The way the Internet was designed has allowed for the phenomenon of crowdsourcing to run rampant. User-created content is the heart of the Internet and the ordinary channels of mass distribution are waning. This process, which has moved the power of production into the hands of the actual users rather than traditional content developers, is beginning to realize what K arl Marx originally had in mind when he talked about the ownership of the means of production.
During the past century, the amount of people attending higher education has grown at an explosive rate, a tendency that continues today. People all around the world are becoming more and more educated in a broader and broader variety of fields. At the same time, the available jobs on the market have become more and more specialized. A person with a degree in the history of art and with a published book about the influence of baroque art on Picasso might today be sitting in a factory doing quality control on screwdrivers for eight hours a day, five days a week. Many people who study science, computing or technology will never work with the sciences, computers or technologies they studied. A student of biochemistry is just as likely to end up driving a taxi as he is to actually work within biochemistry.
The result of the educated masses is that people are beginning to perform their most meaningful and rewarding work away from their ordinary workplace. Going to work between 9 and 5 has stopped being just a way to pay the rent and the bills but is now becoming a way to keep us above water while we do the things we’re really interested in.
Think about the rise and spread of sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, iStockPhoto, Flickr, Twitter, Threadless and every single forum on the Internet. Think about how SETI@Home has pooled the computing power of hundreds of thousands of computers all around the world. Consider the entire Open Source movement from the birth of computer programming until GNU, Linux and beyond. Every single one of these is an example of a large crowd coming together and doing things that would have been impossible to do within the traditional confines of a company with employees, traditions, rules and regulatory policies. People are uploading their own creations to these places and sometimes manage to command a storm of attention to them as their own material is spread around the world in the time it takes to make a few keystrokes.
The Internet is the first technology in the history of mankind that allows people both to share original content with a large crowd and be two-way at the same time. Historically, things like books, magazines, cable television and similar “broadcast” technologies have allowed people to share original content while they fail by not allowing for two-way communication. On the flip side of the coin, however, communication technologies like the telephone, the fax machine and text messaging are great at two-way communication of original content and ideas; but fail because they are so limited in scope and scale. A phone conversation with five people quickly descends into chaos and unruly shouting as people try to make themselves heard.
Using the Internet, a person can ask a question that leads to a discussion involving hundreds of people within the span of a few minutes. A man in Florida can buy a photograph taken by a man in Bangladesh using a service hosted in Amsterdam by a company based in Madrid after having read comments about the photographer in question from previous buyers in Brisbane, Reykjavik and St. Petersburg. Not only is the world of communication shrinking; but the discussion of, the creation of and the methods of dissemination of original content is changing forever. People are avoiding releasing their movies through the industries in Hollywood not because of reasons of principle, morals or finance. They’re avoiding Hollywood simply because they don’t need it any more. It is said that around 60% of all Internet users create their own content to share with others, ranging from holiday snapshots taken with a $80 digital camera to full-length movies and professional-sounding music.
When he was thinking about why human societies tend to divide themselves into an upper, lower and middle class; Karl Marx offered an historical explanation. According to him; ownership of the means of production was the main reason why people divided themselves up into classes that advantaged the few and disadvantaged the many. The “means of production” are, in Marx’s definition, the things that people use to create products. In an agrarian society, this would be the soil and the shovel. In an industrial society; the mines and the factories. Owning these means of production is not the same thing as owning actual physical property, however. Nor is it the same as owning money. Rather, it refers to the capitalistic cultural practice in which a select few individuals within a larger corporation or company have control and decisive power over what is done with the entire profit created by that corporation. In Marxist theory, the (rich and few) owners of the means of production become rich by allowing the many (poor and many) workers to use these tools and produce goods or services.
Traditionally, the means of production of music, movies, animations and cartoons has been a privilege owned by a small and select group of people. If you wanted to make it big within music, you would have to be sure that one of these large corporations decided you were worth spending time and money on. The careers of David Bowie, Michael Jackson, Tina Turner, Rod Steward, Iron Maiden, and nearly everybody else that we remember from before the advent of the 21st Century is the result of a few people at the top of a company deciding that this is worth sponsoring and financing.
Today, creating a song is as easy as meeting up with a friends to write lyrics, create the music on computer software, record the vocals with a cheap over-the-counter microphone and distribution over the Internet. Over the course of a year, an old friend and I created thirty-something hip hop songs using equipment that I had bought without any noticeable dent in my financial status as a student at the time. Creating movies and animation is even easier. Writing a book is no longer dependent on hoping that a publisher approves of your creation and helps you distribute it to a wide audience; you can use a Print-on-Demand service and get your book out there all by yourself on home pages made for this very purpose.
The old businesses are slowly falling apart. The fanatical ways in which the media corporations are fighting piracy are but one of the death throes that they will suffer before they come to the same realization. It is as Buckminster Fuller once said:
You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.
Ownership of the Means of Production is seeping into the hands of the ordinary man. There was no great revolution. There was no rise of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. There was never a transfer of ownership from corporation to state or corporation to workers. Maybe there never will be. Even though this was never what Karl Marx had in mind, I wonder what Marxists of today think about this evolution. Where is it headed and what will happen next?
