[p2p-research] The Commons on Shareable

[Michel Bauwens]

I found the comments by Rachel in the comments field of the Carr article and
will add them to the review,

Michel

On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 9:23 AM, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hi Neal,
>
> this article, citing nicholas carr, will appear on the p2p blog, I will
> also write my own commentary on it,
>
> I often see the p2p foundation as the only place which is at the same time,
> market-neutral or even friendly, while being post- or anticapitalist,
> contrasting with most other thinkers who see p2p/sharing as mostly an
> adjunct to the market society
>
> of course, there will be plenty people more radical than me who will put me
> in the same category, (link not yet available)
>
> see
>
> Netarchical ideologies and the corporatization and marketisation of free
> collaboration <http://blog.p2pfoundation.net/?p=12008>
> [image: photo of Michel Bauwens]
> Michel Bauwens
> 3rd December 2010
>
>  What could be more subversive to consumer capitalism than a mass movement
> of people working without pay to create free stuff for other people? But
> capitalists shouldn’t worry, says Johnson; they should rejoice. The
> innovations of the unpaid web-enabled masses may be “conceived in nonmarket
> environments,” but they ultimately create “new platforms” that “support
> commercial ventures.” What appears to excite Johnson is not the intrinsic
> value of volunteerism as an alternative to consumerism, but the way the net
> allows the efforts of volunteers to be turned into the raw material for
> profit-making ventures.
>
> *Nicholas Carr* cites<http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2010/11/the_unrevolutio.php>Steven Johnson above as part of a new breed of business authors that seem to
> be motivatived by a desire to enclose free collobration and sharing
> practices within a business paradigm. He also cites the authors of the book
> on “Collaborative Consumption”:
>
> Botsman and Rogers are more interested in co-opting anti-consumerist
> energies than unleashing them. Economically speaking, they’re radical
> conservatives.
>
> And he cites a review<http://www.generationbubble.com/2010/10/26/flea-market-ideology-a-review-of-whats-mine-is-yours-the-rise-of-collaborative-consumption/>by Rob Horning who stresses that point:
>
> *“Were the emphasis of What’s Mine Is Yours strictly on giving things
> away, as opposed to reselling them or mediating the exchanges, it might have
> been a different sort of book, a far more utopian investigation into
> practical ways to shrink the consumer economy. It would have had to wrestle
> with the ramifications of advocating a steady-state economy in a society
> geared to rely on endless growth. But instead, the authors are more
> interested in the new crop of businesses that have sprung up to reorient
> some of the anti-capitalistic practices that have emerged online — file
> sharing, intellectual property theft, amateur samizdat distribution, gift
> economies, fluid activist groups that are easy to form and fund, and so on —
> and make them benign compliments [sic] to mainstream retail markets. Indeed,
> conspicuously absent from the book is any indication that any business
> entities would suffer if we all embraced the new consumerism, a gap that
> seems dictated by the book’s intended audience: the usual management-level
> types who consume business books.”*
>
> This leads Carr to the following conclusion about the ideological function
> of those authors:
>
> *“What most characterizes today’s web revolutionaries is their rigorously
> apolitical and ahistorical perspectives – their fear of actually being
> revolutionary. To them, the technological upheaval of the web ends in a
> reinforcement of the status quo. There’s nothing wrong with that view, I
> suppose – these are all writers who court business audiences – but their
> writings do testify to just how far we’ve come from the idealism of the
> early days of cyberspace, when online communities were proudly uncommercial
> and the free exchanges of the web stood in opposition to what John Perry
> Barlow dismissively termed “the Industrial World.” By encouraging us to
> think of sharing as “collaborative consumption” and of our intellectual
> capacities as “cognitive surplus,” the technologies of the web now look
> like they will have, as their ultimate legacy, the spread of market forces
> into the most intimate spheres of human activity.”*
>
>
> On Wed, Dec 1, 2010 at 3:23 AM, Neal Gorenflo <neal at shareable.net> wrote:
>
>>
>> Changing our myths from stories of stuff to stories of sharing -
>> powerful http://ow.ly/1rLwuQ
>>
>>


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