Professor Yochai Benkler '94
September 28, 2007
Professor Yochai Benkler '94
New faculty member Yochai Benkler ’94 is a noted expert on the effects of laws that regulate information production and exchange in the digital environment. He coined the term “commons-based peer production” to describe collaborative efforts such as free and open source software or Wikipedia. His phrase “networked information economy” describes a system of production, distribution and consumption of information goods characterized by decentralized individual actions that do not depend on market strategies.
The critical change has been the emergence of the connected personal computer. For the first time since the industrial revolution, the basic physical capital necessary to act in economically effective ways, in the core economic sectors of the most advanced economies, is widely distributed in the population. Car or steel manufacturers did not need to worry about volunteers getting together on the weekend and competing with them. The cost of an assembly line was simply too high for social action to be economically effective. Today, Microsoft, the broadcasters and Hollywood do indeed need to worry about volunteers cooperating to create alternatives to their products. And this creates a new economic reality. For some, it’s a threat—for others, an opportunity.
This isn’t the creation of some new utopian human type. We are as we have always been. Sometimes we do things for money. Sometimes we talk to friends or stop to give directions on the street. Sometimes we do things because they are the right things to do. Because of the material conditions of information production today, these kinds of social behaviors have become central, rather than peripheral, to the global economy.
In the past few years we’ve seen the rise of the networked public sphere. Be it citizen journalism or e-mail campaigns, people now have greater opportunity to communicate through politically focused networks. Beyond the hype, a good bit of empirical work supports the proposition that this ability to speak even in smallish groups is significant. When people raise issues that others also consider important, they begin to link, talk, and their observations can work their way through the network to ever-more-visible sites. Agenda-setting power partly migrates from a small number of professional opinion makers to distributed groups of intensely engaged participants.
We are also beginning to see cooperation and social production being applied to questions of global justice and development. Commons-based and peer production are beginning to offer a space for various components of human development to be produced outside of the intellectual property system, allowing more significant access to knowledge. Free and open source software is becoming important to technical infrastructure. Open scientific publication and databases are contributing to building scientific capacity globally. Open educational materials can help produce quality teaching materials. And, though still embryonic, there are commons-based efforts in agricultural and biomedical research.
Intellectual property is a form of regulation of information production. It allows information, knowledge and culture to mimic some of the economic characteristics of material goods, enabling a particular set of business models—those that rely on selling information as finished goods. But of course information is fundamentally not “goods.” Having rights that are too strong undermines access to information, not only for consumers of information goods, but also for producers, for whom existing information, together with human capabilities, is the core input. The internal political dynamics of lawmaking—the fact that exclusive rights have concentrated benefits for a small number of industries, and diffuse costs—have brought us extensive exclusive rights, well beyond what sensible economic policy or public policy concerned with access to knowledge would get us.
But we’re beginning to see that dynamic reversed, as more businesses see that collaboration with commons-based information production creates valuable new opportunities. One way of understanding this is by looking at the amicus briefs in the Grokster case in the Supreme Court. Sure enough, on one side were Hollywood, the recording industry and some software publishers. On the other, however, were not only civil society organizations of both left and right and the Free Software Foundation, but also the telecommunications industry, consumer electronics groups, software services, technology venture capitalists and a variety of other segments whose value is many times larger than those of the IP-based industries. This battle—between the industrial information economy and the emerging networked information economy—is among the most important struggles shaping the future of how we create information and knowledge.
I’m working on a book on cooperation more generally. The selfish rational actor model has been the dominant model for human systems design—be it legal and political systems, business processes or technical systems design. The last 40 years have seen the rise of a hypersimplified, selfish model of the individual as someone who requires incentives and monitoring if he or she is to behave in ways consistent with the common good. The systems built on this assumption did well in many cases but fail to provide sufficient play for individual learning, innovation and adaptation that are becoming critical with ever-faster innovation cycles and an increasingly complex global system.
But in the last 15 years there have been efforts in experimental economics and game theory, organizational sociology, management science, anthropology and evolutionary theory that challenge this basic assumption of selfishness. Collaboration goes well beyond Wikipedia or Linux. We can begin to design systems for the more complex people we in fact are—different from each other, some more generous, more socially engaged. The new systems we need to build are as different as the Toyota production system is from Fordism, as the Internet is from the old AT&T network, and as trust or a sense of obligation is from a formal contract.