Jeff Jarvis: "Give us control and we will use it. Don’t and you will lose us."

Sharing Economies

Posted by Samuel Rose at 11:56 AM

This Buzz Machine blog post from Jeff Jarvis is an excellent read, and an illuminating look at current emerging changes in socio-economic structures and dynamics. Building on his earlier ideas about "new laws of media", Jarvis looks at the dynamics inherent in Peer Production Networks.

Jarvis asserts that there are "individual", "collective" and "enabler" (like Yahoo, Google, Wikipedia, etc) levels of scale involved in peer production networks.

Basically, he says that on the" individual" level, we want to control the things that we create (and, that if we can't, we'll go elsewhere). On the "collective" level, we "create as we consume" collectively, and that the "crowd" itself owns the "wisdom of the crowd". If someone tries to "own" this crowd-wisdom generated from consumption, they make it less valuable by trying to disconnect it from larger networks to control it.

The "enabler" level is an open question from Jarvis:

What do the enablers deserve for enabling? And what do we as individuals and as members of the collective deserve for creating the wisdom? What do we owe each other in this exchange of value?

Or the real question is: How do we not screw this up?

There are so many ways we can screw it up. Spam, hate, stupidity, and control can do that. But if everyone behaves the right way, then we create great whole larger than the sums of their parts; every capitalized entity above proves that. But we’re still trying to figure out what the rules are, what “the right way” means.

The truth is that we’re doing nothing less than creating a new society and we’re still figuring out what the rules and economies of that society are.

I think that Jarvis is right-on about many things in his analysis. The reason why the "enabler" level is an open question is because the "enabler" systems are still transitioning out of the old "central control" social structures. And this makes sense, because the majority of our world's economies are still very deeply geared into "central control" economic models and command-control structures. The "enablers" that organize themselves around economic models that depend on central "enabler" ownership of "IP" created by it's users are going to struggle to keep people and content within their fortress walls, and under their rules. They will eventually and inevitably be largely abandoned for systems where the "individual", the "collective" and the "enablers" are one and the same. A system where the "users" become the company owners, employees, research and development, and innovators. This is the future of "peer production" networks. This, also, I think, is at least part of the answer to Jarvis' question of "How do we not screw this up?" We give everyone who uses and creates the resource a choice to have a direct vested interest in the resource itself. They will possibly all become micro-partners in a new kind of "company" that is commons-based, bottom-up user-owned and controlled.

We already see some weaker, old-system shades of this with "Google AdSense", Microsoft offering to pay people to search, and Amazon's Mechanical Turk system. And, we have some other pieces of the puzzle in non-profit systems like Wikipedia, and Open Source Software development. I think that soon, we will see a new type of system that combines the best parts of these emerging ideas to create user-owned companies. Peer production partnerships based around knowldge or other commons-based resources. This could extend eventually  to service and manufacturing industries, too. This could be possible through micro-enterprise partnership models, and "personal fabrication" commons-based peer production networks.

Original Location: http://www.smartmobs.com/archive/2006/01/09/jeff_jarvis_g.html