The Handbook of Peer Production. Группа авторов
Читать онлайн книгу.
to include the feature (“the market order”). Arguments will also be made for what is most technologically appealing or efficient (“the industrial order”). And there may also be arguments for a kind of civility (“the civic order”), for example in discussion of whether the product will be compatible with open standards or competing products.
When analyzing cultures of peer production, it is important to see the role of the inspirational mode of justification, from the value placed on charisma as a quality of leadership to the emphasis placed on growing or maintaining levels of passion among project members. In my previous research (Stevenson, 2018) I outlined the importance of this moral economy in the historical development of the Perl programming language, a scripting language that was a key technology for the early World Wide Web and far outgrew its humble beginnings as a UNIX tool created for system administrators. Support for Perl and the many volunteer hours spent by developers on increasing its value could be justified in many ways – for a typical Perl developer it could be justified economically (becoming more proficient with Perl increased their job prospects), technologically (through a dedication to producing the best possible software), as well as in a civic mode (contributing to a commons that would benefit everyone). What stands out, though, is where the inspirational mode of justification was drawn upon to smooth over conflicts and provide grounds for consensus and action when this seemed to be most difficult: most notably, in a case where Perl’s grassroots volunteers and a commercial company collaborated on the Windows version of Perl. Perl’s creator Larry Wall had a keen sense of the need for the Perl community to feel inspired, and for a shared sense of Perl evolving organically rather than according to any single person’s or community’s interests. Feeling inspired, volunteers would be willing to devote significant time and energy to a project they felt carried significance beyond meeting particular technological, economic, or even civic needs. Believing that the project was bigger than any single individual’s preferences and should be allowed to evolve in unexpected ways, Perl supporters were more likely to accept when decisions they did not agree with in the first instance were made.
The case of Perl and Larry Wall confirms what O’Neil previously argued in the context of open source software communities and other “online tribes” (O’Neil, 2009). Building on Weber’s (1978) classic categorization of forms of legitimate authority, O’Neil argues that what characterizes the organization of online tribes is the infusion of charismatic authority within what are largely bureaucracies, or organizations defined by rational‐legal authority, though these bureaucracies are more transparent and democratic than the classic type defined by Weber (O’Neil, 2011). (It should be noted that this strange mashup is not limited to peer production, and Boltanski and Chiapello (2005) note that increasing appeals to the inspirational mode of justification and charismatic authority are one of the elements of what they call the “new spirit of capitalism.”) Mixing these forms of authority means these tribes appear to have it both ways: on the one hand, a project like Perl preaches inclusivity and has a host of committees, appointed maintainers, project groups and so on, and thus various formal and informal means of ensuring voices are heard; on the other hand, if Perl founder Larry Wall decides to act against the wishes of the majority and implement a particular major change, his charismatic authority will likely ensure support and acceptance. This contradictory stance is epitomized by the common description of open source project maintainers as “benevolent dictators.” As Kreiss et al. (2011) argue, this means that although peer production projects pride themselves on their opposition to “closed” bureaucracies, they in fact introduce other kinds of closure and opacity, potentially bringing about the kinds of inequality they seek to avoid.
This ambiguity of authority is reflected in cultures of peer production. Much discussion will express a distrust of elite power within the organization, often jokingly called “the cabal,” suggesting a secretive group exercising power with impunity. This use of humor can be seen to work through and playfully challenge the competing forms of authority within these projects (Coleman, 2013, p. 122). As individual projects grow and become more established, the limits of charismatic authority are often tested. As a project’s complexity, diversity, and wider significance increases, so will calls for more transparency and democracy. However, even in Wikipedia and established open source projects, the transition to rational‐legal authority and more democratic forms of governance does not mean charismatic authority disappears. As Dafermos (2012) notes in the context of the FreeBSD project transitioning from an informal selection process to democratic elections for its core team members, the significance of charisma remains: “The persuasive authority of core team members is legitimized mainly through the recognition of the authenticity of their technical charisma by committers.”
The importance of the inspirational mode of justification, and thus the value placed on passion and the justification of charismatic authority, is arguably linked to a key issue facing Wikipedia and several open source projects today, namely the prospects of declining participation and (relatedly) increasing pressures on project members that do stay involved. What happens when the inspiration dries up, or when what once felt like a revolutionary product begins to feel routine? In the case of Perl, an instructive moment in this regard occurred in 1999, when Larry Wall and other senior project members saw that the programming language was losing market share, momentum, and key contributors to competing languages. While some supported developing a charter and thus sought to improve Perl’s prospects by transitioning to a more formalized governance structure, Larry Wall and others rejected this idea, arguing that what was needed was to inspire the community again. Wall’s way forward was chosen, and this resulted in the launch of the Perl 6 project, an entirely new language written from scratch. Once again Wall inspired many others to volunteer their time to a large‐scale, visionary collaborative project with him at the helm, however this time the ambition perhaps outgrew the community’s capacity, and Perl 6 remained in development for years, still requiring a great deal of work before it will stand a chance of widespread adoption. The story of Perl 6 and other examples of mixed success or even failure in the world of open source software reveal the tenuousness of peer production, where inspiration is both a boon and a requirement, and thus may work like a double‐edged sword.
7 Conclusion
This chapter has sought to synthesize existing research with sociological theory in order to shed light on the cultures of peer production. Building on Bourdieu’s field theory, I have argued that attention to peer production as cultural production helps us to understand several key aspects of Wikipedia and open source communities. First, such projects do not exist in a vacuum, and their cultures are tied to notions of autonomy within a broader field of software and media production. Wikipedians enact a form of knowledge production that stands in contrast to certain bureaucratic and commercial practices that they perceive as unsatisfactory, if not “evil.” Likewise, Linux communities and other FOSS actors enact a more autonomous form of software production than, say, the commercial and proprietary operating systems produced by Apple and Microsoft. Second, the core values these projects embrace are related to the forms of reputation or symbolic capital that circulate within them, and this in turn creates hierarchies. Third, these values are enacted and maintained through various forms of socialization and a range of cultural practices from sharing code to sharing jokes. Meanwhile enactment of these values does not come without social costs and blind spots: in particular the belief in meritocracy and openness of these communities can lead to a blindness for inequalities that do exist. Fourth, drawing also on the work of Boltanski and Thévenot, as forms of cultural production these projects are notable for the importance of an affective charge: autonomous peer production projects require that participants feel connected to a larger common purpose.
Although this chapter has limited its focus to peer production in its more autonomous (and well‐known) forms of Wikipedia and open source software, the aim is that this framework will help readers map and analyze the cultures of other peer production projects. What larger cultural field are they situated in? To what degree do they appear to be independent or autonomous, and what kinds of companies or other actors would they distinguish themselves from? In what ways are hierarchies created among participants? What shared values do they have and how are they enacted? Most importantly, how do these various elements common to cultural production – a sense of autonomy, shared social norms, and hierarchies of symbolic