YOCHAI BENKLER

Professor of Law, Yale Law School; Author, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom Extracting Signal From Noisy Spin I agree with much of what Jaron Lanier has to say in this insightful essay. The flashy title and the conflation of argments, however, conspire to suggest that he offers a more general attack on distributed, cooperative networked information production, or what I have called peer production, than Lanier in fact offers. What are the points of agreement? First, Lanier acknowledges that decentralized production can be effective at certain tasks. In these he includes science-oriented definitions in Wikipedia, where the platform more easily collates the talents, availability, and diverse motivations throughout the network than a slower-moving organization like Britannica can; free and open source software, though perhaps more in some tasks that are more modular and require less of an overall unifying aesthetic, such as interface. Second, he says these do not amount to a general "collective is always better," but rather to a system that itself needs to be designed to guard against mediocre or malicious contributions through implementation of technical fixes, what he calls "low pass filters." These parallel the central problem characterized by the social software design movement, as one can see in Clay Shirky's work. Those familiar with my own work in Coase's Penguin and since will notice that I only slightly modified Lanier's language to show the convergence of claims. Where, then, is the disagreement? Lanier has two driving concerns. The first is deep: loss of individuality, devaluation of the unique, responsible, engaged individual as the core element of a system of information, knowledge, and culture. The second strikes me as more superficial, or at least as more time- and space-bound. That is the concern with the rise of constructs like "hive mind" and metafilters and efforts to build business models around them. Like Lanier, I see individuals as the bearers of moral claims and the sources of innovation, creativity, and insight. Unlike Lanier, I have argued that enhanced individual practical capabilities represent the critical long term shift introduced by the networked information economy, improving on the operation of markets and governments in the preceding century and a half. This is where I think we begin to part ways. Lanier has too sanguine a view of markets and governments. To me, markets, governments (democratic or otherwise), social relations, technical platforms are all various and partly overlapping systems within which individuals exist. They exhibit diverse constraints and affordances, and enable and disable various kinds of action for the individuals who inhabit them. Because of cost constraints and organizational and legal adaptations in the last 150 years, our information, knowledge, and cultural production system has taken on an industrial form, to the exclusion of social and peer-production. Britney Spears and American Idol are the apotheosis of that industrial information economy, not of the emerging networked information economy. So too is the decline he decries for the New York Times. In my recent work, I have been trying to show how the networked public sphere improves upon the mass mediated public sphere along precisely the dimensions of Fourth Estate function that Lanier extolls, and how the distributed blogosphere can correct, sometimes, at least, the mass media failings. It was, after all, Russ Kick's Memory Hole, not the New York Times, that first broke pictures of military personnel brought home in boxes from Iraq. It was one activist, Bev Harris with her website blackboxvoting, an academic group led by Avi Rubin, a few Swarthmore students, and a network of thousands who replicated the materials about Diebold voting machines after 2002 that led to review and recall of many voting machines in California and Maryland. The mainstream media, meanwhile, sat by, dutifully repeating the reassurances of officials who bought the machines and vendors who sold them. Now, claims that the Internet democratizes are old, by now. Going beyond the 1990s naive views of democracy in cyberspace, on the one hand, and the persistent fears of fragmentation and the rise of Babel, on the other hand, we can now begin to interpret the increasing amoung of data we have on our behavior on the the Web and in the blogsphere. What we see in fact is that we are not intellectual lemmings. We do not meander about in the intellectual equivalent of Brownian motion. We cluster around topics we care about. We find people who care about similar issues. We talk. We link. We see what others say and think. And through our choices we develop a different path for determining what issues are relevant and salient, through a distributed system that, while imperfect, is less easily corrupted than the advertising supported media that dominated the twentieth century. Wikipedia captures the imagination not because it is so perfect, but because it is reasonably good in many cases: a proposition that would have been thought preposterous a mere half-decade ago. The fact that it is now compared not to the mainstream commercial encyclopedias like Grollier's, Encarta, or Columbia, but to the quasi-commercial, quasi-professional gold standard of the Britannica is itself the amazing fact. It is, after all, the product of tens of thousands of mostly well-intentioned individuals, some more knowledgeable than others, but almost all flying in the face of homo economicus and the Leviathan combined. Wikipedia is not faceless, by an large. Its participants develop, mostly, persistent identities (even if not by real name) and communities around the definitions. They may not be a perfect complete replacement for Britannica. But they are an alternative, with different motivations, accreditation, and organization. They represent a new solution space to a set of information production problems that we need to experiment with, learn, and develop; but which offers a genuinely alternative form of production than markets, firms, or governments, and as such an uncorrelated or diverse system of action in the information environment. Improvements in productivity and freedom inhere in this diversity of systems available for human action, not in a generalized claim of superiority for one of these systems over all the others under all conditions. This leaves the much narrower set of moves that are potentially the legitimate object of Lanier's critique: efforts that try to depersonalize the "wisdom of crowds," unmooring it from the individuals who participate; try to create ever-higher-level aggregation and centralization in order to "capture" that "wisdom;" or imagine it as emergent in the Net, abstracted from human minds. I'm not actually sure there is anyone who genuinely holds this hyperbolic a version of this view. I will, in any event, let others defend it if they do hold such a view. Here I will only note that the centralized filters Lanier decries are purely an effort to recreate price-like signaling in a context — information in general, and digital networks in particular — where the money-based price system is systematically disfunctional. It may be right or wrongheaded; imperfect or perfect. But it is not collectivism. Take Google's algorithm. It aggregates the distributed judgments of millions of people who have bothered to host a webpage. It doesn't take any judgment, only those that people care enough about to exert effort to insert a link in their own page to some other page. In other words, relatively "scarce" or "expensive" choices. It doesn't ask the individuals to submerge their identity, or preferences, or actions in any collective effort. No one spends their evenings in consensus-building meetings. It merely produces a snapshot of how they spend their scarce resources: time, web-page space, expectations about their readers' attention. That is what any effort to synthesize a market price does. Anyone who claims that they have found transcendent wisdom in the pattern emerging from how people spend their scarce resources is a follower of Milton Friedman, not of Chairman Mao. At that point, Lanier's critique could be about the way in which markets of any form quash individual creativity and unique expression; it might be about how excessive layers of filtering degrade the quality of information extracted from people's behavior with their scarce resources, so that these particular implementations are poor market-replacement devices. In either case, his lot is with those of us who see the emergence of social production and peer production as an alternative to both state-based and market-based, closed, proprietary systems, which can enhance creativity, productivity, and freedom. To conclude: The spin of Lanier's piece is wrong. Much of the substance is useful. The big substantive limitation I see is his excessively rosy view of the efficacy of the price system in information production. Networked-based, distributed, social production, both individual and cooperative, offers a new system, alongside markets, firms, governments, and traditional non-profits, within which individuals can engage in information, knowledge, and cultural production. This new modality of production offers new challenges, and new opportunities. It is the polar opposite of Maoism. It is based on enhanced individual capabilities, employing widely distributed computation, communication, and storage in the hands of individuals with insight, motivation, and time, and deployed at their initiative through technical and social networks, either individually or in loose voluntary associations.