Share the Love?

Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as "one of the digital pioneers" in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, 'You Are Not a Gadget.'  In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.

Yesterday evening we were fortunate to have Jaron Lanier, described by the New York Times as "one of the digital pioneers" in the internet age, come to give a talk at the RSA about his new book, 'You Are Not a Gadget.'  In this book Jaron develops a more cautious tone to his previously optimistic take on the power of the internet to decentralise cultural production and empower a more diverse and diffuse cultural sphere.

Instead, he argues that a more pernicious by-product of the mantras of 'open culture' and 'information wants to be free' is coming to dominate.  This by-product is a destructive new social contract whereby, as he writes, "authors, journalists, musicians and artists are encouraged to treat the fruits of their intellects and imaginations as fragments to be given without pay to the hive mind.  Reciprocity takes the form of self-promotion.  Culture is to become precisely nothing but advertising."

This raises an interesting point for us in Connected Communities, for it suggests that this 'social contract' might be re-spun in a more positive light, whereby culture becomes precisely nothing but altruism.  This possibility is deflated, however, when we consider what John Tierney, in the New York Times, describes as a "crucial distinction between online piracy and house burglary: There are a lot more homeowners than burglars, but there are a lot more consumers of digital content than producers of it."  The problem, then, isn't so much the giving, but rather the disequilibrium that has emerged between those who provide and those who retrieve online content.

It is in part in response to this disequilibrium that Jaron proposes an overhaul of the ideological underpinnings of the Web, comprising a revision of its software structure and, notably, the introduction of a universal system of micropayments (among other innovations).  The suggestion is that even in the online world where the scope for a global economy of regard is huge - in so far as transaction costs can be minimised and information shared with incredible ease - penalties, controls and prices need to be introduced to ensure that this vast potential is not abused.

This seems, in sum, to be a call for a more healthy form of reciprocity, whereby payment is not so much seen as antithetical to reciprocal relations - as Tim Harford put it recently "many policy wonks believe ...that cash incentives are counterproductive and even morally corrosive" - but rather, where needed, as a formalisation of the very process of reciprocation.

Back on the ground, in traditional, place-based communities, the implications of this are as yet unclear.  However, as we start at Connected Communities to try to lubricate the exchange of individuals' and groups' social capital, assets and resources, it does raise the question not only of how we should expect communities to cope with unequal flows of time, knowledge and resources (time banks may be one possibility), but also of how any regulatory framework that we develop around this accounts for the differentiated stocks of social capital (and so individuals’ capacity to share) that already exist.