KTub8

Digital Solidarity
we realise how important interconnections are, the more
we realise we actually know less than we thought we
knew. But this experience of not-knowing is tempered
by the possibility of finding someone (or something)
who possesses this particular piece of information, skill
or knowledge that one is lacking. The famous maxim
from free and open source software, ‘given enough
eyeballs, all bugs are shallow’, expresses this experience
succinctly. For every (technical) problem that appears
intractable, there is someone, somewhere, to whom this
particular problem is easy to solve. What is needed then
are infrastructures that make it possible to locate and cooperate
with this particular person. The larger the pool
of potential collaborators is, the more ease with which
these potential collaborators can access the resources
in which the problem is embedded, and the more freely
they can themselves benefit from the solution to which
they might contribute their own scarce labour resource,
the more likely it is that this process can take place. In
relation to the ever expanding issues we are facing, one
might say that each of us is becoming less intelligent
individually, because individually we can understand
their complexity less and less. Yet we are becoming more
intelligent collectively because we are developing ways
to connect partial understandings productively on a new
scale.
The social, communicative, complex and networked
dimensions of the production process are mutually
reinforcing, thus creating dynamics that are so strong
that they can break down existing organisational
boundaries and expand into the social. Here exchange
can take place unencumbered by traditional forms
of ownership and the required accounting overheads
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