Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Since the 1990s he has played a role in characterizing the role of information commons and decentralized collaboration to innovation, information production, and freedom in the networked economy and society. His books include The Wealth of Networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom (Yale University Press 2006), which won academic awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in communications. In 2012 he received a lifetime achievement award from Oxford University in recognition of his extraordinary contribution to the study and public understanding of the Internet and information goods. His work is socially engaged, winning him the Ford Foundation Visionaries Award in 2011, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for 2007, and the Public Knowledge IP3 Award in 2006. It is also anchored in the realities of markets, cited as “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times and named best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. Benkler has advised governments and international organizations on innovation policy and telecommunications, and serves on the boards or advisory boards of several nonprofits engaged in working towards an open society.
Towards An Open Social Economy
Democratic capitalism is in crisis. Brexit and the Trump nomination marked victories for xenophobic economic nationalism that would have been unimaginable in these two bastions of free trade, globalization, and liberal pluralism a decade ago. They reflect one trajectory of rebellion against the era of oligarchic capitalism that began in 1973 and crashed on the shoals of the Great Recession. The urgent task of the moment is to define a clear alternative.
Platform cooperativism is at the cutting edge of defining that next ideological framework, the set of ideas, institutions, norms, practices, and beliefs that will allow us to understand the present stage of market society and to re-embed markets in social relations in ways that will produce a more egalitarian, open, and politically stable market society.
Work on the commons and cooperation, on collaborative and learning organizations, FOSS, peer production, and a broader set of disciplines and practices that have developed over the past twenty years provide the foundations of a more decentralized, self-governed, socially-embedded model of market society. It emphasizes the diversity of motivations, institutions, and organizational forms, it recognizes that power in markets is as endemic as it is in the state, and seeks to construct systems that are resilient to these forms of power and allow their participants to engage in self-governance and continuous experimentation, learning, and adaptation in communities of practice.
This emerging view of market society is in direct competition with more technologically-deterministic, still-neoliberal conceptions of how market society will develop in the coming decades as well as the resurgent xenophobic nationalism that challenges the very foundations of open society. Winning that battle of ideas, not on paper but in the real world of running organizations of cooperative, social production, will be central to developing a socially-embedded market society.