Tech Could Mean the End of Capitalism. But What Comes Next?

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18776/paul-mason-on-techs-post-capitalist-promise

For Mason, the growing sense that the present is unsustainable is reflected in the burgeoning pop cultural depictions of zombies, natural disasters and civilizational disintegration. Still, he sees no reason to cede the ground to the pessimists.

Audaciously, Mason envisions a movement from capitalism to postcapitalism that is no less epochal than the transition from medievalism to modernism. A postcapitalist, informationbased, networked society will subvert existing hierarchies and resist neoliberal exploitation, he argues, making possible increased prosperity, greater equality, green economic development and an end to the correlation between work and income. These are vast claims, but Mason insists that core aspects of postcapitalism are already in place—put there by capitalism itself.

The information revolution, Mason contends, subverts two core concepts of capitalist economics: scarcity and the price mechanism. Information is abundant and does not degrade with use, nor does its use by one consumer preclude its use by others. What is more, the marginal cost of reproducing information is constantly falling. In such an environment, information emerges as a public good—a resource or utility to which it is impractical to restrict access, much like street lighting. Mainstream economics responds to these challenges with intellectual property rights, in order to make information behave like a tradable commodity. But such laws are full of inconsistencies and impracticalities—for example, we can copy a CD into iTunes, but not a DVD.

The information revolution makes possible what the legal scholar Yochai Benkler calls “commons-based peer production,” characterized by cooperative, horizontal working relationships. All of this is in marked contrast to the top-down approach of “firm production,” which explains why Boeing could never have created the open-sourced Wikipedia.