This book tackles the concept of openness (as in open source software, open access and free culture), from a critical political economy perspective to consider its encroachment by capitalist corporations, but also how it advances radical alternatives to cognitive capitalism.

Drawing on four case studies, Corporate Capitalism’s Use of Openness will add to discussion on open source software, open access content platforms, open access publishing, and open university courses. These otherwise disparate cases share two fundamental features: informational capitalist corporations base their successful business models on unpaid productive activities, play, attention, knowledge and labour, and do so crucially by resorting to ideological uses of concepts such as “openness”, “communities” and “sharing”.

The authors present potential solutions and alternative regulations to counter these exploitative and alienating business models, and to foster digital knowledge commons, ranging from co-ops and commons-based peer production to state agencies' platforms. Their research and findings will appeal to students, academics and activists around the world in fields such as sociology, economy, media and communication, library and information science, political sciences and technology studies.

This article examines the relation between peer production and capitalism on a systemic and theoretical level. One problem with understanding peer production as an alternative and potentially competing mode of production in relation to capitalism is that the main bulk of economic theory deals only with capitalism. Alternative economic theories from an emerging theoretical P2P movement have done important pioneer work on commons-based peer production, and in discussing its sustainability as a mode of production both on a systemic and individual level (for the peer producers) within capitalism. This article argues that the disadvantages of the P2P movement’s theoretical framework, compared to a Marxist one, have their roots in an evolutionist motif, and the article aims to situate peer production more clearly in relation to the workings of capital, and in relation to a Marxist understanding of the potential for political agencies and counter-powers to emerge from capital’s outside.

The digital world has transformed the conditions for discussing freedom within liberalism. Private property more obviously clashes with the freedom of speech (the public sphere), when the costs of mediated and reproduced art, journalism, information and literature nears zero and the exchange of these takes fluid forms, similar to social communication. The concept of “open”, similar but still opposite to “free”, has taken on an accentuated ideological importance in this context, but so have also alternative visions of intellectual commons. This article contains a case study of Open Knowledge Network’s perspective on openness’ relation to private property and capitalism in the informational field. It does so first through an analysis of the network’s understanding of the copyleft principle, and second through an analysis of the organisation’s view on open business models. A theoretical reading of classical political perspectives on the concept of freedom supports the analysis. One result is the identification of a central ideological lacuna in absent discussions of unconditionally opened-up resources that strengthen the accumulation cycle of capital. This logic favours the negative freedom of closed business models in the competition with open ones that could foster more positive notions of freedom, although open business models are generally advocated and commons are mentioned as desirable. In a dominant ideological formation, openness is used to promote its opposite in the economic field.

Este artículo examina la relación entre la producción entre iguales (P2P) y el capitalismo en un nivel sistémico y teórico. Un problema en la comprensión de la producción entre iguales como una alternativa y potencialmente como un modo de producción que compita con el capitalismo es que la mayor parte de la teoría económica trata sólo con el capitalismo. Las teorías económicas alternativas desde el emergente movimiento teórico P2P han hecho importantes trabajos pioneros sobre la producción entre iguales basada en los bienes comunes (commons), y en discutir la sustentabilidad como un modo de producción tanto en un nivel sistémico como individual dentro del capitalismo. Este artículo argumenta que las desventajas del marco teórico del movimiento P2P, comparado con uno marxista, tienen sus raíces en un sesgo evolucionista, y el texto intenta situar la producción entre iguales más claramente entre los trabajos del capital, y en relación con una comprensión marxista del potencial para la agencia política y los contrapoderes que pueden emerger desde el exterior del capital.

This article examines the relation between peer production and capitalism on a systemic and theoretical level. One problem with understanding peer production as an alternative and potentially competing mode of production in relation to capitalism is that the main bulk of economic theory deals only with capitalism. Alternative economic theories from an emerging theoretical P2P movement have done important pioneer work on commons-based peer production, and in discussing its sustainability as a mode of production both on a systemic and individual level (for the peer producers) within capitalism. This article argues that the disadvantages of the P2P movement’s theoretical framework, compared to a Marxist one, have their roots in an evolutionist motif, and the article aims to situate peer production more clearly in relation to the workings of capital, and in relation to a Marxist understanding of the potential for political agencies and counter-powers to emerge from capital’s outside. 

This book relates Wikipedians’ conceptions of their activities in terms of play, game, work and labour, to their views on Wikipedia and capitalism. The author identifies and compares ideology formations with each other, and with contemporary Marxist theory, providing critical evaluation of the perceived economic relation between peer production and capitalism. The book covers a range of topics including encyclopaedias and the digital revolution; Marxist approaches to cognitive capitalism; and crowdsourcing. The book richly contributes to the emerging literature of critical internet studies, providing a unique intersection of three fields of knowledge: social effects of digital technology; ideologies and politics of cognitive capitalism’s social relations; and the culture of contemporary capitalism.

Wikipedia, Work and Capitalism will be of interest to students and scholars across a range of disciplines including political economy, sociology and digital cultures, as well as social activists, Wikipedians, and peer producers.

This article contributes to the debate on the possibilities and limits of expanding the sphere of peer production within and beyond capitalism. As a case in point, it discusses the explicit and tacit monetary dependencies of Wikipedia, which are not only due to the need to sustain the technological structures that render the collaboration possible, but also about the sustenance of the peer producers themselves. In Wikipedia, the “bright line” principle for avoiding a conflict of interest has been that no one should be paid for directly editing an article. By examining the case of Wiki-PR, a consultant firm allegedly involved in helping more than 12,000 clients to edit Wikipedia articles until 2014, the goal of the analysis is to shed light on the paradoxical situation where the institution for supporting the peer production (Wikimedia Foundation) found itself taking a more strict perspective against commercial alliances than the unpaid community editors.

This study is about voluntary productive activities in digital networks and on digital platforms that often are described as pleasur­able. The aim of the study is to relate the peer producers’ perceptions of their activities on a micro level in terms of play, game, work and labour, to their views on Wikipedia’s relation to capitalism on a macro level, to compare the identified ideological formations on both levels and how they relate to each other, and finally compare the identi­fied ideological formations with contemporary Marxist theory on cognitive capitalism. The intention is to perform a critical evaluation of the economic role of peer production in society.Qualitative and semi-structured interviews with eight Wikipedians active within the Swedish language version of Wikipedia con­stitute the empirical base of the study together with one public lecture by a Wikipedian on the encyclopaedia and a selection of pages in the encyclopaedia that are text analysed. The transcribed interviews have been analysed using a version of ideological analysis as it has been developed by the Gothenburg School. The views on the peer producing activities on the micro level has been analysed in a dialecti­cal way but is also grounded in a specific field model.Six ideological formations are identified in the empirical material. On the micro level: the peripheral, bottom-up- and top-down-formation, on the macro level: the Californian alikeness ideology, communism of capital and capitalism of communism. Communism of capital has two sides to it: one stresses the synergies and the other the conflicts between the two phenomena. The formations on the macro level conform broadly to contemporary Marxist theory, but there are important differ­ences as well. The study results in a hypothesis that the critical side of communism of capital and the peripheral and bottom-up-formation could help to further a more sustainable capitalism of communism, and counteract a deeper integra­tion of the top-down-formation with Californian alikeness ideology. The latter is the main risk of capitalist co-optation of the peer produc­tion that is underway as the manifestly dominant formations on the macro level are Californian alikeness ideology and communism of capital.