Of peers and men – a review
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Benkler, Yochai
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006
(Available for free download on http://www.benkler.org/)
OF PEERS AND MEN
Yochai Benkler likes the internet. He loves blogs, wikis, social networking sites, participatory democracy, Web2.0 and, in all likelihood, World of Warcraft. He is also a very bright legal scholar, with an interest in protecting the public sphere and the new forms of social production that are now emerging. All this taken together forms the core of his new book, a celebration of the power of social networks, technologically intermediated creativity, and the things even dispersed and virtual communities are capable of, presented in an often elegant (if at times rather verbose) manner. It would be easy to write an panegyric of such a nobel strive, but the task of criticism is not the same as that of eulogy. Instead, it might be that specifically the way in which this book is so easy to agree with forces us to subject it to criticism.
This is a book written in order to be both a magnum opus and a major statement. Everything about the book, from the title – a less than subtle play on “The Wealth of Nations” – to the scope, which spans pretty much all of the social sciences, signals that this is to be read as a total analysis of our world. Not necessarily a final word, as Benkler is far too smart to fall into that trap, but still a magisterial proclamation about our times. Oddly enough for our secular era, this seems to be why a lot of very intelligent people (e.g. Lawrence Lessig and Paul Duguid) have fawned over the book. Admittedly, the main arguments and points are compelling, but the adulation that has already been heaped upon this book are rather bewildering, as it neither presents anything particularly novel, nor does so in a particularly gripping way.
Stated in the briefest way possible, Benkler’s arguement is that the forms of social production contemporary technologies (particularly so the set of such known as the internet) have enabled and engendered an entirely new – albeit logically following – socio-economic state of affairs, one that forces us to rethink how we should conceive economy and politics (and law). This is by no means an original statement, as something similar has been stated by a number of thinkers during the last ten years, and he does not portray it as such. Rather, the book tries to collate this thinking into more complete whole, creating a theory of this new age of social production – an age of distributed politics, wonderful social creativity (think Wikipedia on steroids), transparency and the unleashing of human potential. It is a pleasant picture, filled with references to the best aspects of humanity, and one can easily read the book as a paean to the human race and its glorious future.
Yet, the problems of the book stems from this attempt of mapping out this “new” world. While I’ll be the first to agree that a phenomenon such as social production – groups of people cooperating in production outside of the market economy – is important, the implicit claim of Benkler that this has completely revolutionized the economy is nothing short of silly. We still have traditional production, and with e.g. China gearing up to become an industrial powerhouse such as the world has never seen, with factories and market-driven industrial relations galore, this form is not going anywhere anytime soon. It might be academically expedient to praise the ways in which the hip kids are crowdsourcing and building Web2.0-communities, but in its attention to these matters, the author quite willfully ignores the manifold of ways in which the world has stayed the same, and although the book is written in a careful and deliberate way, one often feels as if this merely exacerbates the matter – masking but not quite concealing the problem. Even though the novel ways of cooperation Benkler discusses deserve the kind of attention this book lavishes upon them, the strive to create a system of the unsystematic is bewildering. In a world of abstract peers, emergent phenomena and wildly massive redundancies – the user “toothpastery” on Flickr has over 500 photos of toothpaste posted – the old notion of creating a singular systemic description seems quaint but misguided.
Thus the main question this book raises, at least for this reviewer, is: Why has our age become so enamored with attempts at great systems? Looking to the way in which people like Manuel Castells, Antonio Negri and now Yochai Benkler have been hailed as seers for presenting the same kind of totalizing statements we are taught to ridicule 19th-century thinkers such as G.W.F. Hegel for is nothing short of amazing. Whereas we turn away from attempts to present singular, great theories of everything and the hunt for the one true method which will generate a pure social science, the kind of sweeping statements Benkler’s book is full of is met with nothing short of adulation. Why this desire for order, and why, in our distributed age, has the question of the grand system been reawakened?
