Yochai Benkler

The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 14 Jul 2001

During times of great congestion, the price would go up; during times of low usage, the price would fall. This market would be competitive, so the prices would be neutral, and hence the proposal still fits my definition of a commons. But it is different from Gilder's and Reed's in that it requires money to get access. In the middle is Yochai Benkler, who is agnostic about the technology but clear about the constitutional norm. See Yochai Benkler, “Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law,” New York University Law Review 76 (2000): 23, 81, where he talks about constitutionality. If spectrum is effectively unlimited, or if it could be organized to be effectively unlimited, then it should be structured to permit free access.

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Nimelman, “Of Common Carriage and Cable Access: Deregulation of Cable Television by the Supreme Court,” Federal Communications Law Journal 34 (1982): 167, 173; Robert Means and Deborah Cohn, “Common Carriage of Natural Gas,” Tulane Law Review 59 (1985): 529. As Yochai Benkler writes, however, “after the internal combustion engine was invented, it was not a better system for awarding railroad franchises that was needed, but a well-regulated commons like our national highway system.” Yochai Benkler, “The Commons as a Neglected Factor of Information Policy” (paper presented at Telecommunications Policy Research Center conference, October 3-5, 1998), 68. And indeed, the revenue from rail transportation was $28,348,895,000 in 1992, compared with $135,437,000,000 for local and long-haul trucking services.

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The MPAA estimates the average cost of a feature film (including studio overhead and capitalized interest) was $51.5 million in 1999. See MPAA, “MPAA Average Negative Costs,” slide 14 of 44 (visited June 21, 2001), http://www.mpaa.org/ useconomicreview/2000Economic/slide.asp?ref=14. 10 As Yochai Benkler writes, “[M]ainstream economics very clearly negates the superstition that if some property rights in information are good, then more rights in information are even better.” Yochai Benkler, “A Political Economy of the Public Domain: Markets in Information Goods Versus the Marketplace of Ideas,” in Expanding the Boundaries of Intellectual Property: Innovation Policy for the Knowledge Society, Rochelle Cooper Dreyfuss and Diane Leenheer Zimmerman, eds.

The Future of the Internet: And How to Stop It
by Jonathan Zittrain
Published 27 May 2009

, http://www.bittorrent.com/what-is-bittorrent (last visited May 16, 2007); see also Wikipedia, BitTorrent, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bittorrent (as of Mar. 28, 2007, 16:30 GMT). 61. JOHN STUART MILL, ON LIBERTY AND OTHER ESSAYS 75 (John Gray ed., 1998). 62. Id. 63. YOCHAI BENKLER, THE WEALTH OF NETWORKS 275 (2006). 64. Id. at 277; see also Yochai Benkler, Freedom in the Commons: Towards a Political Economy of Information, 52 DUKE L.J. 1245, 1248—49 (2003) (“Together these shifts can move the boundaries of liberty along all three vectors of liberal political morality. They enable democratic discourse to flow among constituents, rather than primarily through controlled, concentrated, commercial media designed to sell advertising, rather than to facilitate discourse.

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They allow passive consumers to become active users of their cultural environment, and they allow employees, whose productive life is marked by following orders, to become peers in common productive enterprises. And they can ameliorate some of the inequalities that markets have often generated and amplified.”). 65. Yochai Benkler, Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production, 114 YALE L.J. 273 (2004). 66. See Yochai Benkler & Helen Nissenbaum, Commons-based Peer Production and Virtue, 14 J. POL. PHIL. 394 (2006) (arguing that socio-technical systems of commons-based peer production offer not only a remarkable medium of production for various kinds of information goods, but also serve as a context for positive character formation, as a society that provides opportunities for virtuous behavior is one that is more conducive to virtuous individuals, and suggesting that the practice of effective, virtuous behavior may lead to more people adopting the virtues as their own, or as attributes of what they see as their self-definition). 67.

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Freedom Found., to Senators Fritz Hollings and Ted Stevens (Nov. 5, 2001), available at http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/20011105_eff_sssca_letter.html (discussing the proposed SSSCA). 47. See Yochai Benkler, Free as the Air to Common Use: First Amendment Constraints on Enclosure of the Public Domain, 74 N.Y.U. L. REV. 354 (1999) (asserting that expansive intellectual property rights constrain the availability of information); Yochai Benkler, Through the Looking Glass: Alice and the Constitutional Foundations of the Public Domain, 66 LAW& CONTEMP. PROBS. 173, 216—18 (2003) (criticizing the NET Act and DMCA for expanding copyright protection in such a way that will chill expression); Neil Weinstock Netanel, Locating Copyright Within the First Amendment Skein, 54 STAN.

Blockchain Revolution: How the Technology Behind Bitcoin Is Changing Money, Business, and the World
by Don Tapscott and Alex Tapscott
Published 9 May 2016

Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2007). Wikinomics defined seven such business models. The list has been extended here. 18. Commons-based Peer Production is a term developed by Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler in the seminal article “Coase’s Penguin,” The Yale Law Journal, 2002; www.yale.edu/yalelj/112/BenklerWEB.pdf. 19. http://fortune.com/2009/07/20/information-wants-to-be-free-and-expensive/. 20. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 21. Interview with Dino Mark Angaritis, August 7, 2015. 22. Andrew Lih, “Can Wikipedia Survive?,” The New York Times, June 20, 2015; www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html. 23. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 24. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/ascribe-raises-2-million-to-ensure-you-get-credit-for-your-art/. 25. www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html?

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,” The New York Times, June 20, 2015; www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/can-wikipedia-survive.html. 23. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 24. http://techcrunch.com/2015/06/24/ascribe-raises-2-million-to-ensure-you-get-credit-for-your-art/. 25. www.nytimes.com/2010/04/15/technology/15twitter.html?_r=0. 26. http://techcrunch.com/2014/05/09/monegraph/. 27. www.verisart.com/. 28. http://techcrunch.com/2015/07/07/verisart-plans-to-use-the-blockchain-to-verify-the-authencity-of-artworks/. 29. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 30. Interview with David Ticoll, August 7, 2015. 31. Interview with Yochai Benkler, August 26, 2015. 32. www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/friedman-welcome-to-the-sharing-economy.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&partner=rss&emc=rss&. 33. Sarah Kessler, “The Sharing Economy Is Dead and We Killed It,” Fast Company, September 14, 2015; www.fastcompany.com/3050775/the-sharing-economy-is-dead-and-we-killed-it#1. 34.

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—Blythe Masters, CEO, Digital Asset Holdings “This is a book with the predictive quality of Orwell’s 1984 and the vision of Elon Musk. Read it or become extinct.” —Tim Draper, Founder, Draper Associates, DFJ, and Draper University “Blockchain is a radical technological wave and, as he has done so often, Tapscott is out there, now with son Alex, surfing at dawn. It’s quite a ride.” —Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School “If you work in business or government, you need to understand the blockchain revolution. No one has written a more thoroughly researched or engaging book on this topic than Tapscott and Tapscott.” —Erik Brynjolfsson, Professor at MIT; coauthor of The Second Machine Age “An indispensable and up-to-the-minute account of how the technology underlying bitcoin could—and should—unleash the true potential of a digital economy for distributed prosperity.”

The Googlization of Everything:
by Siva Vaidhyanathan
Published 1 Jan 2010

For critical perspectives on Habermas and public-sphere theory, see Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Bruce Robbins and the Social Text Collective, The Phantom Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). 53. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 212–61. 54. Marshall McLuhan, The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Some media theorists like Mark Poster and Jodi Dean are critical of efforts to associate a print-centered nostalgic phenomenon with the cacophony of cultural NOTES TO PAGES 137– 41 245 and political activities in global cyberspace. Others, like Yochai Benkler and Howard Rheingold, see the practice of “peer production” and the emergence of impressive and efficient organizational practices as a sign that Habermas’s dream could come true in the form of digital signals and democratic culture.

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Lawrence Page et al., The PageRank Citation Ranking: Bringing Order to the Web, Technical Report, Digital Libraries Project, Stanford University, 1999, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/422/. 18. John Battelle, The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture (New York: Portfolio, 2005). 19. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 20. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (2002): 369–446. 21. Daniel O. O’Connor and Henry Voos, “Laws, Theory Construction and Bibliometrics,” Library Trends 30, no. 1 (1981): 9–20; see also Christine Kosmopoulos and Denis Pumain, “Citation, Citation, Citation: Bibliometrics, the Web and the Social Sciences and Humanities,” Cybergeo: European Journal of Geography 411 (December 17, 2007), www.cybergeo.eu.

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At the festival, Page and Brin would have encountered a radically decentralized social structure, one that facilitates creativity, collaboration, and experimentation with little or no “command and control.” Burning Man, Turner concludes, is a distillation of the “cultural infrastructure” that nurtures Google, a spiritual manifestation of what Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production.”51 As the sociologist Dalton Conley has described, many of the most highly rewarded workers—those on the creative side of the technology industries—are either trapped in something like a velvet goldmine or struggling to get into one. They are decontextualized from their localities, overconnected to their mobile, cosmopolitan communities, and constantly striving to improve the speed and quality of those connections.

Data and Goliath: The Hidden Battles to Collect Your Data and Control Your World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 2 Mar 2015

Once they are in place: Bruce Schneier (6 Jun 2013), “What we don’t know about spying on citizens: Scarier than what we know,” Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/06/what-we-dont-know-about-spying-on-citizens-scarier-than-what-we-know/276607. The clever thing about this: Yochai Benkler delineated criteria that the courts can use to decide this. Yochai Benkler (Jul 2014), “A public accountability defense for national security leakers and whistleblowers,” Harvard Review of Law and Policy 8, http://benkler.org/Benkler_Whistleblowerdefense_Prepub.pdf. Someone like Snowden: Yochai Benkler makes the case that the smartest thing the US could do is to give Edward Snowden immunity and let him return to the US. Yochai Benkler (8 Sep 2014), “Want to reform the NSA? Give Edward Snowden immunity,” Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/09/want-to-reform-the-nsa-give-edward-snowden-immunity/379612/2.

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This notion of making certain crimes: Michael L. Rich (Mar 2013), “Should we make crime impossible?” Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy 36, http://www.harvard-jlpp.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/36_2_795_Rich.pdf. Yochai Benkler said: Yochai Benkler (4 Dec 2013), “System and conscience: NSA bulk surveillance and the problem of freedom,” Center for Research on Computation and Society, Harvard University, http://crcs.seas.harvard.edu/event/yochai-benkler-crcs-lunch-seminar and https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=6EUueRpCzpw. secrecy is necessary: William E. Colby (1976), “Intelligence secrecy and security in a free society,” International Security 1, http://people.exeter.ac.uk/mm394/Intelligence%20Secrecy%20and%20Security.pdf.

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NSA: Why freedom of association matters,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/01/deep-dive-first-unitarian-church-v-nsa-why-freedom-association-matters. Today, the church is worried: Joshua Eaton (15 Aug 2014), “Challenging the surveillance state,” UU World, http://www.uuworld.org/ideas/articles/297088.shtml. Yochai Benkler likens NSA surveillance: Yochai Benkler (13 Sep 2013), “Time to tame the NSA behemoth trampling our rights,” Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/13/nsa-behemoth-trampling-rights. Even the politically conservative: Economist (16 Nov 2013), “The recorded world: Every step you take,” Economist, http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21589862-cameras-become-ubiquitous-and-able-identify-people-more-safeguards-privacy-will-be.

Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 2 Jan 2009

By invoking Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” I don’t mean to say that policy makers have nothing to worry about here. Smith’s 80706 i-xxiv 001-328 r4nk.indd 49 8/12/08 1:54:46 AM 50 REMI X Wealth of Nations teaches us about the phenomenal power of markets to adjust. But these markets adjust, as Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks powerfully teaches, in light of the baseline allocation of rights. Policy makers must assure that rights are not allocated in a way that distorts or weakens competition. A costly overlay of spectrum rights, for example, or an inefficient market of copyrights, can stifle competition and drive markets to unnecessary concentration.

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But if the same question were asked of newspapers on average, then great skepticism about newspapers would be merited as well. The point with both is that we have effective tools for assessing quality. And more important, we have increasingly famous examples of blogs outdoing traditional media in delivering both quality and truth. Yochai Benkler catalogs a host of cases where bloggers did better than mainstream media in ferreting out the truth, such as uncovering the truth about Trent Lott’s affection for racist statements, or the lack of veracity in Diebold’s claims about its voting machines.19 And even a cursory review of key political blogs—Instapundit or Michelle Malkin on the Right, the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post on the Left—reveals a depth and an understanding that are rare in even the best of mainstream media.

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“Economies” in this sense differ in many ways. In the story that follows, however, I radically and crudely simplify these differences to speak about three types of economies only: a commercial economy, a sharing economy, and a hybrid of the two. Following the work of many, but in particular of Harvard professor Yochai Benkler,1 by a “commercial economy,” I mean an economy in which money or “price” is a central term of the ordinary, or normal, exchange. In this sense, your local record store is part of a commercial economy. You enter and find the latest Lyle Lovett CD. You buy it in exchange for $18. The exchange is defined in terms of the price.

Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is Turning the Internet Against Democracy
by Robert W. McChesney
Published 5 Mar 2013

“Will we one day see,” he asks, “Nobel Prizes won by huge collaborations dominated by amateurs?” Nielsen concedes this revolution in “how knowledge is constructed” faces some speed bumps—not the least of which comes from commercial interests’ desire to patent everything—but the general trajectory is irreversible.19 In his 2011 The Penguin and the Leviathan, Yochai Benkler sees the Internet as driving a fundamental shift in human nature, one very much for the better: All around us we see people cooperating and working in collaboration, doing the right thing, behaving fairly, acting generously, caring about their group or team, and trying to behave like decent people who reciprocate kindness with kindness.

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Short-term thinking and the single-minded pursuit of profit are increasingly subverting an economic system that otherwise has the capacity to benefit everyone. He concludes that because of social media, “we can transform the role of the private sector, including both corporations and consumers, to build a better world.”54 The problem is that celebrants often believe digital technology has superpowers over political economy. “What I found,” Yochai Benkler writes, “was that the Internet has allowed social, nonmarket behavior to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global, networked economy.”55 “We are talking about deep changes in the structure and modus operandi of the corporation and our economy,” Don Tapscott and Anthony D.

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Although the policy battles were won decisively by capital, it is important to acknowledge that there remained plenty of space for people to use the Internet as they wished, so this was not a case like radio broadcasting, wherein the system was turned over to a small number of commercial interests as a monopoly. There has been a tremendous burst of nonprofit and noncommercial Internet sites and free or open software and applications—Yochai Benkler puts the number in the thousands—that have become a central part of the digital realm as experienced by many online.49 Wikipedia is the most striking example. As John Naughton puts it, amateurs “have created what is effectively the greatest reference work the world has yet produced.”50 Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales understood from the outset that it could not be credible and successful if it was commercial, and Wikipedia still has a stance toward advertising that conjures up the Net’s salad days.51 At their best, these noncommercial cooperative ventures hark back to what Internet celebrants have most extolled about the technology’s virtues and potential.52 The most prominent of these developments have found a niche that sits comfortably with the dominant commercial players.

New Power: How Power Works in Our Hyperconnected World--And How to Make It Work for You
by Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms
Published 2 Apr 2018

“nonmarket-based cooperation”: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). “techno-anarcho-utopian magnum opus”: Matthew Ingram, “The Carr-Benkler Wager and the Peer-Powered Economy,” Gigaom, May 9, 2012. “amateur activity springing up”: Olivier Silvian, “Contingency and the ‘Networked Information Economy’: A Critique of The Wealth of Networks,” International Journal of Technology, Knowledge, and Society 4 (2008): 7. “We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu.

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“We could decide to appoint”: Yochai Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited,” Yochai Benkler’s blog, May 7, 2012. www.blogs.harvard.edu. “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler!”: Nicholas Carr, “Pay Up, Yochai Benkler,” Rough Type (blog), May 1, 2012. www.roughtype.com. “For investors, no less than”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” The early flourish of something like: Couchsurfing International, July 2017. www.couchsurfing.com. “I’m thrilled that you’re writing”: Yochai Benkler, discussion with authors, December 2, 2016. “What’s interesting is that if you teach”: Ibid. “Benkler’s dream”: Benkler, “Carr-Benkler Wager Revisited.” “Kickstarter is not a store”: Strickler, Chen, and Adler, “Kickstarter Is Not a Store.”

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But we should reject the idea that our destiny is to end up either being replaced by robots or treated like them. We believe there’s a practical advantage—and a moral imperative—to designing platforms that prove more human: ones that offer worker protections and security, provide freedom and dignity, and release creativity and ultimately value. 12 THE FUTURE: A FULL-STACK SOCIETY Yochai Benkler is a professor at Harvard who has spent the past twenty years writing and thinking about the possibilities of technology-enabled collaboration and mass participation. He has, for most of his career, been an articulate cheerleader for the potential of the internet to distribute power—culturally, politically, and economically.

Future Politics: Living Together in a World Transformed by Tech
by Jamie Susskind
Published 3 Sep 2018

See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 2007). 9. Karl Marx, Contribution to Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels: Collected Works Vol. 3. (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1975), 187. 10. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2006), 130. 11. Benkler, Wealth of Networks, 168. 12. Yochai Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power’, Daedalus 145, no. 1 (Winter 2016), 21. 13. Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen, The New Digital Age: Reshaping the Future of People, Nations and Business. (London: John Murray, 2014), 82. 14.

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It has been a pleasure to work with the fine teams at Oxford University Press and Peters Fraser + Dunlop: Tim Binding, Alexandra Cliff, Tessa David, Kate Farquhar-Thomson, Phil Henderson, Dan Herron, Erin Meehan, Laurie Robertson, Sarah Russo, and Olivia Wells. Chris Summerville expertly copy-edited the final text. I am grateful to Luciano Floridi, Vicki Nash, and Susannah Otter, whose early guidance helped to get the project off the ground. Fred Popplewell’s research was enormously useful. I have benefitted deeply from conversations with Yochai Benkler, Alex CanforDumas, Amber Case, Matt Clifford, David Cox, Primavera De Filippi, Gabriella Fee, Howard Gardner, Josh Glancy, Philip Howard, Laurence Lessig, Andrew Perlman, Michael Sandel, Bruce Schneier, Carina Namih, Beth Simone Noveck, David Weinberger, Owain Williams, Ellen Winner, Tom Woodward, and Jonathan Zittrain.

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Together, tens of thousands of contributors from around the world have produced the greatest repository of human knowledge ever assembled, working cooperatively, not for profit, outside the market system, and not under the command of the state. Similarly, file-sharing websites like Tor are increasingly popular, and in 2015 there were more than 1 billion uses of Creative Commons, a collaboration-friendly copyright system that encourages the use and adaptation of content by others without further permission by the originator. As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks (2006) and The Penguin and the Leviathan (2011), it’s not that human nature has changed in the last twenty years to make us more cooperative. Rather, it’s that this scale of cooperative behaviour would have been impossible in the past. Connective technology has made it possible.23 The last few years have seen the emergence of another technology with potentially far-reaching implications for connectivity and cooperation.

The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts
by Richard Susskind and Daniel Susskind
Published 24 Aug 2015

<http://www.data.gov> for the USA, <http://data.gov.uk> for the UK, and <http://www.data.go.jp> for Japan. 14 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, The Second Machine Age (2014), ch. 12. 15 Most notably, the Sarbanes–Oxley Act of 2002 (enacted 30 July 2002), known also as the ‘Public Company Accounting Reform and Investor Protection Act’. This is part of the federal law of the USA. 16 See e.g. Glasgow Herald, 18 Nov.1985, p. 15. 17 <http://www.ey.com> (accessed 23 March 2015). 18 Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto (2010), 34. 19 Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, 36. 20 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (2006). 21 <http://www.tripadvisor.co.uk>. 22 See Eric Topol, The Patient Will See You Now (2015), on driverless cars and doctorless patients. 23 Penelope Eckert, ‘Communities of Practice’, in The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, ed.

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More, it also seems to challenge classical economic thinking, which presumes that people strive to maximize their own self-interest alone, and are not inclined to contribute to others where there is no obvious and direct payoff to themselves. One of the leading academic commentators on the Internet, Yochai Benkler, in his book The Penguin and the Leviathan, strives to make sense of this apparent generosity, of the way in which ‘co-operation triumphs over self-interest’. As he puts it: the Internet has allowed social, nonmarket behaviour to move from the periphery of the industrial economy to the very core of the global, networked information economy.

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Information and news, knowledge and culture, computer-mediated social and economic interactions form the foundation of everything in all aspects of our lives—from the pursuit of democracy and global justice, to the latest trends in business and media, to the best innovations in the most advanced economies. The Internet has revolutionized how we produce information and the knowledge foundations of our society.97 What motivates people to exhibit this ‘nonmarket’ behaviour? Yochai Benkler’s explanation is a useful starting-point: ‘people contribute their time and effort, for free, because they think it’s the right thing to do, because they think contributing is fair, because it enhances their sense of identity and community and, quite simply, because it’s fun.’98 Not all networks, however, support cooperation.

The People's Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
by Astra Taylor
Published 4 Mar 2014

David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren’t the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 67 and 10. 12. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University, 2006), 93. 13. The talk is called “The New Open-Source Economics,” http://www.ted.com/talks/yochai_benkler_on_the_new_open_source_economics.html. 14. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, “File-Sharing and Copyright” (working paper, Harvard Business School, May 15, 2009), http://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Publication%20Files/09-132.pdf.

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Barriers to entry have been removed, gatekeepers have been demolished, and the costs of creating and distributing culture have plummeted. New tools not only have made cultural production more efficient but have equalized opportunity. NYU professor Clay Shirky, perhaps the leading proponent of this view, calls this process “social production.” Harvard’s Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production,” business writer Jeff Howe calls it “crowdsourcing,” and Don Tapscott and his coauthor Anthony D. Williams say “wikinomics.” Whatever term they use, the commentators agree that a revolution is unfolding, with the potential to transform not just culture but also politics and the economy.

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“Amateurs,” Shirky writes, “are sometimes separated from professionals by skill, but always by motivation; the term itself derives from the Latin amare—‘to love.’ The essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.” Making a similar case, Yochai Benkler likens cultural creation to blood drives: the quality of donations increases when organizers stop paying.12 “Remember, money isn’t always the best motivator,” Benkler said, reiterating the point during a TED Talk touching on similar themes. “If you leave a fifty dollar check after dinner with friends, you don’t increase the probability of being invited back.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet
by Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider
Published 14 Aug 2017

Anthology selection © 2016 Trebor Scholz and Nathan Schneider. The following authors have placed their contributions under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license: Michel Bauwens and Vasilis Kostakis, Yochai Benkler, Francesca Bria, Miriam A. Cherry, Ra Criscitiello, Max Dana, Joshua Danielson, Joel Dietz, John Duda, Enric Duran, Matan Field, Noemi Giszpenc, Mayo Fuster Morell, Marina Gorbis, Jessica Gordon Nembhard, Seda Gürses, Peter Harris, Steven Hill, Pedro Jardim, Francis Jervis, Mary Jo Kaplan, Dmytri Kleiner, Brendan Martin, Rachel O’Dwyer, Rory Ridley-Duff, Carmen Rojas, Douglas Rushkoff, Nathan Schneider, Trebor Scholz, Juliet B.

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David Bollier - From Open Access to Digital Commons PART 3 AN INTERNET OF OUR OWN Showcase 1 - Platforms Stocksy United Fairmondo Coopify Gratipay FairCoop Member’s Media, Ltd. Cooperative TimesFree Snowdrift.coop Resonate Loconomics Cooperative NYC Real Estate Investment Cooperative Robin Hood Collective Seed.Coop 14. Yochai Benkler - The Realism of Cooperativism 15. Janelle Orsi - Three Essential Building Blocks for Your Platform Cooperative 16. Caroline Woolard - So You Want to Start a Platform Cooperative… 17. Melissa Hoover - What We Mean When We Say “Cooperative” 18. David Carroll - A Different Kind of Startup Is Possible 19.

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The Domestic Workers Alliance, for example, formulated a Good Work Code in hopes that policy makers would endorse their guidelines and that platform owners would follow them. Seattle imposed a tax on Uber and gave drivers the right to unionize, Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City made attempts to curb the number of Uber cars, and the city of San Francisco tried to regulate Airbnb. A third pathway is to move production outside of the market altogether. Yochai Benkler labeled this “non-market peer production,” with the most successful example being Wikipedia. And, finally, for the compensated labor market, there is a fourth approach, which is platform cooperativism, a model of social organization based on the understanding that it is hard to substantially change what you don’t own.

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler
Published 14 May 2006

Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," Nature, December 14, 2005, available at ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html›. 25. ‹http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html›. 26. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (2001): 369. 27. IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), ‹http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm›. 28. For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287.

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Giles, "Special Report: Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head," Nature, December 14, 2005, available at ‹http://www.nature.com/news/2005/051212/full/438900a.html›. 25. ‹http://www.techcentralstation.com/111504A.html›. 26. Yochai Benkler, "Coase's Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm," Yale Law Journal 112 (2001): 369. 27. IBM Collaborative User Experience Research Group, History Flows: Results (2003), ‹http://www.research.ibm.com/history/results.htm›. 28. For the full argument, see Yochai Benkler, "Some Economics of Wireless Communications," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 16 (2002): 25; and Yochai Benkler, "Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment," Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 11 (1998): 287.

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Using Networked Communication to Work Around Authoritarian Control Toward a Networked Public Sphere Chapter 8 - Cultural Freedom: A Culture Both Plastic and Critical Cultural Freedom in Liberal Political Theory The Transparency of Internet Culture The Plasticity of Internet Culture: the Future of High-Production-Value Folk Culture A Participatory Culture: Toward Policy Chapter 9 - Justice and Development Liberal Theories of Justice and the Networked Information Economy Commons-Based Strategies for Human Welfare and Development Information-Embedded Goods and Tools, Information, and Knowledge Industrial Organization of Hdi-Related Information Industries Toward Adopting Commons-Based Strategies for Development Software Scientific Publication Commons-Based Research for Food and Medicines Food Security: Commons-Based Agricultural Innovation Access to Medicines: Commons-Based Strategies for Biomedical Research Commons-Based Strategies for Development: Conclusion Chapter 10 - Social Ties: Networking Together From "Virtual Communities" to Fear of Disintegration A More Positive Picture Emerges over Time Users Increase Their Connections with Preexisting Relations Networked Individuals The Internet As a Platform for Human Connection The Emergence of Social Software The Internet and Human Community Part Three - Policies of Freedom at a Moment of Transformation Introduction Chapter 11 - The Battle Over the Institutional Ecology of the Digital Environment Institutional Ecology and Path Dependence A Framework for Mapping the Institutional Ecology The Physical Layer Transport: Wires and Wireless Devices The Logical Layer The Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998 The Battle over Peer-to-Peer Networks The Domain Name System: From Public Trust to the Fetishism of Mnemonics The Browser Wars Free Software Software Patents The Content Layer Copyright Contractual Enclosure: Click-Wrap Licenses and the Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) Trademark Dilution Database Protection Linking and Trespass to Chattels: New Forms of Information Exclusivity International "Harmonization" Countervailing Forces The Problem of Security Chapter 12 - Conclusion: The Stakes of Information Law and Policy Blurb Endnotes Index Copyright © 2006 Yochai Benkler. All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.5/ The author has made an online version of the book available under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license; it can be accessed through the author's website at http://www.benkler.org.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back
by Juliet Schor , William Attwood-Charles and Mehmet Cansoy
Published 15 Mar 2020

In 2016 Kathleen Thelen and Peter Hall organized a Radcliffe Ventures meeting on the Politics of Work and Welfare in the Platform Economy, which significantly expanded my understanding of the sector. A third was the Sharing Cities Summit in Barcelona. Most recently, it has been a privilege to participate in the Political Economy and Justice Workshop at the Safra Center for Ethics at Harvard, organized by Danielle Allen, Yochai Benkler, and Rebecca Henderson. Many thanks to all the participants in those gatherings. I have presented this research to colleagues at many universities and conferences, where I received valuable feedback and encouragement. I am grateful to participants in seminars and workshops at Harvard, Harvard Business School, the Berkman Center, MIT, Northwestern, Boston College, Bentley University, Microsoft Research, Berkeley, Barnard College, New York University, Michigan, Rhode Island School of Design, Brown University, Boston University, CUNY Graduate Center, Connecticut College, University of Toronto, University of Massachusetts, Northeastern University, New School for Social Research, University of Maine, University of Central Arkansas, Tellus Institute, Utrecht University, Hamburg University, and University of Paris-Dauphine.

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For many years I have wanted to publish a book with Naomi Schneider and am privileged to have had the opportunity. It has been a great pleasure to work with her. There are a few people whose work and colleagueship has been especially important and to whom I have a special debt—Jean Rhodes, Veena Dubal, Krishna Dasaratha, Steve Vallas, and Yochai Benkler. Yochai’s writings have been inspirational for me, and our conversations no less so. Yochai, Jean, Krishna, and Prasannan Parthasarathi read the manuscript, and I am grateful to them for doing so. Finally, I would like to thank my family, who are always a source of love and support—David, Jon, Jim, Sharon, Indira, Niranjana, Dan, Lizzie, and Josh.

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The successes, over hundreds of years, of some of Ostrom’s cases led to enthusiasm for expanding “commons” to realms such as art, culture, scholarship, and of course, the digital world.65 The intellectual foundations for sharing also got a boost from a pair of pathbreaking contributions by legal scholar Yochai Benkler (“Sharing Nicely” from the Yale Law Review and his influential book The Wealth of Networks).66 Benkler argued against the conventional view that there are only three choices for organizing economic life—markets, firms, and the state. He made the case that a fourth—“social sharing”—was not only widespread but was becoming more efficient on account of digital technology.

We-Think: Mass Innovation, Not Mass Production
by Charles Leadbeater
Published 9 Dec 2010

They see in the Internet the possibility of community and collaboration, commons-based, peer-to-peer production, which will establish non-market and non-hierarchical organisations. It is not opening a new stage of capitalism and the market but laying the seeds for alternatives to both. We Think stands in this camp along with Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everyone. The most comprehensive statement of this collaborative point of view is Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks. The real measure of the Internet’s impact and value is whether it provides radically different options for how we organise ourselves: generating knowledge, sharing ideas, creating culture, making decisions together. People want meaningful opportunities to participate and contribute, to add their piece of information, view or opinion.

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The web’s best known self-governing communities do seem to bear this out: they rely on responsible self-governance, in which decision-making is relatively transparent and power held to account. The outcome should be that citizens will become more engaged and the political process more legitimate and creative. Yochai Benkler, a Harvard law professor, argues that as the web allows more views to be aired, so citizens will become more critically engaged in debating and choosing between a wider range of proposals. Benkler’s approach echoes Hannah Arendt’s view that citizens should be the ‘craftsmen of democracy’, inquiring into how things work, getting their hands dirty, challenging the power of experts and professionals who dominate policymaking.

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What that means is that the rise of We-Think culture among affluent teenagers in California might be justified on grounds of social justice if provision of the same tools could make an even bigger difference to the lives of the poorest. Then we could say the spread of We-Think potentially makes the world more socially just. There are grounds for guarded optimism, in theory. As Yochai Benkler argues in The Wealth of Networks, Information, knowledge and culture are core inputs into human welfare. Agricultural knowledge and biological innovation are central to food security. Medical innovation and access to its fruits are central to living a long and healthy life. Literacy and education are central to individual growth, to democratic self-governance, and to economic capabilities.

Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age
by Clay Shirky
Published 9 Jun 2010

Creating something personal, even of moderate quality, has a different kind of appeal than consuming something made by others, even something of high quality. I was wrong about Geocities because I bet that amateurs would never want to do anything other than consume. (That was the last time I ever made that mistake.) MEMBERSHIP AND GENEROSITY Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar at Harvard, and Helen Nissenbaum, a philosopher at NYU, wrote a paper in 2006 with a mouthful of a title: “Commons-Based Peer Production and Virtue.” Commons-based peer production is Benkler’s term for systems that rely on voluntary contributions to operate—systems that rely on cognitive surplus.

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As with the Ultimatum Game, the default human behavior relies on mutual regard for other participants, even when there’s money to be made. The second thing that has happened is that the emergence of a medium that makes group coordination cheap and widespread caused many of the old limits on social production to recede. This is the mechanism of production that Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler has called “commons-based peer production,” work that is jointly owned or accessed by its participants, and created by people operating as peers, without a managerial hierarchy. The inclusion of millions of new participants in our media environment has expanded the scale and scope of such production dramatically.

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Chris Anderson, Lili Cheng, Tim O’Reilly, Andrew Stolli, and Kevin Werbach all provided their own observations, as well as offered public platforms for the development of this work. Long-running conversations with many colleagues have provided material and insights for this book, including Sunny Bates, Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Caterina Fake, Scott Heiferman, Tom Hennes, Liz Lawley, Beth Noveck, Danny O’Brien, Paul Resnick, Linda Stone, Martin Wattenberg, David Weinberger, and Ethan Zuckerman. My agent, John Brockman, helped me clarify what I wanted to say, and Eamon Dolan and Helen Conford of Penguin Press helped me say it.

The Sharing Economy: The End of Employment and the Rise of Crowd-Based Capitalism
by Arun Sundararajan
Published 12 May 2016

Some that were quite influential early on were with Odile Beniflah, Lauren Capelin, Shelby Clark, Sunil Paul, Jessica Scorpio, Erica Swallow, Molly Turner, and Hal Varian. Some of the others that were especially notable and/or frequent were with Bhavish Aggarwal, Alisha Ali, Douglas Atkin, Michel Avital, Emily Badger, Mara Balestrini, Yochai Benkler, Rachel Botsman, danah boyd, Nathan Blecharczyk, Jennifer Bradley, Erik Brynjolfsson, Valentina Carbone, Emily Castor, David Chiu, Marc-David Chokrun, Sonal Choksi, Peter Coles, Chip Conley, Ariane Conrad, Arnab Das, Cristian Fleming (and his team at the Public Society), Richard Florida, Natalie Foster, Justin Fox, Liz Gannes, Lisa Gansky, Marina Gorbis, Neal Gorenflo, Alison Griswold, Vijay Gurbaxani, Tanner Hackett, Aassia Haroon Haq, Scott Heiferman, Jeremy Heimans, Sara Horowitz, Sam Hodges, Milicent Johnson, Noah Karesh, Stephane Kasriel, Sarah Kessler, David Kirkpatrick, Marjo Koivisto, Karim Lakhani, Kevin Laws, Michael Luca, Benita Matofska, Andrew McAfee, Ryan McKillen, Lesa Mitchell, Amy Nelson, Jeff Nickerson, Melissa O’Young, Janelle Orsi, Jeremy Osborn, Jeremiah Owyang (to whom I owe a special debt of gratitude for his remarkably selfless sharing of ideas and data), Wrede Petersmeyer, Ai-Jen Poo, Andrew Rasiej, Simone Ross, Anita Roth, Chelsea Rustrum, Carolyn Said, Marcela Sapone, Marie Schneegans, Trebor Scholz, Swati Sharma, Clay Shirky, Dane Stangler, Alex Stephany, James Surowiecki, Jason Tanz, Marie Ternes, Henry Timms, Viv Wang, Cheng Wei, Adam Werbach, Jamie Wong, Caroline Woolard, and numerous members of the OuiShare collective (including Flore Berlingen, Julie Braka, Albert Cañigueral, Simone Cicero, Javier Creus, Arthur De Grave, Elena Denaro, Diana Fillipova, Marguerite Grandjean, Asmaa Guedira, Ana Manzanedo, Bernie Mitchell, Edwin Mootoosamy, Ruhi Shamim, Maeva Tordo and especially Francesca Pick).

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It is useful to step back here and consider the perspectives of several earlier thinkers on the sharing economy, exploring in the process some of the sharing economy’s historical precedents, and its connection to even earlier thought on the gift economies that human societies have relied on for centuries. In 2004, the NYU professor Yochai Benkler (now at Harvard) published “‘Sharing Nicely’: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production.” Motivated in part by the rapid growth of Wikipedia since 2001, Benkler observed the ascendance of social sharing and exchange, and predicted that sharing would soon be at “the very core of the most advanced economies—in information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors.”18 He argued that the change has much to do with the growing availability of free software, distributed computing, and population-scale digital networks.

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He writes: “There exists not just the commercial economy, which meters access on the simple metric of price, but also a sharing economy, where access to culture is regulated not by price but by a complex set of social relations.”24 Later in the same chapter, Lessig qualifies his point: “Of all the ways in which the exchange within a sharing economy can be defined—or put differently, of all the possible terms of the exchange within a sharing economy—the one way in which it cannot be defined is in terms of money.”25 Lessig himself then draws a parallel between his thinking and Benkler’s. “As Yochai Benkler puts it, in commercial economies ‘prices are the primary source of information about, and incentive for, resource allocation’”; in sharing economies “non-price-based social relations play these roles.”26 However, he argues, this “is not because people are against money (obviously)” but rather because “people live within overlapping spheres of social understanding.

The Zero Marginal Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism
by Jeremy Rifkin
Published 31 Mar 2014

Mike Bergan, “The American Commons,” 10,000 Birds, August 6, 2007, http://10000birds .com/the-american-commons.htm (accessed July 2, 2013). 43. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal 112(369) v.04.3 (August 2002): 1–2, http://www.benkler.org/CoasesPenguin.PDF (accessed June 26, 2013). 44. Peter Barnes, Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler Publishers, 2006), xiv. Chapter 12 1. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 470. 2.

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After all, much of the communication that goes on today in the United States and around the world is via e-mail, smartphones, and tablets. In the Collaborative Age, social media like Facebook and Twitter are the indispensable means by which people increasingly communicate with each other. A new generation of scholars like Eli Noam of Columbia University, Yochai Benkler of Harvard University, and Kevin Werbach of the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania found common cause with the traditional market economists. All of them argued that the FCC command and control of the radio bands was, at best, inefficient and wasteful. The new activists disagreed, however, with Coase’s disciples, who argued that market management was the only viable alternative to government control.

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The communication/energy matrix of the Third Industrial Revolution—the Internet of Things—is facilitated more by social capital than by market capital, scales laterally, and is organized in a distributed and collaborative fashion, making Commons management with government engagement the better governing model. Yochai Benkler says that while an inordinate amount of attention is being placed on free software, it is in fact only one example of a much broader social-economic phenomenon. I suggest that we are seeing the broad and deep emergence of a new, third mode of production in the digitally networked environment.

Without Their Permission: How the 21st Century Will Be Made, Not Managed
by Alexis Ohanian
Published 30 Sep 2013

Fifteen years earlier, the US Supreme Court talked about the potential for anyone using the Internet to “become a town crier with a voice that resonates farther than it could from any soapbox,” but until this watershed moment, we’d never seen that voice actually resonate among millions of people.7 The social web changed that, and the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was, poetically, enabled by the very technology those bills threatened. Israeli-American legal scholar Yochai Benkler researched what he calls the “networked public sphere” using eighteen months of text and link analysis to identify the most-linked-to online sources as the voice of the “town crier” resonated across the web.8 At this point it shouldn’t surprise you that there wasn’t just one source, but rather a chorus.

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Now imagine this part in slow motion with dramatic music playing in the background: Senator Ron Wyden (D-Oregon) put a hold on the bill, saying, “The collateral damage of this statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet.”10 Epic. The bill was not gone, however. A year later it returned—still awful—with a new name: the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA). The Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) would follow in the House. Fortunately for us, when it comes to the speed of innovation, that’s a long time in Internet years. As Yochai Benkler’s research shows, Senator Wyden declared in a widely linked release in May of 2011 that he would also place a hold on this new bill. But this release also served as a call to the Internet public for help.11 Content began to surface and websites emerged that called for even more action. One of these sites, AmericanCensorship.org, was organized by the group Fight for the Future, which proved to be a powerful mobilizing force in the months that followed.

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And after a day of protest, phone calls, and petitions, the American people triumphed over tens of millions of lobbying dollars. Turns out the Supreme Court, in its 1997 “town crier” decision (where the Internet enables anyone to be a “town crier,” only with far more impact), wasn’t far off, as Yochai Benkler says: “Not everyone is a pamphleteer, but… what you see is a complex relationship between NGOs and commercial organizations; between VCs and activists; between traditional media and online media; between political media left and right; and tech media; all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking.

The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding From You
by Eli Pariser
Published 11 May 2011

But the trust we place in them to handle it with care is not always warranted, and when decisions are made on the basis of this data that affect you negatively, they’re usually not revealed. Ultimately, the filter bubble can affect your ability to choose how you want to live. To be the author of your life, professor Yochai Benkler argues, you have to be aware of a diverse array of options and lifestyles. When you enter a filter bubble, you’re letting the companies that construct it choose which options you’re aware of. You may think you’re the captain of your own destiny, but personalization can lead you down a road to a kind of informational determinism in which what you’ve clicked on in the past determines what you see next—a Web history you’re doomed to repeat.

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If a self-fulfilling prophecy is a false definition of the world that through one’s actions becomes true, we’re now on the verge of self-fulfilling identities, in which the Internet’s distorted picture of us becomes who we really are. Personalized filtering can even affect your ability to choose your own destiny. In “Of Sirens and Amish Children,” a muchcited tract, information law theorist Yochai Benkler describes how more-diverse information sources make us freer. Autonomy, Benkler points out, is a tricky concept: To be free, you have to be able not only to do what you want, but to know what’s possible to do. The Amish children in the title are plaintiffs in a famous court case, Wisconsin v.

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(New York: 2009), accessed July 19, 2010, www.danah.org/papers/talks/Web2Expo.html. 15 “strategically time” their online solicitations: “Ovulation Hormones Make Women ‘Choose Clingy Clothes,’” BBC News, Aug. 5, 2010, accessed Feb: 8, 2011, www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-10878750. 16 third-party marketing firms: “Preliminary FTC Staff Privacy Report,” remarks of Chairman Jon Leibowitz, as prepared for delivery, Dec. 1, 2010, accessed Feb. 8, 2011, www.ftc.gov/speeches/leibowitz/101201privacyreportremarks.pdf. 16 Yochai Bentler argues: Yochai Benkler, “Siren Songs and Amish Children: Autonomy, Information, and Law,” New York University Law Review, Apr. 2001. 17 tap into lots of different networks: Robert Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000). 17 “make us all next door neighbors”: Thomas Friedman, “It’s a Flat World, After All,” New York Times, Apr. 3, 2005, accessed Dec. 19, 2010, www.nytimes.com/2005/04/03/magazine/03DOMINANCE.html?

Internet for the People: The Fight for Our Digital Future
by Ben Tarnoff
Published 13 Jun 2022

The Answers Are Deeply Weird,” Washington Post, August 18, 2021, and Shoshana Wodinsky, “Facebook’s ‘Widely Viewed Content’ Report Promises Ben Shapiro Isn’t That Popular,” Gizmodo, August 18, 2021. 141, What’s more, it is figures … NYU study: Laura Edelson et al., “Far-Right News Sources on Facebook More Engaging,” Cyber-security for Democracy, March 3, 2021. No measurable effect from Russian influence operations: Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 235–68, and Yochai Benkler, “Cautionary Notes on Disinformation and the Origins of Distrust,” MediaWell, October 22, 2019. “Mostly took the …”: Yochai Benkler, “The Danger of Overstating the Impact of Information Operations,” Lawfare, October 23, 2020. 142, These forces have … Right-wing media ecosystem: Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 75–99. Fox as most-viewed US cable network: Amy Watson, “Top Cable News Networks U.S. 2021, by Number of Viewers,” Statista, June 7, 2021.

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Researchers at New York University found that far-right news sources receive the highest levels of engagement per follower, and that such sources are actually more popular if they spread false information—which is not the case for news sources in the political center or on the left. Meanwhile, despite the amount of attention devoted to the role of Russian influence operations in the 2016 election, they had no measurable effect, according to research by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts. Further, such operations “mostly took the form of jumping on the bandwagon” of the Right, Benkler writes, boosting false narratives initially manufactured by domestic forces. These forces have a wide range of outlets at their disposal. They can circulate propaganda not just through social media but across an entire right-wing media ecosystem, from talk radio to cable TV to news sites.

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Shapiro, “Greater Internet Use Is Not Associated with Faster Growth in Political Polarization among US Demographic Groups,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 114, no. 40 (October 3, 2017): 10616. See also Levi Boxell, Matthew Gentzkow, and Jesse M. Shapiro, “Cross-Country Trends in Affective Polarization,” National Bureau of Economic Research, 2020, and Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 296–339. 141, But the Right has immeasurably … The journalist Kevin Roose compiles the ten top-performing link posts by public US Facebook pages every day and publishes them on Twitter at twitter. com/FacebooksTop10.

Future Perfect: The Case for Progress in a Networked Age
by Steven Johnson
Published 14 Jul 2012

Ultimately I realized there was a word that had been staring me in the face all along: peer. It was a word that traveled nicely between high-tech and low-tech domains. The Internet and the Web (and almost all social networks that have been built on them) are peer-to-peer networks. The scholar Yochai Benkler had written eloquently of open-source projects such as Linux or Wikipedia as models of what he called “peer production.” But peer in the social sense was an evocative and powerful word in its own right: your equals, the ones whose respect and judgment you seek. So this is now what I call myself—and many of my friends and heroes—when asked about our political orientation.

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A few years later, in a casual e-mail exchange, the political scientist Henry Farrell encouraged me to write a book documenting the new politics that seemed to be coalescing around the online world. It took me a while, but eventually all these nudges came together to form Future Perfect. My thinking on these issues has been greatly expanded—if not downright borrowed—from conversations with Beth Noveck, Yochai Benkler, Fred Wilson, Brad Burnham, Larry Lessig, Denise Caruso, John Mackey, John Geraci, Paul Miller, Roo Rogers, Rachel Botsman, Reid Hoffman, Perry Chen, Yancey Strickler, Clay Shirky, Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, Kevin Kelly, Jon Schnur, Raj Sisodia, Gordon Wheeler, Nick Grossman, Jay Haynes, Eric Liftin, John Battelle, and my mother, Bev Johnson.

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For more on Marian Zeitlin’s original work, see Positive Deviance in Child Nutrition (with Emphasis on Psychosocial and Behavioural Aspects and Implications for Development), coauthored with Hossein Ghassemi and Mohamed Mansour. The key books and essays that have shaped my thinking on the power of peer networks and the framework of peer-progressive values include Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks; Beth Noveck’s WikiGovernment; Carne Ross’s The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century; Howard Rheingold’s Smart Mobs; Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations; Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom’s The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations; Tim O’Reilly’s “The Architecture of Participation”; Henry Farrell and Cosma Shalizi’s “Cognitive Democracy”; and just about everything written by Manuel Castells, starting with The Rise of the Network Society.

Working in Public: The Making and Maintenance of Open Source Software
by Nadia Eghbal
Published 3 Aug 2020

While certain members occupy distinct roles, the primary mode of social interaction in these communities is distributed, or many-to-many. WHY WE PARTICIPATE IN THE COMMONS Ostrom’s work on the commons helps us understand the conditions in which people produce software collaboratively: the clubs and federations of open source. In the early 2000s, Yochai Benkler expanded upon Ostrom’s model by applying her findings to the online world. He terms this communal structure commons-based peer production (CBPP) in a 2002 essay called “Coase’s Penguin, Or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm.’” (The title is a reference to Linux’s mascot, which is a penguin; in the paper, Benkler leans heavily upon the example of open source software to make his case.)

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Sean Larkin, the webpack maintainer, found that his skills doing outreach and user support complemented those of webpack’s author and lead developer, Tobias Koppers: When I first became a maintainer, I was too terrified to make code changes. I didn’t know how it worked. So I asked myself what I could do that I could kick ass at. I essentially just got on Twitter and started spending hours a day searching “Webpack.”150 Yochai Benkler suggests that all members in a peer production model are intrinsically motivated to participate. While intrinsic motivation explains why developers create software, as well as why they might casually participate, it doesn’t fully explain why developers continue to maintain projects over time.

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If I shoot fireworks from my house, all my neighbors can enjoy them, because I can’t stop them from viewing the fireworks. However, I might eventually get a little tired of buying materials, organizing the show, and absorbing the legal risks. Early open source advocates and scholars like Eric S. Raymond and Yochai Benkler point out that the problem is not quite that simple. In the physical world, the cost of providing material goods often makes it prohibitively difficult to provide public goods “for the fun of it.” The United States spends nearly $700 billion per year on national defense, for example.262 But online, it’s not that expensive to write code, record a video, make music, or publish one’s thoughts.

The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest
by Yochai Benkler
Published 8 Aug 2011

Also by Yochai Benkler The Wealth of Networks Copyright © 2011 by Yochai Benkler All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Business, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. www.crownpublishing.com CROWN BUSINESS is a trademark and CROWN and the Rising Sun colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Benkler, Yochai. The penguin and the Leviathan: the triumph of cooperation over self-interest/Yochai Benkler. p. cm. 1. Cooperation. 2. Self-interest. 3. Altruism. 4.

They Don't Represent Us: Reclaiming Our Democracy
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 5 Nov 2019

But it is to say that we should stand skeptical about the capacity of cable news to stay focused in a way that advances understanding, or at least the understanding a democratic public would require. Truth or significance may be a by-product; it may as well not. The 2016 election is a perfect example of this more general point. At Harvard, Yochai Benkler and his colleagues have done extraordinary work to understand the pattern of news consumption during the 2016 presidential election. After the 2016 election, they mapped the flow of stories and information across both cable television and the Internet. The strong conclusion that they draw is that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the problem with news in America is not symmetrical.

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See Robert Shapiro and Yaeli Bloch-Elkon, “Political Polarization and the Rational Public,” paper prepared for presentation at the Annual Conference of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, May 18–21, 2006, available at link #95. 44.The optimistic: Mike Godwin, Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Digital Age (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998); Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). The dark: Jonathan Zittrain, The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Knopf, 2010). 45.The quote is from John Gilmore, one of the founders of EFF.

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But it is different from the idea that Americans are becoming more extreme. See Morris Fiorina, “Americans Have Not Become More Politically Polarized,” Washington Post, June 23, 2014, available at link #104; Morris P. Fiorina, “The Political Parties Have Sorted,” a Hoover institution essay on contemporary American politics, series no. 3, 2016. 66.Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018), 73–74. 67.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 75-6. 68.Thomas E. Mann and Norman J. Ornstein, It’s Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism (New York: Basic Books, 2012). 69.Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), Kindle edition, loc. 4048. 70.Benkler, Faris, and Roberts, Network Propaganda, 17. 71.For a related view—that the media “must embrace their solemn duty and educate the population about our great challenges—ratings be damned”—see Rob Cohen, “TV News Is As Much to Blame for Democracy’s Decline as Trump Is,” Chicago Tribune, November 16, 2018, available at link #105. 72.Among the most comprehensive analysis of the news coverage during the 2016 campaign is that conducted by the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center.

Collaborative Futures
by Mike Linksvayer , Michael Mandiberg and Mushon Zer-Aviv
Published 24 Aug 2010

Most of these stories are well known, so we decided to keep them short. They are all very well documented, so these descriptions should be great starting points for further research. 12 Anarchism in the Collaboratory Anarchist theory provides some of the background for our framing of autonomy and self organization. This is recapitulated by Yochai Benkler, one of the leading modern theorists of open collaboration, in his book The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom: “The networked information economy improves the practical capacities of individuals along three dimensions: (1) it improves their capacity to do more for and by themselves; (2) it enhances their capacity to do more in loose commonality with others, without being constrained to organize their relationship through a price system or in traditional hierarchical models of social and economic organization; and (3) it improves the capacity of individuals to do more in formal organizations that operate outside the market sphere.

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Hundreds of millions of Internet users speak multiple languages; some percentage of these users are capable of translating between these. These users could be the backbone of a powerful, distributed peer production system able to tackle the audacious task of translating the Internet. We are at the very early stages of the emergence of a new model for translation of online content—“peer production” models of translation. Yochai Benkler uses the term “peer production” to describe new ways of organizing collaborative projects beyond such conventional arrangements as corporate firms. Individuals have a variety of motives for participation in translation projects, sometimes motivated by an explicit interest in building intercultural bridges, sometimes by fiscal reward or personal pride.

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Networked Solidarity “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.” —Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Postnationalism Catherine Frost, in her 2006 paper Internet Galaxy Meets Postnational Constellation: Prospects for Political Solidarity A er the Internet evaluates the prospects for the emergence of postnational solidarities abe ed by Internet communications leading to a change in the political order in which the responsibilities of the nation state are joined by other entities.

One Way Forward: The Outsider's Guide to Fixing the Republic
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 12 Feb 2012

We believe in: rough consensus and running code.20 This is the age of open-source—in technology, in culture, and now in politics. It is the distinctive character of social movements, enabled by networked technology, that enables the “we” to live differently. It is the “wealth of networks” that Yochai Benkler described five years ago.21 And as it flourishes almost everywhere, it is time, finally, for people to recognize it for what it is: It is power, today. Which brings me to the second reaction that I predicted would be a result of putting these stories together, at least for some: anger. If you’re the sort of citizen I’ve described here—if you’ve “Meetup-ed” with other Tea Partiers or pitched a tent with the Occupiers—then this chapter may well have upset you.

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Occupy Boston seemed the most diverse, from drug addicts (living in a No Drugs Zone) to students to professionals, with a health clinic and stage with a mic thrown into the bargain. 16 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 15. 17 Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (2008), 24–25. 18 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 19. 19 Meckler and Martin, Tea Party Patriots, 19–20. 20 Paulina Borsook, “How Anarchy Works,” Wired 3.10 (October 1995): 110. 21 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2007). 22 As an ABC News polling unit found, “views on extent of racism as a problem are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.” See “The NAACP, the Tea Party and the Question of Racism,” ABC News, July 12, 2010; http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2010/07/the-naacp-the-tea-party-and-the-question-of-racism. 23 Pew Research Center, “Network by the Numbers” (2011); http://stateofthemedia.org/2011/network-essay/data-page-5. 24 Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, Beyond Red vs.

Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet Freedom
by Rebecca MacKinnon
Published 31 Jan 2012

But when governments or corporations abuse their power, the commons can act as a counterweight and support network through which citizens can carve out the necessary spaces to speak and organize, and thus defend their rights and interests. In his book The Wealth of Networks, Harvard law professor Yochai Benkler describes how the Internet is both the product and the incubator of “commons-based information production, of individuals and loose associations producing information in nonproprietary forms.” Without their efforts, neither the Internet nor the World Wide Web—with their tremendous commercial value and political power—would exist.

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But through subsequent reporting in newspapers and research by civil liberties lawyers, it has also become clear that the companies were influenced by government statements and opinions. These included a letter by State Department legal adviser Harold Koh, in which he wrote that the “violation of the law is ongoing” as long as WikiLeaks continues to publish the leaked diplomatic cables. As Harvard legal scholar Yochai Benkler pointed out in a group e-mail discussion with colleagues about WikiLeaks and the State Department’s actions (which I am quoting with his permission), Koh’s assertion was patently “false, as a matter of constitutional law.” The Justice Department has not managed to bring a viable case to a court of law against WikiLeaks or any other entity involved with publishing the cables.

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Parag Khanna, How to Run the World: Charting a Course to the Next Renaissance (New York: Random House, 2011). 13 Communication Power: Manuel Castells, Communication Power (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 346–362, 431–432. CHAPTER 2: RISE OF THE DIGITAL COMMONS 17 In his book The Wealth of Networks: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 472. 18 The World Wide Web, invented two decades after the Internet: For Berners-Lee’s firsthand account, see Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (New York: HarperOne, 1999). 20 In 1989, the computer scientist Richard Stallman got the ball rolling: Though the distinction may seem arcane to nonprogrammers, there are important philosophical differences between developers of open-source software—a much broader set of people—and adherents of the free software movement.

Reinventing Discovery: The New Era of Networked Science
by Michael Nielsen
Published 2 Oct 2011

Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, 406(1):342–353, July 2010. eprint arXiv:0908.2033. [11] J. Battelle. The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture. Boston: Nicholas Brealey, 2005. [12] Yochai Benkler. Coase’s penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm. The Yale Law Journal, 112:369–446, 2002. [13] Yochai Benkler. The Wealth of Networks. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. [14] Tim Berners-Lee. Weaving the Web. New York: Harper Business, 2000. [15] Tim Berners-Lee and James Hendler. Publishing on the semantic web. Nature, 410:1023–1024, April 26, 2001

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Its only drawback is that it’s becoming a little dated (2004), but there is much in the book that is relatively timeless. Going even further back, there is Eric Raymond’s famous essay “The Cathedral and the Bazaar” [178]. Raymond’s essay is what first got me (and many others) interested in open source, and it remains well worth reading. Yochai Benkler’s insightful “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm” [12] and The Wealth of Networks [13] have strongly influenced much thinking about open source, especially in the academic community. Finally, I recommend Ned Gulley and Karim Lakhani’s fascinating account [87] of the Mathworks programming competition.

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p 37 What makes prices useful is that . . . they aggregate an enormous amount of hidden knowledge: [93]. p 38: The “dumb question” was posed by Polymath participant Ryan O’Donnell: [159]. p 39: On the point that online tools are subsuming and extending both conventional markets and conventional organizations: a related point has been made by the theorist Yochai Benkler in his article “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm [12].” Benkler has a different focus, being concerned not so much with the solution of creative problems as with the production of goods. He proposes that online collaboration has enabled a third form of production, beyond markets and conventional organizations, which he calls “peer production.”

The Innovators: How a Group of Inventors, Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution
by Walter Isaacson
Published 6 Oct 2014

Linus Torvalds, “Free Minix-like Kernel Sources for 386-AT,” posting to Newsgroups: comp.os.minix, Oct. 5, 1991, http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html. 135. Torvalds and Diamond, Just for Fun, 87, 93, 97, 119. 136. Gary Rivlin, “Leader of the Free World,” Wired, November 2003. 137. Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown, 2011); Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793. 138. Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar (O’Reilly Media, 1999), 30. 139. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (originally published 1835–40; Packard edition), Kindle location 3041. 140.

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Larry Sanger, “Why Wikipedia Must Jettison Its Anti-Elitism,” Dec. 31, 2004, www.LarrySanger.org. 105. Wikipedia press release, Jan. 15, 2002, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Press_releases/January_2002. 106. Author’s interview with Jimmy Wales. 107. Shirky, “Wikipedia—An Unplanned Miracle.” 108. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002), http://soc.ics.uci.edu/Resources/bibs.php?793; Yochai Benkler, The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest (Crown, 2011). 109. Daniel Pink, “The Buck Stops Here,” Wired, Mar. 2005; Tim Adams, “For Your Information,” Guardian, June 30, 2007; Lord Emsworth user page, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Lord_Emsworth; Peter Steiner, New Yorker cartoon, July 5, 1993, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Internet,_nobody_knows_you’re_a_dog. 110.

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“This is an unplanned miracle, like ‘the market’ deciding how much bread goes in the store. Wikipedia, though, is even odder than the market: not only is all that material contributed for free, it is available to you free.”107 The result has been the greatest collaborative knowledge project in history. So why do people contribute? Harvard Professor Yochai Benkler dubbed Wikipedia, along with open-source software and other free collaborative projects, examples of “commons-based peer production.” He explained, “Its central characteristic is that groups of individuals successfully collaborate on large-scale projects following a diverse cluster of motivational drives and social signals, rather than either market prices or managerial commands.”108 These motivations include the psychological reward of interacting with others and the personal gratification of doing a useful task.

What's Mine Is Yours: How Collaborative Consumption Is Changing the Way We Live
by Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers
Published 2 Jan 2010

As these projects are voluntary, they attract only participants passionate about the subject and motivated to engage with a group of people to help solve real challenges. The same principle applies to SETI@home, which stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence,” set up in 1999 by Space Sciences Laboratory at the University of California, Berkeley. In the essay “Sharing Nicely,” Yale Law School Professor Yochai Benkler pointed to the world’s largest distributed computer network to highlight the trend toward sharing and to prove the potential of a distributed network. The goal of SETI was to apply collective power to look for intelligent life outside Earth. To date 5.2 million global volunteers have downloaded a small screensaver that identifies when their home computer is idle.

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We hope it sparks conversation, debate, and a swarm of positive endeavors. From Rachel Botsman For me, this is a book about the possibilities and powerful reconnections that can help reshape our future for the better. I am indebted to the brilliant thought leaders whose ideas have inspired me to think in this way. These include Yochai Benkler, Robin Chase, Jeff Howe, Kevin Kelly, Lawrence Lessig, Bill McKibben, Elinor Ostrom, Robert Putnam, Jeremy Rifkin, Clay Shirky, and James Surowiecki. Personal thanks to Gillian Blake for transforming the way I write, and to Ben Loehnen for masterfully shepherding this project. This book would not have been remotely possible without my fantastic coauthor and wonderful friend, Roo Rogers.

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orderby=users#table. 39. Statistics taken from Clickworkers Web site. Retrieved October 2009, http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. 40. “Clickworkers Results: Crater Marketing Activity” (July 3, 2001), http://clickworkers.arc.nasa.gov/documents/crater-marking.pdf. As quoted in Yochai Benkler, “The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.” Published under a Creative Commons License,.http://yupnet.org/benkler/. 41. Statistics taken from Facebook’s FarmVille Application Page. Retrieved April 22, 2010, http://www.facebook.com/home.php#!/FarmVille. 42.

#Republic: Divided Democracy in the Age of Social Media
by Cass R. Sunstein
Published 7 Mar 2017

The basic tale is less one of change than of continuity, with differences of degree rather than kind. What do we actually know about use of the Internet? A picture is already emerging, and I will be offering many more details. But let’s begin with a careful and illuminating analysis, now dated but still unsurpassed, in which law professor Yochai Benkler describes and celebrates the “networked public sphere.”11 Benkler shows that the prediction of continuity is essentially inconsistent with the current reality. To be sure, some sites are exceedingly popular, and others are seen by very few people. At the same time, the new model is different from that of the old mass media.

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Hancock, “Experimental Evidence of Massive-Scale Emotional Contagion through Social Networks,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 24 (2015): 8788, http://www.pnas.org/content/111/24/8788.full (accessed August 29, 2016). 14.The point is emphasized in Andrew Shapiro, The Control Revolution: How the Internet Is Putting Individuals in Charge and Changing the World We Know (New York: PublicAffairs, 1999), from which I have learned a great deal, and many of whose concerns, including fragmentation and self-insulation, are the same as those stressed here. 15.Helen Margetts, Peter John, Scott Hale, and Taha Yasseri, Political Turbulence: How Social Media Shape Collective Action (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 5. 16.See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 17.See Sunstein, Infotopia. 18.For a valuable general discussion, see C. Edwin Baker, Advertising and a Democratic Press (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). 19.See Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York: Penguin Books, 2004); Benkler, Wealth of Networks. 2.

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This is a joint article, but the central idea is Ullmann-Margalit’s. 9.See Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon and Schuster, (2000), 18–24. 10.See Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). 11.Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 241–61. 12.Ibid., 242. 13.Ibid., 215. 14.Ibid., 247. 15.Ibid., 253, 257. 16.For a valuable discussion showing the complexity and diversity of networked public spheres in different nations (with attention to Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain), see Robert Faris, John Kelly, Helmi Noman, and Dalia Othman, “Structure and Discourse: Mapping the Networked Public Sphere in the Arab Region,” 2016, http://www.arabnps.org/files/2016/03/ArabNPS.pdf (accessed September 7, 2016).

Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
by Howard Rheingold
Published 24 Dec 2011

Lessig noted, in light of the railroad/highway comparison, “Regulation of spectrum could move from the world of railroads, where central coordinators have to figure out who uses the track when, to the world of highways, where smart devices figure out how to use their common resource as they actually want.”82 New York University law professor Yochai Benkler proposed in a 1998 article that current technology puts the present rationale for licensing spectrum into question. The central institutional choice regarding wireless communications is whether to rely on centralized control by identifiable organizations, or on multilateral coordination among numerous users.

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Most people aren’t clear about what is at stake in this game, and those who could inform us, journalists, work for enterprises now owned by the dinosaurs. The rights of citizens to consume a large variety of information as well as to disseminate their own information widely are held to be fundamental public goods in the United States. Yale professor Yochai Benkler wrote in 2000 about the importance of diverse media to First Amendment rights: In a series of cases in which the Supreme Court reviewed various media regulations, the Court has steadily developed an understanding that decentralization of information production is a policy that serves values central to the First Amendment.

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Isenberg, “The Dawn of the Stupid Network,” ACM Networker 2.1, February/March 1998, 2431, <http://www.isen.com/papers/Dawnstupid.html > (29 March 2002). 80. Hughes, telephone interview by author. 81. GNU Radio, <http://www.gnu.org/software/gnuradio/gnuradio.html > (29 March 2002). 82. Lessig, interview by the author. 83. Yochai Benkler, “Overcoming Agoraphobia: Building the Commons of the Digitally Networked Environment,” Harvard Journal of Law and Technology 287, 1998, <http://www.law.nyu.edu/benklery/agoraphobia.pdf > (18 November 2001). 84. Kevin Werbach, “Open Spectrum: The Paradise of the Commons,” Release 1.0, 19, 10 (November 2001), <http://release1.edventure.com/abstracts.cfm?

The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth
by Jonathan Rauch
Published 21 Jun 2021

Only rarely can it directly attack and infest the core institutions of the reality-based community: the lab, the classroom, the college curriculum, the mainstream newsroom, the court of law.21 What troll epistemology can do is degrade the information environment around the reality-based community. It can induce (in the words of the Harvard University researchers Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts) “a condition that some propaganda seeks to induce, in which the target population simply loses the ability to tell truth from falsehood or where to go for help in distinguishing between the two.”22 The concept of truth, the philosopher Hannah Arendt remarked, contains within itself an element of coercion.23 If you believe something is true, you also believe you must believe it.

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After a news cycle or two, it would fade away. Conservative media might behave the same way toward a left-leaning conspiracy theory. But inject a right-leaning conspiracy theory, and the conservative system would tend to amplify it. That was the finding of an exhaustive analysis of media networks and behavior published in 2018 by Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, of Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. “The consistent pattern that emerges from our data is that … there is no left-right division, but rather a division between the right and the rest of the media ecosystem,” they wrote in Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics.60 In 2016, they found, conspiracy theories and fake news were widely available to Clinton voters and to Trump voters, and both groups were comparably interested in hearing them.

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Profiteers learned to create realistic-looking fake academic journals with pretend peer review, for example, and state-sponsored trolls showed interest in fake-science activity. See Alex Hern and Pamela Duncan, “Predatory Publishers: The Journals that Churn Out Fake Science,” The Guardian, August 10, 2018; Alden Fletcher, “Is the Threat of ‘Fake Science’ Real?,” Lawfare, August 5, 2019. 22. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, and Hal Roberts, Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics (Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 24. 23. Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (Penguin, 1954), p. 239. 24.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet
by David Moon , Patrick Ruffini , David Segal , Aaron Swartz , Lawrence Lessig , Cory Doctorow , Zoe Lofgren , Jamie Laurie , Ron Paul , Mike Masnick , Kim Dotcom , Tiffiniy Cheng , Alexis Ohanian , Nicole Powers and Josh Levy
Published 30 Apr 2013

PART 4 WHAT WE’VE LEARNED In this section, we reflect on what made the SOPA/PIPA victory possible. Professor Yochai Benkler and his team map the networks that helped defeat the legislation; Dave Karpf speaks to why this activism was different from all other activism; and David Segal looks at what happened from the perspectives of an activist and former politician. GLIMPSES OF A NETWORKED PUBLIC SPHERE YOCHAI BENKLER, HAL ROBERTS, ALICIA SOLOW-NIEDERMAN, BRUCE ETLING, ROB FARIS Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

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DAVE DAYEN The Internet Beat SOPA and PIPA: And Mean the Entire Damn Thing DAVID MOON A Political Coming of Age PATRICK RUFFINI This Time, the System Actually Mostly Worked PART 3: Some Activism Since SOPA DAVID SEGAL AND DAVID MOON Cyber Security and Party Platforms DEREK KHANNA Fallout from the Copyfight JOSHUA BAUCHNER The Seizure of Dajaz1 NICOLE POWERS An Interview with Julia O’Dwyer DEMAND PROGRESS Raps with Megaupload Founder Kim Dotcom PART 4: What We’ve Learned YOCHAI BENKLER ET AL Glimpses of a Networked Public Sphere DAVID KARPF Reflecting on the SOPA Blackout: Why Did It Work, and What Does It Mean? DAVID SEGAL That Was Amazing. Can We Do It Again Sometime? PART 5: Where Do We Go from Here? RON PAUL The Battle for Internet Freedom Is Critical for the Liberty Movement ERIN MCKEOWN A Case for Digital Activism by Artists BRAD BURNHAM On the Freedom to Innovate MARVIN AMMORI SOPA and the Popular First Amendment CORY DOCTOROW Blanket Licenses: One Path Forward in Copyright Reform LAWRENCE LESSIG The Internet Can Help Strike at the Root Conclusion Aaron Swartz speaks at the New York City anti-SOPA rally on January 18th, 2012 A MOMENT FOR AARON: 1986-2013 This book was constructed over the course of the fall, and we intended to release it earlier this winter, but then tragedy struck: our friend and colleague Aaron Swartz committed suicide on January 11th, while under federal indictment for downloading too many academic articles housed by the online cataloguing service called JSTOR.

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Short of such likely rare events, however, it is the adaptation and adoption of traditional lobbyist tools like vote counting—through whip sheets—and coordination of communications—through social media and tools like Contact Congress—that will help level the playing field between the body politic and the lobby. To quote one of Prof. Yochai Benkler’s presentations on his ongoing research on the SOPA strike actions: “What you see is a complex relationship between NGOs and commercial organizations, between V.C.’s and activists, between traditional media and online media, between political media left and right and tech media, all weaving together a model of actually looking, learning, mobilizing for action, and blocking [SOPA].

Hacking Capitalism
by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Monopolies built up around proprietary software are believed to be axed soon by FOSS start-ups. The advantage of FOSS businesses is partly that they are closely allied with free market forces, partly that they are integrated into a network that includes the hacker community. In recent years, the law professor Yochai Benkler has come forward as the chief interpreter of the FOSS development model in terms of a networked mode of production. In his view the network is distinct from both the market and firm. Benkler’s argument builds on the theories of the economist Ronald Coase. In 1937, Coase put his finger on the fact that the agents operating on the free market were firms.

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The idea that networks is a novel mode of organising businesses and that it is distinct from markets has been in vogue since the 1990s. According to the argument, networks are supposed to be superior for sharing tacit know-how, in adapting to a volatile environment, and for perpetual learning processes.8 Unfortunately, Yochai Benkler’s decision to follow Ronald Coase and confine himself to an analysis of transaction costs puts a limitation on his thinking. The observations on networks ought instead to be framed in the debate about markets versus central planning that was waged between neoclassical and socialist economists in the first half of the twentieth century.

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Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (USSR: Progress Publishers, 1981), 37, italics in original; hereafter cited in text as 1844. 5. Thomas Malone & Robert Laubacher, “The Dawn of the E-Lance Economy” Harvard Business Review (September 1, 1998). 6. ed. Oliver Williamson and Sidney Winter, The Nature of the Firm: Origins, Evolution, and Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). 7. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and The Nature of the Firm”, The Yale Law Journal vol.112 no.3 (December 2002), and The Wealth of Networks—How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 8. Walter Powel, in ed. Barry Staw & Larry Cummings, Research in Organizational Behavior (London: Jai Press, 1990), 303. 9.

Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
by Clay Shirky
Published 28 Feb 2008

Encyclopedias used to be the kind of thing that appeared only when people paid for them, yet Wikipedia requires no fees from its users, nor payments to its contributors. The genius of wikis, and the coming change in group effort in general, is in part predicated on the ability to make nonfinancial motivations add up to something of global significance. Yochai Benkler, a legal scholar and network theorist and author of The Wealth of Networks, calls nonmarket creation of group value “commons-based peer production” and draws attention to the ways people are happy to cooperate without needing financial reward. Wikipedia is peer production par excellence, set up to allow anyone who wants to edit an article to do so, for any and all reasons except getting paid.

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Articles written for Chris Anderson for Wired and Thomas Stewart for Harvard Business Review did likewise. Long-running conversations with many colleagues have provided material and insights for this book. This list, of all, is both long and incomplete. Researchers, academic and corporate, who have provided critical insights include Yochai Benkler, danah boyd, Elizabeth Churchill, Susan Crawford, Richard Hackman, David Johnson, Valdis Krebs, Frank Lantz, Beth Noveck, Paul Resnick, Linda Stone, Jon Udell, Fernanda Viegas, Martin Wattenberg, and Ethan Zuckerman. Other writers and thinkers with whom I’ve had illuminating conversations include Cate Corcoran, Cory Doctorow, Ze Frank, Dan Gillmor, Adam Greenfield, Bruno Guissani, Jeff Howe, David Isenberg, Joi Ito, Xeni Jardin, Steven Johnson, Matt Jones, Quinn Norton, Danny O’Brien, Kevin Slavin, Alice Taylor, and David Weinberger.

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Anderson, the editor-in-chief of Wired magazine, also has a weblog on the subject at thelongtail.com. Page 129: fame I made earlier drafts of these arguments in the essays, “Communities, Audiences, and Scale”, www.shirky.com/writings/community_scale.html, and “Why Oprah Won’t Talk To You. Ever.”, in Wired Magazine (August, 2004.) Page 133: Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, Yale University Press (2006) links economics with political and legal theory, sketching out a vision of a world where “commons-based peer production” is allowed to flourish. Page 136: Wikipedia deletion and restoration Martin Wattenberg and Fernanda B.

Designing for the Social Web
by Joshua Porter
Published 18 May 2008

Indeed, the overwhelming success of Amazon’s reviews is evidence of a way in which the web has produced a dramatic change in the world’s economy. In traditional economic terms the mere existence of reviews just doesn’t compute. Few existing economic models can accurately describe the value being given (or received) on Amazon. Yochai Benkler, author of Wealth of Networks, a wonderful book describing these new economic changes in detail, notes: A new model of production has taken root; one that should not be there, at least according to our most widely held beliefs about economic behavior. It should not, the intuitions of the late-twentieth-century American would say, be the case that thousands of volunteers will come together to collaborate...

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And yet, this is precisely what is happening…2 The Social Web Of course Amazon isn’t the only one designing for and supporting the activity of its audience in this way: it is merely one of countless examples of social design on the web. For the purposes of this book, we define social design in the following way: Definition: Social design is the conception, planning, and production of web sites and applications that support social interaction 2 Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks. Yale University Press, 2006. 5 6 DESIGNING FOR THE SOCIAL WEB We’ve barely seen the tip of the iceberg when it comes to designing social software. I’m confident we’ll be discussing social software (and how to design it) for decades to come. It is the future of the web.

Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age
by Viktor Mayer-Schönberger
Published 1 Jan 2009

As Harvard Law professor Yochai Benkler has argued so persuasively, the participation of millions of Internet users around the world in creating content has unleashed innovative and beneficial forms of information production that would not have been possible in a world of digital abstinence.4 Plus, John Seely Brown’s digital bricolages—offering powerful combinations and recombinations of information to produce creative works (also mentioned in chapter 3)—would be much harder to build. If such steps mean giving up the social innovations of production and sharing that Yochai Benkler and John Seely Brown talk about, perhaps the idea of digital abstinence itself is too radical, too binary, forcing us to become digital recluses and forego many of the valuable benefits of the digital age.

Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest
by Zeynep Tufekci
Published 14 May 2017

Ian Hutchby, “Technologies, Texts and Affordances,” Sociology 35, no. 2 (2001): 441–56; and Sandra K. Evans, Katy E. Pearce, Jessica Vitak, and Jeffrey W. Treem, “Explicating Affordances: A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Affordances in Communication Research,” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, December 2016. 4. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 5. Thomas Schelling, The Strategy of Conflict (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1960), 69; Medhi Shadmehr and Dan Bernhardt, “Collective Action with Uncertain Payoffs: Coordination, Public Signals, and Punishment Dilemmas,” American Political Science Review 105, no. 4 (2011): 829–51. 6.

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Durkheim, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life; Randall Collins, Interaction Ritual Chains (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004); Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, N.Y.: Anchor Books, 1959). Chapter 5. Technology and People 1. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations (New York: Penguin Press, 2008). 2. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006). 3. Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Michael Rapport, Year of Revolution (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 4.

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For lengthy discussions, see José van Dijck, The Culture of Connectivity: A Critical History of Social Media (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); Tarleton Gillespie, “The Politics of ‘Platforms,’” New Media and Society 12, no. 3 (2010): 347–64; and Kate Crawford and Catharine Lumby, “Networks of Governance: Users, Platforms, and the Challenges of Networked Media Regulation,” International Journal of Technology Policy and Law 1, no. 3 (2013): 270–82. 6. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2006); Steven Johnson, “Can Anything Take Down the Facebook Juggernaut?,” WIRED, May 16, 2012, https://www.wired.com/2012/05/mf_facebook/. 7. Sheera Frenkel, “This Is What Happens When Millions of People Suddenly Get the Internet,” BuzzFeed, November 20, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/sheerafrenkel/fake-news-spreads-trump-around-the-world; Hereward Holland, “Facebook in Myanmar: Amplifying Hate Speech?”

How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet (Information Policy)
by Benjamin Peters
Published 2 Jun 2016

For example, sociologist Manuel Castells has developed an extensive argument detailing how the Soviet Union failed to enter the information age, which this book is in some ways a sideways response to, and legal scholar Lawrence Lessig used his experience observing the rapid deregulation and privatization in post-Soviet economic transition in the early 1990s as a formative analog for what he felt was an equally disastrous attitude about the supposed unregulability of cyberspace common in the late 1990s.10 Since then, scholars have recognized that the summary experiences of perhaps the last two great information frontiers of the twentieth-century—the rise of post-Soviet economic transition and the Internet—present not, as Francis Fukuyama infamously claimed, the end of history so much as a new chapter in it. Leading cyber legal scholar Yochai Benkler has argued for a middle way by observing how online modes of “commons-based peer production” sustain capitalist profit margins through collectivist forms of reputational altruistic communities that do not depend on individual self-interest.11 From the final chapters of Soviet history, we may begin to observe and puzzle through the perennial fact that, for many Western technologists and scholars, the promise of socialist collaboration shines brightest online today—a promise that the Soviet OGAS designers were among the first to foresee.

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For sample references, see Kevin Kelly, Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, and the Economic World, Fourth Edition (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 2004), chap. 4; Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (New York: O’Reilly, 1999); and Leon Trotsky, Platform of the Joint Opposition (1927) (London: New Park Publications, 1973), especially “The Agrarian Question and Social Construction.” 10. Manuel Castells, End of the Millennium: The Information Age—Economy, Society, and Culture (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1998), 5–68; Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 3–8. 11. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006). 12. Melvin Kranzberg, “Technology and History: ‘Kranzberg’s Laws,’” Technology and Culture 27 (3) (1986): 544–560. 13. For Latour’s aphorism, see Bruno Latour, “Technology Is Society Made Durable,” in A Sociology of Monsters: Essays on Power, Technology and Domination, ed.

…

Recent technology commentators and scholars have enthused about the analog update of “cognitive surplus” that can be made available over collaborative peer-based computer networks. See, for example, Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Books, 2010), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 35–132. 8. Anatoly Kitov, Electronnie tsifrovie mashini [Electronic Ciphered Machines] (Moscow: Radioeletronika Nauka, 1956). 9. Charles Eames and Ray Eames, A Computer Perspective: Background to the Computer Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1973), 64, 96–97. 10.

WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency
by Micah L. Sifry
Published 19 Feb 2011

Different kinds of institutions serve those different values; they may be centralized, like firms and government entities or nonprofit organizations, or they may be decentralized, like the anarchic marketplace or the face-to-face worlds of our local communities and ad hoc self-organizing. This last sector, the fourth one, has until recently been too small to matter. Church suppers and rent parties and social clubs have always existed, but only at local scale. Now, thanks to the Internet, we are seeing fourth sector entities at national, even global scale. (I am indebted to Yochai Benkler and his book, The Wealth of Networks, for this analysis.) For example, Wikipedia started in 2001. The nonprofit site, which describes itself as a “free encyclopedia that anyone can edit,” is written collaboratively by online volunteers. The English version has more than 3.5 million articles that have been edited more than 435 million times by more than thirteen million registered users.

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Sifry, “The Rise of Open Source Politics,” The Nation, November 22, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/rise-open-source-politics. 2 Interview with the author, June 2004. 3 See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (University of Chicago Press, 2006). 4 Jay Rosen, “The People Formerly Known as the Audience,” PressThink. org, June 27, 2006, http://archive.pressthink.org/2006/06/27/ppl_frmr. html. 5 Howard Rheingold, “Crap Detection 101,” SFGate.com, June 30, 2009, www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/blogs/rheingold/detail?entry_id=42805. 6 Micah L. Sifry, “The Deaning of America,” The Nation, March 25, 2004, www.thenation.com/article/deaning-america. 7 See Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), Chapter Seven: “Political Freedom, Part Two: The Emergence of the Networked Public Sphere,” for a detailed exploration of the Diebold case. Chapter 3 1 See, for example, news-filtering communities like Digg.com, Reditt.com, and Metafilter.com, or specialized hubs like the Internet Movie Data Base (imdb.com). 2 See, for example, @jetblue, @dellcares, @wholefoods, and @comcastcares, for Jet Blue, Dell, Whole Foods, and Comcast’s respective social media presences on Twitter. 191 WIKILEAKS AND THE AGE OF TRANSPARENCY 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 192 This is, in fact, how the House and Senate currently make the financial disclosure statements of members and their staff, which are required to be public, available.

What's Yours Is Mine: Against the Sharing Economy
by Tom Slee
Published 18 Nov 2015

Who would have thought even five years ago that a world-class operating system could coalesce as if by magic out of part-time hacking by several thousand developers scattered all over the planet, connected only by the tenuous strands of the Internet? 2 The success of Linux and other open source software projects spurred a wave of optimism about a fundamentally new way of creating complex products by relying on networks of peers. Yochai Benkler made an academic case for peer networks in his essay “Coase’s Penguin: Linux and the Nature of the Firm” and then in his influential book The Wealth of Networks, holding up Linux as the archetype of a new form of production that could reshape economies.3 The traditional economy is driven, in this view, by markets and by hierarchical firms or state organizations, but Benkler saw a third possibility, which he labeled “commons-based peer production.”

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One of the most articulate analyses of how the anti-copyright movement has lost touch with those it claims to support is delivered by film-maker and activist Astra Taylor in her 2014 book, The People’s Platform.30 As someone who makes a living from her art, Taylor has grown increasingly skeptical of those who identify artistic creation with amateurism, and who advocate making artistic creations available for free to gain exposure, looking for money-making opportunities elsewhere (concerts, conferences, T-shirts, consulting depending on your kind of creation). Opposition to copyright conveniently pushes questions of payment to one side, but those who make the arguments are often not short of a penny or two. Law professor Yochai Benkler tells us that “money isn’t always the best motivator,” and media professor and successful author of copyrighted books Clay Shirky reminds us that “the essence of amateurism is intrinsic motivation: to be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.” A publication of the Harvard Business School argues that a decline in industry profitability “won’t hurt production because artists’ unique motivations will keep them churning out music even if they are operating at a loss.” 31 Taylor’s book vividly captures the problem for artists in a world of openness and sharing.

Common Knowledge?: An Ethnography of Wikipedia
by Dariusz Jemielniak
Published 13 May 2014

I am also grateful for comments, ideas, and feedback I received from the participants of the open-collaboration seminar at Berkman Center for Internet and Society, especially Shun-Ling Chen, B. Mako Hill, Brian Keegan, and Joseph J. Reagle, whose comments on the manuscript or its parts were very helpful. Discussions of the project with Yochai Benkler and Andreea D. Gorbatai were also enlightening. Other scholars also kindly gave me constructive feedback. I am greatly indebted to Małgorzata Ciesielska, Davydd J. Greenwood, Piotr Konieczny, Tomasz Raburski, and Sebastian Skolik. Also, the reviewers, Jan English-Lueck and Gerald C. Kane, gave me many useful suggestions.

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This indicates that in participative management organization, group conflict resolution in the absence of an impartial facilitator is difficult and introducing ad hoc facilitators is hardly possible. In addition, the discourse of collaboration and consensus seeking, extremely popular when talking about Wikipedia and other open-collaboration communities, does not reflect the reality of everyday editing. Yochai Benkler’s definition of collaboration as cooperating “without relying on either market signals or managerial commands” (2006b, p. 60) is broad, covering almost any communal activity conducted outside traditional structures and hierarchies. Wikipedia article development is, in this sense, collaborative, but in the same way that adding bricks to a wall by individual passersby is or any other 8 4    C o n f l i c t R e s o l u t i o n o n W i k i p e d i a task “chunked out into bite-size pieces that individuals can contribute in small increments and independently of other producers” (Tapscott & Williams, 2006, p. 70).

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Lanier’s and Keen’s critique of Wikipedia assumes that the multiple authorship of Wikipedia articles dilutes authors’ intellect and individuality and reduces them to a sort of a smart mob, composed of anonymous, chaotic, and contingent passersby, heavily relying on free-riding (R. Levine, 2011). While this argument sounds reasonable, it does not hold water in practice (Tumlin, Harris, Buchanan, Schmidt, & Johnson, 2007). It is obviously not true of Wikipedia, which relies equally on single-edit authors and on a stable, highly active community. As Yochai Benkler observes, “Wikipedia is not faceless, by and large. Its participants develop, mostly, persistent identities (even if not by real name) and communities around the definitions” (2006a). Similarly, objections to the dispersed authorship model, expressed also by people sympathetic to Wikipedia’s design, which depict Wikipedia as a “publish then filter” endeavor, as opposed to a traditional encyclopedia that relies on the “filter then publish” principle (Shirky, 2009, p. 98), may be considered at least partially inadequate, since “publishing” means fundamentally different things in the age of the Internet.

Speaking Code: Coding as Aesthetic and Political Expression
by Geoff Cox and Alex McLean
Published 9 Nov 2012

There is indeed heady speculation on the social implications of peer production and the way it poses problems for traditional understandings of organizational structures and the productive activities of publics. Information technologies may have made some of these Coding Publics 77 processes pervasive and more efficient, but these are hardly new ideas, as historians and anthropologists reveal. In Yochai Benkler’s pragmatic view, peer production works because it best matches human capital to projects and the public realm is good for innovation.43 The Foundation for P2P Alternatives also investigates some of the changing business models and the challenges to definitions of social wealth: “a distinction between revenue and benefit sharing that the commons is founded upon (on the one hand, extracting monetary value from social processes and on the other imagining more sustainable alternatives to capitalist economy that have collective benefit).”44 Its founder, Michel Bauwens, optimistically thinks, “A peer to peer system in this respect might be considered ‘post-capitalist’ in the production of a social relation based on sharing and the common good.”45 He argues for a better understanding not simply of revenue sharing but of benefit sharing through peer production and commons-created platforms, and recognizes the antagonisms between the different social contracts of Creative Commons and the GNU General Public License, as well as the different business models these suggest.

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Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009). 38. James Leach, “Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership,” in Ghosh, Code. 39. Ibid., 33–34. 40. Ibid., 35. 41. GNU General Public License; available at http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html. 42. Leach, “Modes of Creativity and the Register of Ownership,” 41. 43. Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” in Ghosh, Code, 169. He is referring to the economist Ronald Coase’s essay “The Nature of the Firm,” of 1937. 44. Michel Bauwens, “The Social Web and Its Social Contracts: Some Notes on Social Antagonism in Netarchical Capitalism,” Re-Public (2008; available at http://www.re-public.gr/en/?

The Wikipedia Revolution: How a Bunch of Nobodies Created the World's Greatest Encyclopedia
by Andrew Lih
Published 5 Jul 2010

Credentials and central control, once considered the most important parameters for generating quality content, now yield to new terms: crowdsourcing, peer production, and open source intelligence. What was once only done top-down is now being viewed bottom-up. Books and essays have addressed the impact of projects freely driven by communities of scattered individuals: The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond, The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki, The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler, The Long Tail by Chris Anderson, Infotopia by Cass R. Sun-stein, and Everything Is Miscellaneous by David Weinberger. This book, however, goes in with a deeper focus on Wikipedia, explaining how it evolved to become the phenomenon it is today, and showing the fascinating community behind the articles and the unique online culture the site has fostered.

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When non-Wikipedians hear of folks like Ram-man and SethIlys, they often ask, “Who would choose to do such things on their own time?” If they’re not paid for what they are doing, what is the motivation? Why would so many folks converge on this strange project to do what they do? Peer Production Noted Yale law professor Yochai Benkler has a theory. In a widely circulated and famous essay on the Internet called “Coase’s Penguin,” he offered his thinking on why people participate in efforts such as Linux and other “free” projects. There was already a culture, before Wikipedia, of folks donating their time, effort, and skills to the collective good for no monetary gain or immediate compensation.

Protocol: how control exists after decentralization
by Alexander R. Galloway
Published 1 Apr 2004

Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the Web, uses a 13. Braden, “Requirements for Internet Hosts,” pp. 6–7. 14. Jonathan Postel, “Transmission Control Protocol,” RFC 793, September 1981, p. 7. Physical Media 39 slightly different four-layer model consisting of “the transmission medium, the computer hardware, the software, and the content.” Yochai Benkler, from whom Lawrence Lessig has drawn, uses instead a three-layer model consisting of a physical layer, a code layer, and a content layer. Lev Manovich uses an even simpler, two-layer model consisting of a “cultural” layer comprised of “the encyclopedia and the short story; story and plot; composition and point of view; mimesis and catharsis; comedy and tragedy,” and a “computer” layer comprised of computer languages, variables, functions, packets, and other code elements.15 Consider an average telephone conversation as an analogy.

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The application layer is a semantic layer, meaning that it is responsible for preserving the content of data within the network transaction. The application layer has no concern for larger problems such as establishing net- 15. For these references, see Jonathan Postel, “Internet Protocol,” RFC 791, September 1981, p. 5; Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web (New York: HarperCollins, 1999), pp. 129–130; Yochai Benkler’s “From Consumers to Users: Shifting the Deeper Structures of Regulation Toward Sustainable Commons and User Access,” Federal Communications Law Journal 52 (2000), pp. 561–579; and Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001), p. 46. The critical distinction is that the OSI model, my preferred heuristic, considers everything to be code and makes no allowances for special anthropomorphic uses of data.

The Myth of Artificial Intelligence: Why Computers Can't Think the Way We Do
by Erik J. Larson
Published 5 Apr 2021

Clay Shirky, a writer and consultant who is now a professor at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, once penned Web 2.0 era best sellers like Here Comes Everyone and Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age, portending the rise of an uber-informed, socially conscious citizen, a new persona.2 A little jingoistic, his message was still clarion: web denizens were poised to rewrite the rule books, ridding the world of stodgy “gatekeepers” like mainstream press and media, who unfairly controlled the production and flow of news and knowledge. “Power to the people” was the trope of the mid-2000s, a meme that copied and spread itself endlessly in blogs, commentary, and on bookshelves (and in e-books). Yochai Benkler, Harvard University professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, proclaimed in his widely read The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom in 2006 that a new era was upon us, a kind of revolution where large numbers of networked people would take on collaborative projects online, all for the public good, without requirements like paychecks.3 Wikipedia seemed to buttress his point, a case of collaborative production without expectation of financial recompense.

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Ibid., 168. 18. Ibid., 169. 19. Ibid., 169. Chapter 15: Myths and Heroes 1. Jaron Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 2. 2. Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus: Creativity and Generosity in a Connected Age (New York: Penguin Press, 2010). 3. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). 4. Ibid., Epigraph. 5. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 6. Lanier, You Are Not a Gadget, 1. 7.

Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future
by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
Published 6 Dec 2016

The first, obviously, is the development of the Internet, which unlike any previous communication technology provided connections from many-to-many as well as one-to-many. The British economist Ronald Coase famously described how the firm could allocate and manage resources better than independent agents in an open market—in “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yochai Benkler shows that when collaboration costs are reduced, as in projects like Linux and Wikipedia, allowing people to allocate themselves to projects can create assets and organizations more effectively than top-down and structured companies. He calls this “commons based peer production.”14 This off-the-balance-sheet, below-the-radar, not-part-of-our-GDP explosion of creativity is taking over more and more of our world.

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Frank Pallotta and Brian Stelter, “Super Bowl 50 Audience Is Third Largest in TV History,” CNN Money, February 8, 2016, http://money.cnn.com/2016/02/08/media/super-bowl-50-ratings/. 12 Baek Byung-yeul, “Lee-AlphaGo Match Puts Go Under Spotlight,” Korea Times, March 10, 2016, http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/nation/2016/04/663_200122.html. 13 Iyad Rahwan, “Society-in-the-Loop: Programming the Algorithmic Social Contract,” Medium, August 13, 2016. http://medium.com/mit-media-lab/society-in-the-loop-54ffd71cd802#.2mx0bntqk. 14 Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and the Nature of the Firm,” Yale Law Journal (2002): 369–446. 15 Melanie Mitchell, Complexity: A Guided Tour (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), ix. Thank you for buying this ebook, published by Hachette Digital. To receive special offers, bonus content, and news about our latest ebooks and apps, sign up for our newsletters.

Liars and Outliers: How Security Holds Society Together
by Bruce Schneier
Published 14 Feb 2012

Jeffrey Conklin (2006), Dialog Mapping: Building a Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems, John Wiley & Sons. ubiquity of data Charles Stross (2011), “Network Security in the Medium Term, 2061–2561 AD,” paper presented at USENIX Security. better off spending Bruce Schneier (2009), “Beyond Security Theater,” New Internationalist, 427:10–13. Yochai Benkler Yochai Benkler (2011), The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Trumphs Over Self-Interest, Crown Business, 25–6. security is a process Bruce Schneier (2000), Secrets and Lies: Digital Security in a Networked World, John Wiley & Sons, 273, 395. Chapter 17 Trust in things Bart Nooteboom (2002), Trust: Forms, Foundations, Functions, Failures and Figures, Edward Elgar, 45.

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Remember, parasites need society to be there in order to benefit from defecting; and being a parasite is a successful strategy only if you don't take too many resources from your host. On the other hand, we're also in a period of history where the ability for large-scale cooperation is greater than it ever has been before. In 2011, law professor Yochai Benkler published a book that is in many ways a companion volume to this one: The Penguin and The Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs Over Self-Interest. Benkler writes that the Internet can and has enabled cooperation on a scale never seen before, and that politics—backed by science—is ready to embrace this new cooperation: I am optimistic in thinking that we are not ripe to take on the task of using human cooperation to its fullest potential—to make our businesses more profitable, our economy more efficient, our scientific breakthroughs more radical, and our society safer, happier and more stable….

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

Now people say, I just look up what I’m interested in on the Internet.”16 Also as before, the change was so strong and apparent that seriously questioning it became mainly the province of cynics, naysayers, and Luddites. The reasonable pundit’s challenge was to capture in adequately epic terms what was happening. Yochai Benkler explained that “the removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.”17 Clay Shirky, for his part, compared the “radical spread of expressive capabilities” to “the one that gave birth to the modern world: the spread of the printing press five centuries ago.”18 But few could compete with Jeff Jarvis’s penchant for proclamation.

…

The political blogs also professionalized: the Daily Kos, a one-man left-leaning Talking Points Memo, hired staff to run more ambitious coverage. Major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, assigned experienced journalists to blog full-time, leveraging all of the authority and prestige of the old media to go after the new audience. Whatever power lay in what Yochai Benkler had called the “wealth of networks,” the old media’s trick of paying people still had some power as well. More work for the journalists, perhaps, but it did stem the flow of attention away from legacy media. In 2008, Wired magazine offered the following advice to those interested in launching a blog: Don’t.

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See Greg Miller, “Turn On, Boot Up, and Jack In with Timothy Leary’s Long-Lost Video Games,” Wired, October 1, 2013, http://www.wired.com/​2013/​10/​timothy-leary-video-games/. 16. C. W. Nevius interviewed Dave Barry after Barry came to speak at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. C. W. Nevius, “Podcasts, Blogs, and Dave Barry,” SFGATE, January 31, 2006, http://www.sfgate.com/​bayarea/​nevius/​article/​Podcasts-blogs-and-Dave-Barry-2523537.php. 17. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 5. 18. Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations, 66. 19. Jeff Jarvis, “My Testimony to Sen. Kerry,” Buzz Machine, April 21, 2009, http://buzzmachine.com/​2009/​04/​21/​my-testimony-to-sen-kerry/​.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom. The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more about the politics of networks than anyone else. “I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems,” he writes, noting that these activities “can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom.”

…

running free Apache software: “July 2015 Web Server Survey,” Netcraft, July 22, 2015. 3D Warehouse offers several million: “Materialise Previews Upcoming Printables Feature for Trimble’s 3D Warehouse,” Materialise, April 24, 2015. community-designed Arduinos: “Arduino FAQ—With David Cuartielles,” Medea, April 5, 2013. Raspberry Pi computers: “About 6 Million Raspberry Pis Have Been Sold,” Adafruit, June 8, 2015. “alternative to both state-based”: Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 650,000 people: “Account Holders,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015. more than half a million projects: “Projects,” Black Duck Open Hub, accessed June 25, 2015.

Black Code: Inside the Battle for Cyberspace
by Ronald J. Deibert
Published 13 May 2013

For instance, after Anonymous’s Operation Tunisia – largely mounted by hacktivists in North America and Europe – it was Tunisian bloggers and activists who were the ones arrested and had their computers confiscated). More importantly, with the tools to cause havoc so cheap and readily available, and the consequences so potentially low, is it wise to actually encourage DDOS attacks as a form of political protest? Yale University’s Yochai Benkler thinks so: “Except in extreme cases akin to the real-world burning of cars and smashing of windows (e.g., had PayPal’s payment systems been disrupted and customers lost money, rather than the company’s homepage being unavailable), they should simply be absorbed as part of the normal flow of the Internet.

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The relationship between the Occupy Movement and Anonymous is detailed in Sean Captain, “The Real Role of Anonymous in Occupy Wall Street,” Fast Company, October 17, 2011, http​://www.f​astcompa​ny.com/​178839​7/th​e-real-ro​le-of-anon​ymo​us-at-occ​upy-wa​ll-str​eet. 8 is it wise to actually encourage DDoS attacks: Yochai Benkler explains why Anonymous should not be viewed as a threat to national security in “Hacks of Valor,” Foreign Affairs, April 4, 2012, http​://ww​w.forei​gnaffa​irs.com​/arti​cles​/1​3738​2​/​yocha​i-benk​ler​/​hack​s-of-val​or. 9 One of the few to study this question in depth: Gabriella Coleman’s work offers a comprehensive history and analysis of Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman “Our Weirdness Is Free: The Logic of Anonymous – Online Army, Agent Chaos, and Seeker of Justice,” Triple Canopy (2012), http​://canop​ycano​pycan​opy.com​/​15​/our​_​weir​dness​_​is​_​free; and “Peeking Behind the Curtain at Anonymous: Gabriella Coleman at TEDGlobal 2012,” TED Blog, June 27, 2012, http​://blo​g.ted.c​om/20​12/06​/27​/peeki​ng-behi​nd-the-cur​tain-at-an​onymo​us-gabr​iell​a-colem​an-at-te​dglob​al–201​2/. 10 MIT Museum Hack archivist: A history of MIT hacks is detailed in T.F.

The Internet Trap: How the Digital Economy Builds Monopolies and Undermines Democracy
by Matthew Hindman
Published 24 Sep 2018

There Is No Such Thing as a Free Audience Building a more rigorous version of attention economics makes us rethink many “obvious” things about the web. It even challenges the single most important assumption about the digital age: the belief that the internet makes distributing content nearly free. 12 • Chapter 1 In the opening pages of The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler argues that the internet has abolished the “industrial” economics that pertained to older communication technologies: The core distinguishing feature of communications, information, and cultural production since the mid-nineteenth century was that effective communication . . . required ever-larger investments of physical capital.

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Loose collections of citizens would be able to function as media outlets, publishing civic information, political opinions, and even original reporting. Wikipedia and political blogs have both been invoked repeatedly as successful examples of distributed content creation. 170 • Chapter 8 Yet as work by Yochai Benkler, Aaron Shaw, and Benjamin Mako Hill has noted, the question is not whether peer production is possible, but instead under what conditions is peer production likely to succeed?18 Again and again, real-world peer production of content has been unable to compete with traditional corporate models.

Digital Empires: The Global Battle to Regulate Technology
by Anu Bradford
Published 25 Sep 2023

These varied groups were united in their goals by their distrust of authorities, hierarchies, and government, and coalesced around the idea that technology allows them to transcend the existing dominant institutions.7 For the left-leaning techno-libertarians, technology offered a way to empower individuals and community activists at the expense of corporate and bureaucratic elites.8 Several prominent scholars, including Yochai Benkler, and influential NGOs, such the Electronic Frontier Foundation, advanced their techno-optimist argument from the political left, emphasizing the internet’s potential to enhance individual freedom and civil liberties.9 For the right-leaning proponents of the market-driven model, technology presented the opportunity to weaken big government and entrench their laissez faire ideology by reducing the power of the nation state, fueling competition, and empowering technology entrepreneurs.10 Even though the early days of the internet combined left and right ideologies under a shared Californian ideology, the free-market ideology has subsequently come to transcend the original countercultural roots of the market-driven model as the internet has further commercialized.11 Even with its faith in markets and reliance on venture capital, there is more to the American techno-libertarian spirit than sheer profit-making.

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Putting aside your own important work to discuss mine is an act of tremendous collegiality that I will never take for granted. Your honest feedback was invaluable and gave me the roadmap to continue. Many other colleagues read drafts, discussed ideas, or pointed me to relevant literature that helped me see further and think deeper. My warm thanks to Bill Alford, Yochai Benkler, Akeel Bilgrami, Kurt Björklund, Gabby Blum, Rachel Brewster, John Coates, Jonathan Cole, Alex de Streel, Einer Elhauge, Luca Enriques, Tom Ginsburg, Jack Goldsmith, Monica Hakimi, Howell Jackson, Suzanne Kingston, Ben Liebman, Tambiama Madiega, Florencia Marotta-Wurgler, Amanda Parsons, Nicolas Petit, Katharina Pistor, Christina Ponsa-Kraus, Eric Posner, Kal Raustiala, Gustavo Ribeiro, Dan Richman, Tim Rühlig, Paul Schwartz, Thomas Streinz, Holger Spamann, Cass Sunstein, and Salome Viljoen.

…

Chapter 1 1.See generally Margaret O’Mara, The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (2019). 2.See generally Sebastian Mallaby, The Power Law: Venture Capital and the Making of the New Future (2022). 3.Id. at ch. 1. 4.O’Mara, supra note 1, at ch. 2. 5.Richard Barbrook & Andy Cameron, The Californian Ideology, 6 Sci. as Culture 44, 45, 49 (1996). 6.Id. at 44–45. 7.James A. Lewis, Sovereignty and the Role of Government in Cyberspace, 16 Brown J. World Affs. 55, 56 (2010). 8.Amy Lynne Bomse, The Dependence of Cyberspace, 50 Duke L.J. 1717, 1726 (2001). 9.See, e.g., Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets (2006); About EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/about. 10.Barbrook & Cameron, supra note 5, at 52–53. 11.Bomse, supra note 8, at 1726. 12.Alistair S. Duff, Rating the Revolution: Silicon Valley in Normative Perspective, 19 Info., Commc’n & Soc’y 1605, 1606 (2016). 13.Id. at 1615. 14.Kai Fu Lee, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order 26–28 (2019). 15.Duff, supra note 12, at 1613. 16.John Perry Barlow, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Electronic Frontier Foundation (Feb. 8, 1996), https://www.eff.org/cyberspace-independence. 17.See e.g., generally David R.

Real World Haskell
by Bryan O'Sullivan , John Goerzen , Donald Stewart and Donald Bruce Stewart
Published 2 Dec 2008

Tuples, Algebraic Data Types, and When to Use Each There is some overlap between tuples and user-defined algebraic data types. If we want, we can represent our BookInfo type from earlier as an (Int, String, [String]) tuple: ghci> Book 2 "The Wealth of Networks" ["Yochai Benkler"] Book 2 "The Wealth of Networks" ["Yochai Benkler"] ghci> (2, "The Wealth of Networks", ["Yochai Benkler"]) (2,"The Wealth of Networks",["Yochai Benkler"]) Algebraic data types allow us to distinguish between otherwise identical pieces of information. Two tuples with elements of the same type are structurally identical, so they have the same type: -- file: ch03/Distinction.hs a = ("Porpoise", "Grey") b = ("Table", "Oak") Since they have different names, two algebraic data types have distinct types even if they are otherwise structurally equivalent: -- file: ch03/Distinction.hs data Cetacean = Cetacean String String data Furniture = Furniture String String c = Cetacean "Porpoise" "Grey" d = Furniture "Table" "Oak" This lets us bring the type system to bear in writing programs with fewer bugs.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

(New York: Penguin Books, 2011), 195. 41 “share a propensity to engage in method-driven research”: Ian Shapiro, The Flight from Reality in the Human Sciences (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 68. 41 “it may be shaped by enthusiasm for the collective objectives”: ibid., 76. 42 “a dispassionate search for the causes”: ibid., 88. 43 Yochai Benkler also draws heavily on Coase: Yochai Benkler, “Coase’s Penguin, or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm,’” Yale Law Journal 112, no. 3 (December 1, 2002): 369–446. 43 “the Internet not only drops transaction and collaboration costs in business”: “Don Tapscott: Four Principles for the Open World,” TED, June 2012, http://www.ted.com/talks/don_tapscott_four_principles_for_the_open_world_1.html?

…

Shirky’s veneration of Ronald Coase’s theory of the firm—and its accompanying discourse on transaction costs—may seem harder to dismiss, not least because Coase is a Nobel Prize–winning economist. References to Coase pop up regularly in the work of our Internet theorists; in addition to Clay Shirky, Yochai Benkler also draws heavily on Coase to discuss the open-source movement. There is nothing wrong with Coase’s theories per se; in the business context, they offer remarkably useful explanations and have even helped spawn a new branch of economics. But here is the problem: thinking of a Californian start-up in terms of transaction costs is much easier than pulling the same trick for, say, the Iranian society.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth
by Juliet B. Schor
Published 12 May 2010

The meteoric rise of open-source platforms, with examples such as Linux, Apache, Mozilla, and Wikipedia, is eroding the rationale for costly and exclusionary information. As activity migrates to the open-access and collaboration model, the case for accessibility is strengthening. On a mass scale, individuals are collaborating and making their contributions freely available to others. Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler, author of the influential The Wealth of Networks, argues that social sharing and exchange has become common across a wide swath of the economy—in the information, culture, education, computation, and communications sectors. The desirability of open access is one way the economics of knowledge differs from that of ordinary private goods.

The Digital Divide: Arguments for and Against Facebook, Google, Texting, and the Age of Social Netwo Rking
by Mark Bauerlein
Published 7 Sep 2011

MacArthur Foundation Series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press, 2008), pp. 161–188. 16 See Dan Gillmor, We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media, 2004), and Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006) for two variants of this story. 17 Michael Cornfield, Presidential Campaign Advertising on the Internet, Pew Internet and American Life Project. 18 Terry Fisher, Lawrence Lessig, and Yochai Benkler, among others, have made the case for this trend from consumers to creators of digital media. 19 See Terry Fisher, “Semiotic Democracy,” http://www.lawharvard.edu/faculty/tfisher/music/Semiotic.html.

Building and Dwelling: Ethics for the City
by Richard Sennett
Published 9 Apr 2018

The two geniuses in search of the undefinable did not, moreover, seek to enlighten their staff; they expected those below to grasp intuitively the inspiration and then carry it out. Thus the open, cutting-edge experiment teetered on the edge of dysfunctional. Mitchell died of cancer in 2010 and so did not live to see his vision play out, but even in the last years of his life, the tech-world was in transition. It was moving from an open to a closed condition. Yochai Benkler writes, ‘what typified the first quarter century of the Internet was an integrated system of open systems … resisting the application of power from any centralized authority’ whereas today ‘we are shifting to an Internet that facilitates the accumulation of power by a relatively small set of influential state and non-state actors’.

…

Aristotle, The Politics, translated by T. A. Sinclair (1962); revised translation by Trevor J. Saunders (1981) (London: Penguin Books, 1992). 11. William James, ‘Pragmatism, Action and Will’, in Pragmatism: The Classic Writings, ed. H. S. Thayer (Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1982), p. 181. 12. Yochai Benkler, ‘Degrees of Freedom, Dimensions of Power’, Daedalus 145, no. 1 (2016): 20, 23. See also Shoshana Zuboff, ‘Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of Information Civilization’, Journal of Information Technology 30, no. 1 (2015): 75–89, and Tim Wu, The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires (New York: Knopf, 2010). 13.

Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?: The Net's Impact on Our Minds and Future
by John Brockman
Published 18 Jan 2011

Everett The Virtualization of the Universe: David Gelernter Information-Provoked Attention Deficit Disorder: Rodney Brooks Present Versus Future Self: Brian Knutson I Am Realizing How Nice People Can Be: Paul Bloom My Perception of Time: Marina Abramović The Rotating Problem, or How I Learned to Accelerate My Mental Clock: Stanislas Dehaene I Must Confess to Being Perplexed: Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic: Yochai Benkler Thinking as Therapy in a World of Too Much: Ernst Pöppel internet is wind: Stefano Boeri Of Knowledge, Content, Place, and Space: Galia Solomonoff The Power of Conversation: Gloria Origgi A Real-Time Perpetual Time Capsule: Nick Bilton Getting from Jack Kerouac to the Pentatonic Scale: Jesse Dylan A Vehicle for Large-Scale Education About the Human Mind: Mahzarin R.

…

Like all technologies, this one has both positive and negative consequences. I’m not sure I’d bet on the first two (negative) hypotheses being closer to the truth—or on the next two, which are more positive. And of course, both sets could be true at the same time. Taking on the Habits of the Scientist, the Investigative Reporter, and the Media Critic Yochai Benkler Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies, Harvard Law School; codirector, Berkman Center for Internet and Society; author, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Answering this question requires us to know what you mean by “the Internet” and what you mean by “the way you think.”

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump
by Michiko Kakutani
Published 17 Jul 2018

“the Four Corners of Deceit”: “The Four Corners of Deceit: Prominent Liberal Social Psychologist Made It All Up,” Rush Limbaugh Show, Apr. 29, 2013. In the three decades since the FCC: Dylan Matthews, “Everything You Need to Know About the Fairness Doctrine in One Post,” Washington Post, Aug. 23, 2011; Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, Mar. 3, 2017; Maggie Haberman and Glenn Thrush, “Bannon in Limbo as Trump Faces Growing Calls for the Strategist’s Ouster,” New York Times, Aug. 14, 2017; Michael J. de la Merced and Nicholas Fandos, “Fox’s Unfamiliar but Powerful Television Rival: Sinclair,” New York Times, May 3, 2017.

Breaking News: The Remaking of Journalism and Why It Matters Now
by Alan Rusbridger
Published 14 Oct 2018

For most of the twentieth century the opposite was usually believed to be true. But in a networked world the collective endeavours of many would win. AOL’s walled garden proved no match for the open Web. ‘An open product can also take advantage of collective, voluntary contributions of the masses, a point emphasized by [Harvard law professor] Yochai Benkler. Consequently, an individual Wikipedia entry might be lousy and contain errors, but the entire corpus will remain impressive.’33 This was what Emily wanted to talk about. She had come down from a meeting with a couple of engineers and the head of advertising. It was a decision every company was going to have to take.

…

And then there were the other external digital thinkers I came across in many contexts, all of whom tutored me in ways big and small. They include Jay Rosen, Clay Shirky, Jeff Jarvis, Dan Gillmor, Peter Barron, Madhav Chinnappa, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen, Louis Rossetto, Frederic Filloux, Nicholas Negroponte, Ricken Patel, Richard Gingras, Ethan Zuckerman, Jonathan Zittrain, Melissa Bell, Yochai Benkler, Craig Newmark and Eric Schmidt. We were, over 20 years, seldom out of legal hot water and I came to depend on a good many of m’learned friends. The best of them were not only hugely resourceful in finding ways to publish – rather than (as some lawyers prefer) not publish – but were passionate about defending freedom of expression.

The Business Blockchain: Promise, Practice, and Application of the Next Internet Technology
by William Mougayar
Published 25 Apr 2016

The concept of a Distributed Autonomous Organization/Corporation (DAO/DAC) is an idealistic outcome of the crypto-tech revolution. Its roots originate in themes on organizational decentralization that were depicted by Ori Brafman in The Starfish and the Spider (2007), and ones about “peer production,” aptly described by Yochai Benkler in The Wealth of Networks (2007). But these two themes were recently joined by the advent of cryptocurrency-related technologies by Dan Larimer who observed that Bitcoin is the original DAC, and Vitalik Buterin who expanded on that construct by generalizing it further as a DAO, noting that the DAO has “internal capital.”

The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
by Tim Wu
Published 2 Nov 2010

Those who grew up in the late twentieth century have known the latter sort of idealism mainly as it manifests itself on the Internet in grand collaborative projects such as the blogosphere or Wikipedia and also in such controversial undertakings as Google’s digitization of great libraries. This impulse is part of what has attracted thinkers like Lawrence Lessig, originally a constitutional theorist, to Internet studies, examining the anthropological and psychological consequences of complete openness and the promise it holds. Scholars such as Harvard’s Yochai Benkler, Eben Moglen, and many others have devoted considerable attention to understanding what moves men and women to produce and share information for the sake of some abstract good. Of course the human urge to speak, create, build things, and otherwise express oneself for its own sake, without expectation of financial reward, is hardly new.

…

The one great exception to this dominion of big business was the Internet, its users, and the industry that had grown on the network. Amid the consolidation, the 1990s also saw the so-called Internet revolution. Would it lead to the downfall of those consolidating superpowers? Some certainly thought so. “We are seeing the emergence of a new stage in the information economy,” prophesied Yochai Benkler. “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.” Unfortunately, the media and communications conglomerates didn’t consult Benkler as their soothsayer. With aggregate audiences in the billions and combined revenues in the trillions, they had—in fact, have—a very different vision of the future: the Internet either remade in their likeness, or at the very least rendered harmless to their core business interests.

Coding Freedom: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Hacking
by E. Gabriella Coleman
Published 25 Nov 2012

In other words, historical outcomes proved to be more unpredictable, complex, and ultimately ironic than anyone could have ever imagined. As Linux and open source gained more visibility in the public sphere, corporations were not the only entities and actors to learn about as well as embrace F/OSS. Influential academic lawyers like James Boyle, Yochai Benkler, and Lawrence Lessig, who were all concerned with diminishing public access to knowledge, were studying the dynamics of F/OSS, and using them as the prime example to argue persuasively for alternatives and moderation in intellectual property law. Debian, the free software project with the largest number of members, had by this time committed to the idea of free software, a morality enshrined in its Social Contract (a list of promises to the F/OSS community) and Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG, clarifying the legal meaning of freedom for the project).

MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World
by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
Published 28 Sep 2010

This means that individuals needn’t rely on markets or capital-intensive firms to make or trade all of the goods and services they desire. In fact, a growing proportion of the things we value (including newspapers, mutual funds, jetliners, and motorcycles) can now be produced by us or in cooperation with the people we interact with socially—simply because we want to. Yochai Benkler, Harvard Law School professor and author of The Wealth of Networks, estimates that the current crop of one billion people living in affluent countries has between 2 billion and 6 billion spare hours among them, every day! If even a small fraction of this creative capacity could be harnessed to produce high-quality information-based goods, the output of these voluntary efforts would dwarf the output of today’s knowledge-intensive industries.

…

Yoni Cohen, “Coda Automotive to launch all-electric vehicle in the fourth quarter,” Los Angeles Times (March 1, 2010). 4. Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams, “Hack This Product, Please!”, BusinessWeek (February 23, 2007). 5. SEMA Show. See: http://www.semashow.com/main/main.aspx?ID=/content/SEMASHOWcom/HomePage. 6. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks (Yale University Press, 2006). 7. Larry Huston and Nabil Sakkab, “Connect and Develop: Inside Procter and Gamble’s New Model for Innovation,” Harvard Business Review (March 2006). 8. “GE adds green ‘Odyssey’ to its India center,” Business Standard (March 13, 2009). 9.

The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium
by Martin Gurri
Published 13 Nov 2018

I’d been enthralled by the astronomical growth in the volume of information, but the truly epochal change, it turned out, was the revolution in the relationship between the public and authority in almost every domain of human activity. I Christen the New Age And Other Definitional Illusions This book is not a history of the revolution, since it’s much too early for that. Thoughtful interpretations of the genesis and nature of the change have been written by Yochai Benkler, Clay Shirky, and Glenn Reynolds, among many others.[3] If you wish to understand the world being formed outside your windowpane, let me introduce you to this growing body of work, then step aside. Nor am I propounding some world-historical argument for or against the new order. Using terms for analytic style coined by Isaiah Berlin and borrowed by Joseph Tetlock in his famous study of expert political judgment, I’m afraid that I am a “fox” rather than a “hedgehog.”

This Is Not Normal: The Collapse of Liberal Britain
by William Davies
Published 28 Sep 2020

In some ways, we have become too concerned with truth, to the point where we can no longer agree on it. The very institutions that might have once brought controversies to an end are under constant fire for their compromises and biases. The threat of misinformation and propaganda should not be denied. As the scholars Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris and Hal Roberts have shown in their book Network Propaganda, there is now a self-sustaining information ecosystem on the American right, through which conspiracy theories and untruths get recycled, between Breitbart, Fox News, talk radio and social media.10 Meanwhile, the anti-vax movement is becoming a serious public health problem across the world, aided by the online circulation of conspiracy theories and pseudo-science.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations
by Nicholas Carr
Published 5 Sep 2016

The virtual world, they argue, provides an escape from repressive social, corporate, and governmental constraints; it frees people to exercise their volition and creativity unfettered, whether as entrepreneurs seeking riches in the marketplace or as volunteers engaged in “social production” outside the marketplace. “This new freedom,” wrote law professor Yochai Benkler in his influential 2006 book The Wealth of Networks, “holds great practical promise: as a dimension of individual freedom; as a platform for better democratic participation; as a medium to foster a more critical and self-reflective culture; and, in an increasingly information-dependent global economy, as a mechanism to achieve improvements in human development everywhere.”

The Metropolitan Revolution: How Cities and Metros Are Fixing Our Broken Politics and Fragile Economy
by Bruce Katz and Jennifer Bradley
Published 10 Jun 2013

And they are able to form and expand all over the main streets and back alleys of the global economy because of their reliance on the information power provided by the new technological paradigm.” Castells, The Rise of the Network Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), p. 168; emphasis in the original. The legal scholar Yochai Benkler cites several examples of networked production. Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press, 2006). Henry Chesbrough of the Harvard Business School echoes Powell and Grodal, finding that interorganizational ties are an element that enables firms to innovate by increasing patenting rates, improving existing products, creating new products, and quickening the time to market of products.

Designing Social Interfaces
by Christian Crumlish and Erin Malone
Published 30 Sep 2009

The critical defining feature of these “enterprises” is that they rely primarily on social information flows, motivations, and relations to organize the group. Individuals self-identify, mostly, for tasks, and through a variety of peer-review mechanisms contributions get recognized by the group and incorporated into what emerges as the collaborative output. —Yochai Benkler interview in OpenBusiness (about his book The Wealth of Networks) Keeping Up As with “Web 2.0” and “synergy,” the buzzphrase “social media” has taken on a life of its own, and has already spawned its own mutant bastard: “social media marketing.” As with those other terms, and much Internet jargon, “social media” means different things to different people.

Uberland: How Algorithms Are Rewriting the Rules of Work
by Alex Rosenblat
Published 22 Oct 2018

The language of freedom captures the openness of entry but also implies that direct sellers may be ‘free’ from assets.” 49. Juliet B. Schor, “Collaborating and Connecting: The Emergence of the Sharing Economy,” in Handbook on Research and Sustainable Consumption, ed. Lucia Reisch and John Thogersen (Northampton, MA: Edward Elgar, 2015). 50. Yochai Benkler, “Sharing Nicely: On Shareable Goods and the Emergence of Sharing as a Modality of Economic Production,” Yale Law Journal 114, no. 2 (November, 2004): 273–358. 51. Alexandra Mateescu, “Who Cares in the Gig Economy?” Points, July 12, 2017, https://points.datasociety.net/who-cares-in-the-gig-economy-6d75a079a889.

Beautiful Visualization
by Julie Steele
Published 20 Apr 2010

Chromogram: Visualizing One Person at a Time In 2006, we revisited Wikipedia. The encyclopedia was thriving, and we wanted to find out more about the people involved—especially the small core of active users who contributed many edits. What were their strategies for allocating time and energy? We were particularly interested in whether the data matched Yochai Benkler’s model of “peer production,” which unified activities ranging from Wikipedia to the creation of Linux. Working with a talented intern, Kate Hollenbach, we decided to analyze the edit histories of the site administrators (“admins”), superusers with special privileges such as the ability to block other users and delete pages.

Messing With the Enemy: Surviving in a Social Media World of Hackers, Terrorists, Russians, and Fake News
by Clint Watts
Published 28 May 2018

Craig Silverman, “This Analysis Shows How Viral Fake Election News Stories Outperformed Real News On Facebook,” Buzzfeed News (November 16, 2016). https://www.buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman/viral-fake-election-news-outperformed-real-news-on-facebook?utm_term=.fw8MNAMD0#.wf9qNQqdz. 2. Jacob Poushter, “Not Everyone in Advanced Economies Is Using Social Media,” Pew Research Center (April 20, 2017). http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/04/20/not-everyone-in-advanced-economies-is-using-social-media. 3. Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review (March 3, 2017). https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. 4. Ned Parker, Jonathan Landay, and John Walcott, “Putin-Linked Think Tank Drew Up Plan to Sway 2016 US Election—Documents,” Reuters (April 19, 2017). http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-russia-election-exclusive-idUSKBN17L2N3. 5.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass
by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri
Published 6 May 2019

Casilli, Jessica Champagne, Nick Couldry, Steven Dawson, Paul Dourish, Natalie Foster, Walt Gantz, Lilly Irani, Dean Jansen, Henry Jenkins, Airi Lampinen, Rochelle LaPlante, Margaret Levi, Kristy Milland, Gina Neff, Tim O’Reilly, Shani Orgad, Anders Schneiderman, Julie Schor, Palak Shah, Rebecca Smith, Max Toth, and David Weil; and Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, particularly the thoughtful Yochai Benkler, Rebecca Tabasky, David Weinberger, and the fabulous Ethical Tech Working Group, with an extra shout-out to co-conspirator Kathy Pham. One and all read and/or suffered through listening to me talk through draft chapters. Thank you. Lastly, to my extended chosen family, particularly T. L. Taylor, for your reads, our walks, and all the love and care you offered me, Andrew Brosnan, for coaching me through the darker mornings at my writing desk, and the Davis Women’s Circle and their families, for reiterating that friendships are a powerful way to keep work in its place.

The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?
by Michael J. Sandel
Published 9 Sep 2020

Acknowledgments I am grateful for having had the opportunity to try out some themes of this book with my colleagues on several occasions: in the Harvard University Department of Government’s political theory colloquium, where I had the benefit of a searching critical commentary by Jonathan Gould; in the Harvard Law School’s summer faculty workshop, which prompted challenging responses and follow-up exchanges with Richard Fallon, Terry Fisher, Yochai Benkler, and Ben Sachs; and in Art, Popular Culture, and Civic Life, the faculty seminar I co-chair with my wife, Kiku Adatto, at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center. During the fall semester of 2019, I taught a seminar on Meritocracy and Its Critics with one of the most spirited and intellectually engaging groups of undergraduates I have encountered.

Free Speech: Ten Principles for a Connected World
by Timothy Garton Ash
Published 23 May 2016

We have the possibility of listening and speaking online to billions, but in practice more and more people are making their own individual versions of the Daily Kiosk. The space of shared deliberative discourse is at once theoretically larger and practically often smaller, but those smaller spaces are themselves more diverse and cosmopolitan. This should be no cause for fatalism. We can realistically hope for what Yochai Benkler has called a ‘networked public sphere’ and one that, for the first time ever, stretches across most of the planet.90 There will not be a single global pnyx, but there can be multiple, overlapping ones, which those of us who enjoy the preconditions for internet use can visit as we please, both listening and speaking as we go.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future
by Paul Mason
Published 29 Jul 2015

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’29 A NEW MODE OF PRODUCTION? In 2006 Yochai Benkler, then a law professor at Yale, concluded that the network economy was ‘a new mode of production emerging in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world’.30 Benkler had been trying to define a legal framework for Open Source publishing, known as the ‘Creative Commons’. In The Wealth of Networks, he described the economic forces that were undermining intellectual property, causing common ownership models and unmanaged production to spread.

Rage Inside the Machine: The Prejudice of Algorithms, and How to Stop the Internet Making Bigots of Us All
by Robert Elliott Smith
Published 26 Jun 2019

Guardian, www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/dec/04/google-democracy-truth-internet-search-facebook 27Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, 2017, Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda. Columbia Journalism Review, www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php 28Robert M. Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, 2017, Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election. Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society Research Paper, https://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle/1/33759251/2017-08_electionReport_0.pdf Chapter 11 1R.E. Smith and B.A. Dike, 1995, Learning Novel Fighter Combat Manoeuvre Rules Via Genetic Algorithms.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics
by Peter Geoghegan
Published 2 Jan 2020

These numbers prove it’, Wired, May 2019. 46 William Davies, ‘They don’t even need ideas’, London Review of Books, June 2019. 47 Darren Loucaides, ‘Inside the Brexit Party’s general election war machine’, Wired, October 2019. 48 Ibid. 49 Mark Di Stefano, ‘A Hyperpartisan Pro-Tommy Robinson News Website Has Been Permanently Banned From Facebook’, Buzzfeed, May 2019. 50 Saska Cvetkovska, Aubrey Belford, Craig Silverman and J. Lester Feder, ‘The Secret Players Behind Macedonia’s Fake News Sites’, OCCRP, July 2018. See also www.occrp.org/en/spooksandspin/the-secret-players-behind-macedonias-fake-news-sites; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 51 Rob Faris, Hal Roberts, Bruce Etling, Nikki Bourassa, Ethan Zuckerman and Yochai Benkler, ‘Partisanship, Propaganda, & Disinformation: Online Media & the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election’, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, August 2017. See also https://cyber.harvard.edu/sites/cyber.harvard.edu/files/2017-08_electionReport.pdf; accessed 26 Jan. 2020. 52 Ibid. 53 Priyanjana Bengani, ‘Hundreds of “pink slime” local news outlets are distributing algorithmic stories and conservative talking points’, Tow Center for Digital Journalism, December 2019.

Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike
by Eugene W. Holland
Published 1 Jan 2009

Problems and possibilities are posted more or less anonymously, and whoever is willing and able to take up the challenge responds and submits solutions, which are freely available to everyone. All Torvald does is subsequently decide whether a given solution is worth incorporating into the next standard release of the GNU-Linux package. Any items he decides against includ­ ing in a general release remain available to all and can be incorporated into future releases by others. Yochai Benkler puts it this way: Torvalds’s authority is persuasive, not legal or technical, and certainly not determinative. He can do nothing except persuade others to prevent them from developing anything they want and adding it to their kernel, nor from distributing that alternative version of the kernel.

Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress--And a Plan to Stop It
by Lawrence Lessig
Published 4 Oct 2011

In exchange for this bit of cash, you will give me that thing/service/promise. Cash is the currency in this economy, and as many of the terms of the relationship as possible get converted, or liquidated, into cash. It is the economy of commodification. It is an economy within which we live much of our lives. As I’ve written elsewhere,57 following the work of Yochai Benkler, Hyde, and others, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with commodification. Indeed, there’s lots that’s great about it. As Lewis Hyde puts it, It is the cardinal difference between gift and commodity exchange that a gift establishes a feeling-bond between two people, while the sale of a commodity leaves no necessary connection.

Cybersecurity: What Everyone Needs to Know
by P. W. Singer and Allan Friedman
Published 3 Jan 2014

crucial dots unconnected Stewart Baker, Skating on Stilts: Why We Aren’t Stopping Tomorrow’s Terrorism (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2010), PDF e-book, http://www.hoover.org/publications/books/8128, accessed April 2013. FOCUS: WHAT HAPPENED IN WIKILEAKS? “ive made a huge mess” Evan Hansen, “Manning-Lamo Chat Logs Revealed,” Threat Level (blog), Wired, July 13, 2011, http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/07/manning-lamo-logs/. “exposing corruption and abuse” Yochai Benkler, “A Free Irresponsible Press: Wikileaks and the Battle over the Soul of the Networked Fourth Estate,” Harvard Civil Rights–Civil Liberties Law Review 46, no. 1 (2011): p. 315, http://harvardcrcl.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Benkler.pdf. evidence of their wrongdoing online Alasdair Roberts, “WikiLeaks: The Illusion of Transparency,” International Review of Administrative Sciences 78, no. 1 (March 2012): p. 116, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?

The Black Box Society: The Secret Algorithms That Control Money and Information
by Frank Pasquale
Published 17 Nov 2014

Some companies have complained that Google’s malware warning system has deterred users from visiting their sites due to no fault of their own. Josh Peterson, “Websites Say Google Malware Warnings Hurting Business,” The Daily Caller, February 18, 2013, http://dailycaller.com /2013/02/18/websites -say-google-malware-warnings-hurting-business/. 36. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007). Clay Shirky, “A Speculative Post on the Idea of Algorithmic Authority” Shirky, November 15, 2009, http://www.shirky.com /weblog/2009/11/a-spec ulative-post-on-the-idea-of-algorithmic-authority/.

Click Here to Kill Everybody: Security and Survival in a Hyper-Connected World
by Bruce Schneier
Published 3 Sep 2018

Food and Drug Administration, Center for Devices and Radiological Health (29 Jul 2016), “General wellness: Policy for low risk devices, guidance for industry and Food and Drug Administration staff,” Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2016/07/29/2016-17902/general-wellness-policy-for-low-risk-devices-guidance-for-industry-and-food-and-drug-administration. 154Data brokers have performed similar: Brian Fung (29 Mar 2017), “What to expect now that Internet providers can collect and sell your Web browser history,” Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/03/29/what-to-expect-now-that-internet-providers-can-collect-and-sell-your-web-browser-history. 154“Power interprets regulation as damage”: Yochai Benkler and Julie Cohen (17 Nov 2017), “Networks 2” (conference session), After the Digital Tornado Conference, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, http://digitaltornado.net. Supernova Group (19 Nov 2017), “After the Tornado 05: Networks 2,” YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCGZ8tIrrIU. 154the CAN-SPAM Act that didn’t stop spam: It made things worse, since it superseded stronger state laws and took away individuals’ ability to bring lawsuits.

Competition Overdose: How Free Market Mythology Transformed Us From Citizen Kings to Market Servants
by Maurice E. Stucke and Ariel Ezrachi
Published 14 May 2020

Feuer (New York: Doubleday, 1959), 9 (arguing that the bourgeoisie has pitilessly torn asunder the motley feudal ties that bound man to his “natural superiors,” and has left no other bond between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”). 33.Theory of Moral Sentiments at I.I.1 (“How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortune of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it”). 34.Nava Ashraf, Colin F. Camerer, and George Loewenstein, “Adam Smith, Behavioral Economist,” Journal of Economic Perspectives 19, no. 3 (Summer 2005): 131, 136, http://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/089533005774357897. 35.Ashraf et al., “Adam Smith,” 136 (quoting Smith). 36.See Yochai Benkler, “The Unselfish Gene,” Harvard Business Review 89, no. 7/8 (July–August 2011): 79, https://hbr.org/2011/07/the-unselfish-gene (“In no society examined under controlled conditions have the majority of people consistently behaved selfishly”; “Dozens of field studies have identified cooperative systems, many of which are more stable and effective than incentive-based ones”); Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 91–92 (“Although in some contexts [the assumption that people are selfish actors] may be realistic [e.g., anonymous market transactions], a half-century of experimental gaming research demonstrates that in many other contexts, people simply refuse to behave like the ‘rational maximizers’ economic theory says they should be”). 37.Keith Jensen, Josep Call, and Michael Tomasello, “Chimpanzees Are Rational Maximizers in an Ultimatum Game,” Science 318, no. 5847 (October 5, 2007): 107, DOI:10.1126/science.1145850. 38.Richard H.

People, Power, and Profits: Progressive Capitalism for an Age of Discontent
by Joseph E. Stiglitz
Published 22 Apr 2019

The discussions of new technologies have been particularly influenced by my coauthor Anton Korinek; on artificial intelligence, by Erik Brynjolfsson, Shane Legg of DeepMind, Mark Sagar of Soul Machines, and a dinner on AI at the Royal Society after my lecture there on the subject of work and AI. Yochai Benkler, Julia Angwin, and Zeynep Tüfekçi have contributed to my understanding of the special issues posed by disinformation. As I return to the issues of globalization, I need to thank Dani Rodrik as well as Danny Quah, Rohinton Medhora, and Mari Pangestu; and on the role of globalization in tax avoidance, Mark Pieth and the Independent Commission for Reform of International Corporate Taxation, chaired by José Antonio Ocampo, on which I serve.

Makers at Work: Folks Reinventing the World One Object or Idea at a Time
by Steven Osborn
Published 17 Sep 2013

I’m looking at open-source hardware and peer production in general and thinking about, first of all, how does it work? Why does it work? But, mostly, what does it mean for society? Osborn: You call it peer production? Mota: Peer production. Osborn: Okay. I haven’t heard that term before. That’s a good term for desktop manufacturing. Mota: This was a term Yochai Benkler used on the Wealth of Networks,2 and it’s a term many people use to describe horizontal networks of creators who get together to produce something in nonhierarchical systems. I made time to work on all these other parallel projects at the same time as the PhD. One of them was OpenMaterials, which was and still is focused on smart and unusual materials, but also mixed with more traditional materials.

How Everything Became War and the Military Became Everything: Tales From the Pentagon
by Rosa Brooks
Published 8 Aug 2016

In no particular order, they include Laura Dickinson, Tom Perriello, Charlie Brown, Peter Singer, Doug Ollivant, Kath Hicks, Damon Stevens, Austin Branch, Kori Schake, Mike Williams, Steve Rickard, Lisa Magarrell, Julie Smith, Wendy Patten, George Soros, Sue Gough, Pete Verga, Stan McChrystal, David Luban, Paul Eaton, David Koplow, Marty Lederman, Jeh Johnson, Jonathan Morgenstein, David Cole, Bob Wieler, Wayne Porter, Puck Mykleby, Laura Donohue, Michael Mullen, Janine Davidson, Phil Carter, Bill Lietzau, Bruce Ackerman, Jack Balkin, Tim Noah, Yochai Benkler, David Petraeus, Shawn Brimley, Jim Mattis, Chris Stone, Brigid Schulte, Liza Mundy, Konstantin Kakaes, Tom Nachbar, Dave Martin, Liz Magill, Jennifer Mnookin, Janet McIntosh, Mary Dudziak, Greg Corn, Bobby Chesney, Charlie Dunlap, Laurie Blank, Greg O’Neil, Steve Vladeck, Heather Hurlburt, Dan Feldman, Kori Schake, Price Floyd, Doug Wilson, Tom Ricks, John Abizaid, Kristen Lord, John Bellinger, Phil Mudd, Lincoln Bloomfield, Rachel Stohl, Jim Dubik, Oona Hathaway, David Barno, and Jeff Smith.

Likewar: The Weaponization of Social Media
by Peter Warren Singer and Emerson T. Brooking
Published 15 Mar 2018

Here’s What We Learned,” All Things Considered, NPR, November 23, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/503146770/npr-finds-the-head-of-a-covert-fake-news-operation-in-the-suburbs. 132 full-fledged empire: Ibid. 132 false story of an FBI agent: David Mikkelson, “Fact Check: FBI Agent Suspected in Hillary Email Leaks Found Dead,” Snopes, November 5, 2016, http://www.snopes.com/fbi-agent-murder-suicide/. 132 1.6 million readers: Sydell, “We Tracked Down.” 132 at least 15 million times: Ryan Grenoble, “Here Are Some of Those Fake News Stories That Mark Zuckerberg Isn’t Worried About,” Huffington Post, November 16, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/facebook-fake-news-stories-zuckerberg_us_5829f34ee4b0c4b63b0da2ea. 132 “not the safest crowd”: Sydell, “We Tracked Down.” 133 1.25 million news stories: Yochai Benkler et al., “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Swing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. 133 founder Andrew Breitbart: Charlie Spiering, “New Andrew Breitbart footage: ‘My Goal Is to Destroy the New York Times and CNN,’” Washington Examiner, August 6, 2012, http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new-andrew-breitbart-footage-my-goal-is-to-destroy-the-new-york-times-and-cnn/article/2504131. 133 “#War”: Joseph Bernstein, “Alt-White: How the Breitbart Machine Laundered Racist Hate,” BuzzFeed, October 5, 2017, https://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/heres-how-breitbart-and-milo-smuggled-white-nationalism?

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite
by Daniel Markovits
Published 14 Sep 2019

The search for a better approach set me on the path that has led to this book. That path itself has been anything but direct, and I have benefited from countless conversations with colleagues and friends, both at Yale and elsewhere, many of whom commented on early drafts. These include Muneer Ahmad, Anne Alstott, Ian Ayres, Monica Bell, Yochai Benkler, Phillip Bobbitt, Dani Botsman, Khiara Bridges, Steve Brill, Rick Brooks, John Buretta, Guido Calabresi, Jessica Cattelino, Bob Ellickson, Dan Esty, Crystal Feimster, Owen Fiss, James Forman, Robert Frank, Bryan Garsten, David Grewal, Oona Hathaway, Geneviève Helleringer, Robert Hockett, Michael Kades, Paul Kahn, Amy Kapczynski, Al Klevorick, Issa Kohler-Hausmann, Roy Kreitner, Doug Kysar, John Langbein, Marc Lipsitch, Zach Liscow, Yair Listokin, Ian Malcolm, Benjamin Markovits, Inga Markovits, Julia Markovits, Rebecca Markovits, Richard Markovits, Stefanie Markovits, Noah Messing, Sam Moyn, David Owens, Przemek Palka, Ben Polak, Robert Post, Asher Price, Claire Priest, Jed Purdy, Aziz Rana, Rob Reich, Judith Resnik, Susan Rose-Ackerman, Scott Shapiro, Dan Sharfstein, Peter Schuck, Vicki Schultz, Reva Siegel, Tim Snyder, Kevin Stack, Tom Tyler, Rory Van Loo, Sharon Volckhausen, Philippe Wells, Leif Wenar, Patrick Wolff, Noah Zatz, and Taisu Zhang.

Merchants of Truth: The Business of News and the Fight for Facts
by Jill Abramson
Published 5 Feb 2019

Using a tool called Prism: Adrian Chen, “The Agency,” New York Times Magazine, June 2, 2015, https://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/07/magazine/the-agency.html. Long before he would take: Scott Shane, “Combative, Populist Steve Bannon Found His Man in Donald Trump,” New York Times, November 27, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/27/us/politics/steve-bannon-white-house.html. A Columbia Journalism Review study: Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris, Hal Roberts, and Ethan Zuckerman, “Study: Breitbart-Led Right-Wing Media Ecosystem Altered Broader Media Agenda,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 3, 2017, https://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-study.php. Its spokesman quit: “Bardella: Breitbart Web Site Is a Trump Super Pac,” CNN.com (video), August 21, 2016, https://www.cnn.com/videos/tv/2016/08/21/bardella-breitbart-web-site-is-a-trump-super-pac.cnn.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
by Shoshana Zuboff
Published 15 Jan 2019

Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2008), 68. 79. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83. 80. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Economics and Sociology of Capitalism, ed. Richard Swedberg (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991), 412 (italics mine). 81. Schumpeter, Capitalism, 83. 82. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006). 83. Tom Worden, “Spain’s Economic Woes Force a Change in Traditional Holiday Habits,” Guardian, August 8, 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/aug/08/spain-debt-crisis-economy-august-economy. 84.

Death Glitch: How Techno-Solutionism Fails Us in This Life and Beyond
by Tamara Kneese
Published 14 Aug 2023

The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion
by John Hagel Iii and John Seely Brown
Published 12 Apr 2010

The Cultural Logic of Computation
by David Golumbia
Published 31 Mar 2009

Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media
by Tarleton Gillespie
Published 25 Jun 2018

The Facebook Effect
by David Kirkpatrick
Published 19 Nov 2010

Connectography: Mapping the Future of Global Civilization
by Parag Khanna
Published 18 Apr 2016