The Handbook of Peer Production. Группа авторов
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this volume; Nissenbaum & Benkler, this volume). Further, deliberations are meant to be based on “the authority of the better argument.” Stephen Levy ([1984]2010) showed how this was translated into hacker language in his book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution when he defined hacker ethical principles, such as the commitment to the free access of computers and information, the mistrust of centralized authority, and the insistence that hackers be evaluated meritocratically, and not by “bogus” criteria (age, degrees, etc.) but rather by how well they can hack (Levy, [1984]2010). In a world dominated by dispossession and exploitation, these “do‐ocratic” attributes proved attractive. This explains why the expansive definition of peer produced infrastructure has blossomed into 1,000 flowers, including peer learning (see Antoniadis & Pantazis, this volume), cartography (Fish, this volume), and collective action (Milan, this volume). The Handbook of Peer Production showcases this great diversity of peer projects. What unites them is a common practice: collective control over production and creation processes, recursively intertwined with the means and ends of this self‐governed practice, the commons.
That being said, we do not intend to suggest that peer production is truly inclusive. Despite Levy’s influential principle, “bogus” criteria have historically shut the door to women and people of color, who have in turn advocated for the importance of recognizing that barriers to entry do exist when it comes to learning how to code and to being accepted in white and male‐dominated techno‐cultures. Further, racist assumptions of deviant behaviors (such as scamming or spamming) have led various institutions to block access to both corporate and non‐corporate platforms, including Wikipedia, in several African countries (Burrell, 2012), reducing the possibility for locals to take part in such projects (Burrell argues in her book Invisible Users that the racist interaction which Africans experienced online in the mid‐2000s led, in part, to practices such as scamming). Being aware of this history helps to understand how peer production has developed, and who has the opportunity to take part without significant barriers. Verrips and Meyer (2001) describe the collective maintenance of technologies such as automobiles by all available means in a country like Ghana: while peer production, as a desire for autonomy, may occur in contexts of commodity affluence and disposable income, the reappropriation of work and technology can also stem from a need for survival, in the South or in disadvantaged sectors of the North. As influential as Benkler’s definition of commons‐based peer production was, it seems to reflect the assumptions of settler colonial worlds (see Deka, this volume; Toupin, this volume).
When dealing with social participation, it is always sound practice to ask: who can take part? In this case we should reflect on who the peer producers are, or to put it differently: where can they thrive; what are the material requisites? Specifically, we must consider the context and conditions in which peer production occurs in the North and how they might differ from the Global South, particularly outside of elite circles. Examples of these assumptions include a constant flow of electricity, minimal infrastructural breakdown, and easy access to computers (rather than only cell or mobile phones through which the majority of people access the Internet in the South). In the North, obstacles preventing entry into peer production projects do exist – for women and people of color in particular – but in terms of digital infrastructure, Internet access, and access to computers, barriers are usually low, except for Indigenous people on reserves and to some extent in remote rural areas. In the Global South access may be restricted by class to the elite and middle class; in India, by caste. Conflict might also come into play, when a government decides to cut off access to the Internet as occurred in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Ambazonia (the English‐speaking part of Cameroon) or in many other regions experiencing contestation around elections. The point here is not to delight in critical self‐flagellation (the Handbook’s editors and many of its contributors are located in the Global North), but to be aware of the situated quality of the produced knowledge. Technological development is one of the Global North’s enduring ideologies, serving to naturalize domination. The industrial revolution occurred not simply after the slave trade, but thanks to it (James, [1938]1989; Robinson, [1980]2000).
Technological power is therefore historically intermingled with processes of dispossession. In more recent cases – such as the subject of this Handbook – technologically advanced projects could be framed as constituting, in the Global North, micro‐enclaves of privilege. Beyond the reproduction of social domination through restricted access to the free time, cultural capital, and social networks necessary to take part in peer production, what role do the digital commons play in the capitalist development process? The relationship of peer production to market forces forms the subject of the next section.
4 The Digital Commons and Capitalist Production
4.1 Post‐Capitalist Imaginaries
Peer production’s position in the wider political economy is contradictory: De Angelis and Harvie (2014) note the “ambiguity” between commons‐within‐and‐for‐capital and commoning‐beyond‐capital. This is particularly the case when it comes to peer production’s historically preeminent exemplar, the production of free and open source software. FOSS now plays a central role in the digital economy, because innovation through open collaboration is the new standard, and because enrolling the free labor of scores of volunteers reduces production costs. Yet since the slyly subversive General Public License (GPL) or “copyleft” was introduced in 1989, FOSS has been described by analysts and advocates as portending or prefiguring a postcapitalist future (see Birkinbine, this volume; Couture, this volume; Dafermos, this volume; Dulong de Rosnay, this volume; O’Neil & Broca, this volume).
In the 1990s peer production politics extended beyond communication and deliberation in that they were portrayed as distinct from a capitalist mode of production based on exclusive private property rights. FOSS licenses set up a legal environment in which contributors could entrust their intellectual properties to individuals with whom they had no prior personal contact (Lee & Cole, 2003; see also Spaeth & Niederhöfer, this volume). In other words, workers in peer production abrogate their exclusive property rights over the product of their labor. Many authors have connected this relinquishment of control by peer producers to a future‐facing socio‐technical imaginary, as well as to earlier models of human cooperation which were historically just as prevalent as competitive market models. Notable examples are activists from the Oekonux network and the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives. In the case of Oekonux, peer production was envisaged as the “germ form of a new mode of production beyond capitalism” (Meretz, 2012), signifying that there is a fluid interplay between the emerging new mode of production and organization and the old model of capitalism and hierarchy: since peer production is understood as dialectically co‐constituted by its “other” (e.g., developed as a reaction to and as part of capitalism), in many of its iterations, such as free and open source software, it also advances capitalist interests (for an extended discussion see Euler, 2016; see also O’Neil & Broca, this volume). In recent years a wealth of books (Bauwens et al., 2019; Bollier & Helfrich, 2019; Mason, 2015; Srnicek & Williams, 2016) have also argued that peer production and peer‐to‐peer infrastructure create digital and non‐digital commons and thereby the foundation of a postcapitalist economy, beyond the current economic system. For Bollier and Helfrich (2019), cooperation is a natural human impulse which is stymied by society. They present a range of principles meant to help develop sustainable ventures. In their book Peer‐to‐Peer: The Commons Manifesto, Bauwens, Kostakis, and Pazaitis (2019) show how peer‐to‐peer is essential for building a commons‐centric future. Whilst they do not refer to a postcapitalist imaginary, their commons‐based future centered around people and nature gestures toward it. What they set to demonstrate is that peer production all at once encompasses social relations, infrastructure, and new modes of production and property ownership, and that these elements create the conditions for a transition to an economy geared towards people and nature (see also Kostakis & Bauwens, this volume; Pazaitis & Drechsler, this volume).
Journalist Paul Mason (2015) is another author who detects (re)generative power in peer production. In PostCapitalism: A Guide to Our Future, he defines peer production as the production of “free stuff that drives out commercially produced commodities” (2015, p. 138). Mason cites Wikipedia