IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

130 Chapter 6
commodities on the stock market, and they have invented an economic
axiom for capitalists: Their task is to ‘‘maximise realised relationship value.
Today’s individuals want to take their lives into their own hands and are
ready to pay for the support and advocacy necessary to fulfill that yearning.
Providing that support economy is the next episode of capitalism.’’ 52 Another
analyst, Chrysanthos Dellarocas, thinks it should be possible to
make money by reengineering word-of-mouth networks and reputation
systems. ‘‘In pre-Internet societies, word of mouth emerged naturally and
evolved in ways that were difficult to control or model,’’ concedes Dellarocas.
But he goes on: ‘‘The Internet allows this powerful social force to be
precisely measured and controlled through proper engineering of the information
systems that mediate online feedback communities. Such automated
feedback mediators specify who can participate, what type of
information is solicited from participants, how it is aggregated, and what
type of information is made available to them about other community
members.’’ 53 These steps are feasible technically, of course—but I don’t
buy the idea that word of mouth as a paid-for service will succeed in social
situations in the same way it does on eBay.
Happily for the optimists among us, noncommercial collaboration is already
a strong social trend among the Internet generation. Free software
is but one symptom, although the most visible one, of a much broader
social phenomenon—a new mode of production in the digitally networked
environment that New York University law professor Yochai Benkler calls
commons-based peer production. ‘‘We are seeing the emergence of a new
mode of production,’’ says Benkler, ‘‘distinguishable from the propertyand
contract-based modes of firms and markets. 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 market prices or managerial commands.’’ 54
Conviviality and decentralization go hand in hand. Although decentralization
is a fashionable topic among today’s Internet theorists, the issue
was first promoted by progressive social thinkers such as Harold Laski
from the 1920s onward. The difference is that Laski’s generation did not
have the Internet, and we do. The Internet gives us the capacity to
design services and institutions that will give back to us the opportunity
to organize our daily lives among ourselves—not by recourse to paidfor
services.