[Marxism] Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online

[Louis Proyect]

http://www.wired.com/culture/culturereviews/magazine/17-06/nep_newsocialism
The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online
By Kevin Kelly

Wikipedia, Flickr, and Twitter aren't just revolutions in online social 
media. They're the vanguard of a cultural movement.

Bill Gates once derided open source advocates with the worst epithet a 
capitalist can muster. These folks, he said, were a "new modern-day sort 
of communists," a malevolent force bent on destroying the monopolistic 
incentive that helps support the American dream. Gates was wrong: Open 
source zealots are more likely to be libertarians than commie pinkos. 
Yet there is some truth to his allegation. The frantic global rush to 
connect everyone to everyone, all the time, is quietly giving rise to a 
revised version of socialism.

Communal aspects of digital culture run deep and wide. Wikipedia is just 
one remarkable example of an emerging collectivism—and not just 
Wikipedia but wikiness at large. Ward Cunningham, who invented the first 
collaborative Web page in 1994, tracks nearly 150 wiki engines today, 
each powering myriad sites. Wetpaint, launched just three years ago, 
hosts more than 1 million communal efforts. Widespread adoption of the 
share-friendly Creative Commons alternative copyright license and the 
rise of ubiquitous file-sharing are two more steps in this shift. 
Mushrooming collaborative sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, the Hype 
Machine, and Twine have added weight to this great upheaval. Nearly 
every day another startup proudly heralds a new way to harness community 
action. These developments suggest a steady move toward a sort of 
socialism uniquely tuned for a networked world.

We're not talking about your grandfather's socialism. In fact, there is 
a long list of past movements this new socialism is not. It is not class 
warfare. It is not anti-American; indeed, digital socialism may be the 
newest American innovation. While old-school socialism was an arm of the 
state, digital socialism is socialism without the state. This new brand 
of socialism currently operates in the realm of culture and economics, 
rather than government—for now.

The type of communism with which Gates hoped to tar the creators of 
Linux was born in an era of enforced borders, centralized 
communications, and top-heavy industrial processes. Those constraints 
gave rise to a type of collective ownership that replaced the brilliant 
chaos of a free market with scientific five-year plans devised by an 
all-powerful politburo. This political operating system failed, to put 
it mildly. However, unlike those older strains of red-flag socialism, 
the new socialism runs over a borderless Internet, through a tightly 
integrated global economy. It is designed to heighten individual 
autonomy and thwart centralization. It is decentralization extreme.

Instead of gathering on collective farms, we gather in collective 
worlds. Instead of state factories, we have desktop factories connected 
to virtual co-ops. Instead of sharing drill bits, picks, and shovels, we 
share apps, scripts, and APIs. Instead of faceless politburos, we have 
faceless meritocracies, where the only thing that matters is getting 
things done. Instead of national production, we have peer production. 
Instead of government rations and subsidies, we have a bounty of free goods.

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