The Handbook of Peer Production

Mathieu O'Neil, Christian Pentzold, Sophie Toupin, Mathieu O'Neil, Christian Pentzold, Sophie Toupin

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781119537144, 9781119537106
• eBook ISBN: 9781119537090
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The definitive reference work with comprehensive analysis and review of peer production

Peer production is no longer the sole domain of small groups of technical or academic elites. The internet has enabled millions of people to collectively produce, revise, and distribute everything from computer operating systems and applications to encyclopedia articles and film and television databases. Today, peer production has branched out to include wireless networks, online currencies, biohacking, and peer-to-peer urbanism, amongst others. The Handbook of Peer Production outlines central concepts, examines current and emerging areas of application, and analyzes the forms and principles of cooperation that continue to impact multiple areas of production and sociality.

Featuring contributions from an international team of experts in the field, this landmark work maps the origins and manifestations of peer production, discusses the factors and conditions that are enabling, advancing, and co-opting peer production, and considers its current impact and potential consequences for the social order. Detailed chapters address the governance, political economy, and cultures of peer production, user motivations, social rules and norms, the role of peer production in social change and activism, and much more. Filling a gap in available literature as the only extensive overview of peer production's modes of generating informational goods and services, this groundbreaking volume:

• Offers accessible, up-to-date information to both specialists and non-specialists across academia, industry, journalism, and public advocacy
• Includes interviews with leading practitioners discussing the future of peer production Discusses the history, traditions, key debates, and pioneers of peer production
• Explores technologies for peer production, openness and licensing, peer learning, open design and manufacturing, and free and open-source software

The Handbook of Peer Production is an indispensable resource for students, instructors, researchers, and professionals working in fields including communication studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and management studies, as well as those interested in the network information economy, the public domain, and new forms of organization and networking.

Part I
Introduction

1
The Duality of Peer Production: Infrastructure for the Digital Commons, Free Labor for Free‐Riding Firms

Mathieu O’Neil, Sophie Toupin, and Christian Pentzold

1 Introduction

There never was a “tragedy of the commons”: Garrett Hardin’s overgrazing farmers were victims of a tragedy of self‐management, as they failed to collectively regulate, as equals, their common pasture. When Elinor Ostrom was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2009, the immemorial notion that there are only two types of goods in the world – private and public, coordinated by markets or the state – was finally put to rest. In the most general terms, peer producers are people who create and manage common‐pool resources together. It sometimes seems as if “peer production” and “digital commons” can be used interchangeably. Digital commons are non‐rivalrous (they can be reproduced at little or no cost) and non‐excludable (no‐one can prevent others from using them, through property rights for example). So, practically speaking, proprietary objects could be produced by equal “peers,” however we argue that peer production has a normative dimension, so that what chiefly characterizes this mode of production is that “the output is orientated towards the further expansion of the commons; while the commons, recursively, is the chief resource in this mode of production” (Söderberg & O'Neil, 2014, p. 2). Though there are many historical antecedents, the term “peer production,” as an object of public and scientific interest, is historically situated in the early 2000s.¹ The meanings associated with a term that is deeply connected to the Internet as it was 20 years ago are bound to change. Today, “peer production” describes a vast array of self‐organized collaborative ventures and distributed work arrangements, from the collective practice of peers who advocate for an issue through a hashtag on social media or evaluate restaurants and holiday accommodation on dedicated websites, to participation in hacklabs and makerspaces. This introductory chapter to the Handbook of Peer Production focuses on peer production’s original incarnations, such as free and open source software and Wikipedia, which depended on the open Internet’s affordances for distributed communication, production, and organization. Non‐Internet mediated forms such as work in shared machine shops or the development of mesh networks are covered extensively in other chapters in this Handbook. We will refer to them if necessary, but they are not our prime concern here. In part, this is because the original forms and understandings of peer production are most relevant to a media and communication audience. But we also choose to focus on Internet‐based peer production in order to explore the term’s genesis: what kind of “production”? And why is it called “peer”?

To answer these questions, this chapter examines a series of productive tensions located in and around peer production. We begin in our second section by interrogating the meaning of infrastructure for peer‐to‐peer models, and find that some forms of peer infrastructure have thrived, whilst others were effectively banned. We next consider Yochai Benkler’s influential theorization of “commons‐based peer production,” and ask to what extent it embodies Western, first world assumptions. Our fourth section explores at length the relationship of peer production to the dominant economy. It begins by outlining claims about peer production’s transformational potential, which are inspired by Benkler’s model and often imbued with techno‐utopian overtones. It then focuses on the organizational and cultural characteristics which enabled co‐optation by, and hybridization with firms. We conclude this central section on peer production’s political economy by reviewing the literature which suggests that peer production, despite its alleged utopian potential, has been recuperated by capitalism and enabled new forms of labor‐exploitation. Our fifth and final section explains the aims of this Handbook and summarizes its structure and content.

2 Peer‐to‐Peer Infrastructure

In the early years of the second millennium, the word “peer” became widely known because of the conjunction of two distinct understandings, one scientific, the other popular. On the scientific side, legal scholar Yochai Benkler (2002) proposed in his journal article “Coase’s Penguin, or Linux and the Nature of the Firm” a seminal understanding of free and open source software (FOSS) as a form of “commons‐based peer production” whose productive efficiency, based on the ease and speed of incorporating multiple contributions to an object, surpassed that of firms and markets. Meanwhile in the Global North more generally, the notion of “peer‐to‐peer” generated wide public interest. This derived from the popularity of practices enabled by the non‐centrally controlled, or distributed, structure of the early mass Internet, prior to its subsequent enclosure by proprietary social media platforms (see Birkinbine, this volume; Kostakis & Bauwens, this volume). Such practices, whose archetype was the Napster file‐sharing service, included torrenting or exchanging files online for free. What was truly original about Napster is that files available for download were not located in a central computer: these files were stored on the user’s machines, who made them available to others through Napster’s (centrally hosted) software. Each node, wherever it was located in the world, was accessible and contributed to the peer‐to‐peer system.

This collaborative production and exchange of content, knowledge, and systems involved participants with varying degrees of ownership and control of the (software/hardware) means of production. A system like Napster relied on participants to function, and they in turn could use the service for free, but Napster soon became a for‐profit company (Alderman, 2001). Now, in the second millennium’s third decade, we face a somewhat different situation. Peer‐to‐peer practices such as torrenting have been almost completely criminalized out of existence, but the Napster model of using and contributing to an online service for free became widespread in the mid‐2000s, with Facebook an emblematic example. In terms of architecture, for many people the Internet is now a content delivery model on closed platforms such as social media or entertainment streaming networks, not a system allowing users to perform effective peer‐to‐peer networking. To be sure, peer production emerged in the 1990s and 2000s despite the network’s physical infrastructure – the fiber‐optic submarine links, terrestrial cables, data centers, cloud storage and Internet of things – being privately owned. A similar paradox concerns the principle of net neutrality, the idea that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and governments should treat all data equally – instead of charging users differentially or limiting access to certain platforms or applications. It is less of a surprise that net neutrality has lasted this long if we understand it as an example of the neoliberal principle of free and undistorted competition (Cohen, 2019).

It now becomes necessary to distinguish an expansive definition of infrastructure as pervasive digital arrangements, from a narrow one that focuses on physical and material settings only. In restrictive terms, when it comes to peer‐to‐peer physical infrastructure, or “built networks that facilitate the flow of goods, people, o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Preface
• Chapter Summaries
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Concepts: Explaining Peer Production
• Part III: Conditions: Enabling Peer Production
• Part IV: Cases: Realizing Peer Production
• Part V: Conflicts: Peer Production and the World
• Part VI: Conversions: Advancing Peer Production
• Index
• End User License Agreement