August 02, 2006

Nicholas Carr has one of the best posts on Jason Calacanis's offer to pay news-voters.

Partly because he lays out the sceptical argument against Benkler's "Wealth of Networks" (which I'm calling TCP/IP vs. the dollar) and treats Calacanis as evidence for an eventual recolonization of the attention or peerospheric economy by capital.

And partly because Benkler has a great come-back in the comments.
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1 comment:

John Powers said...

About the Benkler--Carr dialog, Benkler's, "The shape of the wager, however, should be clear." reminded me of your interest in prediction markets. Carr contends "two years is much too soon" and proposes ten.

I'm more impatient than either of them and want some data now--not really because my eyes glaze over at numbers. But the question remains what measures of peerospheric production are needed and worth paying attention to?

It's useful sometimes to imagine and study the peeroshpere outside or parallel the price system, but it seems the peerosphere and the price system are intertwined.

You raised the point in terms of TCP/IP vs. the dollar that "the more interesting question is "why" the money?"

Your question is very helpful to me, someone who's only dimly catching on. Rival platforms aren't either/or.

I'm optimistic that Benkler is right: "[W]e are seeing the phenomenon of peer production of information scale to much larger sizes, performing more complex tasks than were possible in the past for nonprofessional production."

Carr hedges his bets: "We won't even have sorted out which parts of the current "social production" movement are fads and which will actually endure."

Many short-duration wagers, as in prediction markets, seem a useful way to track and understand the progress of this platform war.

7:58 pm

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