Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler wrote Wealth of Networks through Yale University Press in 2006 to discuss “How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom.” It is released under a Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike License.

Chapter One

 * Page One
 * Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development. How they are produced and exchanged in our society critically affects the way we see the state of the world as it is and might be... For more than 150 years, modern complex democracies have depended in large measure on an industrial information economy for these basic functions.


 * Page Four
 * Education, arts and sciences, political debate, and theological disputation have always been much more importantly infused with nonmarket motivations and actors than, say, the automobile industry.


 * Page Five
 * Third, and likely most radical, new, and difficult for observers to believe, is the rise of effective, large-scale cooperative efforts-- peer production of information, knowledge, and culture.


 * Page Six
 * In the networked information economy, the physical capital required for production is broadly distributed throughout society.


 * Page Nine
 * The very fluidity and low commitment required of any given cooperative relationship increases the range and diversity of cooperative relations people can enter, and therefore of collaborative projects they can conceive of as open to them.


 * Page Fourteen
 * Even as opulence increases in the wealthier economies-- as information and innovation offer longer and healthier lives that are enriched by better access to information, knowledge, and culture-- in many places, life expectancy is decreasing, morbidity is increasing, and illiteracy remains rampant. Some, although by no means all, of this global injustice is due to the fact that we have come to rely ever-more exclusively on proprietary business models of the industrial economy to provide some of the most basic information components of human development.


 * Page Seventeen
 * Assuming that technologies are just tools that happen, more or less, to be there, and are employed in any given society in a pattern that depends only on what that society and culture makes of them is too constrained. A society that has no wheel and no writing has certain limits on what it can do.