Group items tagged

This new brand of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, rather than government—for now.

It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

I use socialism because technically it is the best word to indicate a range of technologies that rely for their power on social interactions.

When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge, it's not unreasonable to call that socialism.

aging hippy John Barlow

Rather, it is a spectrum of attitudes, techniques, and tools that promote collaboration, sharing, aggregation, coordination, ad hocracy, and a host of other newly enabled types of social cooperation.

Clay Shirky

Groups of people start off simply sharing and then progress to cooperation, collaboration, and finally collectivism.

I. SHARING

personal photos

status updates

Sharing is the mildest form of socialism

half-thoughts

6 billion videos

millions of fan-created stories

reviews

locations

bookmarks

map locations

II. COOPERATION

emerge at the group level

Creative Commons

Thousands of aggregator sites

III. COLLABORATION

IV. COLLECTIVISM

"Inside every working anarchy, there's an old-boy network."