1. Sharing
The online public has an incredible willingness to share. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook, Flickr, Instagram, and other sites is an astronomical 1.8 billion per day. It’s a safe bet that the overwhelming majority of these digital photos are shared in some fashion. Then there are status updates, map locations, half-thoughts posted online. Add to this the billions of videos served by YouTube each day and the millions of fan-created stories deposited on fanfic sites. The list of sharing organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Foursquare for locations, Pinterest for scrapbook pieces. Sharing content is now ubiquitous.
Sharing is the mildest form of digital socialism, but this verb serves as the foundation for all the higher levels of communal engagement. It is the elemental ingredient of the entire network world.
2. Cooperation
When individuals work together toward a large-scale goal, it produces results that emerge at the group level. Not only have amateurs shared billions of photos on Flickr and Tumblr, but they have tagged them with categories, labels, and keywords. Others in the community cull the pictures into sets and boards. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that in a sense your picture is my picture. Anyone can use an uploaded photo, just as a communard might use the community wheelbarrow. I don’t have to shoot yet another photo of the Eiffel Tower, since the community can provide a better one than I can take myself. That means I can make a presentation, a report, a scrapbook, a website much better because I am not working alone.
Thousands of aggregator sites employ a similar social dynamic for threefold benefit. First, social-facing technology aids a site’s users directly by letting them individually tag, bookmark, rank, and archive a found item for their own use. Community members can manage and curate their own collections easier. For instance, on Pinterest, plentiful tags and categories (“pins”) enable a user to make very quick and specific scrapbooks that are super easy to retrieve and add to. Second, other users will benefit from an individual’s tags, pins, and bookmarks. It makes it easier for them to find similar material. The more tags an image gets in Pinterest, or likes in Facebook, or hashtags on Twitter, the more useful it becomes for others. Third, collective action can create an additional value that can come only from the group as a whole. For instance, a pile of tourist snapshots of the Eiffel Tower, each taken from a different angle by a different tourist at a different time, and each one heavily tagged, can be assembled (using software such as Microsoft’s Photosynth) into a stunning 3-D holistic rendering of the whole structure that is far more complex and valuable than the individual shots. In a curious way, this proposition exceeds the socialist promise of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” because it betters what you contribute and delivers more than you need.
Community sharing can unleash astonishing power. Sites like Reddit and Twitter, which let users vote up or retweet the most important items (news bits, web links, comments), can steer public conversation as much, and maybe more, than newspapers or TV networks. Dedicated contributors keep contributing in part because of the wider cultural influence these instruments wield. The community’s collective influence is far out of proportion to the number of contributors. That is the whole point of social institutions: The sum outperforms the parts. Traditional socialism ramped up this dynamic via the nation-state. Now digital sharing is decoupled from government and operates at an international scale.
3. Collaboration
Organized collaboration can produce results beyond the achievements of ad hoc cooperation. Just look at any of hundreds of open source software projects, such as the Linux operating system, which underpins most web servers and most smartphones. In these endeavors, finely tuned communal tools generate high-quality products from the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to the previous category of casual cooperation, collaboration on large, complex projects tends to bring the participants only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the end product. An enthusiast may spend months writing code for a subroutine when the program’s full utility is several years away. In fact, the work-reward ratio is so out of kilter from a free-market perspective—the workers do immense amounts of high-market-value work without being paid—that these collaborative efforts make no sense within capitalism.
Adding to the economic dissonance, we’ve become accustomed to enjoying the products of these collaborations free of charge. Half of all web pages in the world today are hosted on more than 35 million servers running free Apache software, which is open source, community created. A free clearinghouse called 3D Warehouse offers several million complex 3-D models of any form you can image (a boot to a bridge), created and freely swapped by very skilled enthusiasts. Nearly 1 million community-designed Arduinos and 6 million Raspberry Pi computers have been built by schools and hobbyists. Their designs are encouraged to be copied freely and used as the basis for new products. Instead of money, the peer producers who create these products and services gain credit, status, reputation, enjoyment, satisfaction, and experience.
Of course, there’s nothing particularly new about collaboration per se. But the new tools of online collaboration support a communal style of production that can shun capitalistic investors and keep ownership in the hands of the producers, who are often the consumers as well.
4. Collectivism
Most people in the West, including myself, were indoctrinated with the notion that extending the power of individuals necessarily diminishes the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, though, most polities socialize some resources and individualize others. Most free-market national economies have socialized education and policing, while even the most extremely socialized societies today allow some private property. The mix varies around the world.
Rather than viewing technological socialism as one side of a zero-sum trade-off between free-market individualism and centralized authority, technological sharing can be seen as a new political operating system that elevates both the individual and the group at once. The largely unarticulated but intuitively understood goal of sharing technology is this: to maximize both the autonomy of the individual and the power of people working together. Thus, digital sharing can be viewed as a third way that renders irrelevant a lot of the old conventional wisdom.
The notion of a third way is echoed by Yochai Benkler, author of The Wealth of Networks, who has probably thought more about the politics of networks than anyone else. “I see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based closed, proprietary systems,” he writes, noting that these activities “can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom.” The new OS is neither the classic communism of centralized planning without private property nor the undiluted selfish chaos of a free market. Instead, it is an emerging design space in which decentralized public coordination can solve problems and create things that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can.
Hybrid systems that blend market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the decentralized, socialized production methods of northern Italian and Basque industrial co-ops, in which employees are owners who select management and limit profit distribution independent of state control. But only since the arrival of low-cost, instantaneous, ubiquitous online collaboration has it been possible to migrate the core of those ideas into diverse new realms, like coding enterprise software or writing reference books. More important, the technologies of sharing enable collaboration and collectivism to operate at much larger scales than ever before.