New Socialism: The Global Collectivist Society Goes Online

A month ago, I came across an article I liked, and the other day I registered on Habré. So I decided to make the first translation of my post. Do not judge much, the translation is rather free, I studied English only at school (I graduated from school 9 years ago, I don’t have a higher education not connected with linguistics). The article is quite voluminous, but no less interesting.

Bill Gates once laughed at open source supporters, uttering the worst epithet that the capitalist can say. These people, he said, are "new, modern-looking communists," and this evil force seeks to destroy the monopolistic way of life that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open Source fanatics are more like supporters of fighters for free will than supporters of communism. However, there is some truth in his statement. The insane, global haste of connecting each person to each other, all this time, quietly, generated a revised version of socialism.
')
The community aspects of digital culture are deep and broad. Wikipedia is just one of the wonderful examples of collectivism formed and not only Wikipedia, but the wiki movement as a whole. Ward Cunningham, who launched the first web-based collaboration website in 1994, today tracks about 150 wiki engines , each of which uses a variety of sites. Founded three years ago, Wetpaint accepts over 1 million public requests. The widespread adoption of a free copyright ( Creative Commons License ) alternative copyright and the growth of free file sharing are two more steps in this direction. The proliferation of “collaborative” sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Hype Machine, Twine adds weight to these great shocks. Almost every day a new start-up proudly marks a new way of using social activities. These changes indicate a steady movement towards creating a kind of socialism-like mood in the networked world.

We are not talking about that grandfather socialism. In fact, there is a long list of events showing that the new socialism is not like that. This is not a class war. It really is not anti-American, digital socialism can be the newest American innovation. Under the old socialism, it is an organ of the state, digital socialism for socialism without a state. This new kind of socialism is currently working in the field of culture and economy, not government, but so far.

The type of communism with which Gates hopes to blacken the creators of Linux was born in an era of heightened borders, centralized subordination, and heavy industrial processes. These difficulties led to the emergence of collective ownership, which supplanted the chaos of the free market, with the help of five-year plans developed by the omnipotent Politburo. This political system, to put it mildly, fell. However, unlike those older socialism stamps with a red flag, the new socialism works through the Internet, which has no boundaries, in a tightly integrated global economy. It is designed to increase individual autonomy and contrary to centralization. This is extreme decentralization.

Instead of collecting on collective farms, we gathered in collective communities. Instead of state-owned factories, we have desktops connected to a virtual corporation. Instead of using drill bits, picks, and shovels, we share applications, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have a faceless (meritocracy) system, in which highly intelligent people are in power, when the only thing that matters is that everything is done. Instead of gross domestic product, we have equal production (peer-production). Instead of the tariff scale and state subsidies, we have an abundance of free products.

As I see it, the word socialism makes many readers twitch. He carries tremendous cultural baggage, as well as the associated terms communal, commune and collective. I use socialism, because technically it is the best word for various technologies that rely on their influence on social interaction. In a broad sense, collective actions are nothing more than what websites and network applications produce only when they use the input from the world community. Of course, there is the danger of mixing in a heap of so many kinds of organization under such a fiery slogan. But from another point of view, we could fix this.

When the mass of people who own the means of production in the direction of achieving a common goal, and the share of their products is common, when their work is free of charge, and using its fruits for free, there is no reason not to say that this is socialism.
In the late 1990s, activist, provocateur, and hippy-aged John Barlow began calling this movement “dot-commmunism” (by analogy with .com-s). He defined it as “the labor force consists exclusively of free agents”, decentralized goods or the economy of barter, where there is no property, and where the technical architecture defines the political space. But there is another side with which socialism is not the correct definition for what is happening - it is not an ideology. It requires no hard code. Rather, it is a whole range of methods, approaches and tools that contribute to cooperation, sharing, aggregation, coordination, anonymity of announcements, and a number of other recently emerging types of social cooperation. This system expands the boundaries and is especially fertile for innovation.

In his book of 2008, “Everybody Comes Here”, media theorist Clay Shirky suggests a successful hierarchy of these new social mechanisms. Groups of people begin with a simple exchange, and then in the course of cooperation, interaction and, finally, collectivism. At every turn, the amount of coordination increases. An overview of the online landscape provides compelling evidence of this phenomenon.

I. DISTRIBUTION (SHARING)

The network has an incredible mass of ready to share something. The number of personal photos posted on Facebook and MySpace is astronomical, however, I can bet that the vast majority of photos taken on a digital camera are published due to fashion. There is also a status update, maps of places, thoughts posted on the Internet. Add to this the 6 billion YouTube videos per month in the USA alone, and the millions of fan-created articles deposited on fan-sites. The list of exchange organizations and almost endless: Yelp for reviews, Loopt for interesting places, Delicious for bookmarks.
Exchange is a soft form of socialism, but it serves as the basis for higher levels of joint activity.

Ii. INTERACTION (COOPERATION)

When people work together to achieve a large-scale goal, they produce results that arise at the group level. Fans not only share over 3 billion photos on Flickr, but they mark their categories, labels, and keywords. The rest of the community select the photos in the albums. The popularity of Creative Commons licensing means that public, if not direct, but still communist, your picture is my picture. Anyone can use a photo, as easily as a friend can use a public cart. I will not have to take another photo from the Eiffel Tower, since the public one may be better than I can do myself.

Thousands of aggregator sites use the same social dynamics for trilateral gains. First, the technology helps users directly, giving them the opportunity to leave tags, bookmarks, titles and an archive for their own use. Second, others use someone else’s individual tags, bookmarks, and so on. And this, in turn, often creates additional values ​​that can only come from this group as a whole. For example, images tagged with the same scene from different angles can be collected into one stunning 3-D image of a place. (Check out Microsoft Photosynth.) In a curious way, this judgment anticipates the socialist motto “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”, because it improves what you offer and provides you with even more than you need.

Social aggregators can reveal amazing power. Sites such as Digg and Reddit, which allow users to vote for web links that they consider the best, can lead a public conversation like newspapers and television networks (for example: Reddit is owned by the parent company Wired, Condé Nast). The largest participants have invested much more in these sites than they could ever get back, but they continue to invest, in part because of the social and cultural power that these tools possess. The influence of participants exceeds one vote, the collective influence of a community can be greater than the proportion of its members. In general, the meaning of social institutions is that the system is more than a simple sum of its parts. Traditional socialism, set a goal to increase this dynamics with the help of the state. Now, being separated from the state and involved in the global digital matrix, this hard-to-reach force operates on a larger scale than ever before.

Iii. COLLABORATION (COLLABORATION)

Organized cooperation can produce results greater than the achievements of banal cooperation. Just look at any of the hundreds of open source projects, such as the Apache Web server. In these endeavors, well-tuned community tools produce high-quality products using the well-coordinated work of thousands or tens of thousands of members. In contrast to the usual interaction, cooperation on large, complex projects, the participants tend to attract only indirect benefits, since each member of the group interacts with only a small part of the final product. An enthusiast can spend months writing a subroutine code when a complete program appears in a few years. In fact, the work-remuneration ratio is so far from a free market, in the long run, workers do such huge amounts of work with high market value without payment that these joint efforts lose meaning in the framework of capitalism.

In addition, to economic discord, we are accustomed to using the products of these cooperation for free. Instead of money, peer producers who create benefits gain trust, status, reputation, pleasure, satisfaction, and experience. Not only the product itself is free, it can be freely copied and used as the basis for new products. Alternative schemes for managing intellectual property, including Creative Commons and GNU licenses, were invented to provide these “freedoms”.
Of course, there is nothing particularly socialistic about cooperation in itself. But the means of online collaboration are supported by the social style of production, which capitalist investors abhor and leaves property in the hands of the workers, as well as to some extent among the consumer masses.

Iv. COLLECTIVISM

Although cooperation can write an encyclopedia, no one is responsible if the community cannot reach consensus and the lack of agreement does not threaten the enterprise as a whole. The team's goal, however, is to create a system where self-governing equal authors take responsibility for critical processes and difficult decisions, such as sorting priorities, is a common decision of all participants. Throughout history, hundreds of small collectivist groups have tried using this system. The results were not encouraging.

Moreover, a close examination of the governing core, for example, Wikipedia, Linux or OpenOffice, shows that these aspirations are far from the ideal of collectivists than they look from the outside. While millions write to Wikipedia, fewer editors (about 1500) are responsible for much of the editing. The same for teams that write code. The overwhelming army of coders is managed by a much smaller group of coordinators. As Mitch Kapor, the founder of the open source Mozilla Foundation, noted, "In every worker anarchy, there is a part with an old-type network structure."

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Some types of groups benefit from a hierarchy, while others are affected by it. Platforms like the Internet and Facebook, or democracies, which are supposed to be used as a substrate for the production of goods and the provision of services with benefits are as non-archharic as opportunities, minimizing barriers to obtaining and distributing rights and responsibilities equally. When powerful figures emerge, the whole community suffers. On the other hand, organizations are built to create products, often need strong leaders and hierarchies are arranged on time scales: one level focuses on hourly needs, the other on the needs of the next five years.

In the past, building an organization that uses a hierarchy, and besides maximizing collectivism, it was almost impossible to find. Now digital networks provide the necessary infrastructure. The network allows product-oriented organizations to work collectively, to work, while remaining completely hierarchical. Organizing with MySQL and open source databases, these are not good old non-hierarchical ones, but they are much more collectivist than Oracle. In addition, Wikipedia is not a bastion of equality, but still significantly more than collectivist than Encyclopaedia Britannica. The core elite that we find in the very center of the Internet collectives is in fact a sign that non-state socialism can work on a large scale.

Most people in the West , including me, were committed to the ideological concept that the empowerment of individuals necessarily reduces the power of the state, and vice versa. In practice, the majority of states make some resources public and others individual. Most free market economies have a social education, and even very socialized societies allow private property.

Instead of considering technological socialism as one of the parties with mathematical equality between the free market individualism and centralized power, it can be considered as a cultural operating system, which increases its significance, and individuals and groups simultaneously. For the most part, not logically, but intuitively understanding the purpose of communal technology, we can conclude the following: to maximize the autonomy of both the individual and the power of the working class. Thus, digital socialism can be considered as a third way, which does not excite old disputes.

The concept of the third way is reflected by Yochai Benkler, the author of The Wealth of Networks, who probably thought more about the political system of networks. “I understand the emergence of social production and equal production as an alternative to both purely state and purely market (patent) systems,” he said, noting that these activities "can contribute to increasing creativity, productivity and freedom." The new OS is not classic communism with centralized planning and no private property, nor the sheer chaos of the free market. Instead, it is a new model of society in which decentralized coordination of state Twa can solve problems and create a product that, neither pure communism nor pure capitalism can master.

Hybrid systems consisting of a mixture of market and non-market mechanisms are not new. For decades, researchers have studied methods of decentralized, socialized production in the North Italian and Basque industrial cooperatives, in which employees are owners, the choice of managers and the restriction of the distribution of profits, regardless of state control. But it was only with the formation of low prices, instantaneous and widespread cooperation that it became possible to migrate on the basis of these ideas to various new areas, for example, writing software for large enterprises or reference books.

The dream is to expand the scale of this third way beyond the boundaries of local experiments. How big? Ohloh , the company that follows open source projects, has about 250,000 people working on an amazing 275,000 projects. This is almost the size of General Motors staff. This is an awful lot of people who work for free, even if not full time. Imagine if all GM employees would not receive a salary and still continue to produce cars!

Until now, the largest in terms of the effort spent on development, these are open source projects, and in the largest of them, such as Apache, several hundred developers participated, comparable to the population of a large village. According to some studies, 60,000 man-years of work were required for last year’s release of Fedora Linux 9, so we have evidence that an independent municipal body and exchange development can manage a project of the scale of a decentralized city or village.

Of course, the total census of participants for online teamwork is much larger. YouTube announces about 350 million visitors monthly. Nearly 10 million registered users contributed to Wikipedia, 160,000 of whom are recognized as active. Over 35 million people have posted and tagged more than 3 billion photos and videos on Flickr. Yahoo hosts 7.8 million groups focused on all sorts of topics. Google hosts 3.9 million.

These figures still lag behind the scale of the nation. They can't even cross the mainstream threshold (although if YouTube is not the mainstream, what is?). But it is obvious that the population living in socialized media (web2.0 media) is important. The number of people who do something for free, “share” something for free, use something for free, belong to the collective software communities working on projects that require joint solutions and / or the advantages of decentralized socialism - has reached millions and continues to number. Revolutions are generated by a much smaller number of people.

At first glance , one can expect a lot of political complaints from people who are building an alternative to capitalism and corporateism. But coders, hackers and programmers who developed the exchange tools do not think of themselves as revolutionaries. No new political parties * currently gathered in conference rooms, at least not in the United States. (In Sweden, the Pirate Party was formed on a file-sharing platform. It won a tiny 0.63 percent of the vote in the 2006 national elections.) (* Translator's note: the original post was published before the last elections in Sweden)

Moreover, the leaders of the new socialism are extremely pragmatic. A study of 2,784 open source software developers explained their motivation. The most common was "learning and developing new skills." This is practical. One researcher said (paraphrasing his words): The main reason for working on free software is to improve your own damn program. In principle, the other reasons are practically scanty.

But the rest of us may not be deliberately insured against a growing wave of exchange, interaction, cooperation, and collectivism. For the first time in many years, the word beginning with the letter “C” was voiced on Western TV and in national news magazines as a direction in US policy. Obviously, the trend towards nationalization of industrial whales, the foundation of national health care, as well as the rapid creation of jobs, at the expense of taxes, is not only the merit of techno-socialism. But recent elections have shown the strength of a decentralized, WEBized framework with digital collaboration at its core. The more we benefit from such cooperation, the more open we become socialist institutions in government. North Korea’s forced, heartbreaking system is dead; The future is a hybrid that takes on hints from Wikipedia and moderate socialism in Sweden.

How strong is the move to a non-market, open source, equal production community can affect us? Every time this question was asked, the answer was: stronger than we thought. Consider craigslist.org. Just a bulletin board, right? But the site expanded a convenient community bulletin board to reach the scale of a regional audience, improving it with pictures, updating it in real time, and suddenly became a national treasure. Acting without government funding or control, linking citizens directly to each other, this is the freest market that brings social benefits to efficiency that any state or traditional corporation could shake. Of course, this undermines the business model of newspapers, but at the same time it is indisputable proof that the exchange model is a real alternative for both corporations seeking profit and civilian institutions supported by taxes.

Who would have believed that poor farmers could get a $ 100 loan from a beautiful stranger on the other side of the planet and pay them back? This is what makes Kiva peer-to-peer lending. Each health expert will say with confidence that the exchange is good for photos, but no one will share records from his medical record. But on the website PatientsLikeMe , where patients combine the results of treatment to improve their own treatment, it proves that collective actions can bring a huge advantage, both to doctors and fighters for confidentiality. The growing habit of sharing what you think (Twitter), what you read (StumbleUpon), your finances ( Wesabe ), your everything (on the Internet), becomes the basis of our culture. Doing this during the co-creation of encyclopedias, news agencies, video archives, and software in groups that cover continents with people whom you don’t know and whose class doesn’t matter, this makes political socialism the logical next step.

Similar things have happened with free markets over the last century. Every day someone asked: what can markets not do? We took a long list of problems that seem to require rational planning or state patronage, and apply the logic of the free market. In most cases, market solutions worked much better. Much of the success in recent decades has been achieved through the application of market mechanisms to social problems.

Now we are trying to do the same trick with the help of collaborative social technologies, the application of digital socialism to the growing wish list and sometimes the problems that the free market cannot decide to understand whether this is possible. So far, the results have been astounding. At almost every step, the strength of joint cooperation, interaction, openness, free pricing, and transparency proved a greater practicality than the capitalists had previously thought possible. Every time, we find that the power of new socialism is greater than we imagined.

We underestimate the power of our tools that can change our mind. Do we really believe that we could jointly build virtual worlds and inhabit every day, and that this did not affect our vision of the poor?The power of online socialism is growing. Its development spreads beyond electrons, possibly developing into elections.
I ask you to add karma so that I can transfer the topic to the web 2.0 blog