KTub8

Digital Solidarity
While this has been the dominant story of the last 30
years, we are now observing areas where the market is
retreating. Not in favour of bureaucracies and command
structures, but of commons. There is evidently no
market anymore for a general interest encyclopaedia,
even though there is more demand than ever for general
level summary information on a wide range of topics. To
provide such encyclopaedic information, very significant
resources, financial and intellectual, are still required.
Yet these are no longer organised by way of commodity
exchange in the market, but through social production in
the commons. 35 The same development can be observed
in other sectors as well, even if the picture becomes more
muddled. It has been estimated, in 2008, that free and
open source software replaced around €60 billion in
investment in proprietary software. 36 This figure has
probably increased since and is likely to be considerably
higher than what free and open source software generated
in new market transactions, though it is extremely hard
to measure. Michael Bauwens has recently concluded,
nevertheless, that free and open source software ‘destroys
more proprietary software value than it replaces. Even as
it creates an explosion of use value, its monetary value
decreases.’ 37 As a general assessment of the economic
transformation of free software, this seems justifiable.
The laboratory of the internet provides new
foundations for experiences of co-operation, and
open source is the leading metaphor. I understand cooperation
here in a purely structural sense, as working
together voluntarily for mutual benefit, no matter what
this benefit might be. To be sure, the benefits can be
quite destructive. The war in Iraq, for example, has been
described as an ‘open source insurgency’, that is,
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