Conor White-Sullivan đ @Conaw 2019-09-15
In 2007 I was studying ethnobotany, thinking my future was in the Amazon studying traditional plant medicine
Then I saw a talk from Yochai Benkler, and read his masterpiece The Wealth of Networks
A thread on non-rival goods, commons based peer production, and OGgameb thinking
First up, if you were reading Benkler in 2004, AirBnB, Uber and Lyft would have been obvious winners.
His paper âSharing Nicelyâ gives a formal definition of shareable good, and shows how tech lowers transaction costs for reallocation
http://benkler.org/SharingNicely.htmlâŚ
His 2005 TED talk on Open Source Economics is really the place to start though. (TED really was amazing back in the day)
I saw this and thought, OMFG, this guy is the Karl Marx of the 21st Century
Completely changed the course of my life.
https://ted.com/talks/yochai\_benkler\_on\_the\_new\_open\_source\_economics/up-next?language=enâŚ
A few highlights
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In the most advanced sectors of the most advanced economies, the means of production are already very widely distributed â theyâre in the hands of everyone with a $1000 laptop.
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This is true largely because of the billions and billions of dollars worth of labor that has been poured into open source.
When you want to write software today, the vast majority of what you need can be taken free from the commons.
Languages, libraries, tooling
- Commons based peer production â is really only possible when youâre dealing with goods that have basically no marginal cost.
1st one extremely expensive
2nd one nearly free
He calls them non-rival goods.
Only other person Iâve heard use that term is @jgreenhall regameb
There are all sorts of things which could be made non-rival and added to the commons which are currently locked into artificial scarcity because we havenât figured out how to reliably produce them otherwise
Formulas for prescription drugs for one
This copy/left documentary goes into how, in Brazil, they chose to ignore US patents on drugs and brought cost down exponentially
Not in itself enough to ensure we keep making new drugs, but shows why figuring out incentives is priority
Excellent watch
Iâve been pretty shocked over the past 12 years how few other tech entrepreneurs Iâve met whoâve heard of Benkler or where motivated by his frameworks.
Assume itâs because either
A) A lot of his work focuses on law and copyright, spectrum governance etc
B) he isnât as wide eyed
But the core ideas are highly motivating, and provide a different orientation to how to think about social change and building the future
How do we create a context where more is being added to the commons?
How do we convert rival to non-rival goods?
The first question deals with changing institutions and context of economic production, and can lead one in revolutionary directions
Second, to me, is just about âSoftware Eating the Worldâ and progress in hard tech
You figure out 3D printing and nanotech and everything = info
Benkler talks about Wikipedia, Linux, and Apache Web Server as modern wonders of the world.
Places where loosely coordinated hobbyists outcompeted firms and nation states.
My question has been, what Wikipedias have we not built yet, for want of the right wiki?
Wikipedia handles things we already know, even there questionably well, as it grounds out on verification from traditional sensemaking institutions that are losing authority.
If you want to contribute to advancing knowledge â gatekept peer review is still the main commons
This is why, starting from Benkler, there is a straight line @michael_nielsenâs âReinventing Discoveryâ
If we want abundance, we need to expand the commons, especially at the frontiers of human knowledge
Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen 2019-09-16
On sources: I found I got little out of Benkler that wasnât available through direct contact with the open source community. I did learn a lot from Ostrom, Olson, and (to some extent) Axelrod & Schelling, though. (Fun thread!)
Conor White-Sullivan đ @Conaw 2019-09-16
I think he was probably so influential on me because I hadnât been involved or interested in those communities at all before.
When I first came across him I just saw Wikipedia as a cool website, open source as free stuff
Benkler contextualized both as part of something bigger
Conor White-Sullivan đ @Conaw 2019-09-16
Oh and to clarify, when I say âstraight lineâ, I meant from me caring about Wealth of Networks to wanting to build things that facilitate Networked Science â not that he was a source for you
Michael Nielsen @michael_nielsen 2019-09-16
Let me plug Ostromâs âGoverning the Commonsâ (again) as a great book on open source, despite being written ~1990. And Schellingâs book on Micromotives and Macrobehaviour is pretty great too. I read it before finishing RD, but didnât appreciate it as much as I have since come to