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preemptive attack against P2P systems. Despite their many disadvantages in
comparison to these, Web 2.0 is more attractive to investors, and thus has
more money to fund and promote centralised solutions. The end result of
this is that capitalist investment flowed into centralised solutions
making them easy and cheap or free for non-technical information producers
to adopt. Thus, this ease of access compared to the more technically
challenging and expensive undertaking of owning your own means of
information production created a ‘landless’ information proletariat ready
to provide alienated content-creating labour for the the new
info-landlords of Web 2.0.

It is often said that the internet took the corporate world by surprise,
coming as it did out of publicly funded university and military research.
It was promoted by way of a cottage industry of small independent internet
service providers who were able to squeeze a buck out of providing access
to the state-built and financed network.

The internet seemed anathema to the capitalist imagination. Web 1.0, the
original dotcom boom, was characterised by a rush to own the
infrastructure, to consolidate the independent internet service providers.
While money was thrown around quite randomly as investors struggled to
understand what this medium would actually be used for, the overall
mission was largely successful. If you had an internet account in 1996 it
was likely provided by some small local company. Ten years later, while
some of the smaller companies have survived most people get their internet
access from gigantic telecommunications corporations. The mission of
Internet Investment Boom 1.0 was to destroy the independent service
provider and put large, well financed, corporations back in the driving
seat.

The mission of Web 2.0 is to destroy the P2P aspect of the internet. To
make you, your computer, and your internet connection dependent on
connecting to a centralised service that controls your ability to
communicate. Web 2.0 is the ruin of free, peer-to-peer systems and the
return of monolithic ‘online services’. A telling detail here is that most
home or office internet connections in the ’90s, modem and ISDN
connections, were synchronous – equal in their ability to send and receive
data. By design, your connection enabled you to be equally a producer and
a consumer of information. On the other hand, modern DSL and cable-modem
connections are asynchronous, allowing you to download information
quickly, but upload slowly. Not to mention the fact that many user
agreements for internet service forbid you to run servers on your consumer
circuit, and may cut off your service if you do.

Capitalism, rooted in the idea of earning income by way of idle share
ownership, requires centralised control, without which peer producers have
no reason to share their income with outside shareholders. Capitalism,
therefore, is incompatible with free P2P networks, and thus, so long as
the financing of internet development comes from private shareholders
looking to capture value by owning internet resources, the network will
only become more restricted and centralised.

It should be noted that even in the case of commons-based peer production,
so long as the commons and membership in the peer group is limited, and
inputs such as food for the producers and the computers that they use are
acquired from outside the commons-based peer group, then the peer
producers themselves may be complicit in the exploitative capturing of
this labour value. Thus in order to really address the unjust capture of
alienated labour value, access to the commons and membership in the peer
group must be extended as far as possible toward the inclusion of a total
system of goods and services. Only when all productive goods are available
from commons-based producers can all producers retain the value of the
product of their labour.

And while the information commons may have the possibility of playing a
role in moving society toward more inclusive modes of production, any real
hope for a genuine, community enriching, next generation of internet-based
services is not rooted in creating privately owned, centralised resources,
but rather in creating cooperative, P2P and commons-based systems, owned
by everybody and nobody. Although small and obscure by today’s standards,
with it’s focus on peer-to-peer applications such as Usenet and email, the
early internet was very much a common, shared resource. Along with the
commercialisation of the internet and the emergence of capitalist
financing comes the enclosure of this information commons, translating
public wealth into private profit. Thus Web 2.0 is not to be thought of as
a second-generation of either the technical or social development of the
internet, but rather as the second wave of capitalist enclosure of the
Information Commons.

Virtually all of the most used internet resources could be replaced by P2P
alternatives. Google could be replaced by a P2P search system, where every
browser and every webserver were active nodes in the search process;
Flickr and YouTube could also be replaced by PeerCast and eDonkey type
applications, which allow users to use their own computers and internet
connections to collaboratively share their pictures and videos. However,
developing internet resources requires the application of wealth, and so
long as the source of this wealth is finance capital, the great
peer-to-peer potential of the internet will remain unrealised.



Dmytri Kleiner <dk AT haagenti.com> is an anarchist hacker and a
co-founder of Telekommunisten, a worker-owned technology company
specialising in telephone systems. Dmytri is a USSR-born Canadian,
currently living in Berlin with his wife Franziska and his daughter
Henriette

Brian Wyrick <brian AT pseudoscope.com> is an artist, film maker and web
developer working in Berlin and Chicago. He also co-founded Group 312
Films, a Chicago-based film group, and posts updates regarding his
projects and adventures at http://www.pseudoscope.com