Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim.
This can all sound a little like, well, ’60s-style utopianism. After all, Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It’s easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism. —Chris Anderson —People Power (Wired)
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I’ll see how big the “to read” stack is…
Well, no other than Wired’s Mark Frauenfelder had high praise for Doctorow’s novel, and I gotta say, it’s most excellent.
And it’s free.
And even though it’s free, I bought a dead-tree copy. Go figure.
I don’t know how much fun-reading time you have this summer, Dennis, but I think you might get a kick out of it, and I’d be curious to hear your impressions.
Crap, my spam blocker ate up the response I wrote.
I blogged that passage because I thought it would be a good way to start a discussion, and also because I wasn’t familiar with the term “wuffie”. Anyway, thanks for setting the record straight. A journalist’s skill in making the important seem interesting and making the complex understandable does lead to oversimplification. I blogged that article because it tied together a lot of things I wanted to talk about in two different classes this fall, but as I look at it again, I see it cites no sources. That’s never a good sign in journalism.
Still, I can’t help but love Wired. The article about an order of Cistercian brothers who started an online office supply store (“Monk ebusiness“) cleverly makes the segue from “Dust to Dust” to printer toner.
ANyway, thanks for setting the record straight, Mike.
Dear Chris:
1. It’s “Whuffie.” With an h. Term coined by Cory Doctorow in Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. “Wuffie” is closer to “Wussie,” which is what people call reporters who have zero familiarity with the subject upon which they are reporting. Or reporters who fail to proofread.
2. No, this was Marx’s goal, not his belief. As your article all too clearly indicates, there are forms of economic activity that go beyond the monetized cash transaction people typically associate with capitalism. In point of fact, the new actors in the information economy do own the means of production, which might indicate that there is, in fact, a profound economic shift currently underway — the ends of which Marx may have foreseen, albeit not the method.