Abstract
This chapter puts peer production and Wikipedia in their context of digitally mediated capitalism. Key concepts are explained and an outline of the book’s content is provided. The problem area and aim of the study, as well as the theoretical and methodological points of departure, are pointed out. Some key concepts for the ideology analysis are defined.
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Notes
- 1.
In addition to digital artisans, the concept of digerati is used, with the connotation that the creative digital craftsman also has an unconventional and alternative lifestyle in relation to traditional corporate culture.
- 2.
Moore’s law: Performance is doubled every 24 months; Metcalfe’s law: network value increases as a square of the number of nodes included.
- 3.
Bidragsgivare is the Swedish word for “contributor”.
- 4.
Fluctuations that have been driven by financial capital and increasingly demanding shareholders.
- 5.
The concepts of mass labourer (mass worker) and class composition are covered in more detail in Chap. 4.
- 6.
George Caffentzis summarises Marx’s account in Capital volume three with three possible methods to counteract the tendency of the rate of profit to fall by increasing the mass of extracted surplus value by raising the intensity of labour or by extending the working day, decreasing the mass of variable capital by cutting wages and increasing external trade, or reducing the mass of constant capital by increasing productivity and external trade. Different combinations can be used and there is no definite capitalist strategy with regard to breaking various types of labour struggle. “These struggles can lead to many futures” (Caffentzis 2013, pp. 72–73).
- 7.
Abstract labour will in this study be called labour or sometimes wage labour. The concept refers in part to the value-producing labour of products sold for their value in exchange on the market and will also be used in another meaning to designate commercial activities focusing on value exchange and value realisation.
- 8.
The concept crowdsourcing was launched by Jeff Howe in 2006.
- 9.
Fordism indicates a phase in the capitalist mode of production characterised by a strict division of “manual and intellectual labour”. This was based on an extreme division of labour and fragmentation of the work process, planned and designed outside the control of the worker and implemented within a strict time frame. Henry Ford’s assembly line constitutes an emblematic example.
- 10.
A cycle of struggles is a concept in autonomist Marxist theory that claims that class struggle, with the working class as an active subject, drives technical and social development.
- 11.
She calls peer production for social production or peer-to-peer.
- 12.
A Marxian critique of the P2P perspective’s theoretical foundation is developed more extensively in an article in Journal of Peer Production (Lund 2017).
- 13.
See explanatory discussions on commons, commons-based peer production, and the copyleft principle, in the section “Commons and the Return of Formal Subsumption” in Chap. 4, and in the section on the informational relation between Wikipedia and companies in Chap. 6. In short, the copyleft licence allows the free access, reproduction, adaptation and distribution of licenced works and derivative works dependent upon them. But the licence requires that the distribution of copies and derivative works are conducted under the same copyleft licence (and clearly marked so). This is important both for Wikipedia’s mode of producing and its relation to capitalism as a mode of production.
- 14.
I developed the idea playwork in autumn 2012 to designate a playful creation of use values that is separate from capitalism and the concept playbour. The activity of uploading a video to YouTube could possibly be included under the latter concept as the platform is controlled by actors with an interest in value-oriented abstract labour, which this study calls labour, but the argument can be problematised further as will be evident in the ideology analysis of the study.
- 15.
The overall research questions being: Which ideological formations distinguish the Wikipedians’ view of their own activities, as well as their view of Wikipedia’s relationship with capitalism? How are the two levels of formations similar or dissimilar from each other? How do the two level’s formations relate to each other? And finally: What is the relationship of the results of the ideology analysis to the Marxist understanding of contemporary social dynamics?
- 16.
Gift economies are often called moral economies that aim to create and maintain social relations. A gift requires no pecuniary compensation, but if something is given away there can still be an implicit demand for some form of return gift. According to social anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, a gift can consist of implicit demands of reciprocity that are balanced or generalised in character. The demands of the former dictate to a greater extent when and how a return gift shall be given (it is close to a simple barter), the demands of the latter do not specify the time, character and forms for the return gift, but it is still important that some form of return gift is made (Sahlins 2004, pp. 193–95). In contexts dominated by gift-economic exchanges it is difficult to distinguish the gift from the return gift, the distinction is in practice unnecessary to unravel, as long as the interaction proceeds. The gift-economic process constitutes in many ways a circle motion, but can also develop into downward or upward spirals of growing sociality or asociality (the latter by the giving of what I call anti-gifts). These gifts, and the pure gift of which Bronislaw Malinowski speaks of (that does not require anything in return) (Malinowski 1922, pp. 176–77), characterise much of the commons-based exchange of actions involved in the creation of use values at Wikipedia.
- 17.
Rasmus Fleischer describes the concept of “dissociation” as first developed by Roswitha Scholz, an editor together with Robert Kurz at the publication Exit: Dissociation is according to Fleischer’s understanding a concept that should be understood at the abstract level of the concept of value: “The value as structure (commodity form) admittedly contends its totalitarian claims, but rejects in practice large parts of societal reproduction. This concerns both a material level (domestic work, upbringing) and an affective-cultural level. Some things can quite simply not be grasped by the value form, cannot be performed as abstract labour—instead they are dissociated from the value, from official society. They primarily apply to women” (Fleischer 2011a).
- 18.
Namespaces is a way to organise articles and, for example, internal affairs regarding the workings of Wikipedia.
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Lund, A. (2017). Introduction. In: Wikipedia, Work and Capitalism. Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-50690-6_1
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