Q&A: Yochai Benkler on the Benefits of an Open Source Economic System

Summary

After the breakthrough of the internet, Yochai Benkler, a law professor at Harvard University, quickly understood that new online forms of collaboration such as Wikipedia or Linux responded to a completely new economic logic. Specializing in the digital culture of the networked society, Benkler worked on a coherent economic vision that guides us beyond the old opposition between state and markets.

According to Benkler, we may be at the beginning of a global cultural revolution that can bring about massive disruption. “Private property, patents, and the free market are not the only ways to organize a society efficiently, as the neoliberal ideology wants us to believe,” Benkler says. “The commons offers us the most coherent alternative today to the dead end of the last 40 years of neoliberalism.”