Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free - By Justin Fox at TIME (printout) - 0 views
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Thursday, Feb. 15, 2007 Getting Rich off Those Who Work for Free By Justin Fox
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It might seem very odd to look to a long-dead Russian anarchist for business advice. But Peter Kropotkin's big idea--that there are important human motivations beyond what he called "reckless individualism"--is very relevant these days. That's because one of the most interesting questions in business has become how much work people will do for free.
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he proposed in his 1902 book, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, that the survival of animal species and much of human progress depended on the tendency to help others.
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Open-source, volunteer-created computer software like the Linux operating system and the Firefox Web browser have also established themselves as significant and lasting economic realities.
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That's not true yet in the worlds of science, news and entertainment: we're still figuring out what the role of volunteers will be, but that it will be much bigger than in the past seems obvious.
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"The question for the past decade was, Is this real?" says Yale law professor Yochai Benkler. "The question for the next half-decade is, How do you make this damned thing work?" Benkler is a leading prophet of today's gift economy
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ut neither does Benkler dream of a world without capitalism. Instead, he has become an unlikely business guru, with a shop at the intersection of Commerce and Cooperation.
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Take the case Benkler makes in his 2006 book, The Wealth of Networks (available, free, at www.benkler.org) for the economic benefits of "peer production" of software and other information products
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Peer production by people who donate small or large quantities of their time and expertise isn't necessarily great at generating the original and the unique, but it's very good for improving existing products (like software) and bringing together dispersed information (Wikipedia). Often better, in Benkler's telling, than corporations armed with copyright and patent laws.
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Clever entrepreneurs and even established companies can profit from this volunteerism--but only if they don't get too greedy. The key, Benkler says, is "managing the marriage of money and nonmoney without making nonmoney feel like a sucker."
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In other fields, it's not so clear. In a critique of Benkler's work last summer, business writer Nicholas Carr speculated that Web 2.0 media sites like Digg, Flickr and YouTube are able to rely on volunteer contributions simply because a market has yet to emerge to price this "new kind of labor." He and Benkler then entered into what has come to be widely known in Web circles as the "Carr-Benkler wager": a bet on whether, by 2011, such sites will be driven primarily by volunteers or by professionals.
