Interview With Yochai Benkler

Wow! Take a look at this interview with Yochai Benkler, the author of The Wealth of Networks. He talks about the sharing, collaborative, altruistic, pay-it-forward times of the present day and how they will have an effect on economy, copyright, and business. I love this paragraph:

“Nonmonetary motivations are what make you stop on the street for a moment to answer a stranger who asks you for the time or directions; what makes you travel five hundred miles to be with you family for the holidays, and what makes you tell a friend a joke, or listen to it. They are also the motivations that lead some of the world’s leading minds to work for what, by comparison to other lines of business in which they could succeed, is a pittance–to satisfy their curiosity, for fame, or because of the sheer fun. These are motivations on which all of us act many times a day, but which have been shunted to the periphery of the economy throughout much of the industrial period. What we see now, as the two core inputs into information production have become widely distributed in the population (that is, computation and communications capacity, on the one hand, and human creativity, experience, and wisdom, on the other hand), these same motivations have moved from the domain of the social and personal to occupy a larger role smack in the middle of the most advanced economies in the world today.”

I think it’s easier to work for less if you happen to have more. For those of us that have less, it’s hard to work for less than what we’re worth. Libraries are at the core of this new marketplace and the new movements that we’ve seen pop up over the past year prove that. While still a bit skeptical of L2, I become less so when they can be placed in correlation with the theories espoused by Benkler.