[p2p-research] Fwd: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

[Michel Bauwens]

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Subject: Fwd: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming
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From: Erminio Modesti <1.erminio at gmail.com>
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 10:23 AM
Subject: The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
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 The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

By Kevin Kelly  05.22.09



http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism?currentPage=all





Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a
capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort of
communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic
incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open
source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet
there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect
everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a revised
version of socialism.



Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one
remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just Wikipedia but
wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative Web
page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad
sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, hosts more than 1 million
communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly Creative Commons
alternative copyright license and the rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are
two more steps in this shift. Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg,
StumbleUpon, the Hype Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great
upheaval. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to
harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a
sort of socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.



We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is a
long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class
warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the
newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the
state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of
socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather
than government—for now.



The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of Linux
was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized communications, and
top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints gave rise to a type of
collective ownership that replaced the brilliant chaos of a free market with
scientific five-year plans devised by an all-powerful politburo. This
political operating system failed, to put it mildly. However, unlike those
older strains of red-flag socialism, the new socialism runs over a
borderless Internet, through a tightly integrated global economy. It is
designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is
decentralization extreme.



Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds.
Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual
co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps,
scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless
meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done.
Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of
government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.



I recognize that the word socialism is bound to make many readers twitch. It
carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms communal,
communitarian, and collective. I use socialism because technically it is the
best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on
social interactions. Broadly, collective action is what Web sites and
Net-connected apps generate when they harness input from the global
audience. Of course, there's rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of
organization under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled
terms available, so we might as well redeem this one.



When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common
goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without
wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call
that socialism.



In the late '90s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Barlow began
calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, "dot-communism." He defined it
as a "workforce composed entirely of free agents," a decentralized gift or
barter economy where there is no property and where technological
architecture defines the political space. He was right on the virtual money.
But there is one way in which socialism is the wrong word for what is
happening: It is not an ideology. It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a
spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration,
sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly
enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a
particularly fertile space for innovation.

Socialism:

A History 1516   Thomas More's Utopia

1794      Thomas Paine's The Age of Reason

1825      First US commune

1848      Marx & Engels' The Communist Manifesto

1864      International Workingmen's Association

1903      Bolshevik Party elects Lenin

1917      Russian Revolution

1922      Stalin consolidates power

1946      State-run health care in Saskatchewan

1959      Cuban Revolution

1967      Che Guevara executed

1973      Salvador Allende deposed

1980      Usenet

1985      Mikhail Gorbachev's glasnost

1991      Soviet Union dissolves

1994      Linux 1.0

1998      Venezuela elects Hugo Chavez

1999      Blogger.com

2000      Google: 1 billion indexed pages

2001      Wikipedia

2002      Brazil elects Lula da Silva

2003      Public Library of Science

2004      Digg

2005      Amazon's Mechanical Turk

2006      Twitter

2008      Facebook: 100 million users

2008      US allocates $700 billion for troubled mortgage assets

2009      YouTube: 100 million monthly US users





In his 2008 book, Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests
a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements. Groups
of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation,
collaboration, and finally collectivism. At each step, the amount of
coordination increases. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample
evidence of this phenomenon.



I. SHARING



The online masses have an incredible willingness to share. The number of
personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, but it's a
safe bet that the overwhelming majority of photos taken with a digital
camera are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map
locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the 6 billion videos
served by YouTube each month in the US alone and the millions of fan-created
stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is
almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for locations, Delicious for
bookmarks.



Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation
for higher levels of communal engagement.



II. COOPERATION



When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces
results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared more
than 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they have tagged them with categories,
labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets.
The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that communally, if not
outright communistically, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a
photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don't have
to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can
provide a better one than I can take myself.



Thousands of aggregator sites employ the same social dynamic for threefold
benefit. First, the technology aids users directly, letting them tag,
bookmark, rank, and archive for their own use. Second, other users benefit
from an individual's tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often
creates additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For
instance, tagged snapshots of the same scene from different angles can be
assembled into a stunning 3-D rendering of the location. (Check out
Microsoft's Photosynth.) In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the
socialist promise of "from each according to his ability, to each according
to his needs" because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than
you need.



Community aggregators can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Digg and
Reddit, which let users vote on the Web links they display most prominently,
can steer public conversation as much as newspapers or TV networks. (Full
disclosure: Reddit is owned by Wired's parent company, Condé Nast.) Serious
contributors to these sites put in far more energy than they could ever get
in return, but they keep contributing in part because of the cultural power
these instruments wield. A contributor's influence extends way beyond a lone
vote, and the community's collective influence can be far out of proportion
to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social
institutions—the sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism aimed to
ramp up this dynamic via the state. Now, decoupled from government and
hooked into the global digital matrix, this elusive force operates at a
larger scale than ever before.



III. COLLABORATION



Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad
hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software
projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, finely tuned
communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of
thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to casual
cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the
participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group
interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend
months writing code for a subroutine when the program's full utility is
several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from
a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of
high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts
make no sense within capitalism.



Adding to the economic dissonance, we've become accustomed to enjoying the
products of these collaborations free of charge. Instead of money, the peer
producers who create the stuff gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment,
satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product free, it can be copied
freely and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for
managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and the GNU
licenses, were invented to ensure these "frees."



Of course, there's nothing particularly socialistic about collaboration per
se. But the tools of online collaboration support a communal style of
production that shuns capitalistic investors and keeps ownership in the
hands of the workers, and to some extent those of the consuming masses.

The Old

Socialism

The New

Socialism

Authority centralized among elite officials          Power distributed among
ad hoc participants

Limited resources dispensed by the state           Unlimited, free cloud
computing

Forced labor in government factories   Volunteer group work a la Wikipedia

Property owned in common      Sharing protected by Creative Commons

Government- controlled information    Real-time Twitter and RSS feeds

Harsh penalties for criticizing leaders     Passionate opinions on the
Huffington Post





IV. COLLECTIVISM



While cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is held responsible if
the community fails to reach consensus, and lack of agreement doesn't
endanger the enterprise as a whole. The aim of a collective, however, is to
engineer a system where self-directed peers take responsibility for critical
processes and where difficult decisions, such as sorting out priorities, are
decided by all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small-scale
collectivist groups have tried this operating system. The results have not
been encouraging, even setting aside Jim Jones and the Manson family.



Indeed, a close examination of the governing kernel of, say, Wikipedia,
Linux, or OpenOffice shows that these efforts are further from the
collectivist ideal than appears from the outside. While millions of writers
contribute to Wikipedia, a smaller number of editors (around 1,500) are
responsible for the majority of the editing. Ditto for collectives that
write code. A vast army of contributions is managed by a much smaller group
of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founding chair of the Mozilla open source
code factory, observed, "Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy
network."



This isn't necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from
hierarchy while others are hurt by it. Platforms like the Internet and
Facebook, or democracy—which are intended to serve as a substrate for
producing goods and delivering services—benefit from being as
nonhierarchical as possible, minimizing barriers to entry and distributing
rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful actors appear, the entire
fabric suffers. On the other hand, organizations built to create products
often need strong leaders and hierarchies arranged around time scales: One
level focuses on hourly needs, another on the next five years.



In the past, constructing an organization that exploited hierarchy yet
maximized collectivism was nearly impossible. Now digital networking
provides the necessary infrastructure. The Net empowers product-focused
organizations to function collectively while keeping the hierarchy from
fully taking over. The organization behind MySQL, an open source database,
is not romantically nonhierarchical, but it is far more collectivist than
Oracle. Likewise, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but it is vastly
more collectivist than the Encyclopædia Britannica. The elite core we find
at the heart of online collectives is actually a sign that stateless
socialism can work on a grand scale.



Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the
notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the
power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities
socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market
economies have socialized education, and even extremely socialized societies
allow some private property.



Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum
trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, it
can be seen as a cultural OS that elevates both the individual and the group
at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of
communitarian technology is this: to maximize both individual autonomy and
the power of people working together. Thus, digital socialism can be viewed
as a third way that renders irrelevant the old debates.



The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth
of Networks, who has probably thought more than anyone else about the
politics of networks. "I see the emergence of social production and peer
production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed,
proprietary systems," he says, noting that these activities "can enhance
creativity, productivity, and freedom." The new OS is neither the classic
communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted
chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which
decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that
neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.



Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For
decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production
methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees
are owners, selecting management and limiting profit distribution,
independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost,
instantaneous, ubiquitous collaboration has it been possible to migrate the
core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like writing enterprise
software or reference books.



The dream is to scale up this third way beyond local experiments. How large?
Ohloh, a company that tracks the open source industry, lists roughly 250,000
people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. That's almost the size of
General Motors' workforce. That is an awful lot of people working for free,
even if they're not full-time. Imagine if all the employees of GM weren't
paid yet continued to produce automobiles!



So far, the biggest efforts are open source projects, and the largest of
them, such as Apache, manage several hundred contributors—about the size of
a village. One study estimates that 60,000 man-years of work have poured
into last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have proof that
self-assembly and the dynamics of sharing can govern a project on the scale
of a decentralized town or village.



Of course, the total census of participants in online collective work is far
greater. YouTube claims some 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million
registered users have contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are
designated active. More than 35 million folks have posted and tagged more
than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups
focused on every possible subject. Google has 3.9 million.



These numbers still fall short of a nation. They may not even cross the
threshold of mainstream (although if YouTube isn't mainstream, what is?).
But clearly the population that lives with socialized media is significant.
The number of people who make things for free, share things for free, use
things for free, belong to collective software farms, work on projects that
require communal decisions, or experience the benefits of decentralized
socialism has reached millions and counting. Revolutions have grown out of
much smaller numbers.



On the face of it, one might expect a lot of political posturing from folks
who are constructing an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But the
coders, hackers, and programmers who design sharing tools don't think of
themselves as revolutionaries. No new political party is being organized in
conference rooms—at least, not in the US. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party
formed on a platform of file-sharing. It won a paltry 0.63 percent of votes
in the 2006 national election.)



Indeed, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A survey
of 2,784 open source developers explored their motivations. The most common
was "to learn and develop new skills." That's practical. One academic put it
this way (paraphrasing): The major reason for working on free stuff is to
improve my own damn software. Basically, overt politics is not practical
enough.



But the rest of us may not be politically immune to the rising tide of
sharing, cooperation, collaboration, and collectivism. For the first time in
years, the s-word is being uttered by TV pundits and in national
newsmagazines as a force in US politics. Obviously, the trend toward
nationalizing hunks of industry, instituting national health care, and
jump-starting job creation with tax money isn't wholly due to
techno-socialism. But the last election demonstrated the power of a
decentralized, webified base with digital collaboration at its core. The
more we benefit from such collaboration, the more open we become to
socialist institutions in government. The coercive, soul-smashing system of
North Korea is dead; the future is a hybrid that takes cues from both
Wikipedia and the moderate socialism of Sweden.



How close to a noncapitalistic, open source, peer-production society can
this movement take us? Every time that question has been asked, the answer
has been: closer than we thought. Consider craigslist. Just classified ads,
right? But the site amplified the handy community swap board to reach a
regional audience, enhanced it with pictures and real-time updates, and
suddenly became a national treasure. Operating without state funding or
control, connecting citizens directly to citizens, this mostly free
marketplace achieves social good at an efficiency that would stagger any
government or traditional corporation. Sure, it undermines the business
model of newspapers, but at the same time it makes an indisputable case that
the sharing model is a viable alternative to both profit-seeking
corporations and tax-supported civic institutions.



Who would have believed that poor farmers could secure $100 loans from
perfect strangers on the other side of the planet—and pay them back? That is
what Kiva does with peer-to-peer lending. Every public health care expert
declared confidently that sharing was fine for photos, but no one would
share their medical records. But PatientsLikeMe, where patients pool results
of treatments to better their own care, prove that collective action can
trump both doctors and privacy scares. The increasingly common habit of
sharing what you're thinking (Twitter), what you're reading (StumbleUpon),
your finances (Wesabe), your everything (the Web) is becoming a foundation
of our culture. Doing it while collaboratively building encyclopedias, news
agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents, with
people you don't know and whose class is irrelevant—that makes political
socialism seem like the logical next step.



A similar thing happened with free markets over the past century. Every day,
someone asked: What can't markets do? We took a long list of problems that
seemed to require rational planning or paternal government and instead
applied marketplace logic. In most cases, the market solution worked
significantly better. Much of the prosperity in recent decades was gained by
unleashing market forces on social problems.



Now we're trying the same trick with collaborative social technology,
applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to
problems that the free market couldn't solve—to see if it works. So far, the
results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing,
cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has
proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time
we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we
imagined.



We underestimate the power of our tools to reshape our minds. Did we really
believe we could collaboratively build and inhabit virtual worlds all day,
every day, and not have it affect our perspective? The force of online
socialism is growing. Its dynamic is spreading beyond electrons—perhaps into
elections.



Senior maverick Kevin Kelly (kk at kk.org) wrote about correspondences between
the Internet and the human brain in issue 16.07.




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