I'm not so sure the metaphor of Platform War is really the right way to see it. On one hand the "war" does highlight the differences in communications networks (money vs. social networks). But on the other hand obscures the interdependencies of the two.
I agree with him (and Amarty Sen who he quotes).
Markets are "embedded in" and "parameterized by" civil society and its explicit rule-sets. And these are political decisions.
I agree, too, that the relationship between economy and society isn't a "platform war", although it can be antagonistic. Political power isn't a direct rival platform to the market. (Where it's set-up to be, it's a disaster.)
OTOH, the zone of public discourse on the internet seems to me to be a much more direct rival to the market. Behind all the familiar phrases like "peer production" and "attention economy" and "amateur journalism" is the basic fact : people are being motivated to produce stuff by something other than money. Attention is attracted by PageRank and votes on Digg and social networks carrying viral memes etc; not by paid advertising carried by profit-making publishers who pay professional content-makers to lure them into their pages and onto their channels.
If you look at the amount of work that people put into, say, MySpace. And you count the number of viewers. You might be tempted to try to extrapolate a "monetary value" based on an analogy with how much money would be involved in organizing all this via the dollar economy; but you'll get a completely bogus figure. Questions like "where's the money?" seen to me to be assuming that something like MySpace is "failing" to live up to its potential as a money maker. (Which really means, a high-bandwidth "money router", able to skim a little bit off the top.)
But I'd suggest that this potential doesn't exist. MySpace is an "attenion router". And, unless they can think of something very clever which I can't, they'll never be a high-traffic money router. So there's nothing to skim. (Except attention, which will be increasingly recognised as valuable, of course.)
OTOH Google are very clever and very succesful because they've become the most efficient place to turn attention into money and back again. No one makes it so easy to try to sell your attention for money (by putting AdSense on your blog) or spend money to buy (relevantish) attention (by buying AdSense ads)
Oh, and Ross Mayfield has a great post on Markets as Social.
1 comment:
Sometimes I feel overwhelmed by the news of the day, and I seem to be feeling that way often lately.
Micheal Shaw at his blog Bag News Notes http://bagnewsnotes.typepad.com/bagnews/
wrote in re the current escalation of war in the Middle East:
"What I can't imagine is the kind of humanitarian technology necessary to keep pace with the radically lower threshold for intense warfare."
Truth be told I can't wrap my head around that kind of "humanitarian technology" either, but feel a great sense of urgency to ramp-up my imagination!
The August issue of "Harpers" came in the mail today. Skimming the articles there's one about peak oil, "Imagine There's No Oil: Scenes from a liberal apocalypse" by Bryant Urstadt. The article is about Urstadt attending the Second U.S. Conference on "Peak Oil." Urstadt ends the piece with a fellow there asking him if he'd bought any gold yet.
This week I had two teenaged relatives visiting. MySpace doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me, but it was fun to watch the kids engage there. And fun to hear their perspectives about the meaning of MySpace friends, a subject not entirely settled in their minds, but obviously important.
So I read that bit about gold in Urstadt's essay. Chances are really good I'll never have enough money to stash some gold away, but it struck me that a network of friends would be a heck of a lot more useful than gold.
Not really attracted to Shaw's term "humanitarian technology" but it has the advantage of being a neat opposition to the instruments of war. Ross Mayfield's post on Markets as Social is really great, a pleasure to see "trust" center stage. WMD indeed quicken the mind, however solutions hardly seem technological. The underlying issues revolve around trust and the lack there of. Your point: "[M]oney and IP are rival protocols in rival networks which are means to the same end : that of articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity." is so important. The point helps me to understand just how important TCP/IP technology is. (Alas, listening to Alaska senator Ted Stevens discussing; "The Internet is a series of Tubes"--YouTube has a number of videos which make his statements easy to listen to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
EtOoQFa5ug8&mode=related&search= I feel sympathy his uneasy grasp of the subject of the Internet.)
"Behind all the familiar phrases like "peer production" and "attention economy" and "amateur journalism" is the basic fact : people are being motivated to produce stuff by something other than money."
Yep, the radical nature of your point is beginning to sink in.
I'm horrified by John Robb's Global Guerrillas "Networked tribes, infrastructure disruption, and the emerging bazaar of violence." I certainly take his analysis seriously about the dangers, but I'm not very enthusiastic about his ideas for countermeasures. In any case political and economic motives using the protocol of TCP/IP aren't always benign; perhaps no more or less so than for using the protocol of money. Perversions from the goal of "articulating human labour to create more wealth for humanity" are probably inevitable.
What's so important about your posts is the clarity about how really radical TCP/IP technology is. My success using money to create wealth hasn't been much, what that bodes for my using TCP/IP technology isn't very clear. On one hand I'm pessimistic, but on the other, and I dare say my dominant hand, I'm so very optimistic. This revolution is as close as I have come to imagining a "humanitarian technology."
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