Things were build by passionate people, who had the skills and the means to do it.
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
While a lot of this involved volunteers and people taking initiative, a lot of this is also people working and being paid to do so. Linus Torvalds was getting paid to work on the Linux kernel from pretty early on, for example. And a lot of contributions made to Linux are done by software engineers working for a very wide range of companies that each have their own commercial interest in moving the Linux kernel forward or getting their drivers or whatever.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
I love these two projects for how they are, and continue to be, built. They say something hopeful and deep about humanity.
Before Linux and Wikipedia, we assumed that if you gave everyone a sharpie, that we would graffiti and deface the world.
Instead, we learned that humans will stop and sit and write the most thorough history ever seen for the sake of free knowledge and create the tools for us to do so.
This has happened with most of the fields - volunteers do a lot of work, make their fields/areas good, raise interest, bring ppl into it which usually brings money then which usually brings money chasers who then usually "optimize" the hell out of every metric for maximum gains.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
Missed some mentions like crowdfunding, crowd-sourced journalism / investigative efforts & the like. But a good read.
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
I enjoyed this article - it gives a definition of "peer production", and explains our sense of unease when voluntary collaborative efforts get mixed with financial gains.
I don't understand the reason for this article and book:
The idea is hardly new; it's been very well-known, widely used, and widely studied for decades, and not just in IT. For example, in the corporate world Hasbro created an FOSS license for significant aspects of the game Dungeons & Dragons back in the 2000s. And the public obviously embraced FOSS and crowd-sourcing over and over - wikis on every game and hobby, fan fiction, Minecraft, etc. What is new in this book? What is the impetus? What audience needs to be told about Wikipedia?
Also, why change the terminology from free/libre open source, crowd-sourcing, etc.?
> Motivate participants to contribute using diverse incentives that are frequently, if not exclusively, nonmonetary.
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.
It is truly a wonder, building the complex technical framework of modern computing was achieved a community project. It shown even with out market incentives we can go a long way, to solve the current challenges like AI and misinformation.
From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet
(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)289 points by jonbaer 16 hours ago | 95 comments
Comments
I feel that modern tech first took away the passion, by making everything a product, than took away the means by making everything cloud, and now kills the skills by eutrophizing our brains with AI.
There is no cabal of evil tech that pushes this, but the results are the same.
Decentralization does not imply charity. You see the same around openstreetmap. There are a lot of organizations that benefit from their data that actively contribute to it or make donations to keep development funded. Same with Wikipedia.
Before Linux and Wikipedia, we assumed that if you gave everyone a sharpie, that we would graffiti and deface the world.
Instead, we learned that humans will stop and sit and write the most thorough history ever seen for the sake of free knowledge and create the tools for us to do so.
Great OS volunteers still exist today, but the ratio of genuine field lover to money chaser is absurd now.
https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/6212/Peer-Production
Imho people (and even animals!) instinctively understand that most actions are not zero-sum. That other people's gain (whether individual or community) often exceeds the 'loss' of the person who puts in the effort. Doubly so if the latter enjoys doing it.
Classical economics ignores that. It assumes that parties nearly-always act rational (untrue), generally don't like 'work' so require compensation (YMMV), participants in a market are well-informed (untrue), transactions are zero-sum (rarely), money is THE only relevant 'currency' (it's just one of many), people are selfish (debatable, imho this is learned rather than intrinsic behaviour), markets are free (untrue), or that 'free' markets are the only way to efficiently allocate resources (again: debatable). That's a lot of questionable assumptions to base crucial socio-economic (and policing / military) systems on.
More likely it's mostly historic reasons. During some period, some approach worked better for some groups of people (probably helped by a lot of violence). And this carried forward to the present day in complex, poorly-understood ways. Never mind propaganda (include social networks' algorithms there), disinformation, or that status quo can be incredibly hard to disrupt.
Disclaimer: I'm not advocating to turn what exists upside down! But it's good to question underlying assumptions considered 'common knowledge'. Re-organise things, have a look at alternatives. And things change. What was valid yesteryear may not hold water today.
A man who does a thing for fun is drinking from something real and it nourishes him and gets him high.
A man who's working within the corporate reality And pursuing boss defined goals. He's faking it and he starves.
The idea is hardly new; it's been very well-known, widely used, and widely studied for decades, and not just in IT. For example, in the corporate world Hasbro created an FOSS license for significant aspects of the game Dungeons & Dragons back in the 2000s. And the public obviously embraced FOSS and crowd-sourcing over and over - wikis on every game and hobby, fan fiction, Minecraft, etc. What is new in this book? What is the impetus? What audience needs to be told about Wikipedia?
Also, why change the terminology from free/libre open source, crowd-sourcing, etc.?
> It’s worth repeating that these characteristics defy conventional assumptions about organizations and economic production.
I'm reminded of the meme, a caveman honing a spear, with the tag "How is he innovating without financial incentive?"
I feel like the "conventional" understanding of human behavior and motivation is new and wrong. That being: to get people to do things, you gotta pay them. To get them to do the thing better, offer a monetary reward / incentive.
In reality, the savviest of capitalism's participants instinctively understand this to be false: the prize in a sales contest is never a cash reward, it's always a car (or similar). A car that can be seen in the parking lot forever after, a clear symbol of the winner's success and competence. In the old days, it'd be bear claws on a necklace.
We made the mistake of thinking that the bear claws, shells, whatever, were an early form of currency, that they were a single scalar by which a society measured value, something that could be traded, when in reality they were abstract markers of a given person's prowess or status. People aren't proud and excited to own a porsche or have more bear claws so much as they're excited to show off what the porsche or bear claws represent: their competence and hard work. Trading the bear claws for a cow doesn't impart the value of the claws onto the receiver; unless they can lie successfully, everyone knows they didn't kill that bear, so the claws are useless, or worse, stolen valor. Similarly, many of us doubt that the people who have orders of magnitude more shells than the rest of us did anything worthy of deserving them, or at least not to such an absurd degree.
I've been reading a lot about human happiness and fulfillment lately because I'm 35 and a dink so I'm gonna have to do this manually (I assume kids give automatic fulfillment, correct me if I'm wrong).
In "The Dispossessed," Ursula K. Le Guin writes:
> A child free from the guilt of ownership and the burden of economic competition will grow up with the will to do what needs doing and the capacity for joy in doing it. It is useless work that darkens the heart. The delight of the nursing mother, of the scholar, of the successful hunter, of the good cook, of the skillful maker, of anyone doing needed work and doing it well -- this durable joy is perhaps the deepest source of human affection, and of sociality as a whole."
Emphasis mine. This idea that happiness and fulfillment comes from doing useful work and doing it well is the most consistent idea I've found in my reading. Edward M. Hallowell specifically prescribed it as treatment for depression from ADHD: experiment until you find an activity you're good at (novelty hunting), then work to get better at it, then seek recognition for your competence. Repeat until death.
So therefore I think FOSS is the natural human instinct, and all these attempts to steer human motivation with money is a wrongheaded abomination, and the source of a great deal of our unhappiness in life. How else can we explain that happiness and fulfillment is lower in some of the richest societies on earth than it is in some of the poorest? Very few of us are doing useful work, and we instinctively know it.