Making Sense of the Emerging Economy with Yochai Benkler

Summary

Unless technologies are explicitly designed to reduce inequality, they wind up exacerbating it. Reflections on Yochai Benkler’s closing remarks at Ouishare.

Making a living from open source hardware meant I was participating in an international network of people who freely shared their “intellectual property” with each other, growing a common resource of benefit to everyone. My peers included a 1970s Californian performance artist, a 12-year-old in a small Spanish town looking for mental stimulation, and a Russian engineer who remixed my ideas and returned them to the Internet extended and improved.

This socio-economic reality was beyond the imagination of Hayek, Keynes, Marx or Smith. As I started to grapple with this void, Yochai Benkler was the first academic to fill in the blank space. Yochai gave a name to the work I was doing: commons-oriented peer production