All entries for Wednesday 30 September 2009

Source of a revolution: in praise of the internet

The internet is our greatest hope for the future. There; contest it, laugh, berate me for being polemical - it's true. I will avoid producing a cute list of the internet's more annoying phenomena, which seems a little too obvious at this point; instead, be assured that I'm not talking about image macros and 4chan-spawned memes, but the democratisation of knowledge and opportunity, the transfer of privilege from the few to the many. The future, literally in front of us. Time magazine began to realise it some time ago, so it's not even a novel idea and shouldn't be controversial - but the popular opinion is still, more often than not, to reject it in favour of the internet-as-tacky-distraction, the grisly melange of pornography and lolcats. No - not while I'm logged on, which is embarrassingly often - the future, connected to you by a series of tubes (I'll stop now).

This piece of unadventurous futurism has been my personal opinion for some time, borne of a mixture of social theorisation and solipsism - in equal parts the hope for a more egalitarian, less plutocratic society and the desperate wishing that something, anything constructive or even tangible could come from all those hours spent idly browsing reddit and TV Tropes. But recently it has passed from mere thought into academia, or at least something roughly in that vicinity. Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams covers the bases well, taking the reader on an articulate tour through all the successes of the internet's collaborated content - Linux, craigslist, blogs, InnoCentive, Second Life - as well as the (partial) defeats of those forces such as DRM that aim to halt the collectivist revolution. Using the term 'prosumers' they denote the ways in which the end-users of technology have become the makers of its creative content rather than just passive receivers (a point since made irrefutable, I note, by the unprecedented success of the iPhone's app store). Naturally, Wikipedia is used as the flagship for this new model of production - it is the biggest success of them all, a colossal peer production network that blew all its more traditional competitors into the past and is so ubiquitous that it verges on becoming a proprietary eponym, a Kleenex, a Hoover. And it's hard to argue - when was the last time you fired up Encarta?

Yet when it comes to the troublesome subject of money, the story is altogether different. Money has traditionally been where the internet-idealism comes unstuck - any sceptic you happen to be sitting next to will at this point nod smugly and inform you, 'There's no money on the internet'. And in accordance with this weak spot of the web, the authors are uncharacteristically timid: the politics becomes pronouncedly more straight-laced, fitting the collaborative model into conventional economic practices rather than - as might fit better with the tone of the rest of the book - seeking to break free of them. The chapter "The Wiki Workplace" details a few instances of how the web has translated into 'real world' profits (such as Best Buy's Geek Squad, which apart from turning profits is also hated by many for charging extortionate amounts to perform simple tasks), and postulates that web-based collective efforts could soon be turning over huge sums of money. Elsewhere, a sub-chapter entitled "Why the Open Source Critics are Wrong About Free Enterprise" outlines the benefits of peer production for businesses, rejecting the supposition that it might undermine the typical capitalist model.

I do not find these sections as appealing. The evidence is not there for the conventional economic success of peer production: of all the co-collaborative social networks, none is profitable of itself apart from Second Life, which has become so by creating its own in-game economy that users enter into financially - something Facebook, Youtube et al are unlikely ever to do. Nobody makes any money directly from Wikipedia. And in all this futurism let us not forget the recent past: the dotcom boom, which was a thrilling financial frenzy until the dust settled and revealed a desert strewn with unprofitable websites and shattered hopes. No, the old ways are not the only ones.

I personally find Dan Pink's analysis of the situation to be more applicable: as the internet moves the goalposts further towards creativity and co-operation, the traditional financial motivators are no longer all-powerful. We cannot rely on money to bring about the next set of revolutions in knowledge, production or social interaction - but as Wikipedia, Firefox, Linux and so many others have demonstrated, we do not have to, and in fact we should not, for it stifles thinking and encumbers progress. It is undeniable, there is very little money on the web - but this only makes it more of a dynamic and crucial force.

Colin Fallon : 30 Sep 2009 23:35 |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem