PERSON
Yochai Benkler
The legal scholar who gave commons-based peer production its mathematics and showed that freedom and the organization of production are the same question—now confronting the paradox that the technology most fully realizing his vision of individual autonomy simultaneously undermines the collective infrastructure on which that autonomy was built.
Yochai Benkler's most important insight arrived in the form of a question about Linux. Linux was not a market. Linux was not a firm. It was producing, at extraordinary scale and quality, one of the most consequential pieces of software in history—and the economic theory of his time had no category for what it was. Benkler supplied the category:
commons-based peer production, the third mode of production made possible when the cost of coordination among distributed individuals drops below the cost of organizing through markets or firms. His 2006 book
The Wealth of Networks gave this phenomenon its political-economic theory: the transition from an industrial information economy, in which the means of information production were concentrated in expensive capital equipment owned by a handful of corporations, to a networked information economy, in which those means were distributed among hundreds of millions of individuals, was a democratic event