Book of Peer Production

Edited By Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil

http://peerproduction.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/JoPP_Peer-book.pdf

CONTENTS

SOCIALLY USEFUL PRODUCTION

 THE CUNNING OF INSTRUMENTAL REASON 

AUTHORITY IN PEER PRODUCTION

 BECOMING MAKERS 

HACKLABS AND HACKERSPACES

Introduction to Book of Peer Production

 Johan Söderberg & Mathieu O'Neil

The Book of Peer Production is an off-spring of the Journal of Peer Production, an open access, peer reviewed journal dedicated to investigating the emergence of peer production as a new mode of production. Characteristic of peer production is that the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production. In fact, the commons and peer production are two names for describing the same thing: a particular kind of labour relation. This labour relation is predicated on voluntary participation and the selfselection of tasks. Participants may be driven by a variety of motivations, for instance, self-fulfilment, peer recognition, developing new skills, or something else again. We may call such motivations intrinsic. The high degree of intrinsic motivation in commons-based peer production is proportionate to a relatively low degree of extrinsic motivation. That is to say, monetary compensation for labour expenditure. This is testified in the willingness among participants to relinquish exclusive proprietary rights over the results of their labour in favour of public ownership licenses. Starting from this ideal type, we set out to scrutinise the inconsistencies and contradictions of peer production, placing emphasis on its hybrid co-existence with dominant forms of (wage) labour and property relations. A key area of investigation are cases where the output of the community is appropriated by a private rights holder. Commons-based peer production is thus turned into a model for exploiting free labour.1 We invite contributions from as many perspectives as possible in this discussion. The overriding goal is to conceptualise what peer production is and could become, as a step towards building a more just and sustainable future. In keeping with the topic of the journal and the book, we seek to position ourselves in-between the grassroots initiatives and discussions taking place on the Internet, driven by practitioners and activists of various kinds, and the theory and critiques coming out of academia. We are thus obliged to say some words about the match, and mismatch, between the concept of peer production and the academic world. This leads on to a much larger and thorny question: the state of the contemporary intellectual landscape. This has been brilliantly mapped by a French sociologist, Razmig Keucheyan, in his book Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Leaning on Perry Anderson's diagnosis, Keucheyan makes two key points: first, it must be recognised that the New Left was defeated by the neo-liberal 1 For a more on peer production, see: Vasilis Kostakis and Michel Bauwens (2014) Network Society and Future Scenarios for a Collaborative Economy. London: Palgrave. On the risk of exploitation of free labour, see: (ed.) Trebor Scholz (2012) The Internet as Playground and Factory. New York: Routledge. counter-offensive. Under the current circumstances, its ideas and tactics are a roadplan for continued failures. Second, it is clarifying to compare leading critical intellectuals of the early 20th century with their contemporary counterparts. Rosa Luxemburg, Trotski, Lenin, Lukàcs, Korsch and Gramsci combined incisive political analysis with the leadership of political organisations. There are still a handful of intellectuals closely associated with far-left micro-parties; in present-day Europe we have the late Daniel Bensaïd in France and Alex Callinicos in the United Kingdom; in Latin America, one may think of Álvaro García Linera, vice-president of Bolivia since 2006, and of Subcomandante Marcos of the Mexican Zapatista Army of National Liberation (Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional or EZLN). But the overwhelming majority of present-day intellectuals with a critical bent (the writers of this introduction included), are state employees in the service of the university system. From this observation Keucheyan concludes: This does not mean that contemporary critical intellectuals are not engaged, or that they are less radical than classical marxists. But, aside from their engagement, they are academics, which cannot fail to influence the kind of theories they produce.2 The claims about an ascendant mode of peer production seems to point in the opposite direction. As a counterpoint to the academisation of debates and politics, alternative forums and meeting places flourish where practitioners and activists reflect over their practice and its wider, societal implications. No-one personifies this stance better than Richard Stallman. His ideals of autonomy, creativity, sharing, and cooperation have been advanced through the creation of GNU software, the General Public Licence (or “copyleft”) and the Free Software Foundation. Those achievements have been coupled with an independent production of ideas, manifestos, forecasts and strategic plans. Recall the promise for the future that concludes the GNU Manifesto:
In the long run, making programs free is a step toward the post-scarcity world, where nobody will have to work very hard just to make a living. People will be free to devote themselves to activities that are fun, such as programming, after spending the necessary ten hours a week on required tasks such as legislation, family counseling, robot repair and asteroid prospecting. There will be no need to be able to make a living from programming.3

2 Keucheyan, R. (2010) Hémisphère gauche. Une cartographie des nouvelles pensées critiques. Paris: La Découverte. 3 Stallman, R. (1985) The GNU Manifesto. Available: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/ manifesto.html/

Trained social scientists are bound to react with a wry smile when reading the references to asteroids and robots. Most likely, they will proceed to formulate a critique of the logocentric, techno-deterministic, Western and/or patriarchal hacker culture.4 We invite such critiques as part of our collective undertaking to reflect over peer production. Having said that, a critique is not complete unless the critic includes himself/ herself in his/her analysis. As we saw, the position of the critic largely overlaps with that of the professional academic. One bias of this profession is a generalised anxiety not to be perceived as naive, against which the critical stance serves as an antidote. What is problematic here is that this attitude accords so well with the ironic, post-ideological hegemonic order of the day. In contrast, the convictions expressed by Richard Stallman and like-minded people have been rewarded with striking successes on the ground. The creation of peer production projects such as Project Gutenberg, Wikipedia and the many offshoots of GNU/Linux are some cases in point. Those accomplishments stand out all the more as the traditional left is struggling to come up with an adequate response to the mounting crisis of the capitalist system. Post-1989, the space for thinking and debating alternatives to neoliberal and/or keynesian capitalism is steadily shrinking, also within the left. It is in this light that historically and sociologically informed studies of the peer production model become urgent. Inquiries of the sort have been pioneered by Oekonux and the Peer-to-Peer Foundation. They have been involved in concurrent theory development, free software production and community organising, a mixture that has fostered conceptual creativity. The Oekonux project, originally launched in 1999 in Germany, has been at the forefront of critical theorising about peer production. In the view of Oekonux members and sympathisers, the Marxist critique of the capitalist mode of production (where the proletariat seizes the means of production through state power) is superseded by a peer production critique (where the wage labour relation and commodity production are replaced with commons-based production). The 4 Kreiss, D., Finn, M. & Turner, F. (2011) The limits of peer production: Some reminders from Max Weber for the network society. New Media & Society 13(2): 243–259 proponents of the Peer-to-Peer Foundation share many of the same concerns and analysis without being as closely tied to the Marxist tradition. The initiative to start the Journal of Peer Production came out of discussions at the Fourth Oekonux conference in Manchester in 2009; our ambition was to create a forum that accommodates these different perspectives. It is fitting that the book has been produced in connection with the Free Society Conference and Nordic Summit (FSCONS). Since its beginning in 2007, FSCONS has been a rallying point for everyone interested in bottom-up technology development and its wider, societal implications. Equally fitting is it to have the book published on Nordic Summer University Press, a forum for independent thinking and self-organisation for more than 60 years. The same aspiration is expressed by the authors of this volume. In the opening chapter, Adrian Smith documents the story about The Lucas Plan. When workers in the U.K. arms industry faced layoffs in 1970s, they proposed to take over the factory and repurpose it for 'socially useful production.' In the next chapter, Johan Söderberg investigates an open source 3D printing project that set out to abolish the need for market exchanges. The ambitious goal of the project is compared with a longer history of utopian engineering thinking. George Dafermos demonstrates in his study of the FreeBSD project that a complex engineering project can be scaled up without it requiring traditional divisions of labour and associated hierarchies. The chapter by Austin Toombs, Shaowen Bardzell and Jeffrey Bardzell traces the many paths that leads to the adoption of a ”maker” identity. Maxigas' chapter, finally, calls attention to a tradition of Hacklabs, often set up in squatted buildings on the European continent, that predated the latest wave of Hackerspaces. The disappearance of that history in the collective representations of hackers is linked to the marginalisation of the more confrontational politics of Hacklabs. This leads us to a common theme in all of the chapters in this volume. Namely, the need for independent reflection and scholarly work to restore to our collective memory foregone and forgotten traditions of utopian technology development. Restoring that memory is a first step towards bringing about a different future.