisis, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, TSMC, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

In exchange for this bit of cash, you will give me that thing/service/promise. Cash is the currency in this economy, and as many of the terms of the relationship as possible get converted, or liquidated, into cash. It is the economy of commodification. It is an economy within which we live much of our lives. As I’ve written elsewhere,57 following the work of Yochai Benkler, Hyde, and others, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with commodification. Indeed, there’s lots that’s great about it. As Lewis Hyde puts it, It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.


pages: 448 words: 117,325

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World by Bruce Schneier

23andMe, 3D printing, air gap, algorithmic bias, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Brian Krebs, business process, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, cognitive bias, computer vision, connected car, corporate governance, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Heinemeier Hansson, disinformation, Donald Trump, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, end-to-end encryption, fault tolerance, Firefox, Flash crash, George Akerlof, incognito mode, industrial robot, information asymmetry, information security, Internet of things, invention of radio, job automation, job satisfaction, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, loose coupling, market design, medical malpractice, Minecraft, MITM: man-in-the-middle, move fast and break things, national security letter, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NSO Group, pattern recognition, precautionary principle, printed gun, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, ransomware, real-name policy, Rodney Brooks, Ross Ulbricht, security theater, self-driving car, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart transportation, Snapchat, sparse data, Stanislav Petrov, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, The Market for Lemons, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, Uber for X, Unsafe at Any Speed, uranium enrichment, Valery Gerasimov, Wayback Machine, web application, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero day

Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and Radiological Health (29 Jul 2016), “General wellness: Policy for low risk devices, guidance for industry and Food and Drug Administration staff,” Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/07/29/2016-17902/general-wellness-policy-for-low-risk-devices-guidance-for-industry-and-food-and-drug-administration. 154Data brokers have performed similar: Brian Fung (29 Mar 2017), “What to expect now that Internet providers can collect and sell your Web browser history,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/29/what-to-expect-now-that-internet-providers-can-collect-and-sell-your-web-browser-history. 154“Power interprets regulation as damage”: Yochai Benkler and Julie Cohen (17 Nov 2017), “Networks 2” (conference session), After the Digital Tornado Conference, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, http://digitaltornado.net. Supernova Group (19 Nov 2017), “After the Tornado 05: Networks 2,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCGZ8tIrrIU. 154the CAN-SPAM Act that didn’t stop spam: It made things worse, since it superseded stronger state laws and took away individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits.


pages: 320 words: 87,853

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information by Frank Pasquale

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, asset-backed security, Atul Gawande, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Black Swan, bonus culture, Brian Krebs, business cycle, business logic, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Chelsea Manning, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, computerized markets, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, digital rights, don't be evil, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Filter Bubble, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial thriller, fixed income, Flash crash, folksonomy, full employment, Gabriella Coleman, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Earth, Hernando de Soto, High speed trading, hiring and firing, housing crisis, Ian Bogost, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, information security, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Bogle, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, kremlinology, late fees, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Michael Milken, mobile money, moral hazard, new economy, Nicholas Carr, offshore financial centre, PageRank, pattern recognition, Philip Mirowski, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, reality distortion field, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, risk-adjusted returns, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, search engine result page, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, statistical arbitrage, statistical model, Steven Levy, technological solutionism, the scientific method, too big to fail, transaction costs, two-sided market, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, value at risk, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, zero-sum game

Some companies have complained that Google’s malware warning system has deterred users from visiting their sites due to no fault of their own. Josh Peterson, “Websites Say Google Malware Warnings Hurting Business,” The Daily Caller, February 18, 2013, http://dailycaller.com /2013/02/18/websites -say-google-malware-warnings-hurting-business/. 36. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Clay Shirky, “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority” Shirky, November 15, 2009, http://www.shirky.com /weblog/2009/11/a-spec ulative-post-on-the-idea-of-algorithmic-authority/.


pages: 462 words: 129,022

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, carried interest, central bank independence, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, DeepMind, deglobalization, deindustrialization, disinformation, disintermediation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, global macro, global supply chain, greed is good, green new deal, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, late fees, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, pension reform, Peter Thiel, postindustrial economy, price discrimination, principal–agent problem, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, secular stagnation, self-driving car, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, two-sided market, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, working-age population, Yochai Benkler

The discussions of new technologies have been particularly influenced by my coauthor Anton Korinek; on artificial intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Shane Legg of DeepMind, Mark Sagar of Soul Machines, and a dinner on AI at the Royal Society after my lecture there on the subject of work and AI. Yochai Benkler, Julia Angwin, and Zeynep Tüfekçi have contributed to my understanding of the special issues posed by disinformation. As I return to the issues of globalization, I need to thank Dani Rodrik as well as Danny Quah, Rohinton Medhora, and Mari Pangestu; and on the role of globalization in tax avoidance, Mark Pieth and the Independent Commission for Reform of International Corporate Taxation, chaired by José Antonio Ocampo, on which I serve.


pages: 511 words: 132,682

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants by Maurice E. Stucke, Ariel Ezrachi

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", affirmative action, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 737 MAX, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, cloud computing, commoditize, corporate governance, Corrections Corporation of America, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, delayed gratification, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, fake news, Garrett Hardin, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Google Chrome, greed is good, hedonic treadmill, incognito mode, income inequality, income per capita, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labor-force participation, late fees, loss aversion, low skilled workers, Lyft, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, Network effects, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, payday loans, Ponzi scheme, precariat, price anchoring, price discrimination, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, search costs, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Stanford prison experiment, Stephen Hawking, sunk-cost fallacy, surveillance capitalism, techlash, The Chicago School, The Market for Lemons, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, ultimatum game, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, Yochai Benkler

Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 9 (arguing that the bourgeoisie has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”). 33.Theory of Moral Sentiments at I.I.1 (“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it”). 34.Nava Ashraf, Colin F. Camerer, and George Loewenstein, “Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 131, 136, http://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533005774357897. 35.Ashraf et al., “Adam Smith,” 136 (quoting Smith). 36.See Yochai Benkler, “The Unselfish Gene,” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 7/8 (July–August 2011): 79, https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-unselfish-gene (“In no society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly”; “Dozens of field studies have identified cooperative systems, many of which are more stable and effective than incentive-based ones”); Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 91–92 (“Although in some contexts [the assumption that people are selfish actors] may be realistic [e.g., anonymous market transactions], a half-century of experimental gaming research demonstrates that in many other contexts, people simply refuse to behave like the ‘rational maximizers’ economic theory says they should be”). 37.Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game,” Science 318, no. 5847 (October 5, 2007): 107, DOI:10.1126/science.1145850. 38.Richard H.


pages: 548 words: 147,919

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon by Rosa Brooks

airport security, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, big-box store, clean water, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, different worldview, disruptive innovation, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Snowden, facts on the ground, failed state, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, John Markoff, Mark Zuckerberg, moral panic, no-fly zone, Oklahoma City bombing, operational security, pattern recognition, Peace of Westphalia, personalized medicine, RAND corporation, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, technological determinism, Timothy McVeigh, Turing test, unemployed young men, Valery Gerasimov, Wall-E, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler

In no particular order, they include Laura Dickinson, Tom Perriello, Charlie Brown, Peter Singer, Doug Ollivant, Kath Hicks, Damon Stevens, Austin Branch, Kori Schake, Mike Williams, Steve Rickard, Lisa Magarrell, Julie Smith, Wendy Patten, George Soros, Sue Gough, Pete Verga, Stan McChrystal, David Luban, Paul Eaton, David Koplow, Marty Lederman, Jeh Johnson, Jonathan Morgenstein, David Cole, Bob Wieler, Wayne Porter, Puck Mykleby, Laura Donohue, Michael Mullen, Janine Davidson, Phil Carter, Bill Lietzau, Bruce Ackerman, Jack Balkin, Tim Noah, Yochai Benkler, David Petraeus, Shawn Brimley, Jim Mattis, Chris Stone, Brigid Schulte, Liza Mundy, Konstantin Kakaes, Tom Nachbar, Dave Martin, Liz Magill, Jennifer Mnookin, Janet McIntosh, Mary Dudziak, Greg Corn, Bobby Chesney, Charlie Dunlap, Laurie Blank, Greg O’Neil, Steve Vladeck, Heather Hurlburt, Dan Feldman, Kori Schake, Price Floyd, Doug Wilson, Tom Ricks, John Abizaid, Kristen Lord, John Bellinger, Phil Mudd, Lincoln Bloomfield, Rachel Stohl, Jim Dubik, Oona Hathaway, David Barno, and Jeff Smith.


Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media by Peter Warren Singer, Emerson T. Brooking

4chan, active measures, Airbnb, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, Comet Ping Pong, content marketing, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, deep learning, digital rights, disinformation, disintermediation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, false flag, Filter Bubble, global reserve currency, Google Glasses, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker News, illegal immigration, information security, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, it is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it, Jacob Silverman, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, lolcat, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Mohammed Bouazizi, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, moral panic, new economy, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, Parag Khanna, pattern recognition, Plato's cave, post-materialism, Potemkin village, power law, pre–internet, profit motive, RAND corporation, reserve currency, sentiment analysis, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, social web, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, systems thinking, too big to fail, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, Upton Sinclair, Valery Gerasimov, We are Anonymous. We are Legion, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, Yochai Benkler

Here’s What We Learned,” All Things Considered, NPR, November 23, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs. 132 full-fledged empire: Ibid. 132 false story of an FBI agent: David Mikkelson, “Fact Check: FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead,” Snopes, November 5, 2016, http://www.snopes.com/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/. 132 1.6 million readers: Sydell, “We Tracked Down.” 132 at least 15 million times: Ryan Grenoble, “Here Are Some of Those Fake News Stories That Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Worried About,” Huffington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-fake-news-stories-zuckerberg_us_5829f34ee4b0c4b63b0da2ea. 132 “not the safest crowd”: Sydell, “We Tracked Down.” 133 1.25 million news stories: Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Swing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. 133 founder Andrew Breitbart: Charlie Spiering, “New Andrew Breitbart footage: ‘My Goal Is to Destroy the New York Times and CNN,’” Washington Examiner, August 6, 2012, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-andrew-breitbart-footage-my-goal-is-to-destroy-the-new-york-times-and-cnn/article/2504131. 133 “#War”: Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate,” BuzzFeed, October 5, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?


pages: 788 words: 223,004

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts by Jill Abramson

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alexander Shulgin, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, barriers to entry, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Hebdo massacre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, cloud computing, commoditize, content marketing, corporate governance, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, data science, death of newspapers, digital twin, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, East Village, Edward Snowden, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, future of journalism, glass ceiling, Google Glasses, haute couture, hive mind, income inequality, information asymmetry, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Joseph Schumpeter, Khyber Pass, late capitalism, Laura Poitras, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, new economy, obamacare, Occupy movement, Paris climate accords, performance metric, Peter Thiel, phenotype, pre–internet, race to the bottom, recommendation engine, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Sheryl Sandberg, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Snapchat, social contagion, social intelligence, social web, SoftBank, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, telemarketer, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, vertical integration, WeWork, WikiLeaks, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Using a tool called Prism: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html. Long before he would take: Scott Shane, “Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump,” New York Times, November 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house.html. A Columbia Journalism Review study: Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. Its spokesman quit: “Bardella: Breitbart Web Site Is a Trump Super Pac,” CNN.com (video), August 21, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/08/21/bardella-breitbart-web-site-is-a-trump-super-pac.cnn.


pages: 976 words: 235,576

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

The search for a better approach set me on the path that has led to this book. That path itself has been anything but direct, and I have benefited from countless conversations with colleagues and friends, both at Yale and elsewhere, many of whom commented on early drafts. These include Muneer Ahmad, Anne Alstott, Ian Ayres, Monica Bell, Yochai Benkler, Phillip Bobbitt, Dani Botsman, Khiara Bridges, Steve Brill, Rick Brooks, John Buretta, Guido Calabresi, Jessica Cattelino, Bob Ellickson, Dan Esty, Crystal Feimster, Owen Fiss, James Forman, Robert Frank, Bryan Garsten, David Grewal, Oona Hathaway, Geneviève Helleringer, Robert Hockett, Michael Kades, Paul Kahn, Amy Kapczynski, Al Klevorick, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Roy Kreitner, Doug Kysar, John Langbein, Marc Lipsitch, Zach Liscow, Yair Listokin, Ian Malcolm, Benjamin Markovits, Inga Markovits, Julia Markovits, Rebecca Markovits, Richard Markovits, Stefanie Markovits, Noah Messing, Sam Moyn, David Owens, Przemek Palka, Ben Polak, Robert Post, Asher Price, Claire Priest, Jed Purdy, Aziz Rana, Rob Reich, Judith Resnik, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Scott Shapiro, Dan Sharfstein, Peter Schuck, Vicki Schultz, Reva Siegel, Tim Snyder, Kevin Stack, Tom Tyler, Rory Van Loo, Sharon Volckhausen, Philippe Wells, Leif Wenar, Patrick Wolff, Noah Zatz, and Taisu Zhang.


pages: 918 words: 257,605

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff

"World Economic Forum" Davos, algorithmic bias, Amazon Web Services, Andrew Keen, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bartolomé de las Casas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, blue-collar work, book scanning, Broken windows theory, California gold rush, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, classic study, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, connected car, context collapse, corporate governance, corporate personhood, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, digital capitalism, disinformation, dogs of the Dow, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Easter island, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, facts on the ground, fake news, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, future of work, game design, gamification, Google Earth, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Herman Kahn, hive mind, Ian Bogost, impulse control, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Jean Tirole, job automation, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, linked data, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, means of production, multi-sided market, Naomi Klein, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Occupy movement, off grid, off-the-grid, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, precision agriculture, price mechanism, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, RFID, Richard Thaler, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Mercer, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, slashdot, smart cities, Snapchat, social contagion, social distancing, social graph, social web, software as a service, speech recognition, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, technological determinism, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, two-sided market, union organizing, vertical integration, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, winner-take-all economy, Wolfgang Streeck, work culture , Yochai Benkler, you are the product

Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 68. 79. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83. 80. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 412 (italics mine). 81. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83. 82. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 83. Tom Worden, “Spain’s Economic Woes Force a Change in Traditional Holiday Habits,” Guardian, August 8, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/08/spain-debt-crisis-economy-august-economy. 84.


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Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization by Parag Khanna

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, 2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 9 dash line, additive manufacturing, Admiral Zheng, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, Basel III, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, borderless world, Boycotts of Israel, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, British Empire, business intelligence, call centre, capital controls, Carl Icahn, charter city, circular economy, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, continuation of politics by other means, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, data is the new oil, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, digital map, disruptive innovation, diversification, Doha Development Round, driverless car, Easter island, edge city, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, European colonialism, eurozone crisis, export processing zone, failed state, Fairphone, Fall of the Berlin Wall, family office, Ferguson, Missouri, financial innovation, financial repression, fixed income, forward guidance, gentrification, geopolitical risk, global supply chain, global value chain, global village, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, high-speed rail, Hyperloop, ice-free Arctic, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, industrial robot, informal economy, Infrastructure as a Service, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, John von Neumann, Julian Assange, Just-in-time delivery, Kevin Kelly, Khyber Pass, Kibera, Kickstarter, LNG terminal, low cost airline, low earth orbit, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, mass affluent, mass immigration, megacity, Mercator projection, Metcalfe’s law, microcredit, middle-income trap, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, Multics, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, off grid, offshore financial centre, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, openstreetmap, out of africa, Panamax, Parag Khanna, Peace of Westphalia, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Thiel, Philip Mirowski, Planet Labs, plutocrats, post-oil, post-Panamax, precautionary principle, private military company, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, Quicken Loans, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Coase, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, Stuxnet, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, systems thinking, TaskRabbit, tech worker, TED Talk, telepresence, the built environment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, UNCLOS, uranium enrichment, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero day