[Etc-br] InfoEnclosure 2.0

[tatiw at riseup.net]

excelente!

http://www.metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0

InfoEnclosure 2.0  - ByDmytri Kleiner & Brian Wyrick

The hype surrounding Web 2.0’s ability to democratise content production
obscures its centralisation of ownership and the means of sharing. Dmytri
Kleiner & Brian Wyrick expose Web 2.0 as a venture capitalist’s paradise
where investors pocket the value produced by unpaid users,  ride on the
technical innovations of the free software movement and kill off the
decentralising potential of peer-to-peer production

Wikipedia says that ‘Web 2.0, a phrase coined by O’Reilly Media in 2004,
refers to a supposed second generation of internet-based services – such
as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies –
that emphasise online collaboration and sharing among users.’

The use of the word ‘supposed’ is noteworthy. As probably the largest
collaboratively authored work in history, and one of the current darlings
of the internet community, Wikipedia ought to know. Unlike most of the
members of the Web 2.0 generation, Wikipedia is controlled by a non-profit
foundation, earns income only by donation and releases its content under
the copyleft GNU Free Documentation License. It is telling that Wikipedia
goes on to say ‘[Web 2.0] has become a popular (though ill-defined and
often criticised) buzzword among certain technical and marketing
communities.’

The free software community has tended to be suspicious, if not outright
dismissive, of the Web 2.0 moniker. Tim Berners-Lee dismissed the term
saying ‘Web 2.0 is of course a piece of jargon, nobody even knows what it
means.’ He goes on to note that ‘it means using the standards which have
been produced by all these people working on Web 1.0.’

In reality there is neither a Web 1.0 nor a Web 2.0, there is an ongoing
development of online applications that cannot be cleanly divided.

In trying to define what Web 2.0 is, it is safe to say that most of the
important developments have been aimed at enabling the community to
create, modify, and share content in a way that was previously only
available to centralised organisations which bought expensive software
packages, paid staff to handle the technical aspects of the site, and paid
staff to create content which generally was published only on that
organisation’s site.

A Web 2.0 company fundamentally changes the mode of production of internet
content. Web applications and services have become cheaper and easier to
implement, and by allowing the end users access to these applications, a
company can effectively outsource the creation and the organisation of
their content to the end users themselves. Instead of the traditional
model of a content provider publishing their own content and the end user
consuming it, the new model allows the company’s site to act as the
centralised portal between the users who are both creators and consumers.

For the user, access to these applications empowers them to create and
publish content that previously would have required them to purchase
desktop software and possess a greater technological skill set. For
example, two of the primary means of text-based content production in Web
2.0 are blogs and wikis which allow the user to create and publish content
directly from their browser without any real need for knowledge of markup
language, file transfer or syndication protocols, and all without the need
to purchase any software.

The use of the web application to replace desktop software is even more
significant for the user when it comes to content that is not merely
textual. Not only can web pages be created and edited in the browser
without puchasing html editing software, photographs can be uploaded and
manipulated online through the browser without the need for expensive
desktop image manipulation applications. A video shot on a consumer
camcorder can be submitted to a video hosting site, uploaded, encoded,
embedded into an HTML page, published, tagged, and syndicated across the
web all through the user’s browser.

In Paul Graham’s article on Web 2.0 he breaks down the different roles of
the community/user into more specific roles, those being the Professional,
the Amateur, and the User (more specifically, the end user). The roles of
the Professional and the User were, according to Graham, well understood
in Web 1.0, but the Amateur didn’t have a very well defined place. As
Graham describes it in ‘What Business Can Learn From Open Source’, the
Amateur just loves to work, with no concern for compensation or ownership
of that work; in development, the Amateur contributes to open source
software whereas the Professional gets paid for their proprietary work.

Graham’s characterisation of the ‘Amateur’ reminds one of If I Ran The
Circus by Dr. Suess, where young Morris McGurk says of the staff of his
imaginary Circus McGurkus:

    My workers love work. They say, ‘Work us! Please work us!
    We’ll work and we’ll work up so many surprises
    You’d never see half if you had forty eyses!’

And while ‘Web 2.0’ may mean nothing to Tim Berners-Lee, who sees recent
innovations as no more than the continued development of the web, to
venture capitalists, who like Morris McGurk daydream of tireless workers
producing endless content and not demanding a pay cheque for it, it sounds
stupendous. And indeed, from YouTube to Flickr to Wikipedia, you’d truly
never see half if you had forty eyses.

Tim Berners-Lee is correct. There is nothing from a technical or user
point of view in Web 2.0 which does not have its roots in, and is not a
natural development from, Web 1.0. The technology associated with the Web
2.0 banner was possible and in some cases readily available before, but
the hype surrounding this usage has certainly affected the growth of Web
2.0 internet sites.

The internet (which is more than the web, actually) has always been about
sharing between users. In fact, Usenet, a distributed messaging system,
has been operating since 1979! Since long before even Web 1.0, Usenet has
been hosting discussions, ‘amateur’ journalism, and enabling photo and
file sharing. Like the internet, it is a distributed system not owned or
controlled by anyone. It is this quality, a lack of central ownership and
control, that differentiate services such as Usenet from Web 2.0.

If Web 2.0 means anything at all, its meaning lies in the rationale of
venture capital. Web 2.0 represents the return of investment in internet
startups. After the dotcom bust (the real end of Web 1.0) those wooing
investment dollars needed a new rationale for investing in online
ventures. ‘Build it and they will come’, the dominant attitude of the ’90s
dotcom boom, along with the delusional ‘new economy’, was no longer
attractive after so many online ventures failed. Building infrastructure
and financing real capitalisation was no longer what investors were
looking for. Capturing value created by others, however, proved to be a
more attractive proposition.

Web 2.0 is Internet Investment Boom 2.0. Web 2.0 is a business model, it
means private capture of community-created value. No one denies that the
techology of sites like YouTube, for instance, is trivial. This is more
than evidenced by the large number of identical services such as
DailyMotion. The real value of YouTube is not created by the developers of
the site, but rather it is created by the people who upload videos to the
site. Yet, when YouTube was bought for over a billion dollars worth of
Google stock, how much of this stock was acquired by those that made all
these videos? Zero. Zilch. Nada. Great deal if you are an owner of a Web
2.0 company.

 The value produced by users of Web 2.0 services such as YouTube is
captured by capitalist investors. In some cases, the actual content they
contribute winds up the property of site owners. Private appropriation of
community created value is a betrayal of the promise of sharing
technology and free cooperation.

Unlike Web 1.0, where investors often financed expensive capital
acquisition, software development and content creation, a Web 2.0 investor
mainly needs to finance hype-generation, marketing and buzz. The
infrastructure is widely available for cheap, the content is free and cost
of the software, at least that much of it that is not also free, is
negligible. Basically, by providing some bandwidth and disk space, you are
able to become a successful internet site if you can market yourself
effectively.

The principal success of a Web 2.0 company comes from its relationship to
the community, more specifically, the ability of the company to ‘harness
collective intelligence’, as O’Reilly puts it. Web 1.0 companies were too
monolithic and unilateral in their approach to content. Success stories of
the transition from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 were based on the ability for a
company to remain monolithic in its brand of content, or better yet, its
outright ownership of that content, while opening up the method of that
content’s creation to the community. Yahoo! Created a portal to community
content while it remained the centralised location to find that content.
EBay allows the community to sell its goods while owning the marketplace
for those goods. Amazon, selling the same products as many other sites,
succeeded by allowing the community to participate in the ‘flow’ around
their products.

Because the capitalists who invest in Web 2.0 startups do not often fund
early capitalisation, their behaviour is markedly more parasitic as well.
They often arrive late in the game when value creation already has good
momentum, swoop in to take ownership and use their financial power to
promote the service, often within the context of a hegemonic network of
major, well financed partners. This means that companies that are not
acquired by venture capital end up cash starved and squeezed out of the
club.

In all these cases, the value of the internet site is created not by the
paid staff of the company that runs it, but by the users who use it. With
all of the emphasis on community created content and sharing, it’s easy to
overlook the other side of the Web 2.0 experience: ownership of all this
content and ability to monetise its value. To the user, this doesn’t come
up that often, it’s only part of the fine print in their MySpace Terms of
Service agreement, or it’s the Flickr.com in the url of their photos. It
doesn’t usually seem like an issue to the community, it’s a small price to
pay for the use of these wonderful applications and for the impressive
effect on search engine results when one queries one’s own name. Since
most users do not have access to alternative means to produce and publish
their own content, they are attracted to sites like MySpace and Flickr.

Meanwhile, the corporate world was pushing a whole different idea of the
Information Superhighway, producing monolithic, centralised ‘online
services’ like CompuServe, Prodigy and AOL. What separated these from the
internet is that these were centralised systems that all users connect
directly to, while the internet is a peer-to-peer network, every device
with a public internet address can communicate directly to any other
device. This is what makes peer-to-peer technology possible, this is also
what makes independent internet service providers possible.

It should be added that many open source projects can be cited as the key
innovations in the development of Web 2.0: free software like Linux,
Apache, PHP, MySQL, Python, etc. are the backbone of Web 2.0, and the web
itself. But there is a fundamental flaw with all of these projects in
terms of what O’Reilly refers to as the Core Competencies of Web 2.0
Companies, namely control over unique, hard-to-recreate data sources that
get richer as more people use them – the harnessing of the collective
intelligence they attract. Allowing the community to contribute openly and
to utilise that contribution within the context of a proprietary system
where the proprietor owns the content is a characteristic of a successful
Web 2.0 company. Allowing the community to own what it creates, though, is
not. Thus, to be successful and create profits for investors, a Web 2.0
company needs to create mechanisms for sharing and collaboration that are
centrally controlled. The lack of central control possessed by Usenet and
other peer controlled technologies is the fundamental flaw. They only
benefit their users, they do not benefit absentee investors, as they are
not ‘owned’.

Thus, because Web 2.0 is funded by Capitalism 2006, Usenet is mostly
forgotten. While everybody uses Digg and Flickr, and YouTube is worth a
billion dollars, PeerCast, an innovative peer-to-peer live video streaming
network that has been in existence for several years longer than YouTube,
is virtually unknown.