New book: 'The Wealth of Networks'

Via Crooked Timber and Brad DeLong comes news of Yochai Benkler’s The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, just published by Yale University Press. CT's Henry Farrell writes:

There’ll be more about this book on CT soon – for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.

Yochai Benkler is professor of law at Yale Law School.  He argues that:

..the rise of peer production ...presents a stark challenge to conventional thinking about the economics of information production.

...It is important to see these phenomena not as exceptions, quirks, or ephemeral fads.. It is a mistake to think that we have only two basic free transactional forms—property-based markets and hierarchically organized firms. We have three, and the third is social sharing and exchange. It is a widespread phenomenon—we live and practice it every day with our household members, coworkers, and neighbors. We coproduce and exchange economic goods and services. But we do not count these in the economic census. Worse, we do not count them in our institutional design.

He argues that while the strength and domain of copyright, trademarks and patents have expanded, social trends in the past few years "are pushing in the opposite direction." Benkler's vision is a utopian one, seeing a networked information economy as "an opportunity to change the way we create and exchange information, knowledge, and culture". This will "offer individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection."

Cynics will snort. Business will wonder how to profit from it. Politicians will see it as a threat. But anyone interested in these issues should certainly take the time to read this book.

Benkler has posted the whole book and individual chapters on a Wiki, under a Creative Commons noncommercial sharealike license, with "an invitation to collaborate".