New Socialism: The Global Collectivist Society Goes Online

A month ago I came across an article I liked , and the other day I registered on Habré. So I decided to do her first post to translate it. Do not judge much, the translation is quite free, I studied English only at school (I finished school 9 years ago, I have no higher education whatsoever connected with linguistics). The article is quite voluminous, but this is no less interesting.

Bill Gates once laughed at open source, pronouncing the worst epithet that a capitalist can say. These people, he said, are “new, modern-looking communists,” and this evil force seeks to destroy the monopolistic system that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open Source fanatics are more like supporters of free will fighters than communists. However, there is some truth to his statement. The crazy, global rush to connect each person to each other, all this time, quietly, gave rise to a revised version of socialism.

The community aspects of digital culture are deep and broad. Wikipedia is just one of the great examples formed by collectivism and not only Wikipedia, but the wiki movement in general. Ward Cunningham, who opened the first Web collaboration website in 1994, today traces about 150 wiki engines , each of which uses many sites. Founded three years ago, Wetpaint accepts over 1 million public requests. Widespread adoption of freeware ( Creative Commons License) Alternative copyrights and the growth of free file sharing are two more steps in this direction. The proliferation of “collaborative” sites such as Digg, StumbleUpon, Hype Machine, Twine adds weight to these great shocks. Almost every day, a new start-up proudly marks a new way to use social activities. These changes indicate a steady movement towards creating a kind of socialism-like mood in the networked world.

We are not talking about grandfather socialism. In fact, there is a long list of events showing that the new socialism is not like that. This is not a class war. He really is not anti-American, digital socialism can become the latest American innovation. Under the old socialism, it is an organ of the state, digital socialism is behind socialism without a state. This new type of socialism is currently working in the field of culture and economics, not government, but for now.

The type of communism that Gates hopes to denigrate the creators of Linux was born in an era of tight borders, centralized subordination, and heavy industrial processes. These difficulties led to the emergence of collective ownership, which supplanted the chaos of the free market, with the help of five-year plans developed by the omnipotent Politburo. This political system, to put it mildly, has fallen. However, unlike those older stamps of socialism with a red flag, the new socialism works over the Internet, which has no borders, in a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to enhance individual autonomy and contrary to centralization. This is extreme decentralization.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gathered in collective communities. Instead of state-owned factories, we have desktops connected to a virtual corporation. Instead of using drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share applications, scripts, and APIs. Instead of the faceless political bureau, we have a faceless (meritocracy) system in which highly intelligent people are in power when the only thing that matters is that everything is done. Instead of gross domestic product, we have equal production (peer-production). Instead of a tariff scale and state subsidies, we have an abundance of free goods.

As I see it, the word socialism makes many readers twitch. It carries a huge cultural baggage, as well as the related terms communal, commune and collective. I use socialism, because technically this is the best word for various technologies that rely on their influence on social interaction. In a broad sense, collective action is nothing more than what websites and network applications produce only when they use input from the global community. Of course, there is the danger of mixing into so many types of organizations under such a fiery slogan. But from another point of view, we could fix this as well.

When there are a lot of people who own the means of production in the direction of achieving a common goal, and the share of their products is common, when their labor is without payment, and they use its fruits for free, then there is no reason not to say that this is socialism.
In the late 90s, activist, provocateur and aging hippies John Barlow began calling this movement “dot-commmunism” (similar to .coms). He defined this as “labor consists solely of free agents,” decentralized goods or the economy of barter, where there is no property, and where the technical architecture defines the political space. But there is another side with which socialism is not the right definition for what is happening - it is not an ideology. It requires no hard code. Rather, it is a whole range of methods, approaches and tools that promote cooperation, exchange, aggregation, coordination, anonymity of announcements, and a number of other recently appeared types of social cooperation. This system expands the boundaries and is especially fertile for innovation.

In his 2008 book, “Everyone Comes Here,” media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a successful hierarchy of these new social mechanisms. Groups of people begin with a simple exchange, and then in the course of cooperation, interaction and, finally, collectivism. At every step, the amount of coordination increases. An overview of the online landscape provides compelling evidence for this phenomenon.

I. DISTRIBUTION (SHARING)

There is an incredible mass of people on the net who are willing to share something. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, however, I can bet that the vast majority of photos taken on a digital camera are published due to fashion. There is also a status update, sitemaps, and reflections posted on the Internet. Add to that, 6 billion YouTube videos per month in the US alone, and millions of fan-created articles stored on fan sites. The list of exchange organizations is almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for interesting places, Delicious for bookmarks.
Exchange is a soft form of socialism, but it serves as the basis for higher levels of joint activity.

II. COOPERATION

When people work together towards a large-scale goal, they produce results that arise at the group level. Fans not only share over 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they mark their categories, labels, and keywords. The rest of the community selects photos into albums. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that public, if not direct, but still communist, your picture is my picture. Any user can use a photograph, as easy as a “comrade” can use a public cart. I don’t have to take another photo from the Eiffel Tower, since public can be better than I can do myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites use the same social momentum for triangular benefits. Firstly, the technology helps users directly, giving them the opportunity to leave tags, bookmarks, titles and archives for their own use. Secondly, others use other people's individual tags, bookmarks and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional values ​​that can come only from this group as a whole. For example, photos tagged with the same scene from different angles can be collected in one stunning 3-D image of the place. (Check out Microsoft Photosynth.) Curiously, this proposition anticipates the socialist motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need,” because it improves what you offer and provides you even more than you need.

Public aggregators can unleash amazing power. Sites such as Digg and Reddit, which allow users to vote for web links that they consider to be the best, can conduct a public conversation, like newspapers and television networks (as an example: Reddit is owned by the parent company Wired, Condé Nast). The largest contributors have invested much more in these sites than they could ever get back, but they continue to invest, in part because of the socio-cultural power that these tools possess. The influence of the participants exceeds one vote, the collective influence of the community may be more than the proportion of the number of its members. In general, the meaning of social institutions is that the system is more than a simple sum of its parts. Traditional socialism, set a goal to build up this dynamics with the help of the state. Now, being separated,

III. COOPERATION (COLLABORATION)

Organized cooperation can give results greater than achieving banal cooperation. Just look at any of the hundreds of open source projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, well-tuned public tools produce high-quality products through the coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to the usual interaction, cooperation on large, complex projects, participants usually attract only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the final product. An enthusiast can spend months writing code for a routine when a complete program appears in a few years. In essence, the work-reward ratio is so far from the free market,

In addition to economic dissonance, we are used to using the products of these collaborations for free. Instead of money, equal producers who create benefits receive trust, status, reputation, pleasure, satisfaction, and experience. Not only is the product itself free, it can be freely copied and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and GNU licenses, were invented to provide these "freedoms."
Of course, there is nothing particularly socialist in cooperation in itself. But the means of online cooperation support the social production style, which capitalist investors abhor and leave property in the hands of the workers, as well as to some extent among the consumer masses.

IV. COLLECTIVISM

Although collaboration can write an encyclopedia, no one bears responsibility if the community cannot reach consensus and the lack of consent does not threaten the enterprise as a whole. The goal of the team, however, is to create a system where self-managing, equal rights authors take responsibility for the most important processes and difficult decisions, such as sorting priorities, is a common decision of all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small collectivist groups have tried to use this system. The results were not encouraging.

Moreover, a close study of the governing kernel, for example, Wikipedia, Linux or OpenOffice, shows that these aspirations are far from the ideal of collectivists than it looks from the outside. While millions write on Wikipedia, fewer editors (about 1,500) are responsible for most of the editing. The same goes for teams that write code. The vast army of coders is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, founder of the open source fund Mozilla, noted, “In every anarchy worker, there is a part with an old-type network structure.”

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some types of collectives benefit from a hierarchy, while others have suffered from it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracies that are supposed to be used as a substrate for the production of goods and the provision of services with benefits that are as non-hierarchical as opportunities, minimizing barriers to obtaining and sharing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful figures appear, the whole community suffers. On the other hand, organizations are built to create products, often need strong leaders and hierarchies are arranged on time scales: one level focuses on hourly needs, the other on the needs of the next five-year period.

In the past, building an organization that uses hierarchy, and besides maximizing collectivism, was almost impossible to find. Digital networks now provide the necessary infrastructure. The network enables product-oriented organizations to function collectively, to work, while remaining completely hierarchical. Organizing with MySQL and open source databases is not good old non-hierarchical, but they are much more collectivist than Oracle. In addition, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but still much more than collectivist than Encyclopaedia Britannica. The core elite that we find in the very center of Internet collectives is actually a sign that non-state socialism can work on a large scale.

Most people in the West, including myself, were adherents of the ideological concept that the expansion of the powers of individuals necessarily reduces the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, most states make some resources public and others individual. Most free market economies have a social background, and even very socialized societies allow private ownership.

Instead of considering technological socialism as one of the sides with the mathematical equality between individualism of the free market and centralized power, it can be regarded as a cultural OS, which increases the importance of both individuals and groups at the same time. To a large extent, not logically, but intuitively understanding the purpose of communal technology, we can conclude the following: maximize the autonomy of both man and the working class. Thus, digital socialism can be seen as a third way that does not excite the old debate.

The concept of the third path is reflected by Yochai Benkler, the author of The Wealth of Networks, who probably thought more about the political network system. “I understand the emergence of social production and equal production as an alternative to both purely state and purely market (patent) systems, '' he said, noting that these activities“ can help increase creativity, productivity and freedom. ”The new OS is neither classic communism with centralized planning and without private ownership, nor the sheer chaos of the free market, instead it is a new model of society in which decentralized coordination of state it can solve problems and create a product that neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can overpower.

Hybrid systems consisting of a mixture of market and nonmarket mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied the methods of decentralized, socialized production in North Italian and Basque industrial cooperatives in which employees are owners, the choice of managers and limiting the distribution of profits, regardless of state control. But only with the formation of low prices, instant and universal cooperation, it became possible to migrate on the basis of these ideas in various new areas, for example, writing software for large enterprises or reference books.

The dream is to expand the scope of this third path beyond the boundaries of local experiments. How big OhlohThe open source software company has around 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. It is almost the size of the staff of General Motors. This is an awful lot of people who work for free, even if not full time. Imagine if all GM employees didn’t get paid and continued to produce cars!

So far, the largest in terms of development efforts are open source projects, and the largest of them, such as Apache, were attended by several hundred developers, comparable to the population of a large village. According to some studies, it took 60,000 man-years of work for last year's release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have evidence that an independent municipal authority and exchange development can manage a project on the scale of a decentralized city or village.

Of course, the overall census of online collaborators is much larger. YouTube claims about 350 million monthly visitors. Nearly 10 million registered users contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of which are recognized as active. Over 35 million people have published and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on various topics. Google hosts 3.9 million.

These figures are still behind the scale of the nation. They can't even cross the mainstream threshold (though if YouTube is not mainstream, what is?). But it is obvious that the population living in socialized media (web2.0-th media) is important. The number of people who do something for free, “share” something for free, use something for free, belong to the collective program communities working on projects that require joint solutions and / or the benefits of decentralized socialism - has reached millions, and continues to be counted. Revolutions spawned by a much smaller number of people.

At first sightYou can expect a lot of political claims from people who are building an alternative to capitalism and corporatism. But coders, hackers and programmers who have developed exchange tools do not think of themselves as revolutionaries. There are no new political parties * currently gathered in conference rooms, at least not in the United States. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party is formed on a file-sharing platform. It won an insignificant 0.63 percent of the vote in the 2006 national election.) (* Translator's note: the original post was published before the last election in Sweden)

Moreover, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A study of 2,784 open source software developers explained their motivation. The most common was “learning and developing new skills.” It is practical. One researcher said (Paraphrasing his words): The main reason for working on free software is to improve your own damn program. In principle, the remaining causes are almost miserable.

But the rest of us may not be deliberately insured against a growing wave of exchange, interaction, cooperation and collectivism. For the first time in many years, the word beginning with the letter “C” was voiced on Western TV and in national news magazines as a direction in US politics. Obviously, the trend towards the nationalization of industrial whales, the foundation of national health care, as well as the rapid creation of jobs, due to taxes, is due not only to techno-socialism. But recent elections have shown the power of a decentralized, WEB-based framework with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such cooperation, the more open we become socialist institutions in government. North Korea’s forced, heartbreaking system is dead; the future is a hybrid

How strong can the move to a non-market, open source, peer-to-peer manufacturing community affect us? Each time this question was asked, the answer was: stronger than we thought. Consider craigslist.org. Just a message board, right? But the site has expanded a convenient community bulletin board to reach the regional audience, improving it with pictures, real-time updates, and suddenly became a national treasure. Acting without state funding or control, linking citizens directly with each other, this is the most free market that brings social benefits with efficiency that any state or traditional corporation could shake. Of course, this undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it is indisputable proof.

Who would believe that poor farmers can get a $ 100 loan from a beautiful stranger on the other side of the planet and pay them back? This is what makes Kiva peer-to-peer lending. Every healthcare expert will declare with confidence that the exchange is good for photographs, but no one will share notes from their medical record. But on PatientsLikeMe , where patients combine treatment outcomes to improve their own treatment, proves that collective action can be a huge advantage for both doctors and privacy fighters. An ever-growing habit of sharing what you think (Twitter), what you read (StumbleUpon), your finances ( Wesabe), your everything (on the Internet) becomes the foundation of our culture. Doing this while co-creating an encyclopedia, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that span continents with people you don’t know and whose class doesn't matter, makes political socialism the logical next step.

Similar things have happened to free markets over the last century. Every day, someone asked: what markets can not do? We took a long list of issues that seem to require rational planning or government patronage, and apply the logic of the free market. In most cases, market solutions worked much better. A significant part of the successes in recent decades have been achieved through the application of market mechanisms to social problems.

Now we are trying to do the same trick with the help of joint social technologies, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes and sometimes problems that the free market cannot solve to understand if this is possible. To date, the results have been astounding. At almost every step, the power of collaborative collaboration, interaction, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven greater practicality than we capitalists previously thought possible. Each time, we find that the power of the new socialism is greater than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools that can change our minds. Do we really believe that we could jointly build virtual worlds and inhabit every day, and that this did not affect our vision of the poor? The power of online socialism is growing. Its development extends beyond the electrons, perhaps outgrowing in the election.
I ask to add karma so that I can transfer the topic to the WEB 2.0 blog