Nicholas Carr The Big Switch, Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google (2009)

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enjoy it. It gives them satisfaction. People naturally like to create things, to show off their
creations to others, to talk about themselves and their families, and to be part of communal
projects. It s no different on the Internet. Even very early online communities and Web sites
made extensive use of free labor. In the 1990s, so many thousands of America Online members
were performing unpaid jobs for the company, such as moderating chat rooms, that Wired
magazine called AOL a cyber-sweatshop. Much of Amazon.com s early appeal came from the
book reviews donated by customers and the ratings of those reviews submitted by other
customers. The uploading of videos, the writing of blogs, the debugging of open-source code, the
editing of Wikipedia entries all are simply new forms of the pastimes or charitable work that
people have always engaged in outside their paid jobs.
What has changed, though, is the scope, scale, and sophistication of the
contributions and, equally important, the ability of companies to harness the free labor and turn
it into valuable products and services. Ubiquitous, inexpensive computing and data
communication, together with ever more advanced software programs, allow individuals to make
and share creative works and other information goods in ways that were never possible before,
and they also enable thousands or even millions of discrete contributions to be assembled into
commercial goods with extraordinary efficiency. In his book The Wealth of Networks, Yale law
professor Yochai Benkler traces the recent explosion in social production to three technological
advances. First, the physical machinery necessary to participate in information and cultural
production is almost universally distributed in the population of the advanced economies, he
writes. Second, the primary raw materials in the information economy, unlike the physical
economy, are [freely available] public goods existing information, knowledge, and culture.
Finally, the Internet provides a platform for distributed, modular production that allows many
diversely motivated people to act for a wide range of reasons that, in combination, cohere into
new useful information, knowledge, and cultural goods.
All three factors will become even more salient in the years ahead. The World Wide
Computer will continue to give individuals new production capabilities, to expand their access to
information, and to make it easier to meld their contributions into useful and attractive products
and services. Benkler sees a kind of popular revolution in the making, where the means of
producing and distributing information goods, formerly controlled by big companies, are put into
the hands of the masses. He believes the networked information economy marks a significant
inflection point for modern societies, which promises to bring a quite basic transformation in
how we perceive the world around us. By changing the way we create and exchange
information, knowledge, and culture, he writes, we can make the twenty-first century one that
offers individuals greater autonomy, political communities greater democracy, and societies
greater opportunities for cultural self-reflection and human connection.
Other writers and scholars have made arguments similar to Benkler s. They see a new
and liberating economy emerging a gift economy that, based on sharing rather than selling,
exists outside of and even in opposition to the market economy. Although the term gift
economy dates back at least a quarter century to Lewis Hyde s 1983 book The Gift:
Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property, its new vogue highlights how extensive free labor
and its products have become on the Internet. The gift economy, it s often said, is engendering a
richer, more egalitarian culture, while drawing wealth and power away from the corporations and
governments that have, allegedly, monopolized the distribution of creative works and other
information goods. Richard Barbrook, of the University of Westminster in London, expressed
this view well in his 1998 essay The Hi-Tech Gift Economy. He wrote of Internet users:
Unrestricted by physical distance, they collaborate with each other without the direct mediation
of money or politics. Unconcerned about copyright, they give and receive information without
thought of payment. In the absence of states or markets to mediate social bonds, network
communities are instead formed through the mutual obligations created by gifts of time and
ideas.
There s truth in such claims, as anyone looking at the Web today can see. Computers and
the Internet have given people powerful new tools for expressing themselves, for distributing
their work to broad audiences, and for collaborating to produce various goods. But there s a
na�vet�, or at least a short-sightedness, to these arguments as well. The utopian rhetoric ignores
the fact that the market economy is rapidly subsuming the gift economy. The gifts of time and
ideas are becoming inputs to the creation of commodities. Whether it s a big company like
Rupert Murdoch s News Corporation, which owns MySpace, or a one-man operation like
Markus Frind s Plenty OfFish, businesses are using the masses of Internet gift-givers as a global
pool of cut-rate labor.
When, in 2005, the Internet giant Yahoo acquired Flickr for a reported $35 million, the
larger company freely admitted that it was motivated by the prospect of harvesting all the free
labor supplied by Flickr s users. As Yahoo executive Bradley Horowitz told Newsweek, With
less than 10 people on the payroll, [Flickr] had millions of users generating content, millions of
users organizing that content for them, tens of thousands of users distributing that across the
Internet, and thousands of people not on the payroll actually building the thing. That s a neat
trick. If we could do that same thing with Yahoo, and take our half-billion user base and achieve
the same kind of effect, we knew we were on to something. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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