Dtek Industries

Hieb, this book seems to have had a big impact on you. I have ben looking through it, and I like how your subject heads organize the thoughts and quotations. I wonder if you might go a step further and speak specifically about how this book further informs or supports your public conscience--politics, work, etc. The bits about the "new folk culture" and "writable culture," and about the way in which advertisers now try to sell and define as cool the culture that includes their product, whatever their product may be--I especially tuned in there. It is intriguing, but I wonder if there is much sense in any such speculation. As either Postman or Winn (or both) point out, the computer was supposed to come in and close the achievement gap in writing and reading scores--the gap between, to use these words, pre-industrial age technologies scores and industrial age technologies scores. Your comment on the school blog help me develop my own contention: that this "new folk culture," as I understand it anyway, has all the necessary ingredients to support its own speculated impact, but it's hamstrung by the fact that it is a lazy impulse--a habituated will to be distracted, to float and be stirred on the surface of things that leads us to these technologies--we want the TV psychologically and are willing to do only the minumum to get it. I don't know. Why would I think this website is an exception? Well, maybe there is a point there... Hmmm. Talk to me more about it.

Benkler spends a good deal of time on an issue that i hardly mentioned, if at all, in my quotations below. he talks about how much networked peer production is the result of people simply continuing to do something small and instinctual in a new, easy-to-coordinate medium: giving.

i met someone recently who i just discovered wrote this article on Rock/Paper/Scissors and Game Theory for Popular Science's web site (a site i incidentally did some work on recently :) ).

this quote by the man she was interviewing stuck out to me:

This just shows the strength of the giving feeling in individuals. Giving is one of the strongest drives. We like to be part of a family. We like to be part of a community. You can still argue that it's self-interest. Somehow you've got to serve people's self interests. But one of the big ones is an interest in feeling that you're part of a community.

sounded familiar... and it made me realize, we'll never know if our urge to give is truly altruistic or self-interested, but to the extent that we can never know it, the distinction doesn't matter.

here's the most concise quote i found on how copyright has shifted way out of the balance it was originally intended to create (a balance, roughly, between incentives to create on the one hand, and public benefit/availability on the other), towards the "commercial producers that rely on property":

Combined with the possibility and existence of technical controls on actual use and the DMCA's [Digital Millenium Copyright Act's] prohibition on circumventing those controls, this means that copyright law has shifted. It existed throughout most of its history as a regulatory provision that reserved certain uses of works for exclusive control by authors, but left other, not explicitly constrained uses free. It has now become a law that gives rights holders the exclusive right to control any computer-mediated use of their works, and captures in its regulatory scope all uses that were excluded from control in prior media.

and here's the quote i found that most explicitly refers to the title of the book, and the potential wealth if the right "hands" are kept "off" the NIE.

remember that the gist of Adam Smith's seminal book (as it appears to a layman armed mostly with high school history and wikipedia, anyway!) was that governments should keep their regulatory hands off of the free market (this basic idea, of course, is presently under the most intense scrutiny and criticism for many generations, given the current economic crisis). anyway, here is Benkler's take on why "regulatory abstinence" is needed in the case of the NIE:

In each layer, the policy debate is almost always carried out in local, specific terms. We ask questions like, Will this policy optimize "spectrum management" in these frequencies, or, Will this decrease the number of CDs sold? However, the basic, overarching question that we must learn to ask in all these debates is: Are we leaving enough institutional space for the social economic practices of networked information production to emerge? The networked information economy requires access to a core set of capabilities--existing information and culture, mechanical means to process, store, and communicate new contributions and mixes, and the logical systems necessary to connect them to each other. What nonmarket forms of production need is a core common infrastructure that anyone can use, irrespective of whether their production model is market-based or not, proprietary or not. In almost all these dimensions, the current trajectory of technological economic-social trends is indeed leading to the emergence of such a core common infrastructure, and the practices that make up the networked information economy are taking advantage of open resources.

...

The core common infrastructure appears to be emerging without need for help from a guiding regulatory hand. This may or may not be a stable pattern. It is possible that by some happenstance one or two firms, using one or two critical technologies, will be able to capture and control a bottleneck. At that point, perhaps regulatory intervention will be required. However, from the beginning of legal responses to the Internet and up to this writing in the middle of 2005, the primary role of law has been reactive and reactionary. It has functioned as a point of resistance to the emergence of the networked information economy. It has been used by incumbents from the industrial information economies to contain the risks posed by the emerging capabilities of the networked information environment. What the emerging networked information economy therefore needs, in almost all cases, is not regulatory protection, but regulatory abstinence.

just one quote from chapter 10, too, which deals with how the NIE affects community and social interactions. the chapter's conclusion offers a summary of much of the discussion and empirical evidence preceding it:

This chapter began with a basic question. While the networked information economy may enhance the autonomy of individuals, does it not also facilitate the breakdown of community? The answer offered here has been partly empirical and partly conceptual.
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Empirically, it seems that the Internet is allowing us to eat our cake and have it too, apparently keeping our (social) figure by cutting down on the social equivalent of deep-fried dough--television. That is, we communicate more, rather than less, with the core constituents of our organic communities--our family and our friends--and we seem, in some places, also to [pg 376] be communicating more with our neighbors. We also communicate more with loosely affiliated others, who are geographically remote, and who may share only relatively small slivers of overlapping interests, or for only short periods of life. The proliferation of potential connections creates the social parallel to the Babel objection in the context of autonomy--with all these possible links, will any of them be meaningful? The answer is largely that we do, in fact, employ very strong filtering on our Internet-based social connections in one obvious dimension: We continue to use the newly feasible lines of communication primarily to thicken and strengthen connections with preexisting relationships--family and friends. ...

The conceptual answer has been that the image of "community" that seeks a facsimile of a distant pastoral village is simply the wrong image of how we interact as social beings. We are a networked society now--networked individuals connected with each other in a mesh of loosely knit, overlapping, flat connections. This does not leave us in a state of anomie. We are welladjusted, networked individuals; well-adjusted socially in ways that those who seek community would value, but in new and different ways. ...

in the conclusion to chapter 8, he summarizes some thoughts about the new folk culture made possible by the NIE, and the tension with the vested interests of the industrial economy (emphasis mine):

By comparison to the highly choreographed cultural production system of the industrial information economy, the emergence of a new folk culture [pg 300] and of a wider practice of active personal engagement in the telling and retelling of basic cultural themes and emerging concerns and attachments offers new avenues for freedom. It makes culture more participatory, and renders it more legible to all its inhabitants. The basic structuring force of culture is not eliminated, of course. The notion of floating monads disconnected from a culture is illusory. Indeed, it is undesirable. However, the framework that culture offers us, the language that makes it possible for us to make statements and incorporate the statements of others in the daily social conversation that pervades life, is one that is more amenable to our own remaking. We become more sophisticated users of this framework, more self-conscious about it, and have a greater capacity to recognize, challenge, and change that which we find oppressive, and to articulate, exchange, and adopt that which we find enabling. As chapter 11 makes clear, however, the tension between the industrial model of cultural production and the networked information economy is nowhere more pronounced than in the question of the degree to which the new folk culture of the twenty-first century will be permitted to build upon the outputs of the twentieth-century industrial model. In this battle, the stakes are high. One cannot make new culture ex nihilo. We are as we are today, as cultural beings, occupying a set of common symbols and stories that are heavily based on the outputs of that industrial period. If we are to make this culture our own, render it legible, and make it into a new platform for our needs and conversations today, we must find a way to cut, paste, and remix present culture. And it is precisely this freedom that most directly challenges the laws written for the twentieth-century technology, economy, and cultural practice. [pg 301]

i finished this book today. damn. in all, my reading spanned about 9 months, during which time i moved across the country, went through 2 personal crises of a magnitude i've never felt before, and have generally started to build a new life for myself. romance even flowered and withered for me while this book was firmly planted on my various bedside tables.

...

the book is also helping me crystallize my own thinking behind some of the slow movements i've been making in my professional life for years: ways my work overlaps with my politics and intellectual curiosities; striving to fuse avocation and vocation, as my friend Joel pointed out so long ago. in many respects the concept of the "networked information economy" gives shape and credence to vague intuitions and dim projections stirring around in my head 12 years ago in college when i saw my friend shy's web site and said "i want to build one of those".

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as such, in addition to being full of meaning for me in its own right, the Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler will always occupy an emotional, nostalgic spot in my memory.

i am excited to round out my comments here with quotes from the last ~150 pages of the book. this journal will always remain for me, as i move on with my life.

incidentally, i finished the book today at 2:36pm in the Junebug Cafe of Jamaica Plain, Boston. on the top 40 radio station they had playing was an a capella cover of Every Little Thing She Does is Magic, performed by the Mosaic Whispers of Washington University. saludos amigos.

in chapter 6, Benkler offers a long critique of the mass media that dominated the public sphere in the industrial production economy, including this concise statement on mass media and politics (emphasis mine). it's a familiar one (takes me back to Manufacturing Consent), but well-stated and worth repeating.

Examples abound, but the basic analytic structure of the claim is fairly simple and consists of three distinct components. First, advertiser-supported media need to achieve the largest audience possible, not the most engaged or satisfied audience possible. This leads such media to focus on lowest-common-denominator programming and materials that have broad second-best appeal, rather than trying to tailor their programming to the true first-best preferences of well-defined segments of the audience. Second, issues of genuine public concern and potential political contention are toned down and structured as a performance between iconic representations of large bodies of opinion, in order to avoid alienating too much of the audience. This is the reemergence of spectacle that Habermas identified in The Transformation of the Public Sphere. The tendency toward lowest-common-denominator programming translates in the political sphere into a focus on fairly well-defined, iconic views, and to avoidance of genuinely controversial material, because it is easier to lose an audience by offending its members than by being only mildly interesting. The steady structuring of the media as professional, commercial, and one way over 150 years has led to a pattern whereby, when political debate is communicated, it is mostly communicated as performance. Someone represents a party or widely known opinion, and is juxtaposed with others who similarly represent alternative widely known views. These avatars of public opinion then enact a clash of opinion, orchestrated in order to leave the media neutral and free of blame, in the eyes of their viewers, for espousing an offensively partisan view. Third, and finally, this business logic often stands in contradiction to journalistic ethic. While there are niche markets for high-end journalism and strong opinion, outlets that serve those markets are specialized. Those that cater to broader markets need to subject journalistic ethic to business necessity, emphasizing celebrities or local crime over distant famines or a careful analysis of economic policy.

in the next chapter, he offers ideas about how the networked information economy might better serve the public sphere:

The networked public sphere is not made of tools, but of social production practices that these tools enable. The primary effect of the Internet on the [pg 220] public sphere in liberal societies relies on the information and cultural production activity of emerging nonmarket actors: individuals working alone and cooperatively with others, more formal associations like NGOs, and their feedback effect on the mainstream media itself. These enable the networked public sphere to moderate the two major concerns with commercial mass media as a platform for the public sphere: (1) the excessive power it gives its owners, and (2) its tendency, when owners do not dedicate their media to exert power, to foster an inert polity. More fundamentally, the social practices of information and discourse allow a very large number of actors to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political arenas, rather than mostly passive recipients of mediated information who occasionally can vote their preferences.

and concluding Chapter 4 - The Economics of Social Production...

The overarching point is that social production is reshaping the market conditions under which businesses operate. To some of the incumbents of the industrial information economy, the pressure from social production is experienced as pure threat. It is the clash between these incumbents and the new practices that was most widely reported in the media in the first five years of the twenty-first century, and that has driven much of policy making, legislation, and litigation in this area. But the much more fundamental effect on the business environment is that social production is changing the relationship of firms to individuals outside of them, and through this changing the strategies that firms internally are exploring. It is creating new sources of inputs, and new tastes and opportunities for outputs. Consumers are changing into users--more active and productive than the consumers of the [pg 127] industrial information economy. The change is reshaping the relationships necessary for business success, requiring closer integration of users into the process of production, both in inputs and outputs. It requires different leadership talents and foci. ...

For all of us, there comes a time on any given day, week, and month, every year and in different degrees over our lifetimes, when we choose to act in some way that is oriented toward fulfilling our social and psychological needs, not our market-exchangeable needs. It is that part of our lives and our motivational structure that social production taps, and on which it thrives. There is nothing mysterious about this.
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What needs to be understood now, however, is under what conditions these many and diverse social actions can turn into an important modality of economic production. When can all these acts, distinct from our desire for [pg 99] money and motivated by social and psychological needs, be mobilized, directed, and made effective in ways that we recognize as economically valuable?

much of the book has to do, in one way or another, with how we should handle policies related to intellectual property in our new networked information economy -- the subject of so much speculation and debate currently.

below is a quick glimpse (emphasis mine) into Benkler's take on that, from chapter 2, "Some Basic Economics of Information Production and Innovation". two key concepts mentioned here are "non/rivalry" -- i.e. food is a rival resource; information is a nonrival resource -- and "on the shoulders of giants" -- referring to a statement by Isaac Newton where he humbly attributes the brunt of his own discoveries to those who came before him.

The implication is that when a country--either one that already has a significant patent system, or a developing nation--increases its patent protection, it slightly decreases the level of investment in innovation by local firms. Going on intuitions alone, without understanding the background theory, this seems implausible--why would inventors or companies innovate less when they get more protection? Once you understand the interaction of nonrivalry and the "on the shoulders of giants" effect, the findings are entirely consistent with theory. Increasing patent protection, both in developing nations that are net importers of existing technology and science, and in developed nations that already have a degree of patent protection, and therefore some nontrivial protection for inventors, increases the costs that current innovators have to pay on existing knowledge more than it increases their ability to appropriate the value of their own contributions. When one cuts through the rent-seeking politics of intellectual property lobbies like the pharmaceutical companies or Hollywood and the recording industry; when one overcomes the honestly erroneous, but nonetheless conscience-soothing beliefs of lawyers who defend the copyright and patent-dependent industries and the judges they later become, the reality of both theory and empirics in the economics of intellectual property is that both in theory and as far as empirical evidence shows, there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law.

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and in the conclusion of the chapter:

The networked information economy has upset the apple cart on the technical, material cost side of information production and exchange. The institutional ecology, the political framework (the lobbyists, the habits of legislatures), and the legal culture (the beliefs of judges, the practices of lawyers) have not changed. They are as they developed over the course of the twentieth century--centered on optimizing the conditions of those commercial firms that thrive in the presence of strong exclusive rights in information and culture. The outcome of the conflict between the industrial information economy and its emerging networked alternative will determine whether we evolve into a permission culture, as Lessig warns and projects, or into a society marked by social practice of nonmarket production and cooperative sharing of information, knowledge, and culture of the type I describe throughout this book, and which I argue will improve freedom and justice in liberal societies.

I need to read the quotations below, but let me just throw this in, in reactin to the first part of your post: it sounds a bit like what I think Chomsky is getting at with Manufacturing Consent. And the second part of what you said, regarding Adam Smith, reminds me that most recently I have heard Chomsky matter-of-factly state that he is a conservative. His social and economic policies are conservative--and yet it is impossible that Sean Hannity would ever want to interview him.

Anyway, most of the rest you said I do not unerstand. My guess is that you are saying what I think you have been kind of saying for years--especially regarding the music world--this here internet thing is transforming shit--McCluhan like. And you seem to be excited about the possiblities of that--as though some "real" change, such as some of us might hope Obama could usher in, may be at hand--gradual, no doubt, like watching a kid grow, only slower--but you know what I mean, like how Jonah surprises you every now and again--or how my little freshman become giant seniors who could beat me into a pulp--but slower, much slower--definite, yes, happening right underneath our noses, and yet we can only speculate about its effects, and therefore be mostly wrong about them. I am finding myself approaching this "tome" as one such work of speculation. What do you think?

just a guy is Joey D

here are a few quotes to start me off on my journaling... (and btw, my task is made much easier by the fact that the entire book is online under a creative commons license! but it sure is nice to have the paper, bound softcover book right beside me.)

The first part of this book is dedicated to establishing a number of basic economic observations. Its overarching claim is that we are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy, which I call the "networked information economy." It is displacing the industrial information economy that typified information production from about the second half of the nineteenth century and throughout the twentieth century. What characterizes the networked information economy is that decentralized individual action--specifically, new and important cooperative and coordinate action carried out through radically distributed, nonmarket mechanisms that do not depend on proprietary strategies--plays a much greater role than it did, or could have, in the industrial information economy. The catalyst for this change is the happenstance of the fabrication technology of computation, and its ripple effects throughout the technologies of communication and storage. The declining price of computation, communication, and storage have, as a practical matter, placed the material means of information and cultural production in the hands of a significant fraction of the world's population--on the order of a billion people around the globe. The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication spanning the ever-larger societies and geographies that came to make up the relevant political and economic units of the day required ever-larger investments of physical capital. Large-circulation mechanical presses, the telegraph [pg 4] system, powerful radio and later television transmitters, cable and satellite, and the mainframe computer became necessary to make information and communicate it on scales that went beyond the very local. Wanting to communicate with others was not a sufficient condition to being able to do so. As a result, information and cultural production took on, over the course of this period, a more industrial model than the economics of information itself would have required. The rise of the networked, computer-mediated communications environment has changed this basic fact. The material requirements for effective information production and communication are now owned by numbers of individuals several orders of magnitude larger than the number of owners of the basic means of information production and exchange a mere two decades ago.

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I suggest that the networked information environment offers us a more attractive cultural production system in two distinct ways: (1) it makes culture more transparent, and (2) it makes culture more malleable. Together, these mean that we are seeing the emergence of a new folk culture--a practice that has been largely suppressed in the industrial era of cultural production--where many more of us participate actively in making cultural moves and finding meaning in the world around us. These practices make their practitioners better "readers" of their own culture and more self-reflective and critical of the culture they occupy, thereby enabling them to become more self-reflective participants in conversations within that culture. This also allows individuals much greater freedom to participate in tugging and pulling at the cultural creations of others, "glomming on" to them, as Balkin puts it, and making the culture they occupy more their own than was possible with mass-media culture. In these senses, we can say that culture is becoming more democratic: self-reflective and participatory.

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The first methodological choice concerns how one should treat the role of technology in the development of human affairs. The kind of technological determinism that typified Lewis Mumford, or, specifically in the area of communications, Marshall McLuhan, is widely perceived in academia today [pg 17] as being too deterministic, though perhaps not so in popular culture. The contemporary effort to offer more nuanced, institution-based, and politicalchoice-based explanations is perhaps best typified by Paul Starr's recent and excellent work on the creation of the media. While these contemporary efforts are indeed powerful, one should not confuse a work like Elizabeth Eisenstein's carefully argued and detailed The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, with McLuhan's determinism. Assuming that technologies are just tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do. Barry Wellman has imported into sociology a term borrowed from engineering--affordances. 1 Langdon Winner called these the "political properties" of technologies. 2 An earlier version of this idea is Harold Innis's concept of "the bias of communications." 3 In Internet law and policy debates this approach has become widely adopted through the influential work of Lawrence Lessig, who characterized it as "code is law." 4
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The idea is simple to explain, and distinct from a naïve determinism. Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense--if you have technology "t," you should expect social structure or relation "s" to emerge--is false. Ocean navigation had a different adoption and use when introduced in states whose land empire ambitions were effectively countered by strong neighbors--like Spain and Portugal--than in nations that were focused on building a vast inland empire, like China. Print had different effects on literacy in countries where religion encouraged individual reading--like Prussia, Scotland, England, and New England--than where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain. This form of understanding the role of technology is adopted here. Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder. In a challenging environment--be the challenges natural or human--it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the feasible--uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a technology--different patterns of adoption and use [pg 18] can result in very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies can persist with different patterns of use over long periods. It is the feasibility of long-term sustainability of different patterns of use that makes this book relevant to policy, not purely to theory. The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns. There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.