PEN-L message, Re: The Political Economy of Peer Production

Greetings Economists,

On Feb 6, 2008, at 11:19 AM, Jayson Funke wrote:

Any thoughts on the following article?

Doyle;

Strikes me as rather glib with jargon. P2P has generated a lot of press around how to distribute movies hence the sign in the window of a Blockbuster outlet. P2P comes out of graph theory about nodes and vertices.

I don't see P2P as to quote:

"a new human dynamic is emerging: peer to peer (P2P)."

Doyle;

This article makes a lot of broad generalizations with little direct connection to sources. For example to quote;

"People use just four fundamental models for organizing most aspects of sociality most of the time in all cultures.

Doyle;

Which is way too big an assertion about P2P in most cultures. Another quote;

The massive use of open source software in business, enthusiastically supported by venture capital and large IT companies such as IBM, is creating a distributed software platform that will drastically undercut the monopolistic rents enjoyed by companies such as Microsoft and Oracle

Doyle;

This is an old story, one business uses cost effective means of grabbing market share from other businesses. Open source is cheap mental (voluntarist) labor undermining paid engineers in various companies.

Network production of information is significantly different from publishing (one to many) business models in that the process adds network information to data. The publishing model assumes data remains static. To quote;

A Commons-based political economy would be centered around peer to peer, but it would co-exist with:

• A powerful and re-invigorated sphere of reciprocity (gift-economy) centered around the introduction of time-based complementary currencies.

Doyle;

I don't see this as a gift economy, if one in the next breath mentions currency. While this essay breathlessly reports the enthusiasm of network proponents, I don't see much real economic analysis being brought to bear.

Doyle