SKIRMISHER

Look at today’s world wide web, sift the blogosphere, and eyeball sites like digg or reddit. It would strike you that after all those failed revolutions, the world ended up being sort of Marxist.

As Chris Anderson said:

“Marx himself believed that the industrial proletariat would revolt against the bourgeoisie, creating a state where the workers own the means of industrial production. It’s easy to see an echo of that in blogosphere triumphalism.”

Because, when you think about it, the web has become a place where content and software are produced by peers–by hordes of amateurs who happily contribute or create value and content for free–Flickr, YouTube, what-have-you. In many ways, the whole new setup is much more liberating and exciting.

Wired’s Anderson says:

But the real miracle is in the more intentional work millions of us do to populate the Web: 80 million MySpace pages, 40 million bloggers, nearly a million amateur encyclopedians. The result is a shared culture of fandom, commentary, and camaraderie. And then there’s open source software, which has changed both the corporate server (Linux) and the consumer desktop (Firefox) – and given new life to IBM, a company that now thrives by building software and services atop peer-produced code.

Previous industrial ages were built on the backs of individuals, too, but in those days labor was just that: labor. Workers were paid for their time, whether on a factory floor or in a cubicle. Today’s peer-production machine runs in a mostly nonmonetary economy. The currency is reputation, expression, karma, “wuffie,” or simply whim.

But it’s a mistake to equate peer production with anticapitalism. This isn’t amateurs versus professionals; it’s each benefiting the other. Companies aren’t just exploiting free labor; they’re also creating the tools that give voice to millions. And that rowdy rabble isn’t replacing the firm; it’s providing the energy that drives a new sort of company, one that understands that talent exists outside Hollywood, that credentials matter less than passion, and that each of us has knowledge that’s valuable to someone, somewhere.

PEOPLE POWER [Wired]

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