peer production projects do exist – for women and people of color in particular – but in terms of digital infrastructure, Internet access, and access to computers, barriers are usually low, except for Indigenous people on reserves and to some extent in remote rural areas. In the Global South access may be restricted by class to the elite and middle class; in India, by caste. Conflict might also come into play, when a government decides to cut off access to the Internet as occurred in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Ambazonia (the English‐speaking part of Cameroon) or in many other regions experiencing contestation around elections. The point here is not to delight in critical self‐flagellation (the Handbook’s editors and many of its contributors are located in the Global North), but to be aware of the situated quality of the produced knowledge. Technological development is one of the Global North’s enduring ideologies, serving to naturalize domination. The industrial revolution occurred not simply after the slave trade, but thanks to it (James, [1938]1989; Robinson, [1980]2000).
Technological power is therefore historically intermingled with processes of dispossession. In more recent cases – such as the subject of this Handbook – technologically advanced projects could be framed as constituting, in the Global North, micro‐enclaves of privilege. Beyond the reproduction of social domination through restricted access to the free time, cultural capital, and social networks necessary to take part in peer production, what role do the digital commons play in the capitalist development process? The relationship of peer production to market forces forms the subject of the next section.
4 The Digital Commons and Capitalist Production
4.1 Post‐Capitalist Imaginaries
Peer production’s position in the wider political economy is contradictory: De Angelis and Harvie (2014) note the “ambiguity” between commons‐within‐and‐for‐capital and commoning‐beyond‐capital. This is particularly the case when it comes to peer production’s historically preeminent exemplar, the production of free and open source software. FOSS now plays a central role in the digital economy, because innovation through open collaboration is the new standard, and because enrolling the free labor of scores of volunteers reduces production costs. Yet since the slyly subversive General Public License (GPL) or “copyleft” was introduced in 1989, FOSS has been described by analysts and advocates as portending or prefiguring a postcapitalist future (see Birkinbine, this volume; Couture, this volume; Dafermos, this volume; Dulong de Rosnay, this volume; O’Neil & Broca, this volume).
In the 1990s peer production politics extended beyond communication and deliberation in that they were portrayed as distinct from a capitalist mode of production based on exclusive private property rights. FOSS licenses set up a legal environment in which contributors could entrust their intellectual properties to individuals with whom they had no prior personal contact (Lee & Cole, 2003; see also Spaeth & Niederhöfer, this volume). In other words, workers in peer production abrogate their exclusive property rights over the product of their labor. Many authors have connected this relinquishment of control by peer producers to a future‐facing socio‐technical imaginary, as well as to earlier models of human cooperation which were historically just as prevalent as competitive market models. Notable examples are activists from the Oekonux network and the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. In the case of Oekonux, peer production was envisaged as the “germ form of a new mode of production beyond capitalism” (Meretz, 2012), signifying that there is a fluid interplay between the emerging new mode of production and organization and the old model of capitalism and hierarchy: since peer production is understood as dialectically co‐constituted by its “other” (e.g., developed as a reaction to and as part of capitalism), in many of its iterations, such as free and open source software, it also advances capitalist interests (for an extended discussion see Euler, 2016; see also O’Neil & Broca, this volume). In recent years a wealth of books (Bauwens et al., 2019; Bollier & Helfrich, 2019; Mason, 2015; Srnicek & Williams, 2016) have also argued that peer production and peer‐to‐peer infrastructure create digital and non‐digital commons and thereby the foundation of a postcapitalist economy, beyond the current economic system. For Bollier and Helfrich (2019), cooperation is a natural human impulse which is stymied by society. They present a range of principles meant to help develop sustainable ventures. In their book Peer‐to‐Peer: The Commons Manifesto, Bauwens, Kostakis, and Pazaitis (2019) show how peer‐to‐peer is essential for building a commons‐centric future. Whilst they do not refer to a postcapitalist imaginary, their commons‐based future centered around people and nature gestures toward it. What they set to demonstrate is that peer production all at once encompasses social relations, infrastructure, and new modes of production and property ownership, and that these elements create the conditions for a transition to an economy geared towards people and nature (see also Kostakis & Bauwens, this volume; Pazaitis & Drechsler, this volume).
Journalist Paul Mason (2015) is another author who detects (re)generative power in peer production. In PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, he defines peer production as the production of “free stuff that drives out commercially produced commodities” (2015, p. 138). Mason cites Wikipedia as an example of a peer produced space where commercial interests cannot operate. In his view, society has to design the transition to postcapitalism (2015, p. 140). To engender this transition, he suggests paying everyone a basic income while automating as many tasks as possible and freeing people to contribute to a peer production economy. Along the same lines, we can cite Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ (2016) book Imagining Life After Capitalism. For them, a postcapitalist economy will liberate us from work; it is through the development of technologies that our freedoms are expanded. Another recent book mobilizing similar tropes and arguments is Aaron Bastani’s (2018) Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani anticipates the end of societies based on waged work: thanks to activist leftist government’s use of technology, society will succeed in mastering our planetary crises.
These authors all herald the advent of a postcapitalist society through changes in wage labor. Most also espouse a deep belief in the transformational capacity of peer production as a practice and in the notion that technology, particularly automation, will save humanity. In short, they all adopt utopian socio‐technical imaginaries. According to Sheila Jasanoff and Sang‐Hyun Kim (2016), technological development, like science fiction, operates in constant interaction with the social context that inspires and supports its production. And indeed, although the abovementioned depictions of peer production are postcapitalist, it could be queried whether economic growth and constant technological innovation are truly the best way to tackle the environmental and social crises, and whether peer production should not be put to work in a more localized and simple manner, oriented towards “degrowth,” for example (for a discussion of related ideas readers are invited to consult the final chapter of this Handbook, “Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons”).
Some Black scholars, who do not refer to a peer production framework, also question the techno‐utopian assumptions that many of these accounts of postcapitalist futures espouse (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). For example, in Race after Technology, Ruha Benjamin (2019) criticizes naïve assumption of access to computers and the Internet as a solution to inequality. Further, it is doubtful whether elaborations of postcapitalist futures sufficiently take into account commons‐based peer production’s role in the present‐day capitalist economy. This role is itself a subject of debate: does the fact that firms are benefiting from the free labor of volunteer code developers situate FOSS and peer production more generally within the same exploitative historical trend exemplified by the rise of the so‐called “sharing economy” (where, under the guise of increased freedom and flexibility, the social rights of individuals are in effect stripped away, since Uber drivers and others are contractors whose working conditions are precarious, rather than employees benefiting from social protections and rights)? This at any rate was the crux of Kreiss et al.’s (2011) virulent critique of peer production, which in their view represents a step backward for workers’ rights. We explain why this critique is only partly justified in the remainder of this section, starting with the organizational structure of peer projects. We then examine the process whereby
