MansBestFriendster
Web 2.0 – Man's best friendster?
Trechos de Mute Vol 2 #4 - Web 2.0 – Man's best friendster?.
The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production obscures its
centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick
expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise where investors pocket the value
produced by unpaid users, ride on the technical innovations of the free software
movement and kill off the decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production.
[...] If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of venture
capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet startups. After the
dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing investment dollars needed a new
rationale for investing in online ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the
dominant attitude of the ’90s dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’,
was no longer attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure
and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were looking for.
Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a more attractive proposition.
Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web 2.0 is a business model, it means private
capture of community-created value. No one denies that the techology of sites like YouTube,
for instance, is trivial. This is more than evidenced by the large number of identical
services such as DailyMotion. The real value of YouTube is not created by the developers
of the site, but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the site. Yet,
when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth of Google stock, how much of
this stock was acquired by those that made all these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great
deal if you are an owner of a Web 2.0 company.
The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is captured by capitalist
investors. In some cases, the actual content they contribute winds up the property of
site owners. Private appropriation of community created value is a betrayal of the promise
of sharing technology and free cooperation.
[...] The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from its relationship to the
community, more specifically, the ability of the company to ‘harness collective
intelligence’, as O’Reilly puts it.
[...] With all of the emphasis on community created content and sharing, it’s easy
to overlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of all this content
and ability to monetise its value.
[...] Thus, to be successful and create profits for investors, a Web 2.0 company
needs to create mechanisms for sharing and collaboration that are centrally controlled.
The lack of central control possessed by Usenet and other peer controlled technologies
is the fundamental flaw. They only benefit their users, they do not benefit absentee
investors, as they are not ‘owned’.
[...] From this perspective, it can be said that Web 2.0 is capitalism’s preemptive
attack against P2P systems. [...] Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors, and thus
has more money to fund and promote centralised solutions. The end result of this is
that capitalist investment flowed into centralised solutions making them easy and cheap
or free for non-technical information producers to adopt. Thus, this ease of access
compared to the more technically challenging and expensive undertaking of owning your
own means of information production created a ‘landless’ information proletariat ready
to provide alienated content-creating labour for the the new info-landlords of Web 2.0.
[...] The internet seemed anathema to the capitalist imagination. Web 1.0, the original
dotcom boom, was characterised by a rush to own the infrastructure, to consolidate the
independent internet service providers. While money was thrown around quite randomly
as investors struggled to understand what this medium would actually be used for, the
overall mission was largely successful. If you had an internet account in 1996 it was
likely provided by some small local company. Ten years later, while some of the smaller
companies have survived most people get their internet access from gigantic
telecommunications corporations. The mission of Internet Investment Boom 1.0 was to
destroy the independent service provider and put large, well financed, corporations
back in the driving seat.
The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect of the internet. To make you, your
computer, and your internet connection dependent on connecting to a centralised service
that controls your ability to communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free, peer-to-peer
systems and the return of monolithic ‘online services’.
[...] Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share ownership,
requires centralised control, without which peer producers have no reason to share their
income with outside shareholders. Capitalism, therefore, is incompatible with free P2P
networks, and thus, so long as the financing of internet development comes from private
shareholders looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will
only become more restricted and centralised.
[...] That is, borders are also, in another sense, temporal. From Locke to Marx, the very
condition of the ostensible peace of the social contract would be connected up with the
temporal limitation of the work contract, in turn constitutive of the difference between the
‘freeman’ and the slave. But, what happens when such temporal limits are frayed by technics?
If I might put it like this, technics ‘comes home’, as it were. It becomes an intimate
habitus in the intersection of war and society. Even if this particular war is conducted in
more or less soft form, it is as the continuous war of democracy against the outbreak of war
within its borders – which is to say, the outbreak of another kind of war, something other
than the competitive clash between the formally equal, understood as a prelude to a contract.
And yet, if the proliferation of ‘social software’ and related copyfights suggests anything,
it is that while the concept of work preserves its Lockean associations with right and
enclosure, its temporal boundaries give way to an always-on, always available net-working.
Some time ago, Tiziana Terranova noted the disaffection of ‘netslaves’, experiencing ‘24/7
sweatshops’ and ‘ninety-hour weeks.’ She fruitfully related this to various (post-)Operaio
concepts such as the social factory, general intellect and, not least, affective labour.
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