Thread by @Conaw

In 2007 I was studying ethnobotany, thinking my future was in the Amazon studying traditional plant medicine

Then I saw a talk from Yochai Benkler, and read his masterpiece The Wealth of Networks

A thread on non-rival goods, commons based peer production, and OG #gameb thinking

First up, if you were reading Benkler in 2004, AirBnB, Uber and Lyft would have been obvious winners.

His paper "Sharing Nicely" gives a formal definition of shareable good, and shows how tech lowers transaction costs for reallocation

benkler.org/SharingNicely.…

His 2005 TED talk on Open Source Economics is really the place to start though. (TED really was amazing back in the day)

I saw this and thought, OMFG, this guy is the Karl Marx of the 21st Century

Completely changed the course of my life.

ted.com/talks/yochai_b…

A few highlights

1) In the **most advanced** sectors of the **most advanced** economies, the means of production are already very widely distributed -- they're in the hands of everyone with a $1000 laptop.

2) This is true largely because of the billions and billions of dollars worth of labor that has been poured into open source.

When you want to write software today, the vast majority of what you need can be taken free from the commons.

Languages, libraries, tooling

3) Commons based peer production -- is really only possible when you're dealing with goods that have basically no marginal cost.

1st one extremely expensive
2nd one nearly free

He calls them non-rival goods.

Only other person I've heard use that term is @jgreenhall re #gameb

There are all sorts of things which could be made non-rival and added to the commons which are currently locked into artificial scarcity because we haven't figured out how to reliably produce them otherwise

Formulas for prescription drugs for one

This copy/left documentary goes into how, in Brazil, they chose to ignore US patents on drugs and brought cost down exponentially

Not in itself enough to ensure we keep making new drugs, but shows why figuring out incentives is priority

Excellent watch

vimeo.com/8040182

I've been pretty shocked over the past 12 years how few other tech entrepreneurs I've met who've heard of Benkler or where motivated by his frameworks.

Assume it's because either
A) A lot of his work focuses on law and copyright, spectrum governance etc

B) he isn't as wide eyed

But the core ideas are highly motivating, and provide a different orientation to how to think about social change and building the future

How do we create a context where more is being added to the commons?

How do we convert rival to non-rival goods?

The first question deals with changing institutions and context of economic production, and can lead one in revolutionary directions

Second, to me, is just about "Software Eating the World" and progress in hard tech

You figure out 3D printing and nanotech and everything = info

Benkler talks about Wikipedia, Linux, and Apache Web Server as modern wonders of the world.

Places where loosely coordinated hobbyists outcompeted firms and nation states.

My question has been, what Wikipedias have we not built yet, for want of the right wiki?

Wikipedia handles things we already know, even there questionably well, as it grounds out on verification from traditional sensemaking institutions that are losing authority.

If you want to contribute to advancing knowledge -- gatekept peer review is still the main commons

This is why, starting from Benkler, there is a straight line @michael_nielsen's "Reinventing Discovery"

If we want abundance, we need to expand the commons, especially at the frontiers of human knowledge

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinventi…

https://mobile.twitter.com/Conaw/status/1128711113850286080

All of my work in tech has been because I read Benkler, and one way or another its been political.

It's just a different kind of political.

"You don't change things by fighting existing reality, you change things by building a new one which makes the old one obsolete."

If you're interested in these ideas, highly recommend listening to this interview with @jgreenhall and @dthorson

Someone else coming to very similar conclusions, at the same time, from different source

open.spotify.com/episode/591s5m…