The Handbook of Peer Production. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн книгу.
this transition, he suggests paying everyone a basic income while automating as many tasks as possible and freeing people to contribute to a peer production economy. Along the same lines, we can cite Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ (2016) book Imagining Life After Capitalism. For them, a postcapitalist economy will liberate us from work; it is through the development of technologies that our freedoms are expanded. Another recent book mobilizing similar tropes and arguments is Aaron Bastani’s (2018) Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Bastani anticipates the end of societies based on waged work: thanks to activist leftist government’s use of technology, society will succeed in mastering our planetary crises.
These authors all herald the advent of a postcapitalist society through changes in wage labor. Most also espouse a deep belief in the transformational capacity of peer production as a practice and in the notion that technology, particularly automation, will save humanity. In short, they all adopt utopian socio‐technical imaginaries. According to Sheila Jasanoff and Sang‐Hyun Kim (2016), technological development, like science fiction, operates in constant interaction with the social context that inspires and supports its production. And indeed, although the abovementioned depictions of peer production are postcapitalist, it could be queried whether economic growth and constant technological innovation are truly the best way to tackle the environmental and social crises, and whether peer production should not be put to work in a more localized and simple manner, oriented towards “degrowth,” for example (for a discussion of related ideas readers are invited to consult the final chapter of this Handbook, “Be Your Own Peer! Principles and Policies for the Commons”).
Some Black scholars, who do not refer to a peer production framework, also question the techno‐utopian assumptions that many of these accounts of postcapitalist futures espouse (Benjamin, 2019; Noble, 2018). For example, in Race after Technology, Ruha Benjamin (2019) criticizes naïve assumption of access to computers and the Internet as a solution to inequality. Further, it is doubtful whether elaborations of postcapitalist futures sufficiently take into account commons‐based peer production’s role in the present‐day capitalist economy. This role is itself a subject of debate: does the fact that firms are benefiting from the free labor of volunteer code developers situate FOSS and peer production more generally within the same exploitative historical trend exemplified by the rise of the so‐called “sharing economy” (where, under the guise of increased freedom and flexibility, the social rights of individuals are in effect stripped away, since Uber drivers and others are contractors whose working conditions are precarious, rather than employees benefiting from social protections and rights)? This at any rate was the crux of Kreiss et al.’s (2011) virulent critique of peer production, which in their view represents a step backward for workers’ rights. We explain why this critique is only partly justified in the remainder of this section, starting with the organizational structure of peer projects. We then examine the process whereby a labor relation predicated on voluntary participation and the self‐selection of tasks has become subsumed into the capitalist economy.
4.2 The Organizational Structure of Peer Projects
The intricacies of self‐governance have been a prime focus of research into peer production (Arazy et al., 2019; Auray, 2005; Dafermos, 2012; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; O’Neil, 2009, 2014; Pentzold, 2018). For example, Wikipedia has variously been described as “anarchic” (Reagle, 2005), “democratic” (Descy, 2006), “polycentric” (Mindel et al., 2018), and “meritocratic” (Bruns, 2008). It has also been called a “hybrid of different governance systems” (Holloway et al., 2007), a “self‐governing institution” (Spek et al., 2006), a form of “collective governance” (Aaltonen & Lanzara, 2015), an “adhocracy” (Konieczny, 2010), and an “ethical‐modular organization” (O’Neil, 2015). From a historical perspective, peer production projects can be likened to self‐run organizations such as cooperatives and kibbutzim. However, their most clear antecedents are what were previously known as “voluntary associations” and “collectivist organizations.” During the 1960s, the rejection of traditional societal institutions as well as of colonialism and imperialism led to the rise of countercultural groups in the Global North, which explicitly rejected what Max Weber called “traditional” and “legal‐rational” forms of authority (Weber, 1947). Social‐scientific interest in communes and cooperatives accordingly increased. The workings of collectivist organizations were analyzed by Rothschild‐Whitt (1979), who defined them as alternative institutions which “self‐consciously reject the norms of rational‐bureaucracy” (p. 509). Collectivist organizations are groups in which decisions become authoritative to the extent that all members have the right to full and equal participation. There are no established rules of order, formal motions and amendments, or votes, but instead a “consensus process, in which all members participate in the collective formulation of problems and negotiation of decisions” (pp. 511–512).
Following on from the 1960s concern for more inclusive and participatory forms of activism and politics (Kaufman, 1969), the necessity of rules was recognized in collectivist groups in order to avoid what feminist activist Jo Freeman (1972) called the “tyranny of structurelessness”: the absence of explicit rules facilitates power being monopolized by informal cliques who manipulate communications (by approving the declarations of their fellows and ignoring or disparaging those of others) and decisions (by deliberating secretly). In line with this concern – how to democratically organize cooperation amongst volunteers – researchers have examined rule‐making in self‐organized peer projects (Auray, 2005; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; see also Karp et al., this volume; Pentzold, this volume). Authors who examined the emergence and evolution of FOSS communities such as Debian (Coleman, 2012; O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007; O’Neil, 2014) and FreeBSD (Dafermos, 2012; Jørgensen, 2007) focused on the “succession problem,” that is, on the evolution from an informal mode of legitimacy, organized around the figure of the charismatic founder, to a more formalized and democratic mode.
Online collectivist organizations comprise typically bureaucratic mechanisms such as the maintenance of archives of all decisions, and precise rules (O’Neil, 2009), which are nowadays increasingly formalized in Codes of Conduct. In order to introduce a bureaucratic basis of authority into a community form, members must design democratic mechanisms to limit that basis of authority (O’Mahony & Ferraro, 2007). In Debian the power of the project leader is limited in four ways: leaders must defer to the project; they have limited authority over technical matters; members can recall leaders; and the authority of leaders is counterbalanced by that of a Technical Committee (see also interview with Zacchiroli, this volume). Wikipedia editors who demonstrate their willingness to work for the common good can become “administrators,” “stewards,” or “bureaucrats” and hence exercise varying degrees of control over other participants. They can be replaced by other Wikipedians: meritocracy and the separation of roles and persons are other key characteristics of bureaucratic systems, in contrast to charismatic and traditional leadership (Weber, 1947). The difference with traditional bureaus is that rules are supposed to be generated transparently and democratically (O’Neil, 2009; Haider & Sundin, this volume). Wikipedia is thus both a formal bureaucracy with a structured system of rules and roles and a “deliberative bureaucracy” as decisions are made through “consensus with universal and equal participation, and care is taken over time to create mutual understanding and agreement” (Joyce, Pike, & Butler, 2013).
In sum, protection from abuse in peer production is provided by the community, rather than by state‐backed contracts, so recourse procedures may be unstable; nonetheless, Kreiss et al.’s (2011) assessment that peer organizations offer no protection from unjust domination is incorrect. It remains the case that the legal protection of (for example) the GPL applies to the result of labor, not to workers themselves. Peer organizations are not legally responsible for the welfare of participants, so do not offer the same level of support as formal bureaucracies do (O’Neil, 2015).
How do contemporary collectivist organizations fit into the wider political economy? Table 1.1 maps contemporary configurations of work according to their extrinsic or intrinsic logic (vertical axis) and to the degree of control workers are afforded over their labor (horizontal axis).