Michel Bauwens on the Sharing Economy’s Impact on Capitalism
On the Al Jazeera website, Michel Bauwens of the P2P Foundation has a terrific big-picture assessment of the impressive growth of the sharing economy and peer production, and its serious long-term implications for capitalism.
He starts by explaining how commons-based peer production is rapidly expanding. It is no longer confined to the familiar, robust worlds of free software, wikis, the blogosphere, and social networking in cyberspace. Peer production has moved on to various physical realms. It can be seen in such innovations as open source manufacturing, which has produced Wikispeed, a 100 mpg car built by a team of volunteers in just three months, and Arduino, the open-source electronics prototyping platform. It can also be seen in various crowdsourcing and social lending platforms, such as Kickstarter (which I recently learned channeled more money to artists in 2011 than the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts).
Peer production has also spawned a whole new sector of “collaborative consumption.” This consists of organized forms of swapping and bartering, car-sharing, CouchSurfing and other lifestyle practices and innovative markets based on sharing. The point in most cases is to reduce one’s dependence on the market and live a more social, convivial life. The goal is not acquisition and ownership, but access and use.
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