Practical Anarchism: Peer Mutualism, Market Power, and the Fallible State
Practical Anarchism: Peer Mutualism, Market Power, and the Fallible State “The most significant difference between political thought inside the digirati and outside it is that in the network society, anarchism (or more properly, anti-possessive individualism) is a viable political philosophy.” Eben Moglen, Anarchism Triumphant, FIRST MONDAY 1999. Commons-based peer production has come to play a large role in the construction of the networked environment, networked culture, and the networked social order. Non-proprietary, voluntaristic, self-organized practices account for standard setting for the Internet itself, development of some of the core software utilities that run the Web, as well as, increasingly, operating systems of servers, smartphones, and embedded computing; enterprise software; content management systems, and even statistics packages rely on free and open source software. The basic infrastructure for our synthesized “state of knowledge,” our age's Encyclopedia, is some combination of Wikipedia and the Google search, itself an amalgamation of information produced by both traditional models and new, distributed, nonprorietary models of cooperation. Over the course of the first decade of the 21st century, commons-based peer production has moved from being ignored, through being mocked, feared, regarded as an exception or intellectual quirk, to finally becoming a normal and indispensable part of life. The experience of the last two decades with networked peer models moderates one doubt, and raises two major questions. The doubt alleviated concerns the feasibility of sustained, large-scale cooperation in the absence of property or hierarchy. The experience of the last decade offers substantial existence proof that non-proprietary voluntaristic cooperation can create outputs whose production was previously thought to require hierarchical state or corporate organization, anchored in proprietary control over the resources necessary for, and products of, human action.
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