[iDC] Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?
pat kane
scottishfutures at googlemail.com
Thu Aug 23 08:58:07 UTC 2007
Hi Michel
I thought Benkler regarded peer-to-peer as more than just an
appendage to market-system and state-system allocations of resources,
but as at least a vigorous corrective, and at best a viable
alternative to them - indeed reconnecting resource allocation and
generation to democracy and citizenship in a way that the previous
two domains have insufficiently done. My problem with Tapscott is
that his perspective on mass collaboration is so relentlessly (and
literally) in-corporating - which is why I quoted D
iLampedusa. Actually by way of Immanuel Wallerstein in this brilliant
essay - http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/iw-vien2.htm - from which the
key quote is this:
The basic reason for concessions by persons of privilege to demands
for democratization is to defuse the anger, to incorporate the
rebellious, but always in order to save the basic framework of the
system. This strategy incarnates the di Lampedusa principle that
"everything must change in order that nothing change."
The di Lampedusa principle is a very efficacious one, up to a tipping
point. Demands for further democratization, for further
redistribution of the political, economic, and social pie, far from
having exhausted themselves, are endless, even if only in increments.
And the democratization of the past 200 years, even if it has
benefited only my hypothetical 19% of the world population, has been
costly to the 1%, and has consumed a noticeable portion of the pie.
If the 19% were to become 29%, not to speak of their becoming 89%,
there would be nothing left for the privileged. To be quite concrete,
one could no longer have the ceaseless accumulation of capital, which
is after all the raison d'être of the capitalist world-economy. So
either a halt must be called to the democratization process, and this
is politically difficult, or one has to move to some other kind of
system in order to maintain the hierarchical, inegalitarian realities.
It is towards this kind of transformation that I believe we are
heading today. I shall not repeat here my detailed analysis of all
the factors that have led to what I think of as the structural crisis
of the capitalist world-system. Democratization as a process is only
one of the factors that have brought the system to its current
chaotic state, and immanent bifurcation.(7) What I see, as a result,
is an intense political struggle over the next 25-50 years about the
successor structure to a capitalist world-economy. In my view this is
a struggle between those who want it to be a basically democratic
system and those who do not want that. I therefore somewhat unhappy
about the suggestion of the organizers that democracy may be "an
essentially unfinishable project." Such a formulation evokes the
image of the tragic condition of humanity, its imperfections, its
eternal improvability. And of course, who can argue with such an
imagery? But the formulation leaves out of account the possibility
that there are moments of historic choice that can make an enormous
difference. Eras of transition from one historical social system to
another are just such moments of historic choice.(8)
Is peer-to-peer part of this struggle towards a 'successor
structure'? Or not? The panic of Tapscott in the face of mass
collaboration makes me think it must be.
PK
Pat Kane
+44 (0)7718 588497
http://www.theplayethic.com
http://theplayethic.typepad.com
http://www.newintegrity.org
http://www.scottishfutures.net
http://www.patkane.com
All mail to: patkane at theplayethic.com
On 23 Aug 2007, at 08:03, Michel Bauwens wrote:
> Just a quick reply to this one.
>
> I think that the various attempts to make sense of emerging
> passionate and collaborative production outside the institutional
> frameworks of the for-profit world, such as this one, are
> legitimate. But indeed, I think there is a key differentiation to
> be made, and that is the following:
>
> 1) between all those, and that includes both liberals such as
> Benkler/Tapscott, but also left commentators (does Trebor belong to
> this category) who believe that peer to peer is entirely immanent
> to the current production system, a simple appendage to the market
>
> 2) and those, such as myself, who believe it has a 'transcendent'
> potential as well. Taking the latter view does not mean upholding
> any automaticity, nor denying the immanence, but simple accepting
> that the immanent aspect is not sufficient, that both the system-
> confirming and system-transcending aspects and potential have to be
> held at the same time, to make a full sense of the phenomena.
>
> This being said, both communities and institutions need to take
> account of each other, and to undertake processes of adaptation,
> and this is what the Wikinomics book addresses, from the point of
> view of the for-profit world,
>
> Michel
>
>
>
> On 8/20/07, pat kane <scottishfutures at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
>
>> From: pat kane <playethical at gmail.com>
>> Date: 19 August 2007 21:51:29 BDT
>> To: iDC list <idc at bbs.thing.net>
>> Subject: Don Tapscott's Wikinomics: A Dismal Netology?
>>
>> Hi all
>>
>> Trebor asked me to post this - I've been reading Don Tapscott's
>> Wikinomics for a review for the Independent, a UK 'quality'
>> tabloid. It's not up to the usual levels of theoretical precision
>> that abounds on iDC, and you'll all know most of the references,
>> but it might at least be a thought-starter. It also has a
>> reference - I think the first newspaper reference ever! - to the
>> work of Micheal Bauwens, our resident integral net-sage. Any (and
>> better) responses welcomed.
>>
>> Pk
>>
>> Pat Kane
>> http://www.theplayethic.com
>> http://theplayethic.typepad.com
>> http://www.newintegrity.org
>> http://www.scottishfutures.net
>> http://www.patkane.com
>>
>> All mail to: patkane at theplayethic.com
>>
>> Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
>>
>>
>>
>> By Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
>>
>>
>> Reviewed by Pat Kane
>>
>>
>> A spectre is haunting the information age – the spectre of
>> communism. And if you don't believe me, listen to Bill Gates. In a
>> 2005 interview, when asked whether the idea of intellectual
>> property was being challenged by the net generation's ingrained
>> habit of downloading, using and sharing content for free, Gates
>> disagreed.
>>
>>
>> "I'd say that of the world's economies, there's more that believe
>> in intellectual property today than ever. There are fewer
>> communists in the world today than there were", mused the uber-
>> geek. "There are some new modern-day sort of communists who want
>> to get rid of the incentive for musicians and moviemakers and
>> software makers under various guises. They don't think that those
>> incentives should exist."
>>
>>
>> Gates' views have since been ridiculed widely throughout the tech
>> community (though they recently received some elegant support in
>> Andrew Keen's The Cult of the Amateur). But the tycoon's anxieties
>> weren't baseless. In particular, Microsoft faces a swarming
>> battalion of services on the internet which promise to provide
>> everything the software giant does in your computer – email,
>> database, operating system, everything – for nothing.
>>
>>
>> These services ( Open Office, Ubuntu , Firefox and many others)
>> have mostly been created, and developed, by digital idealists
>> committed to a vision of knowledge and culture which – if not
>> communist – then at least revives the old idea of a '
>> commonwealth', a realm of resources available as of right to free
>> men and women, and places it bang in the heart of the late-
>> capitalist West.
>>
>>
>> The flurry of brand names from web culture that we conjure with in
>> our daily news stories – Google, YouTube, MySpace, Facebook,
>> Flickr – are fuelled by the free labour, and avid attention, of
>> the netizens of this new commonwealth. And the only sustainable
>> way these Web giants have found to make any money is by
>> demonstrating to advertisers that potential consumers are
>> watching. So it would seem that, at least at the networked end of
>> things, capitalism is parasitic upon collaboration. No wonder Bill
>> Gates would rather try to mitigate Aids in Africa these days, than
>> deal with this Monday-morning head-splitter of a problem.
>>
>>
>> If there's any group poised to profit from the bewilderment of
>> executive managers in the midst of turbulent markets and trends,
>> it's business consultants. And Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams,
>> as they say in these circles, are certainly built to last. The
>> extremely gimmicky title of their book draws inspiration from one
>> the less satisfying aspects of this digital "mass collaboration"
>> culture, the wiki. (Apart from Wikipedia, have you ever used a
>> real wiki? To a nineties'-era newspaper hack like myself, it
>> sometimes seems like as if the most fiddly aspects of page-setting
>> software has been perversely elevated to a new economic paradigm).
>>
>>
>> At times, Wikinomics reminds you of the famous quote from the
>> nobleman in Giuseppe De Lampudesa's The Leopard: "If we want
>> things to stay as they are, things will have to change". Meaning
>> that if the corporate West wants to find a way to keep making
>> money out of the circulation of information and culture, then the
>> whole way they do business will have to turn on its head.
>>
>>
>> Tapscott and Williams present themselves quite self-consciously as
>> the hand-holding guides of trembling CEOs and senior managers
>> through this scary landscape. A land where copyright can barely be
>> protected; where powerful companies have to open up their products
>> and services to collaboration with hackers and amateurs; where new
>> technologies largely propelled by irrepressible geeks can threaten
>> and unravel existing commercial markets.
>>
>>
>> They do their best, but most of the writers' attempts to bolt the
>> usual scarcity-and-control models of money-making on to these
>> alarmingly collective processes are remarkably tenuous. For
>> example, they suggest that the most active participants in YouTube
>> or Flickr be given star status, and granted a small but
>> proportionate share of the ad revenue that their impassioned
>> participation helps generate.
>>
>>
>> But can you imagine the resentment that would build among such
>> playful enthusiasts, each currently with as much right to access
>> and status as the other, if a lucrative star system began to
>> appear on these platforms? The very altruism and creative spirit
>> that vitalised these networks would quickly evaporate, and all
>> manner of gamings and distortions of the system for profit would
>> ensue. Talk about 'not getting it'.
>>
>>
>> Many of Tapscott and Williams' other recommendations to big
>> business are inspired by an ideal of scientific practice – peer-
>> support-and review, the open sharing of knowledge – which is as
>> much about Enlightenment as it is about capitalism. And let's not
>> forget that the Web itself, the platform that dynamised this whole
>> situation, came out of the purely scholarly vision of Tim Berners-
>> Lee – a physicist who wanted to help his fellow researchers freely
>> exchange information.
>>
>>
>> There's a weird blindness at the heart of this book, with its
>> gushing celebrations of how world-wide corporate collaboration
>> might produce the next Boeing airliner, or a new kitchen surface
>> wipe. As the peer-to-peer visionary Micheal Bauwens has eloquently
>> written, the problem is that we regard what is truly plentiful as
>> scarce (information), and what is truly scarce as plentiful (our
>> finite natural world).
>>
>>
>> There is virtually zero consciousness in Wikinomics of the kind of
>> limits to global corporate activity that our acute environmental
>> crisis must necessarily impose. Indeed, with an award-winning
>> cheesiness, the book opens with an anecdote about a goldmine –
>> revived, of course, through wikinomical means.
>>
>>
>> As Jeffery Sachs noted in his BBC Reith Lectures this year, mass
>> collaboration through informed networks will be one of the key
>> tools whereby we might heal the planet, environmentally and
>> geopolitically. But you'd hardly learn of that grand ambition from
>> this rather comically opportunistic book. The spectre of
>> consultantism hangs over it more oppressively than anything else.
>>
>>
>> Pat Kane is the author of 'The Play Ethic' ( www.theplayethic.com).
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
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