6 SHARING
Bill Gates once derided advocates for free software with the worst epithet a capitalist can muster. These folks demanding that software should be free, he said, were a “new modern-day sort of communists,” a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong on several points: For one, free and open source software zealots are more likely to be political libertarians than commie pinkos. Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to connect everyone to everyone all the time is quietly giving rise to a revised technological version of socialism.
Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just one notable example of an emerging collectivism. Indeed, not just Wikipedia but wikis of all sorts. Wikis are a set of documents that are collaboratively produced; their text can easily be created, added, edited, or altered by anyone, and by everyone. Different wiki engines operate on different platforms and OSs with various formatting abilities. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first collaborative web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, each powering myriad sites. Widespread adoption of the share-friendly copyright license known as Creative Commons encourages people to legally allow their own images, text, or music to be used and improved by others without the need for additional permission. In other words, sharing and sampling content is the new default.
There were more than one billion instances of Creative Commons permissions in use in 2015. The rise of ubiquitous file sharing sites such as Tor, where one can find a copy of almost anything that can be copied, is another step toward collaboration since it makes it very easy to begin your creation with something already created. Collaborative commenting sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Pinterest, and Tumblr enable hundreds of millions of ordinary folks to find photos, images, news items, and ideas drawn from professional and friends’ sources, and then collectively rank them, rate them, share them, forward them, annotate them, and curate them into streams or collections. These sites act as collaborative filters, promoting the best stuff at the moment. Nearly every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of digital “social-ism” uniquely tuned for a networked world.
We’re not talking about your grandfather’s political socialism. In fact, there is a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the newest American innovation. While old-school political socialism was an arm of the state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.
The type of old-school communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of shared software, such as Linux or Apache, was born in an era of centralized communications, top-heavy industrial processes, and enforced borders. Those constraints from early last century gave rise to a type of collective ownership that tried to replace the chaos and failures of a free market with well-thought-out scientific five-year plans devised by a politburo of all-powerful experts. This type of government operating system failed, to put it mildly. The top-down socialism of the industrial era could not keep up with the rapid adaptions, constant innovations, and self-generating energy that democratic free markets offered. Socialistic command economies and centralized communistic regimes were left behind. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, this new digital socialism runs over a borderless internet, via network communications, generating intangible services throughout a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.
Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing picks and shovels, we share scripts and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of free government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free commercial goods and services.
I recognize that the word “socialism” is bound to make many readers twitch. It carries tremendous cultural baggage, as do the related terms “communal,” “communitarian,” and “collective.” I use “socialism” because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely on social interactions for their power. We call social media “social” for this same reason: It is a species of social action. Broadly speaking, social action is what websites and net-connected apps generate when they harness input from very large networks of consumers, or participants, or users, or what we once called the audience. Of course, there’s rhetorical danger in lumping so many types of organizations under such an inflammatory heading. But there are no unsoiled terms available in this realm of sharing, so we might as well redeem this most direct one: social, social action, social media, socialism. When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it’s not unreasonable to call that new socialism.
What they have in common is the verb “to share.” In fact, some futurists have called this economic aspect of the new socialism the “sharing economy” because the primary currency in this realm is sharing.
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In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and aging hippy John Perry Barlow began calling this drift, somewhat tongue in cheek, “dot-communism.” He defined dot-communism as a “workforce composed entirely of free agents,” a decentralized gift or barter economy without money where there is no ownership of property and where technological architecture defines the political space. He was right about the virtual money since the content that Twitter and Facebook distribute is created by unpaid contributors—that is, users like you. And Barlow was right about the lack of ownership, as explained in the previous chapter. We see sharing economy services such as Netflix and Spotify move audiences away from owning anything. But there is one way in which “socialism” is the wrong word for what is happening: It is not an ideology, not an “ism.” It demands no rigid creed. Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation. It is a design frontier and a particularly fertile space for innovation.
In his 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a useful hierarchy for sorting through these new social arrangements, ranked by the increasing degree of coordination employed. Groups of people start off simply sharing with a minimum of coordination, and then progress to cooperation, then to collaboration, and finally to collectivism. At each step of this socialism, the amount of additional coordination required enlarges. A survey of the online landscape reveals ample evidence of this phenomenon.