DISQUS

Hello! The Technology Liberation Front is using DISQUS, a powerful comment system, to manage its comments. Learn more.

Community Page

techliberation.com/ Jump to website »

Subscribe
- New Comments
Community
Top Commenters
- eee_eff
  781 comments · 5 points
- Richard Bennett
  604 comments · 1 points
- Steve R.
  461 comments · 20 points
- Jim Harper
  261 comments · 1 points
- Adam Thierer
  180 comments · 0 points
Popular Threads
- Defending Free
  1 week ago · 12 comments
- “Free” Isn’t Worth Reading, But It’s Worth Discussing
  1 week ago · 10 comments
- Thank God the Euro-crats are Saving Us from a Browser Monopoly
  5 days ago · 1 comment
- Ad-Supported Internet: The Musical (Web Side Story)
  1 week ago · 7 comments
- Don’t Believe ‘Special Access’ Hype
  2 weeks ago · 19 comments
Recent Comments
- Incredibly hollow post, contracts of adhesion are designed to unilaterally "protect" the seller by "restricting" (depriving) the consumer of their rights. To assert that we...
  1 hour ago by Steve R.
  
  in The Arcane Mystery of What Everyone Does
- Why don't more proprietary software vendors use a common license? The proprietary EULAs mostly say the same things -- couldn't the BSA or somebody issue a standard one?
  12 hours ago by dmarti
  
  in The Arcane Mystery of What Everyone Does
- Twitter as we know it was built for about $15-20 million. Google lasted almost a year on $100,000 before taking over the world with $25 million of investor money. This is highway robbery, you could...
  14 hours ago by Timon
  
  in Initial recovery.gov pricetag: $9 million
- I think the news people are in a "damned if you do, damned if you don't" bind over Google's indexing and summarizing of their work. Allowing it to be indexed gets them a little...
  15 hours ago by Richard Bennett
  
  in Antitrust Enforcement in the Age of Free
- I'm a software engineer who has built web applications for Office Depot, Target, AIG (no I'm not proud of it) and many others. J. Stephens apparently has not worked in the private sector....
  19 hours ago by Nick
  
  in Initial recovery.gov pricetag: $9 million

The Technology Liberation Front

The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.

Jump to original thread »

Broken Windows on the Internet

Started by TLF · 11 months ago

5 comments

Greg Lastowka
3 years ago

Fwiw, there's a discussion of Yochai's book going on over at Crooked Timber, including a review by Dan Hunter.

link

I agree with you (of course) that the Wikipedia model provides economic value, perhaps even more than Britannica provides. It strikes me, though, that the peer production & sharing model might have a disadvantage in producing campaign contributions. One thing about these particular broken windows is that the glaziers know how to lobby effectively, while the shopkeepers face some significant collective action problems.

Greg Lastowka
3 years ago

Whoops, bungled the HTML for the link.

Here's the plain text:
http://crookedtimber.org/2006/05/30/a-general-t...

eee_eff
3 years ago

"How do we know that Wikipedia and SETI@Home don't contribute in any meaningful way to the U.S. economy?"

Obviously, they are of value to the economy. Just because they are not overtly monetized certainly does not mean they are not of value.

"By the same logic, the sun and the air don't contribute in any meaningful way to the U.S. economy."

Strongly recommend the book "The Future of Life" by Edward Wilson, The Future of Life, in which he does take a stab at valuing the biosphere.

But, let's get back to the reason these phenomena are so revolutionary--not because they have built an Encyclopedia (which is in fact very good, but I digress) or a super computer but because they have done so outside of the control infrastructure of the traditional hierarchies.

That is why wikipedia, open source software, have been so vilified by those agents of the powerful traditional hierarchies.

Examples of this vilification: Microsoft calling FOSS "cancerous", Brittanica response to the Nature study, SCO suit against linux, and you can look at those apologists of the corporate power infrastructure attacking open source and Free Culture at such propaganda sites as IP Central every day...