The wealth of networks

What Hacker News says

1. CuriousSkepticSep 2019
   A nice deep dive into that thought is the book “The Wealth of Networks” by Yochai Benkler

   https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Networks

   It’s main focus is on what he calls Commons Based Peer-Production and how the default capitalistic model of private property doesn’t fit that mode of production

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2. malandrewMay 2014
   The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler and Information Rules by Hal Varian are good. Both are a bit dated though. If you know of any contemporary works to those, I'm all ears.
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3. eegilbertJan 2011
   If you have the time and interest, check out The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. It's a much better and thoughtful piece—and of course, much longer.
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4. neilkJan 2008
   Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks talks about this at length. The whole text is available online but don't let that stop you from running out right now and buying a seminal work of our time.

   Here's a passage you may find interesting:

   "For a wide range of reasons - institutional, cultural, and possibly technological - some resources are more readily capable of being mobilized by social relations than by money. If you want to get your nephew a job at a law firm in the United States today, a friendly relationship with the firm's hiring partner is more likely to help than passing on an envelope full of cash. If this theory of social capital is correct, then sometimes you should be willing to trade off financial rewards for social capital. Critically, the two are not fungible or cumulative."

   Benkler's argument is rather complex, so I urge people to read the chapter in full (if not the book) before gainsaying it.

   http://www.benkler.org/wealth_of_networks/index.php?title=Se...

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5. CuriousSkepticAug 2019
   This line of thinking can be expanded beyond copyright.

   Exclusive access to capital assets are almost by definition rent-seeking. While there is absolutely arguments to be had for the efficiency and effectiveness of such arrangement I think we could do better in capturing the extra rent from those we grant exclusivity.

   To that end all monopoly grants, such as copyright, but others too, should be tied to a cost. F.ex. one could perhaps find a proxy for the rent value of a particular grant by means of annual auctions. Such a scheme wouldn’t capture the cost of losing a resource as a commons though.

   See Henry George and geo-libertarianism for more thinking in this direction. But I think there’s some need for innovation to address “commons based peer-production” as Yochai Benkler terms it in The Wealth of Networks).

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6. dredmorbiusApr 2019
   No.

   It's that the stumbling block of "people won't run servers" is already untrue. People do.

   (They may not realise it, but they do.)

   They run fairly limited servers, with fairly low attack surfaces and assets, and they (with no small fault of vendors) administer them very poorly. But they run servers.

   I am both enthusiastic about what FreedomBox are trying to do and apprehensive of both possible success and consequences (I've been submitting multiple related articles to HN myself over the past few days). I'm watching the discussion with interest, there are good points being made.

   If you break down the challenge, it has multiple parts.

   Hardware really isn't the problem -- a $25 RaPi, the Olimex box, a Turris product, or one of Zotex's Pico systems[0] could serve amply, at price-points up to about $300, with full ownership of data, hardware, and link.

   Software mostly isn't -- the basic pieces exist, though some are rough. The federated social space, probably Friendica, is a good bet. Mastodon addreses microblogging. For blog-type interactions, RSS/Atom and a feed reader or aggregator works well, and would be a good addition to the FreedomBox.

   Social graph -- user adoption -- is a huge issue, though it's also somewhat self-sorting. Early adoptors of such technologies tend to be a fairly high-affinity and the space, if it develops sufficient early momentum, something that could be as few as several 100s or 1,000s of active users (and that could be 10k - 10m registrations or trials) may take root. Though early organic growth may appear slow.

   It's the soft areas can be frustratingly hard: picking the technology stack, from harware to OS, protocols, and implementations. This is where choice cuts two or three ways, often leaving bloody stumps. For the advocates, it's a battle for supremacy, for the general public its all a confusing blur. A hidden benefit of tech monopolies is that the constrain choice and simplify decisionmaking.

   As we've learnt over the past five years or so, the social consequences, large and small, of wholly unregulated or cabalistically controlled media systems are huge, and how FreedomBox or equivalents peturb that dynamic isn't clear, though I might be prepared to place some bets.[1]

   Media systems simply do not and can not resist hierarchical consolidation for reasons of basic graph theory, though the particulars of that consolidation and the administration, objectives, and guiding principles of key hubs fall along a wide continuum. Even with FreedomBox, it's certain that people will share resources and systems -- possibly a handful as families, households, and friends, possibly communities of hundreds, thousands, or millions. Services are cheap -- the direct provisioning costs of Diaspora run about $0.25/user-year[2], which is the definition of "too cheap to meter". As a service, bundling at less than 100-1,000 users is logistically impossible. Among my thoughts is how community bundlng might be facilitated.

   Running persistent network services over consumer-grade broadband (or worse) is also a major pain in the backside, often through vendor limitations, though those are imposed with good reason. Registering and keeping control of a domain space is an obstacle to most people. Maybe not you, maybe not some of your friends, but yes, the general public.

   And then we get to the direct service-administration risks: anything from service interruptions to hardware failure, data loss, system compromise, botnets, malware, denial of service, surveillance, credentials fraud, blackmail, legal regulations (copyright, patents, privacy, libel), and more. Decidedly nontrivial.

   FreedomBox at least is building from some of the best possible bases: Debian GNU/Linux, experts in online law[3], Free Software, open protocols, and simple, inexpensive hardware. It might succeed, and if it fails, the lessons should be highly illuminating.

   But, and back to my point previously, the hurdle of getting people to run dedicated server appliances is not the core challenge, though possibly having them do that without realising they're doing so is informative.

   ________________________________

   Notes:

   0. https://www.zotac.com/product/mini_pcs/zbox_p_series

   1. I'm somewhat involved in a project in this space, https://Darcy.is

   2. Experience from https://pluspora.com, run by two people and hosting 10k+ users. Mind that additional admin and moderation services add to this.

   3. Eben Moglen, a/k/a "Richard Stallman's lawyer", and Yochai Benkler (Th Wealth of Networks), whom I'm very late to the party in discovering just within the past week, among many others.

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