The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom is a book by Harvard Law School professor Yochai Benkler published by Yale University Press on April 3, 2006. The book has been recognized as one of the most influential works of its time concerning the rise and impact of the Internet on the society, particularly in the sphere of economics. It also helped popularize the term Benkler coined few years earlier, the commons-based peer production (CBPP). A PDF of the book is downloadable under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Share-alike license. Benkler has said that his editable online book is "an experiment of how books might be in the future", demonstrating how authors and readers might connect instantly or even collaborate.
Summary
Part 1: The networked information economy Benkler describes the current epoch as a "moment of opportunity" due to the emergence of what he terms the Networked Information Economy (NIE), a "technological-economic feasibility space" that is the result of the means of producing media becoming more socially accessible. Benkler states that his methodology in the text is to look at social relations using economics, liberal political theory, and focuses on individual actions in nonmarket relations. Benkler sees communication and information as the most important cultural and economic outputs of advanced economies. He traces the emergence and development of various communications (radio, newspapers, television) through the 19th and 20th centuries as functions of increasingly centralized control due to the high cost factor of production, and believes that media was thus produced on an industrial scale. Benkler's term for this is the industrial information economy. With the emergence of computers, networks, and increasingly affordable media production outlets, Benkler introduces the concept of the NIE, which sees media access as a form of power, and recognizes decentralized individual actions in said media as a result of the removal of physical and economic constraints to the creation of media. To Benkler, this is due to a new feasibility space: lowered costs of access via digital production and radical decentralization rather than centralized messaging ("coordinate coexistence", 30). This results in emerging productions of information that use non-proprietary strategies (such as GNU licences and collaborative production formats).
Goods The forms of cultural productions—music is an example Benkler uses frequently—are either rival or nonrival. Rival products decrease as they are used (e.g. pounds of flour), the use of nonrival products (e.g. listening to a song) does not decrease their availability for further use. Static vs. dynamic efficiency: one premise of exclusive rights has always been that only financial incentives can facilitate participation in information production. Benkler argues that in an age where computers reduce the cost of production, the equation of innovation-to-rights shifts as well. The declining cost of communication means that in the networked society there are fewer barriers for individual cultural production that are "meaningful" to other users. Thus, in network economy, "human capacity becomes primary scarce resource".
Peer production To close this section, Benkler argues that the networked environment makes possible a new modality of organizing production: that of commons-based peer production. He discusses the parameters of the commons and gives the example of free and open-source software. He discusses shared acts of communication (utterances, reviews, distribution of information) and goods (like server space). Lastly, he draws a contrast to the regulation and rival resource of radio spectrum bandwidth and the sharability of space in a digital commons.
Economics of social production Benkler argues here that the networked society allows for the emergence of non-hierarchical groups that are committed to information production. Open software is one of the ways one can view the emergence of this new form of information production. "Commons-based" peer production eschews traditional rational choice models offered by economists. Benkler details some of the key components of this new economy based not on financial remuneration but on user-involvement, accreditation, and tools that promote collaboration between individuals. In order to understand why people engage in production aside from financial incentives, Benkler argues that one can distinguish two types of motivation:
Extrinsic motivation: motivation that comes from outside in the form of financial reward, punishment, etc. Intrinsic motivation: motivation that derives from within oneself, such as the pleasure involved in completing a task.
Part 2: The political economy of property and commons In this section, Benkler examines the relationship of individual access to participation in the dissemination and creation of information via communication systems, building on his earlier ideas of commons-based peer production. He examines the historical emergence of the mass media, looking at the relationship between print and radio and ever-broadening, industrial broadcast models of production which became supported by advertising. The criticisms of mass media which Benkler brings up include:
its commercialism, because he sees that as supporting the development of programs that appeal to large audiences rather than specific interests, in the name of mass broadcasting; limited intake of information, due to the relatively small number of people gathering information; too much power assigned to too few people. Benkler moves from this overview and criticism to exploring what this text describes as the potential for networked communications to do:
"Better access to knowledge and the emergence of less capital-dependent forms of productive social organization offer the possibility that the emergence of the networked information economy will offer up opportunities for improvement in economic justice, on scales both global and local."
From passive to active For Benkler, another key component of the network society is that individuals are more active in producing their education and cultural production. According to him, online encyclopedias such as Wikipedia allow for users to create rather than just consume knowledge and information.
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