here is a review of another book on web 2.0, don tapscott, anthony 
williams: wikinomics: how mass collaboration changes everything

the review was published in international journal of of communication 
vol. 2 (2008)

http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/250/125

shirky seems to be an example of bourgeois thinkers simply ignoring 
economic issues as the review of felix shows. the book by tapscott and 
williams shows which dangerous and ideological results are the outcome 
if bourgeois thinkers write about economic issues of web 2.0.

christian

-- 
---------------
Christian Fuchs
Associate Professor
eTheory Research Group
ICT&S Center - Advanced Studies and Research 
in Information and Communication Technologies & Society
University of Salzburg
Sigmund Haffner Gasse 18
5020 Salzburg
Austria
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Phone +43 662 8044 4823
Fax   +43 662 6389 4800
http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at
http://www.icts.uni-salzburg.at/fuchs/
Co-Editor of tripleC - open access online journal on cognition, communication 
and cooperation for a global sustainable information society
http://triple-c.at
New Book: Fuchs, Christian. 2008. Internet and Society: Social Theory in the 
Information Age. New York: Routledge. 408 Pages.
http://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/i&s.html

Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams, Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration 
Changes Everything, New York: Penguin, 2007, 320 pp., $25.95 (hardcover).

Book Review by
Christian Fuchs
University of Saltzburg
 

The Amazon Mechanical Turk is an online platform on which employers can post 
“Human Intelligence Tasks” (HITs) that are searched by prosumers looking for 
paid employment who select and perform these knowledge tasks with the help of 
their computers, submit the results, and then get paid. “Developers use the 
Amazon Mechanical Turk web service to submit tasks to the Amazon Mechanical 
Turk website, approve completed tasks, and incorporate the answers into their 
software applications. To the application, the transaction looks very much like 
any remote procedure call: the application sends the request, and the service 
returns the results. Behind the scenes, a network of humans fuels this 
artificial artificial intelligence by coming to the web site, searching for and 
completing tasks, and receiving payment for their work” (mturk.com FAQs, 
accessed on November 23, 2007). The reward per task ranges between zero, a few 
cents (in most cases), and some dollars. One example of an HIT assignment is to 
determine the presence of opinion in a text article and submit the result, 
e.g., “Your task is to read the news article or blog post below and determine 
whether it is editorial in nature or is an expression of opinion, and whether 
it is positive, negative, or neutral” (mturk.com, accessed on November 23, 
2007). Multiple users will input their results which will be used by the task 
assigner who aggregates and sells the results as a commodity. The example is 
characteristic for what Tapscott and Williams celebrate as Wikinomics – an 
online economy based on networking, peering, and collaboration. 

Sounds like a good way for earning some money? The shadow side  in which 
Tapscott and Williams are not interested, is that the remuneration is poor. In 
the example just cited, the reward is four cents for an estimated task time of 
10 minutes, which results in a total hourly compensation of 24 cents if you 
repeatedly carry out similar tasks. Hence, this “new” economy of mass 
collaboration seems to support and advance an extremely flexible regime of 
accumulation that brings about precarious labour.

In Critical Theory, representatives like Brecht, Benjamin, and Enzensberger 
argue that the prosumer brings about the emergence of an emancipatory 
collectivity in media production. The theme that unites these authors is the 
idea that collective media production by all, for all, is socialistic. Brecht 
(1932, p.64) contends that radio would advance public life if it were changed 
“over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest 
possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That 
is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to 
let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship 
instead of isolating him. On this principle, the radio should step out of the 
supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers” (Brecht, 1932, pp. 64 
& 54). Walter Benjamin (1936, pp. 39 & 28) argues that printed letters to the 
editors would anticipate a situation in which literary license has become a 
common property. “Thus, the distinction between author and public is about to 
lose its basic character. . . .  At any moment, the reader is ready to turn 
into a writer” (Benjamin, 1936, pp. 39 & 28).  This would be a socialization of 
production because it would enable proletarians to speak, and it would also be 
an expression of proletarian expertise (Benjamin, 1934). The more consumers 
become producers, the better a media apparatus like the newspaper or the 
theatre would be (Benjamin, 1934, p. 243). Hans Magnus Enzensberger (1970) 
argues that an emancipatory use of media is characterized by a structure in 
which each receiver is a potential transmitter, programs are produced 
collectively, the masses are mobilized, and there is feedback, political 
learning, decentralization, and self-organization. He maintains that the 
development of the media from distribution to communication and collective 
production systems would be “consciously prevented for understandable political 
reasons.” For the mass of people to become productive, “the elimination of 
capitalistic property relationships is a necessary, but by no means sufficient 
condition.” In the capitalism of Web 2.0, the mass has become productive, but 
the capitalistic property relations still exist. This is an indication that the 
actual economy of Web 2.0 and Social Software, which is analyzed by Tapscott 
and Williams in the book at hand, shows that a media structure in which 
recipients act as producers does not (as assumed by Critical Theorists like 
Benjamin, Brecht, or Enzensberger) necessarily imply emancipation, but is 
perfectly compatible with the repressive economic structures of capitalist 
society.

Tapscott and Williams claim that the emergence of Social Software (the “new 
web,” as they call it) has brought about a potential for an economy that is 
based on mass collaboration, which they term “Wikinomics.” The task of the book 
is to show why and how mass collaboration does not reduce, but rather enhances 
profitability. The Wikinomics model is based on the four principles of openness 
(of standards and external involvement), peer production, sharing, and acting 
globally (20-30).

Tapscott and Williams introduce seven Wikinomics business models that are 
summarized in the following table:


Model   Characteristics (C) Accumulation strategy (AS) Chapter (C) Examples (E)

M1: Peer pioneers
C: Self-organizing, voluntary, non-monetary communities that collaboratively 
produce open source goods and services.    
AS: Companies should donate gifts and code to open source communities in order 
to outsource work (“harnessing external talent”) in non-core areas of business 
so that production costs are reduced, to attract new customers in complementary 
areas, enhance competition in a non-core area of business, and develop social 
capital.    
C: 3    
E: Linux, Wikipedia, IBM support for Linux


M2: Ideagoras   
C: Generating ideas for innovations with the help of social networking 
platforms that bring together questions and solutions to problems.       AS: 
Companies should seek for brilliant ideas outside their own company walls, 
which gives them comparative advantages in invention and allows them to cut 
costs.       
C: 4    
E: InnoCentive, Nine-Sigma, InnovationXChange Network, Eureka Medical, 
YourEncore, Innovation Relay Centers, P&G, yet2.com, 

M3: Prosumers   
C: Based on the principle of user-generated content and products. Consumers 
become producers.   
AS: “Customers get more of what they want, and companies get free R&D” (132). 
Companies should see customers as co-creators of products and hence value. 
Products should be designed in ways that allow users to design all by 
themselves, remix, and share.    
C: 5    
E: Second Life, Lego Mindstorms, Music Mashups, Creative Commons, YouTube, 
Slashdot, digg

M4: New Alexandrians    
C: Collaborative open-access production of scientific knowledge 
AS: Industry should collaborate with universities and researchers in open 
projects that are win-win situations. Scientific knowledge should be left open 
and the applications proprietary.      
C: 6    
E: Google Print, arXiv, Human Genome Project, Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms 
(SNP) Consortium, Intel’s Open University Network

M5: Platforms for Participation 
C: Creation of business partnerships by opening of software services and 
databases via an application programming interface (API). Existing platforms or 
applications are combined or integrated with other ones.       AS: By 
collaborating with other firms and their applications, a company’s product is 
spread so that new customers are attracted or a certain fee or share of revenue 
is obtained from the business partner.     C: 7    
E: HousingMaps, CheapGas, developer communities of eBay, Google, Amazon; 
PeopleFinder, BBC Creative Archive, Amazon, Scorecard, Neighborhood Knowledge 
California

M6: Global Plant Floor  
C: Physical products are modularized and production is globally outsourced so 
that products are co-created by many contributing actors that work in parallel. 
  
AS: Quality could be increased and costs cut by engaging in global outsourcing 
of design, manufacturing, decision-making and the involvement of globally 
distributed creators.  
C: 8    
E: BMW, Lifan, Boeing

M7: Wiki Workplace      
C: Usage of blogs, wikis, chatrooms, peer-to-peer-networks, podcasts, etc. 
across departmental and organizational boundaries in order to collaborate and 
form ad hoc communities.       
AS: Advantages would be the pooling of knowledge, resources, and human 
capacities that form networks. Flat hierarchies would be important, and work 
should be transformed into fun (“fun workplace ethos”). Participatory 
management and self-organization should be advanced by usage of the new web so 
that inclusion increases the attachment of employees to the company, and as a 
consequence, productivity and product quality.   
C: 9
E: Geek Squad, Best Buy, Socialtext, Google 20% rule 


These models of competition all share one thing in common: “These new forms . . 
. enable firms to harvest external knowledge, resources, and scale that were 
all previously impossible. Whether your business is closer to Boeing or P&G, or 
more like YouTube or Flickr, there are vast pools of external talent that you 
can tap with the right approach. Companies that adopt these models can drive 
important changes in their industries and rewrite the rules of competition” 
(269sq). Per Tapscott and Williams, these models are not so different from 
prior ones. As this quotation shows, in the end, it really is still all about 
profit-making and achieving overall capitalist economic goals. The difference 
is that Wikinomics strategies are more subtle. They colonize spare time and 
transform free time into labour time, in which surplus value is created and 
appropriated by capital. However, the prosumers don’t realize that they are 
being exploited because exploitation now seems fun to them; it is entertaining, 
and takes place during their spare time. 

Wikinomics, hence, is not only a subtle form of exploitation of unpaid labour, 
but also an ideology. The main idea is to outsource labour to globally 
distributed customers and collaborators that act as prosumers so that labour 
and other costs are reduced. Marx showed that if variable capital costs (labour 
costs) decrease, the rate of exploitation (the relation of surplus value to 
variable capital s/v) increases. With the rise of Wikinomics, exploitation 
expands to the realm of spare time, economic colonization and instrumental 
reason become universal, and the rate of exploitation increases because 
prosumers, as a tendency, deliver unpaid surplus value. Tapscott and Williams 
don’t call this process exploitation, but they implicitly admit that it is all 
about the extraction of surplus value from consumers: “Companies can design and 
assemble products with their customers, and in some cases customers can do the 
majority of the value creation” (289sq). This is not a novel form of management 
and organization because it has in common with Taylorism the overall goal of 
increasing competitive advantage and the reduction of humans to economic reason 
in the last instance (cf. Fuchs, Blachfellner & Bichler, 2007).

Most of the authors’ Web 2.0 accumulation strategies are based on the notion of 
the cost-cutting effects of the global outsourcing of labour, supported by the 
Internet. In reality, this strategy has the form of a new self-employment, 
which already in the past produced precarious forms of flexibility with more 
risks, less social security, and less secure employment. The most probable 
result of an economy based on Wikinomics will be an increase in precarious and 
unpaid labour that benefits certain companies that exploit unpaid labour. Such 
a situation remunerates more people for only a strictly limited time for 
specific tasks. The result will be more precarious jobs and living conditions, 
with an increased income gap between corporate workers on top, and then 
flex-workers, temporary workers, and the unemployed at the bottom.
 
Tapscott and Williams have an idealistic and unrealistic view of capitalism. 
They argue that in the end, all actors involved in Wikinomics will benefit. For 
example, they say that the new business models would “drive new innovation, 
create jobs and wealth, and add tremendous value for customers” (p. 234). If 
there is one general principle of capitalism, it is that capitalism is a system 
that never benefits all, but only some at the expense of others, and some more 
than others so that relative or absolute inequality is generated. In 
capitalism, economic freedom stands in antagonism with social equity. 
Capitalism is, overall, always a non-co-operative (i.e., competitive) system 
because it is particularistic: Capital is accumulated by someone or a group at 
the expense of others who are being exploited or excluded. There is a dialectic 
of ownership and non-ownership, accumulation and dispossession of money 
capital. Tapscott and Williams create the impression that all will benefit from 
Wikinomics, but they don’t see that those who gain competitive advantages will 
do so at the expense of other economic actors and that those prosumers who work 
for free in the Wikinomy are exploited by capital.

Capitalism is a competitive society in the sense that it benefits certain 
groups at the expense of others. I have argued in another place, based on the 
principle of Essence taken from dialectical philosophy, that co-operation, 
understood as human collaboration that brings advantages to all, is the Essence 
of society because a fully competitive society is self-destructive, whereas a 
fully cooperative society is possible, which makes co-operation a more 
grounding phenomenon of society than competition (Fuchs, 2008). If Truth is 
seen as the correspondence of Essence and Existence, then capitalism is a false 
society, and only a fully co-operative society is a true state of human 
existence. One important quality of capitalism that has been grasped by Marx is 
that capitalism, in advancing productivity by technological and organizational 
progress, at the same time deepens exploitation and alienation and produces 
potentials for a fully co-operative society (Fuchs, 2008). In this context, 
Marx has spoken of the antagonism between the productive forces and the 
relations of production. One novel quality of transnational informational 
capitalism is that co-operative potentials are no longer predominantly advanced 
in forms that feel alienating and uncontrollable for the masses. Instead, 
information, “immaterial” labour, media, and technology advance the overall 
competitive and instrumental character of society by integrating the 
subjectivity of human actors so that the impression is created that their work 
and lives are fun, participatory, rewarded, acknowledged, etc. Yet in reality, 
those actors become ever more subsumed under the control of capital to a 
greater extent and in ever more spheres of human existence (Fuchs, 2008). In an 
economy based on Wikinomics principles, spare time, as a tendency, becomes 
labour time in which surplus value is produced.

Mass collaboration has traditionally been associated with socialist 
self-management, collective grassroots control of the means of production, and 
the emergence of a co-operative economy, in which necessary labour is reduced 
to a minimum and which functions according to the principle of “to each 
according to his needs, from each according to his abilities.” Tapscott and 
Williams argue that Wikinomics would not be a threat for capitalism and not be 
based on communist principles: “mass collaboration and peer production are 
really the polar opposites of the communism that Gates and Lanier despise.  . . 
.Whereas communism stifled individualism, mass collaboration is based on 
individuals and companies employing widely distributed computation and 
communication technologies to achieve shared outcomes through loose voluntary 
association” (17). This is neither completely wrong nor right because certain 
forms of online mass collaboration obviously pose threats for capitalist 
interests, as one can see in those examples where certain companies and 
industries try to legally stop file sharing (e.g., Napster) or prosecute 
copyright infringement. If people give something that is normally sold as a 
commodity for free to others, many will be happy to receive those gifts, and as 
a result there will be a tendency of falling profits in the respective business 
areas.  

This seems to be especially the case with strictly non-commercial platforms 
that allow the free sharing of information. But there is a certain truth in 
Tapscott’s and Williams’ remarks because there are numerous Web 2.0 examples in 
which sharing, peering, and gifts are used for making large profits (e.g., 
YouTube, MySpace, Google).  As with all bourgeois thinking, Tapscott’s and 
Williams’ book is undialectical; they think in terms of “either . . . or,” not 
in terms of “both . . . as well as.” As a result, they argue that Web 2.0 is 
fully capitalistic and doesn’t threaten capitalist profitability. In reality, 
Web 2.0 both affirms capitalism and produces potentials that can undercut 
profitability and anticipate a fully cooperative economy. In this respect, Web 
2.0 is characterized by the antagonism between the digitally networked 
productive forces and the generalized capitalist relations of production 
(Fuchs, 2008).

Wikinomics shows how mass collaboration and digital gifts can be subsumed under 
capitalist logic. The difference between my own approach and the authors’ is 
that the latter welcome this development, whereas I consider it from a 
neo-Marxist perspective as the extension and intensification of alienation and 
exploitation (Fuchs, 2008), yet I recognize that, at the same time, it bears 
certain potentials for alternative developments. Transnational informational 
capitalism is characterized by a paradox situation that was foreseen 30 years 
ago by Herbert Marcuse, in which subjective unfreedom is accompanied by the 
highest objective potentials for emancipation that have thus far existed in 
human history (Fuchs, 2008). 
 
I have characterized this paradox economy as the gift commodity Internet 
economy (Fuchs, 2008). Commercial Web 2.0 applications are typically of no 
charge for users; they generate profit by achieving as many users as possible 
by offering free services and selling advertisement space to third parties and 
additional services to users. The more users, the more profit, that is, the 
more services are offered for free, the more profit can be generated. Although 
the principle of the gift points towards a post-capitalist society, gifts are 
today subsumed under capitalism and used for generating profit in the Internet 
economy. The Internet gift economy has a double character; it supports and at 
the same time undermines informational capitalism.

The gift commodity Internet economy can be read as a specific form of what 
Dallas Smythe (1981, 2006) has termed the audience commodity. He suggests that 
in the case of media advertisement models, the audience is sold as a commodity. 
“Because audience power is produced, sold, purchased and consumed, it commands 
a price and is a commodity. . . . You audience members contribute your unpaid 
work time and in exchange you receive the program material and the explicit 
advertisements” (Smythe, 1981/2006, pp. 233 & 238). Audiences constitute unpaid 
labor; the consumption of the mass media is work because it results in a 
commodity, which is to say it produces that commodity. In this model, the 
audience’s work would also include “learning to buy goods and to spend their 
income accordingly,” the demand for the consumption of goods, and the 
reproduction of their own labour power (Smythe, 1981/2006, 243sq). 

With the rise of user-generated content and free access social networking 
platforms and other free access platforms that yield profit by online 
advertisement, the Web seems to come close to the accumulation strategies 
employed by capital on traditional mass media like TV or radio. The users who 
Google data, upload or watch videos on YouTube, upload or browse personal 
images on Flickr, or accumulate friends with whom they exchange content or 
communicate online via social networking platforms like MySpace or Facebook, 
constitute an audience commodity that is sold to advertisers. The difference 
between the audience commodity on traditional mass media and on the Internet is 
that in the latter the users are also content producers, there is 
user-generated content, the users engage in permanent creative activity, 
communication, community-building, and content-production. That the users are 
more active on the Internet than in the reception of TV or radio content is due 
to the decentralized structure of the Internet which allows many-to-many 
communication. Due to the permanent activity of the recipients and their status 
as prosumers, I would, in the case of the Internet, argue that the audience 
commodity is a prosumer commodity. The category of the prosumer commodity does 
not signify a democratization of the media towards participatory systems, but 
the total commodification of human creativity. Much of the time spent online 
produces profit for large corporations like Google, News Corp. (which owns 
MySpace), or Yahoo! (which owns Flickr). Advertisements on the Internet are 
frequently personalized; this is made possible by surveilling, storing, and 
assessing user activities with the help of computers and databases. This is 
another difference from TV and radio, which, due to their centralized 
structure, provide less individualized content and advertisements. But one can 
also observe a certain shift in the area of traditional mass media, as in the 
cases of pay per view, tele-votes, talkshows, and call-in TV and radio shows. 
In the case of the Internet, the commodification of audience participation is 
easier to achieve than with other mass media. The rise of the Internet prosumer 
commodity also shows that the visions of critical theorists like Benjamin, 
Brecht, and Enzensberger of an emancipatory media structure have today been 
subsumed under capital.

The gift commodity economy is based on what Tiziana Terranova (2000) has termed 
free labour; as a tendency, prosumers produce surplus value without payment. 
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (2005) speak in this context of the 
exploitation of the multitude that produces knowledge as part of the commons of 
society. Free labour is the labour that produces the prosumer commodity that is 
sold to corporations at specific rates so that they are allowed to provide 
personalized advertisements that target and try to mind-control the users while 
they are active online in order to convince them to buy certain products or 
services. 

Capital is accumulated by collaboration, the provision of free access, peering, 
sharing, networking, communicating, and opening resources. Consumers become 
producers of surplus value: “In each instance the traditionally passive buyers 
of editorial and advertising take active, participatory roles in value 
creation” (Tapscott and Williams 2007,  p. 14). There are “models where masses 
of consumers, employees, suppliers, business partners, and even competitors 
co-create value in the absence of direct managerial control” (55). The result 
is not the emergence of “a new economic democracy . . . in which we all have a 
lead role” (15), as Tapscott and Williams claim, but a subtly operating, 
coercive, and highly exploitative capitalist economy that tries to reduce 
labour and other investment costs by the global dynamic outsourcing of labour 
to prosumers, competitors, and subcontractors with the help of Web 2.0.

Tapscott and Williams argue that it can be reasonable for companies to create 
platform incentive systems, i.e., to pay money to users for certain services in 
order to motivate them to participate and add value (205-209). “A more 
comprehensive framework might include royalty payments to top innovators. . . . 
Companies that attract and reward the best participants have the opportunity to 
create new sources of competitive advantage” (207). To pay some money to users 
who generate surplus value is better than to pay no money to them, but the 
authors’ overall idea is that only the best ideas are rewarded, so that more 
people engage more intensively in order to get a reward, which will result in 
more overall production and exploitation of surplus. The only reasonable claim 
in this context is that all prosumption should be paid for by corporations 
because they create surplus value. Such a move would advance coming closer to 
the ultimate goal of a fully co-operative society, in which no surplus is 
exploited and people co-operate freely in a post-scarcity, high-technology 
economy that distributes all goods for free and advances the well-rounded 
development of all individuals. Such a society is non-capitalist in character.

Due to its lack of grounding in scientific discourse and its extremely sloppy 
dealing with scientific sources and quotations, Wikinomics is not a scientific 
monograph, but more a guide for business leaders. Nonetheless, it is worthwhile 
reading for readers who want to observe how affirmative thinking and bourgeois 
ideology operate within the discourse on Web 2.0.

In the end, there is an important truth in the work of Brecht (1932, p. 64), 
who wrote that the usage of the media in the interest not of the few, but of 
all, is unfeasible in the capitalist social order, but feasible in another 
order. Web 2.0 and Wikinomics show that networked prosumption in a capitalist 
order serves the economic interests of the few, but has the potential to serve 
the interests of all in another societal order that can be concretely 
anticipated today.

My aim is not to pose a purely pessimistic view on the economistic 
techno-optimism of Tapscott and Williams because there are actual examples, 
like peer-to-peer file-sharing or Wikipedia, that show that already today there 
are examples for techno-social Internet-based systems that transcend the 
instrumental logic of competition and instrumental reason and anticipate a 
society that is based on co-operation, sharing, and participation. These 
accounts are either radical in the sense that they argue that Internet and 
society have anti-capitalist potentials, or they are social-democratic in the 
sense that they argue that there is a new importance of public goods inherent 
in the Internet (e.g., Atton, 2004’ Barbrook, 1998, 1999, 2007; Benkler, 2006; 
Lessig, 2006; Söderberg, 2002). 

On the radical side, Atton (2004, p. ix) stresses that in the “anti-copyright 
and open software movements . . .  philosophy of communiatarianism and usufruct 
offer alternatives to the political economies of copyright ownership and 
intellectual property rights.” Richard Barbrook (1998, 1999, 2007) argues that, 
due to digital gifts, “within the mixed economy of the Net, anarcho-communism 
has become an everyday reality” (Barbrook, 1998). “By giving away their own 
personal efforts, Net users always receive the results of much greater amounts 
of labour in return from others. Although many on-line activities are trivial, 
some collaborations are now creating very sophisticated products, such as the 
Linux operating system and interactive music pieces. Net users are now 
developing a much more efficient and enjoyable way of working together: 
cyber-communism” (Barbrook, 1999). A similar account is given by Johan 
Söderberg (2002): “The success of free software in out-performing commercial 
software is a showcase of the productive force of the general intellect, 
foreseen by Marx 150 years ago. It underpins the claim by Autonomist Marxists 
that production is becoming intensively social, and supports their case of a 
rising mismatch between collective labour power and an economy based on private 
property. . . . It is here that Marxism has its role to play as a toolbox of 
critical analysis and ideological awareness. Ultimately, the direction of 
history is not reducible to emerging productive forces, conveniently mapped out 
by historical materialism, but is contested and resolved in struggles between 
social actors. In this struggle the hacker movement is important, I stress, 
because they can challenge capital's domination over technological development.”

An example for the social-democratic version of the argument is that Yochai 
Benkler contends that there are now socially-produced alternatives to 
information commodities: “The basic technologies of information processing, 
storage, and communication have made nonproprietary models more attractive and 
effective than was ever before possible” (Benkler, 2006, p. 462). Arguments 
similar to the ones put forth by Benkler are made by Lawrence Lessig: “With 
respect to intellectual property, I argue against code that tracks reading and 
in favor of code that guarantees a large space for an intellectual commons” 
(Lessig, 2006, p. 276).

Synthesizing both the Web 2.0 commodity-argument and the Web 2.0 
commons-argument for me means an actualization of the Marxian antagonism 
between productive forces and relations of production: “Networks are forms of 
development as well as fetters of capitalism . . . Networks are a material 
condition for a free association, but the cooperative networking of the 
relations of production is not an automatic result of the networked productive 
forces, a network society . . .  is something that people must struggle for” 
(Fuchs, 2008, p. 160).


References

Atton, Chris. 2004. An Alternative Internet. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University 
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Barbrook, Richard. 1998. The Hi-Tech Gift Economy. First Monday 3 (12).

Barbrook, Richard. 1999. The: :Cyber.com/munist: :Manifesto. 
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Barbrook, Richard. 2007. Imaginary Futures. London: Pluto Press.

Benjamin, Walter. 1934. Der Autor als Produzent. In Medienästhetische 
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Benjamin, Walter. 1936/1939. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical 
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Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. 2005. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age 
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