Carr-Benkler wager revisited | Yochai Benkler's blog

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Nick Carr wants to settle the Carr-Benkler wager.  He thinks he won.  I would have thought that by 2012 it was clear that the Web is in fact focused on social media, participation in which is driven primarily by people’s desire to express themselves with and to each other, rather than on sites that have figured out how to pay their top contributors in order to draw audiences.  Peer production, the term I had introduced in 2001 in Coase’s Penguin, covered the fact that a critical source of value on the Net was the diverse experience and insight of many different people, with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and motivations.  As I wrote in 2001, “By connecting a very large number of people to these potential opportunities to produce, the e-text projects, just like Clickworkers, Slashdot, or Amazon, can capitalize on an enormous pool of underutilized intelligent human creativity and willingness to engage in intellectual effort.”  The reference to Amazon here was to the then-innovative way in which Amazon had integrated unpaid user reviews as a central part of the value Amazon the site provided when people were selecting books, by comparison to professional book critics. A feature that has become so normal in our view, that no one even stops to think what a profound shift we have undergone when the main selling point of Angie’s List is that it doesn’t use reviews other than those of real people.  It’s become the new normal.  I then embedded this economic observation in a broader sense of the implications of these trends for democracy and autonomy, and outlined the political and regulatory battles that the incumbents of the 20th century are engaging in so as to squelch the rise of social production and engagement in The Wealth of Networks in 2006.

It was in 2006, in response to the book, that Carr used Jason Calacanis’s effort to recruit the top contributors to Digg by paying them as a hook to criticize my view and argue that the future of the Web was to become a platform for delivery of professional content.  The question he raised was clear:

“I think that what Calacanis is getting at is that the reason "social media" has existed outside the price system up until now is simply that a market hadn’t yet emerged for this new kind of labor. We weren’t yet able to assign a value – in monetary terms – to what these workers were doing; we weren’t even able to draw distinctions between what they were contributing. We couldn’t see the talent for the crowd. Now, though, the amateurs are being sorted according to their individual skills, calculations as to the monetary value of those skills are starting to be made, and a market appears to be taking shape. As buyers and sellers come into this market, we’ll see whether large-scale social media can in fact survive outside the price system, or whether it’s fated to be subsumed into professional media. Which is mightier – Benkler’s dream or Calacanis’s wallet?”

“Benkler’s dream,” in The Wealth of Networks, is that what is critically new about the networked environment is that it allows people to come together, to act with and for each other in productive relationship.  In commenting on Carr’s point, I suggested that we look and see whether in the future the most influential sites will be those that allow people to come together and create with and for each other for social motivational reasons, rather than those that would be based on being able to clear markets, draw the best talent by paying it, and draw the most audience by providing that paid for, professional media content.  So, I wrote on his blog:

“The reason is that the power of the major sites comes from combining large-scale contributions from heterogeneous participants, with heterogeneous motivations. Pointing to the 80/20 rule on contributions misses the dynamic that comes from being part of a large community and a recognized leader or major contributors in it, for those at the top, and misses the importance of framing this as a non-priced social process. Adding money alters the overall relationship. It makes some people "professionals," and renders other participants, "suckers." It is not impossible to mix paid and unpaid participants, as we see in free and open source software and even to a very limited extent in Wikipedia. It is just hard, and requires a cultural form that is definitely not "now at long last we can tell who’s worth something and pay them, while everyone else is just worthelss." What Calacanis is doing now with his posts about the top contributors to Digg is trying to alter the cultural interpretation of what they are doing: from leaders in an engaged community, to suckers who are being taken for a ride by Ross.Maybe he will succeed in raining on Digg’s parade, though I doubt it, but that does not mean that he will succeed in building...