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The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, by Yochai Benkler
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Review
"[An] ambitious attempt to understand how the internet is changing society. . . . The book draws on a staggering array of disciplines: from graph theory to economics, law to political science. But Benkler’s breadth is not at the expense of depth. . . . He never falls for easy, superficial conclusions. His writing is clear and readable . . . Keeping it as light as he does is a remarkable feat for a heavyweight piece of work. . . . This is an important book."—Paul Miller, Financial Times Magazine"New networks offer a glimpse of the new polity and the ancient regime is struggling to prevent its birth. The Wealth of Networks is a reveille for netizens. . . . [It] is about the ‘transformation of the information and cultural production sector.’ Few are unaware that this sector is undergoing transformation, and Benkler’s identification of major forces at work is important and enlightening."—Paul Duguid, Times Literary Supplement"Benkler excels . . . in bringing together disparate strands of the new information economy, from the democratization of the newsmedia via blogs to the online effort publicizing weaknesses in Diebold voting machines. . . . His defense of the Internet's power to enrich people's lives is often stirring."―Publishers Weekly"The Wealth of Networks details the emergence of a networked society that if allowed to flourish will produce more value than does a proprietary system. . . . This book deserves to be read beyond the scope of the few scholars interested in intellectual property issues."―Debora Halbert, The Law and Politics Book Review"The Wealth of Networks is Internet utopianism for grown-ups. Benkler’s sprawling argument sums up years of work on the economics, sociology, and politics of information technology. He is interested in the world that exists mostly for what it shows about what might be―a charitable definition of the utopian temper. His book is one part introduction to a vast and rapidly growing field of technology, economics, and law, and one part an object lesson in the place of utopian hopes in mature liberal thought. Benkler makes a strong case that we disown utopianism at our peril. In making that argument, he develops a liberal and realistic version of utopian thinking that avoids some of the hazards of the approach."―Jedediah Purdy, American Prospect"Professor Benkler’s manifesto turns a much-needed spotlight on issues of great scope and moment that deserve far more public attention than they’ve yet gotten. For that reason, we’ve chosen Strategy & Business as the best book about the future in 2006."—Howard Rheingold, The Wealth of Networks (Best Books '06)"A tour de force argument. . . . Benkler argues that now is the time to consider the balance between the promise of technology and the threats to its full measure. His is a book that gets behind (or beyond) current policy specifics to engage the basic issues involved. Important reading."―Communication Booknotes Quarterly"Erudite, passionate, and economically sophisticated, Professor Benkler's new book is required reading for anyone interested in the democratic (and not-so-democratic) vistas of the Internet age."―Harvard Law ReviewWinner of the 2006 Donald McGannon Award for Social and Ethical Relevance in Communications Policy Research given by the Donald McGannon Communication Research Center at Fordham University, New YorkSelected as a 2007 AAUP University Press Book for Public and Secondary School LibrariesWinner of the American Political Science Association's 2007 Don K. Price Award for the Best Book in Science and Technology PoliticsWinner of the 2008 CITASA Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association section on Communication and Information Technologies"In this book, Benkler establishes himself as the leading intellectual of the information age. Profoundly rich in its insight and truth, this work will be the central text for understanding how networks have changed how we understand the world. No work to date has more carefully or convincingly made the case for a fundamental change in how we understand the economy of society."—Lawrence Lessig, Professor of Law, Stanford Law School"A lucid, powerful, and optimistic account of a revolution in the making."—Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library"This deeply researched book documents the fundamental changes in the ways in which we produce and share ideas, information, and entertainment. Then, drawing widely on the literatures of philosophy, economics, and political theory, it shows why these changes should be welcomed, not resisted. The trends examined, if allowed to continue, will radically alter our lives—and no other scholar describes them so clearly or champions them more effectively than Benkler."—William W. Fisher III, Hale and Dorr Professor of Intellectual Property Law, Harvard University, Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society"At last a book that confronts the politics and economics of the Internet in a fundamental way, moving beyond the surface of policy debate to reveal the basic structure of the challenges we confront."—Bruce Ackerman, Sterling Professor of Law and Political Science, Yale University"A magnificent achievement. Yochai Benkler shows us how the Internet enables new commons-based methods for producing goods, remaking culture, and participating in public life. The Wealth of Networks is an indispensable guide to the political economy of our digitally networked world."—Jack M. Balkin, Professor of Law and Director of the Information Society Project, Yale University
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About the Author
Yochai Benkler is the Joseph M. Field ’55 Professor of Law at Yale Law School, Yale University.
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Product details
Paperback: 528 pages
Publisher: Yale University Press; 9/23/07 edition (October 23, 2007)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0300125771
ISBN-13: 978-0300125771
Product Dimensions:
9.5 x 1.5 x 6.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.2 out of 5 stars
17 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#399,613 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
First, I should note that The Wealth Of Networks is terribly edited. Given that Benkler thanked his editor for his Herculean work at the beginning of the book, I can only imagine the state it started in; as it is, it ended with glaring grammatical errors, including using "effect" when he meant "affect" and "wave" when he meant "waive". (I'll provide specific examples sometime tomorrow.) Editing, apparently, is a craft that is only noticed in its absence. I didn't realize this until I read The Wealth of Networks. By the time I was done with the book, I was copyediting every page.None of this mentions the stylistic errors, which are rife. Benkler uses the first-person singular pronoun once, or possibly twice, in the whole book; its use is jarring. The rest is passively voiced and all the words are sesquipedalian. Nothing's wrong with inconsistency in style, when deployed artfully, but it feels more like an oversight here than a deliberate plan.Those of you who've read the book will perhaps object to all this cavilling over style. Again, it's only noticeable because it's so bad; normally I would almost ignore the style and get to the meat of the argument. It was hard to do so here.Benkler's argument is quite systematic and nearly has the force of pure logic. His claim -- propounded over a decade's worth of papers and synthesized in this book -- is that the new economics of the Internet fundamentally change deep parts of our culture. Cheap communication allows projects like Linux and the Wikipedia to emerge and more to the point work very well. Each of us can invest trivial amounts of our time and money, yet the end result is something much greater than any of us could have expected. Person A links to person B on his website, and lots of person A's follow along with their own person B's. Pretty soon there's enough information -- from our trivial little links alone -- that Google can come through and aggregate that information into a profoundly useful information-retrieval tool. Millions of people click on star ratings on Amazon, and pretty soon we can all get highly accurate suggestions about books we might like. I copyedit the Wikipedia, and so do hundreds of thousands of others; before long, the Wikipedia competes with Britannica.Benkler's task is to take his understanding of what makes all this stuff tick, and think through the consequences. What does it mean for democracy when people can communicate cheaply? We're starting to get a taste of the answer with blogs. The media available for political discourse before the Net came around -- like television -- were passive. Someone else produced a lot of content at great cost, and pushed it out to a lot of stupid devices that couldn't really do anything interesting; televisions are "dumb terminals" for video. Now we can all be publishers for no cost, and the devices are smart enough that we can talk back and start conversations. Yes, we're still getting much of our news from old-media stalwarts like the New York Times, but the medium allows us to blog about it, post comments to others' blogs, and search around and see what others have said about it. All of this is possible because the publishing tools are getting easier, because communication is cheap, and because computers are increasingly available to everyone. We now have media that permit and encourage conversation; the old broadcast media never did.In a world where communication is no longer passive, and where you don't need a multimillion-dollar television studio to get your ideas out to the world, democracy changes radically. For one thing, the fringes suddenly have a voice that they didn't have before. It's obvious, just from thinking for a moment about how mass media work, that they serve inoffensive pabulum to the least common denominator. If you can choose to broadcast a show that might offend people or upset them (say, displaying images from Abu Ghraib), or else broadcast the latest news about Brad and Jen, you will choose the latter in a heartbeat. The point in mass media is not to publish the widest array of views, but to maximize revenue. Maximizing revenue means appealing to the broadest mass of people, which in turn means being as inoffensive as possible.It's not difficult to see that mass-market media incentives are quite different than the incentives that a democracy should strive for. Commercial interests are not our interests, orthodox capitalist training to the contrary. So what happens when media become non-commercial, like blogs? Suddenly you have millions of people who can get their ideas out to the world, and lots of things happen. For instance, it becomes clear to people that there's more than just the Republican Party and the Democratic Party -- or even Republicans, Democrats, Greens and Libertarians. The whole tone of the culture changes. Biting commentary gets airtime. We become active. We argue, like people in a democracy are supposed to.All of this is not pie-in-the-sky idealism. As Benkler makes very clear, it's kind of inevitable. The axiom is basically this: people will do more of what's easy for them, and less of what's difficult. With the cost of communications technology now negligible, lots of things become easy.The objection that not everyone is a blogger is irrelevant. It may in fact be true that the majority of Americans are passive dullards. Even if it is, the fact remains that there is a new set of technologies that let many of us do things that we couldn't have done before, and it would take willful blindness to believe that this leaves democracy unchanged.Benkler builds out the argument in considerably more detail and considerably more verbosity. He wants you to understand what is likely to come out of all of this, what the challenges are, and where the promise may lead us. It's a tremendous synthesis.Alas, it will take people like Larry Lessig to make Americans understand this promise; Benkler has confined himself to academia. As I may have mentioned, I've heard a lot of trashing on Lessig recently -- that he's a shallow thinker who wasn't even a good enough lawyer to win Eldred. I've heard Benkler's book described as a landmark that people will be discussing in 20 years. Allow me to disagree. I think Code is a much more important work, both for the ground it cleared and for its rhetorical power. I think Lessig's later book Free Culture could actually get people storming the gates of Disney, whereas Benkler will never.More to the point, Benkler's work seems like much more of a look back than a plan for forward motion. If you already use Linux and have internalized its lessons, you hardly need the theory that Benkler gives you. If you have really thought about the Wikipedia, then you can skip over that chunk of his book. A copy of Code and a thorough understanding of the GPL will probably give you 90% of what The Wealth of Networks does.In twenty years, The Wealth of Networks will stand as a very nice description of the world as it stood in 2006. Code will mark the beginning of a movement. As someone who is ensconced in that movement, I believe that everyone should have a copy of The Wealth of Networks on his shelf and a copy of Code in his pocket.
First published 2 months before Twitter was publicly launched, Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks hit stores in May of 2006, but still provides a startlingly accurate picture of today's 2009 world. In a world where Facebook, YouTube, and MySpace receive over 250 million unique visitors every month, where traditional advertising revenue is in double-digit decline, where 95% of all songs downloaded last year weren't paid for, and where Wikipedia has 13 million articles in 200 hundred different languages--it is clear that old ways of creating and disseminating information are breaking down and being replaced. Wealth of Networks provides a lucid analysis of this upheaval and the competing forces struggling with in it, as well as elucidating the consequences that might result from dominance by just one of these forces.In Wealth of Networks Yochai Benkler discusses the emergence of a new "networked information economy" that breaks much from earlier industrial modes of production. The rise of technology innovation in creation, distribution, and storage of digital information creates an environment more conducive to the rise of effective non-market, non-proprietary forms of production. Benkler sees the shift provided by the falling marginal costs of creating, distributing, and storing informational goods as an opportunity to rethink the institutional structure by which the information economy is governed. Rather than attempting to harness these changes that fly in the face of conventional economic logic, Benkler advocates opening ourselves to the potential provided by peer production, and a commons based approach to the information economy. He argues that there are both economic and social benefits to the emergence of a significant non-market space in the information economy, but cautions that existing intellectual property laws could serve to retard this growth. Based on his belief that the rise of non-proprietary models will enable greater personal autonomy, personal freedom, expanded political democracy, and more extensive cultural transparency, he advocates for the creation of an institutional structure that will support the emergence of an increasingly non-market informational economy.Benkler's argument gains strength by utilizing arguments based on both economic efficiency and on normative social desirability. Benkler demonstrates that a commons based and not proprietary approach to informational goods may result in increased efficiency because it reduces the cost to future innovation. He points out that extensive licensing may limit future advancement because so much of informational technological growth relies upon work that has come before. Moreover, he explains that this commons based approach will result in a more equitable distribution of informational goods in the future. Not only will it encourage future innovation in advanced societies, having low-cost informational products will enable lesser developed nations to access key informational goods enabling them to address issues of specific relevance in their nations. He uses the development of medical treatments for diseases plaguing the 3rd world as an example of this by pointing out that in a proprietary model the economic incentives for 1st world pharmaceutical companies to research these is minimal, and that the cost for 3rd world companies or non-profits to do so on their own is prohibitive. A frequent criticism of an informational commons argument based only on reason of equity is that it would be economically detrimental to the major pharmaceutical companies. Thus, by addressing the economic efficiency component as well as social benefit Benkler provides a much stronger and multi-faceted argument.Benkler clearly articulates the benefits of the networked information economy, but spends very little time on the costs. His prognosis seems positive when viewed from the light of personal freedom and democracy, but for those of us who do have some concern over money the issue of what will happen to the information based economies of the developed world remains somewhat fuzzy. If the model of non-proprietary production comes to dominate it seems it will result in a tremendous transfer of wealth out of the monetarily based market. Will we reap the benefits of increased democracy, and more ability to function autonomously only at the cost of a downward change in our standard of living? How will we replace the monetary value lost to the non-proprietary market? Benkler basically ignores these questions because he is much more concerned with answering questions about the normative social costs and benefits, as well as refuting claims that information is not efficiently produced in a non-proprietary system. However, it seems that there are very real economic implications in terms of monetary cost that would result in significantly shrinking the industrial information economy, and Benkler could have benefited by acknowledging this problem even if it were just in a brief nod to the wrenching effects they may have.In conclusion I highly recommend Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks because it hits upon the core tensions at the center of the modern informational revolution that is occurring and still rings uncannily true despite the rapid changes that have occurred in the years since its publication. While it lacks acknowledgment of the monetary cost adopting an information commons approach might exact this is largely due to the face that Benkler is more concerned with non-monetary social gain, and in this arena Benkler mounts an impressive, detailed, and incredibly persuasive argument. In many ways this book reads as a call to action with Benkler reminding us to be vigilant because in this moment of transition the choices we make will decide much more than the future of copyright, but the future of our own freedom, and even the future of democracy the world over.
This academic treatise is long, but never dry or overly technical. Benkler fills it with fascinating examples of intellectual property law gone awry. His argument is not that copyrights, trademarks and patents should be abolished, but that they must be reexamined and refined in the Internet age, rather than ramped up ad infinitum to the point that ordinary people are painted as criminals. Benkler argues that mechanisms designed to encourage innovation under very different economic conditions often hamper innovation today. This book is a more intellectual complement to Laurence Lessig's lighter fare, such as Free Culture.Unfortunately, Benkler rarely puts his arguments in explicit terms, making it difficult to parse the implications of what he's saying. He seems to be advocating a much larger role for government in some areas; for instance, after making the bizarre claim that newspapers don't require copyright protection (on the specious grounds that they take in little revenue from licensing their content), he then holds up the BBC as an ideal media establishment. The implication would seem to be that he thinks of nationalization as an acceptable solution to the plight of our newspapers; but surely there is a difference between a public institution that competes with private media, versus a government monopoly on media? But before Benkler can grapple with this, he's moved on to another subject. Although I agree with Benkler's broader argument, many of his specific claims are just frustrating.Note that the entire book is available freely at its official website, where it can be found both in PDF format and as a public wiki for people to discuss passages in detail.
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