Date post: | 27-Mar-2015 |
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The Network EconomyNew role of Culture in Economics
Implications for the nature of Markets, Property & Ownership
Creativity & Work
Commons & Ecology
Benkler: “...battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment”
Redefining Wealth
Quantitative: Money & Material
Accumulation
Qualitative: Well-being
Regeneration
McLuhan on Technology• Extension of human senses
& functions
• Civilization: extending muscles & bodily functions like heating
• Electronic technology: extending the human mind & nervous system
Questions• Is capitalism an intrinsically material-
based and scarcity-based system?
• How does information redefine property?
• How do we support or remunerate culture-based production?
• What is the appropriate balance of commercial & non-market production in the economy?
• Does ‘globalization’ of information require economic globalization?
Related Questions• Who are corporate allies in the
quest to free up culture flows?• What business models can tolerate
non-proprietary information?• What are possible negative impacts
of mass collaboration?• What are the implications for
university research & education?
Knowledge-based Development
• Dematerialization: intrinsic: substituting information for resources
• Detoxification: ...great potential to tune into benign process & substances.
• Decentralization: intrinsic part of the network economy
Hardware & Sustainability• Electronics: design for
obsolescence. The Waste Economy. • Design for monopoly: incompatibility• E-waste & toxicity• Electronics & global labour
exploitation.• Crucial role of Extended Producer
Responsibility (EPR) in reducing & reusing.
• New possibilities for efficiency in the “World Wide Computer”
Work (Creativity) in the Info Economy
• a growing proportion of work is involved in the production of “meaning & value”
• a break from the historic role of worker as cog in the Megamachine
• the decline of bureaucracy• people as means & ends of ‘development’;
inversion of ‘investment-consumption’ relationship
• all-round human development: underlying basis for “creative class” economy: freedom & individuation.
N.B.: The overwhelming portion of ecological development—green building, permaculture, renewable energy, eco-industrial networks, reuse-based waste management etc.--all require greater knowledge
Commons in the Info Economy
• Sharing & conservation: key role of design.
• Sharing: flip side of the new importance of creativity.
• Green goods and info goods as “public goods”, not easily served by market exchange.
• Key struggles today: over control of the Commons—the “2nd Enclosure”
Democracy & the New Commons
• the Digital Divide
• Net Neutrality & the Information Highway
• Struggle over Bandwidth