The questions that animate this chapter are: How should we think about peer production? How are other people thinking about it? What is it good for, in analytical terms, exactly? Should peer production become a field of study?
30 Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Proposals for the Commons
Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, & Christian Pentzold
At the heart of peer production lies the impulse to take control of one’s life and produce something independently of the authority of social and professional hierarchies. This is also a deeply moral impulse, as the fruits of one’s labor are meant to be shared with others: the commons are both the resource being produced and the means to produce it. In this way peer production challenges the dominant societal model based on the solitary consumption of perishable items which are always produced somewhere else. Peer production is therefore organically connected to issues such as sustainable development, the re‐localization of the economy, and “degrowth.” This final chapter builds on the conceptual breakthroughs discussed in the Handbook of Peer Production to reflect on the existential import of peer production as a set of alternative ethical life‐choices. It sets out to define legal, economic, and policy initiatives required to grow the commons. Readers are presented with practical suggestions to shape the future by collaborating with others to create common goods.
1 The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free‐Riding Firms
Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, and Christian Pentzold
1 Introduction
There never was a “tragedy of the commons”: Garrett Hardin’s overgrazing farmers were victims of a tragedy of self‐management, as they failed to collectively regulate, as equals, their common pasture. When Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, the immemorial notion that there are only two types of goods in the world – private and public, coordinated by markets or the state – was finally put to rest. In the most general terms, peer producers are people who create and manage common‐pool resources together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons are non‐rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non‐excludable (no‐one can prevent others from using them, through property rights for example). So, practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers,” however we argue that peer production has a normative dimension, so that what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). Though there are many historical antecedents, the term “peer production,” as an object of public and scientific interest, is historically situated in the early 2000s.1 The meanings associated with a term that is deeply connected to the Internet as it was 20 years ago are bound to change. Today, “peer production” describes a vast array of self‐organized collaborative ventures and distributed work arrangements, from the collective practice of peers who advocate for an issue through a hashtag on social media or evaluate restaurants and holiday accommodation on dedicated websites, to participation in hacklabs and makerspaces. This introductory chapter to the Handbook of Peer Production focuses on peer production’s original incarnations, such as free and open source software and Wikipedia, which depended on the open Internet’s affordances for distributed communication, production, and organization. Non‐Internet mediated forms such as work in shared machine shops or the development of mesh networks are covered extensively in other chapters in this Handbook. We will refer to them if necessary, but they are not our prime concern here. In part, this is because the original forms and understandings of peer production are most relevant to a media and communication audience. But we also choose to focus on Internet‐based peer production in order to explore the term’s genesis: what kind of “production”? And why is it called “peer”?
To answer these questions, this chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production. We begin in our second section by interrogating the meaning of infrastructure for peer‐to‐peer models, and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. We next consider Yochai Benkler’s influential theorization of “commons‐based peer production,” and ask to what extent it embodies Western, first world assumptions. Our fourth section explores at length the relationship of peer production to the dominant economy. It begins by outlining claims about peer production’s transformational potential, which are inspired by Benkler’s model and often imbued with techno‐utopian overtones. It then focuses on the organizational and cultural characteristics which enabled co‐optation by, and hybridization with firms. We conclude this central section on peer production’s political economy by reviewing the literature which suggests that peer production, despite its alleged utopian potential, has been recuperated by capitalism and enabled new forms of labor‐exploitation. Our fifth and final section explains the aims of this Handbook and summarizes its structure and content.
2 Peer‐to‐Peer Infrastructure
In the early years of the second millennium, the word “peer” became widely known because of the conjunction of two distinct understandings, one scientific, the other popular. On the scientific side, legal scholar Yochai Benkler (2002) proposed in his journal article “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” a seminal understanding of free and open source software (FOSS) as a form of “commons‐based peer production” whose productive efficiency, based on the ease and speed of incorporating multiple contributions to an object, surpassed that of firms and markets. Meanwhile in the Global North more generally, the notion of “peer‐to‐peer” generated wide public interest. This derived from the popularity of practices enabled by the non‐centrally controlled, or distributed, structure of the early mass Internet, prior to its subsequent enclosure by proprietary social media platforms (see Birkinbine, this volume; Kostakis & Bauwens, this volume). Such practices, whose archetype was the Napster file‐sharing service, included torrenting or exchanging files online for free. What was truly original about Napster is that files available for download were not located in a central computer: these files were stored on the user’s machines, who made them available to others through Napster’s (centrally hosted) software. Each node, wherever it was located in the world, was accessible and contributed to the peer‐to‐peer system.
This collaborative production and exchange of content, knowledge, and systems involved participants with varying degrees of ownership and control of the (software/hardware) means of production. A system like Napster relied on participants to function, and they in turn could use the service for free, but Napster soon became a for‐profit company (Alderman, 2001). Now, in the second millennium’s third decade, we face a somewhat different situation. Peer‐to‐peer practices such as torrenting have been almost completely criminalized out of existence, but the Napster model of using and contributing to an online service for free became widespread in the mid‐2000s, with Facebook an emblematic example. In terms of architecture, for many people the Internet is now a content delivery model on closed platforms such as social media or entertainment streaming networks, not a system allowing users to perform effective peer‐to‐peer networking. To be sure, peer production emerged in the 1990s and 2000s despite the network’s physical infrastructure – the fiber‐optic submarine links, terrestrial cables, data centers, cloud storage and Internet of things – being privately owned. A similar paradox concerns the principle of net neutrality, the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments should
