and reduce costs.
4.3 How Capitalism Co‐opts Peer Production: The Case of Free and Open Source Software
Early critical understandings of Californian Internet culture (Barbrook & Cameron, 1996), of online communities (Terranova, 2000), and of computer hacking (Wark, 2004) took it for granted that capitalist interests would seek to capture autonomous online labor, though these accounts were in the main written when this co‐optation was an interesting novelty, rather than a central component of IT firms’ business model, as it is today. But how did the integration of communities of peer producers into the “ecosystems” of firms come about?
Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) had presciently argued in their book on the “new spirit of capitalism,” originally published in 1999, that capitalism uses critique to rejuvenate itself, by integrating the 1960s countercultural critique of tradition, boredom, and hierarchy. This helped to justify the freeing of capital, the deployment of anti‐welfarist ideology, the weakening of the state and the erosion of organized labor by emphasizing personal liberation rather than social emancipation, which alleviates exploitation. To these insights Fisher (2010) added the legitimizing function of a technological discourse in which hackers are a central productive force. Similarly for Barron (2013), FOSS exemplifies a particularly pure form of the “new spirit of capitalism”: a post‐Fordist regime of accumulation, arranged around lean firms working as networks with a multitude of participants, organizing work in the form of teams or projects, intent on customer satisfaction, and a general mobilization of workers thanks to their leaders’ vision.
In an article detailing how hacker practices and innovations are adopted, adapted, and repurposed by corporate and political actors, Delfanti and Söderberg (2018) reprise the notion that assimilated critiques serve to legitimize capitalism and suggest that hacking itself is being hacked, as “the very idea that tinkering offers a way to subvert the agendas of the powers‐that‐be has become a foundational myth of contemporary capitalism” (p. 461). Beyond repurposing, technical innovations such as modularized production and distributed mesh networks and retrieval systems are now “integrated in the material infrastructure of capitalism” (p. 476), and coupled with distrust for incumbent actors, aka “disruption.”
Christopher Kelty’s (2008) influential definition of FOSS projects as “recursive” is key to understanding how what was once perceived as a force resisting privatization has been integrated into dominant circuits of capital. Hackers have extremely divergent politics, but they all agree that proprietary software and intellectual property rights, as well as surveillance and censorship, should be rejected. This stems from the fact that such an opposition constitutes the techno‐legal preconditions for the hacker public to exist as such: “recursive politics” aim to consolidate and grow the material conditions for the survival of this public. In contrast issues such as feminism and workers’ rights are not “recursive” in the sense that hackers “perceive them to be unrelated to what really matters to them the most, computers and Internet freedom” (Delfanti & Söderberg, 2018, p. 463). This was the key for the disruptive potential of FOSS to be tamed: all firms needed to do was to adopt hackers’ core demand (providing access to code through “open” licenses) to ensure that participants could continue to help their environments thrive. The ethical logic of self‐fulfillment and the focus on technical excellence did the rest, imbuing projects with a propensity to accept any valid contribution (irrespective of whether it originates from a commercial or communal setting) and an aversion to discussing questions of subsistence (“who can afford to take part?”), as such discussions complicate the notion that contributions are solely evaluated on merit.
The integrated firm‐project economic model raises the issue of the sustainability of projects. As Nadia Eghbal observed in her Roads and Bridges report: “fundamentally, digital infrastructure has a free rider problem” (2016, p. 106). This tension had been noted since the beginning of FOSS development, when firms were described as harvesting the altruism of volunteer developers (Haruvy et al., 2003), resulting in a relationship between altruistic individuals and selfish firms (Bonaccorsi & Rossi, 2004). That firms are benefiting from the free labor of volunteers situate FOSS and peer production more generally within the same exploitative historical trend exemplified by domestic work. This is a move made by Kylie Jarrett (2016, 2019) who argues, in line with past feminist critiques (Dalla Costa & James, 1972), that unpaid domestic labor is crucial for capitalist production and reproduction. The binary between production and reproduction work renders essential forms of labor invisible.
Lund and Zukerfeld (2020) suggest that profit deriving from what they call the “enclosures model” seeks to increase the price of outputs, whilst profit deriving from the “openness model” seeks to decrease as much as possible the price of inputs. Copyright‐based production processes exploit productive activities during labor time, whilst “profit from openness is to a greater extent based on the exploitation of productive activities during leisure time” (Lund & Zukerfeld, 2020, p. 23). For these authors, firm adoption of FOSS is part of an emerging “Openness Ideology” representing a shift from a “profit from enclosures” model (based on the rhetoric of individuals, property, and exclusion) to a “profit from openness” model which extols the virtues of communities, inclusion, and freedom: the peer production of software opened the way for the wholesale capture by commercial interests of free labor. This was facilitated by the introduction of algorithms, which enable social media platforms to extract valuable behavioral data from participants’ “digital labor,” that is to say labor which does not think of itself as labor (Frayssé & O’Neil, 2015). A concrete example of the process whereby a commons is turned into a commodity can be seen through what Schöpf (2015) called the “commodification of the couch”: the commons‐oriented Couchsurfing hospitality exchange platform, which enabled the conversion of private households into shareable commons, attracted funds from venture capitalists in 2011, and subsequently started gathering and selling data on the activities of its users.
This brings us back to the critique articulated by Kreiss et al. (2011): in the end peer production amounts to little more than ultra‐exploitation. Yet the notion that unpaid participants are necessarily always being exploited should be reassessed. Red Hat, whose Fedora project combines waged and volunteer labor, has a business model which is only possible because products are created at a much lower cost than a fully‐waged workforce would entail. Does this constitute exploitation? Firms such as Red Hat are not appropriating FOSS code, which is accessible to all. Benjamin J. Birkinbine (2020) advances the notion of “incorporation” over that of “enclosure” which typically refers to the imposition of higher excludability on the common resource. Instead, “corporations have developed unique ways of transforming the products and processes of commons‐based peer production into commercial offerings without placing restrictions” (Birkinbine, 2020, p. 24) on the community’s access to their collective resources. As pointed out by Sébastien Broca (2013), this is quite different from the situation of proletarians who are dispossessed from the fruits of their labor. Here the exchange seems to be mutually profitable, even if the goods being swapped – economic profits for the firms, self‐realization for the developers – are different. It could even be argued that Red Hat creates an environment where developers can play with passion (Lessig, 2008).
Peer production projects originate from within what could be called a hobbyist sphere, characterized by two inter‐related traits: in contrast to salaried work, active users – not just CEOs and managers – can assume concrete strategic and operational control over projects; but these projects do not enable participants to make a living from their volunteer work. The exception to this rule is of course FOSS, where developers were either held to be able to convert the cultural capital acquired in communities into economic capital in the form of employment (Lerner & Tirole, 2002), or – with the adoption of FOSS by firms – simply be recruited to produce firm‐oriented free and open source software alongside volunteers. The fact that firms are paying the salaries of developers in FOSS projects was originally found to be notable (González‐Barahona & Robles, 2013; Mansell & Berdou, 2010; Riehle et al., 2014)
