socio‐technical dynamic is emerging from its ashes: peer‐to‐peer (P2P). First, P2P is a type of social relation in human networks, where participants have maximum freedom to connect. Second, P2P is a technological infrastructure that makes the generalization and scaling up of such relations possible. Thus, P2P gives rise to a mode of production, i.e., peer production that includes new governance mechanisms and property frameworks.
P2P is not something new. It has existed since the dawn of humanity and initially was the dominant form of relationship in nomadic hunter‐gathering societies. In industrial capitalism (and later in the state‐socialist systems), the P2P dynamics were driven to the margins. However, with the affordance of P2P‐based technologies, P2P dynamics can now scale up to a global level and create complex artifacts that transcend the possibilities of both state‐ and market‐based models alone.
So, what are the infrastructural requirements that facilitate the re‐emergence of peer production? In his original article, Michel Bauwens (2005) posited that the first requirement is access to the technological infrastructure, i.e., to individual computers that are interconnected and thus enable a universal machine capable of executing any logical task. The Internet, as a point‐to‐point network, was designed for participation “from the edges” without the use of obligatory hubs such as telephone exchanges for example. Although not fully in the hands of its participants, the Internet is controlled through distributed governance, and outside the complete hegemony of particular private or state actors.
On the one hand, the current Internet might be the product of decisions made four to five decades ago. On the other hand, it has been subsequently shaped by commercial interests after the invention of the Web and the browser, and by governments intent on controlling it. But it has also been taken up by the hacker movements and user communities adapting and changing it to their benefit. The community wi‐fi movement, the open spectrum advocacy, and alternative meshwork‐based telecommunication infrastructures are exemplary of the latter efforts. However, the future of the Internet, and of the Web that runs on the Internet, is a terrain of struggle, in which different interests are striving for supremacy.
The second requirement, according to Bauwens (2005), is the existence of a “software” infrastructure for autonomous global cooperation. A growing number of collaborative tools, such as wikis, facilitate the creation of trust and social capital, making it possible to create global groups that can create use‐value without the intermediary of for‐profit enterprises.
The third requirement is a legal infrastructure that enables the creation of use‐value and protects it from private appropriation. For example, the General Public License (which prohibits the appropriation of software code) and certain versions of the Creative Commons license fulfill this role. They enable the protection of common use‐value and use viral characteristics to spread. The General Public License and related material can only be used in projects that in turn put their source code in the public domain.
The fourth requirement is cultural. The diffusion of mass intellectuality, (i.e., the distribution of human intelligence) and associated changes in ways of feeling and being (ontology), ways of knowing (epistemology), and value constellations (axiology) have been instrumental in creating the type of cooperative autonomy needed to sustain an ethos that can enable peer production (Bauwens, 2005).
3 Principles and Characteristics of Peer Production
According to Bauwens (2005) then, the P2P dynamics have allowed for:
producing use‐value through the free cooperation of producers who have access to distributed capital: this is peer production, different from for profit maximization production or production by state‐owned institutions. The product of (commons‐based) peer production, as defined by Benkler (2002, 2006), is not exchange value for a market, but use‐value for a community of users who may also be the producers.
community‐driven governance mechanisms: this is peer governance, different from market allocation or corporate hierarchy.
making use‐value freely accessible on a universal basis, through new commons‐oriented property regimes: this is peer property, different from private property or public (state) property.
Peer production is thus fundamentally different from the incumbent models of value creation under industrial capitalism. In the latter, the owners of the means of production hire workers, direct the work process and sell products for profit maximization. Such production is organized by allocating resources through price signals, or through hierarchical command that takes into account these price signals.
In contrast, peer production is in principle open to anyone with skills (and access to the appropriate technological infrastructure) to contribute to a joint project: the knowledge of every participant is pooled.1 These participants may be paid, but not necessarily, as this system of production is open to self‐motivated contributions. Precisely because peer production projects are open systems in which knowledge can be freely shared and distributed, anyone with the right knowledge and skills can contribute, either paid by companies, clients, or not at all. In these open systems, there are many reasons to contribute beyond or besides that of receiving monetary payment. Peer production allows contributions based on all kinds of motivations, but most importantly on the desire to create something mutually useful to those contributing. Hence, people contribute because they find it meaningful and valuable. Next we review the most important principles and characteristics of peer production.
3.1 Distributed Networks
Peer production occurs in distributed networks. Distributed networks are networks in which autonomous agents can freely determine their behavior and linkages without the intermediary of obligatory hubs. As Alexander Galloway highlights in his book Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization (2004), distributed networks are not the same as decentralized networks, for which hubs are obligatory. Peer production is based on distributed power and distributed access to resources. In a decentralized network such as the US‐based airport system, planes have to go through determined hubs. However, in distributed systems or partly distributed systems, such as the Internet (van Steen & Tanenbaum, 2016) or highway systems, hubs may exist, but are not obligatory and agents may always route around them. One should not forget that a significant amount of the Internet’s backbone is wired and thus centralized too (Starosielski, 2015). Nevertheless, although we may now be far from the early vision of the Internet as a highly distributed network, the distributed elements still allow for peer production to transcend some of the restrictions of time and space. Peer production, as we discuss below, is “cosmo‐local.”
3.2 Commons
Peer production is not a “gift economy” and it is not fully based on reciprocity. Peer production follows the adage: each contributes according to their capacities and willingness, and each takes according to their needs. Thus, any “gifting” is most often non‐reciprocal gifting, i.e., the use of peer‐produced use‐value does not create a reciprocal obligation. Peer production does not usually involve reciprocity between individuals but only between individuals and the collective resource. For example, people are allowed to develop their software based on an existing piece of software distributed under the widely used GNU General Public License, only if their final product is available under the same kind of free and open source license (in this case, GNU General Public License).
Peer production can most easily operate in the sphere of digital goods, where the main inputs are free time and the available surplus of computing resources. Reciprocity‐based schemes are necessary in the material sphere where the higher cost of capital intervenes. At present, peer production offers no coherent solution to the material
