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Ideologies of Autonomy Wikipedia @ 20 Ideologies of Autonomy Christopher M. Cox Published on: Jun 11, 2019 Updated on: Jun 21, 2019 Wikipedia @ 20 Ideologies of Autonomy Introduction When I first began routinely using Wikipedia in the early 2000s, my interest owed as much to the model for online curation the site helped to popularize as it did Wikipedia itself. As a model for leveraging the potential of collective online intelligence, emerging modes of online productivity enabled everyday people to help build Wikipedia and, just as importantly for me, proliferated the use of “Wikis” to centralize and curate content ranging from organizational workflows to repositories for the intricacies of pop culture franchises. As a somewhat obsessive devotee of the television series Lost (2004-2011), I was especially enthusiastic about the latter, since the Lostpedia wiki was an essential part of my engagement with the series’ themes, mysteries, and motifs. On an almost daily basis during the show’s run, I found myself plunging ever deeper into Lostpedia, gleaming reminders of previous plot points and character interactions and using this knowledge to piece together ideas about the series’ sprawling mythology. Steadily, as Wikipedia also became a persistent fixture in my online media diet, I found myself using the site in a similar manner, often going down “Wikipedia holes” wherein I bounced from page to page, topic to topic, probing for knowledge of topics both familiar and obscure. This newfound ability to find, consume, and interact with a universe of ideas previously diffuse among various types of sources and institutions made me feel empowered to more readily self- direct my intellectual interests. In other words, I felt more autonomous, a trait inherent among ideas about Wiki-style peer production. Around the same time as my budding forays into Lostpedia and Wikipedia, scholars advanced ideas about the potential of collectivized online collaboration that preceded the emergence of Wikipedia. In 1994, several years before the launch of Wikipedia, the French philosopher Pierre Levy published Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (subsequently published in English in 1997), a book that highlights the liberatory potential of online communities. As Levy argues, the internet empowers individuals to readily find and collaborate with others, ultimately forming communities built and sustained by the knowledge that each community member brings to bear on the greater whole. To Levy’s mind, this enables people to exist beyond hierarchical restrictions imposed by state governments, cultural norms, and other forces that impose limits upon people’s individual and collective autonomy. Similar ideas about the utopian potential of collectivized knowledge gained traction among popular and scholarly discourse over ensuing years, especially during the 2004-2008 timeframe, which saw the publication of The Wisdom of Crowds (2004), Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything (2006), Convergence Culture (2006), The Wealth of Networks (2006), Here Comes Everybody (2008), and Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (2008). In their respective ways, these books stressed newfound forms of renewed individual and collective empowerment at hand for those who use online technologies to self-organize and aim the fruits of 2 Wikipedia @ 20 Ideologies of Autonomy their collective prowess at particular outcomes, such as building and curating a centralized online encyclopedia. Many of these works became foundational texts in academic media studies. In 2014, when I entered a PhD program as an outgrowth of my own pursuit for greater intellectual and professional autonomy, many of these works were already staples of digital media courses and reading lists, with Wikipedia often spotlighted as an exemplar of Levy’s “collective intelligence” (1997), Axel Bruns’ “produsage” (2008) (wherein no significant difference exists between producers and users), and the autonomous potential of Yochai’s Benkler’s “networked information economy” (2006) built on peer production taking place outside the commercial auspices of capitalist marketplaces. Twenty years after the launch of Wikipedia, the site’s popularity and prominence among online information resources has led to a budding skepticism of Wikipedia. This skepticism views the site’s centralized mode of content production and editorial oversight as a process that concentrates and wields power in a manner similar to the very type of power impositions Levy and others sought to circumvent. A highly visible strand of this skepticism emerges from Everipedia, an upstart online encyclopedia launched in 2015 and, in 2017, adopted Blockchain technology and cryptocurrency as models for incentivizing and generating the production of encyclopedic content. Where the emergence of Wikipedia corresponded to utopian ideals about harnessing collectivized knowledge to build resources and communities at a remove from state and market-controlled strictures, Everipedia is bound up with similar ideas about the liberatory potential of Blockchain and cryptocurrencies to establish market-based models for peer production operating beyond the purview of state regulatory regimes. Thus, notions of autonomy undergird the creation and maintenance of Wikipedia and Everipedia, albeit with critical distinctions as to techno-economic conditions that enable greater autonomy. To better understand Wikipedia’s role in the media ecosystem in the last 20 years and the trajectory of social, economic, and technological models affiliated with Wikipedia-style organization and production, I chart the ways autonomy is conceptualized as a critical force amid attempts to (de)centralize encyclopedic production and access. In what follows, I unpack how both off-market peer production associated with Wikipedia and the importance of decentralization and economic incentives to Everipedia provide telling insights as to how individual and collective autonomy is conceived and what this might indicate about the future of online collaboration and production. My own experience with Wikipedia over the last twenty years subsumed notions of autonomy and, going forward, better typifying autonomy amidst overlapping vectors of social, economic, and technological arrangements helps to spotlight the potential for lived autonomy across virtual and material domains. Where Benkler asks “why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free?” (5), my ultimate aim is to unravel a nexus of circumstances threated into such questions. One of the most critical circumstances to unravel is competing notions of decentralization and centralization. 3 Wikipedia @ 20 Ideologies of Autonomy Autonomy and (De)Centralizing Online Production and Access With respect to the design of computer connectivity, centralization and decentralization are different ways to network computers and enable people to access the network. In centralized networks, all information and processes must pass through a single hub at the center of individual nodes within the network. Decentralized networks, on the other hand, have no singular hub at the center of network activity. Instead, the network is arranged into a series of regions branching off from one another. Each region has a central hub that organizes the nodes in the region, yet no one region is at the center of network activity. Centralized and decentralized networks are often allegorized as societal models, casting centralized state governments, banks, and other institutions as forces of power that exert control over all social activity inevitably brought into their domain. As exemplified by network design, centralization and decentralization can be complimentary modes of interactivity, even if presiding social institutions centralize power in a way that obfuscates their potential interrelationship. In The Wealth of Networks, Benkler describes a networked information economy (NIE) emerging from the “radical decentralization of intelligence in our communications network and the centrality of information, knowledge, culture, and ideas” (2006, 32). Thus, online connectivity offers centralized access to other people, digital media tools, and ways to align people and tools to contribute back to the online world, despite the dispersion of people across geographical, social, and institutional boundaries. Whereas 20th century mass media such as radio and television enabled only specialists to access media tools and use these tools for one-way communication aimed at an aggregated populace (the “masses”), networked connectivity breaks down these barriers, enjoining decentralized contributors to centralized spaces and modes of interactivity. As we will soon see, Everipedia and adherents of the Blockchain tend to situate decentralization and centralization as innately oppositional forces, positing decentralization as a solution to the imposition of power amassed by centralized processes. Benkler, however, stresses their complimentary nature, focusing on how they’re used as organizing principles more so than on which is used. While the mass media of the 20th century were highly centralized, their ability to restrict access and impose power was not due to their centralization, but because they were concentrated and commercialized at a “mass” economic scale. This distinction is critical, as things (i.e. Wikipedia) or processes
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