Yochai Benkler: "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom"

Yochai Benkler, law professor at Yale, gave a fascinating talk today called, "The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom", based around his book of the same name. The audio of the talk is available by clicking on the title of this post or here: Yochai Benkler at Boalt (MP3 audio) (the audio as well as everything on this blog is licensed under a CC attribution license).

The talk was absolutely fascinating to me as he managed to link together a number of different phenomena and social production processes into a very interesting retrospective on the last few decades. He even spent a while speaking about the event that directly resulted in my getting into electronic voting research: the Diebold memos controversy. This case was where a diffuse group of students and activists were able to keep Diebold Election Systems, Inc. from quashing discussion surrounding a set of internal memos. And, as Prof. Benkler pointed out, that resulted in the decertification of Diebold's equipment in the State of California one year before the legal ruling against DESI in the same case (the EFF and Stanford Cyberlaw Clinic were the legal support for the plaintiff students).

Here is the abstract to his talk:

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment. In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing ­ and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained ­ or lost ­ by the decisions we make today.