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Against Crowdsourced Politics
Written by Mary Joyce on November 16, 2009 – 2:47 am -
The last post begins with the seemingly benign phrase “the promise of digital activism is to crowdsource global political transformation.” I wrote it and I was pretty proud of myself. I thought it succinctly summed up the potential of decentralized politics, where power is defined at the edge and by the grassroot, by thousands of ordinary citizens mobilizing together. Well, Michel Bauwens set me straight.
Michel is the founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives. I heard him speak yesterday at the great Internet as Factory and Playground conference in New York. Michel didn’t set me straight directly, but his definition of crowdsourcing, and its distinction from peer-to-peer collaboration, made me see the error of my ways.
The key is that crowdsourcing is still centralized: the producer is still a cog in a machine, only the machine is bigger. It’s not a factory, it’s the entire world, and producers are connected by the network, not be shared physical space. The individual producer chooses which part of the task she will take, she takes a much smaller part, and she decides whether or not to participate, but she does not decide what the overall project is. Whether the task is something as malevolent as identifying Iranian protesters for the government or as benign as fans re-shooting Star Wars, the task is defined at the center, produced at the edge. It is no coincidence that the term crowdsourcing derives from another practice of hierarchical labor distribution: outsourcing.
Peer to peer production is different: it is center-less and it is non-hierarchical. Even if someone is organizing, that person has no more power than any other member of the project. There is no center and edge. There is only the network. The web site doesn’t make the origins clear, but if Star Wars: Uncut is organized by a group of fans, then their project to re-shoot their favorite movie by piecing together thousands of scenes re-staged by other fans is peer-to-peer. If the project is organized by Lucasfilm Ltd., then it is being crowdsourced. It is all about who benefits and where the power lies.
What would this mean in the political realm? Crowdsourced politics means that the center benefits ultimately from the divided labor: for example, a political campaign asking supporters to host fundraisers in their homes or directing citizens to call their Congressman to support or opposed a piece of legislation. The effects of crowdsourcing might be in the public interest, but even though execution of the task occurs at the edge, the ultimate decision of what the activity will be is decided at the center.
Peer-to-peer politics is much more chaotic, but also much more interesting. For example, the current state of the Tea Party movement in the United States, though espousing conservative political views, is not centrally organized by traditional powers of the right, including the Republican party. Even when one of its most effective organizers, blogger and web strategist Eric Odom, decided to re-join the Republican party earlier this month, the movement did not die (or at least has not yet).
It is this form of political organizing, peer-to-peer not crowdsourced, that has the greatest potential to truly challenge existing institutions. When power is concentrated in groups of citizens rather than institutions, there is a potential for lack of accountability as the group may rely on no one but its members for resources. However, the lack of connection to traditional power structures could also mean the group is not not beholden to institutions that are accountable to special interests such as corporations or economic, religious, or political elites.
Because of the Internet, peer-to-peer politics is likely to become a permanent feature of the American political scene, and perhaps that of other countries as well. It will certainly destabilize existing formal and informal political institutions. Whether this destabilization will be ultimately beneficial for the majority of citizens is yet to be seen.
H/T to Lawrence Lessig for the title
Tags: 4change, crowdsource, crowdsourcing, nptech, p2p, tea party
Posted in Americas, Campaigns, Theory | 7 Comments »
By David Sasaki on Nov 17, 2009 | Reply
This seems like a meta-semantic debate to me. Which, of course, is the reason for academic conferences in the first place: the competition of coinages. Whether you call it “crowdsourcing” or p2p, there will always be nodes in the network bringing people together. And in doing so they will always gather power, and the potential to abuse it.
By Mary Joyce on Nov 17, 2009 | Reply
Hi David! “meta-semantic debate” – is that a good thing? I stand by the idea that the two terms describe different structures (hub and spokes vs. decentralized network), but I agree with you that both bring people together in ways that gather power.
By David Sasaki on Nov 17, 2009 | Reply
Good question! I don’t even know what it means, but I figured I’d try my hand at coining coinages.
You’re not alone in seeing a distinction. Check out Helge’s presentation about the student protests in Austria. But I believe that if you do a network analysis of who is connected to who in every “movement” or “campaign” (like the tea party movement) you will always see hubs and spokes emerge.
By Cromag on Nov 26, 2009 | Reply
I can’t help but view these assertions as academic. They frame interesting tactical tools but are naive to the political avenues that exploit them.
By Jonathan Eyler-Werve on Jan 7, 2010 | Reply
I think this is an important distinction, and not meta at all — these are distinct economic structures, rather than competing names for the same thing. A good book exploring the distinction is The Starfish and the Spider, by Brafman and Beckstrom.
I work with an organization that has been fairly successful with crowdsourcing – we run a research network with 800 people in some 100 countries. But for the volume of work we do, there’s astonishingly little peer-to-peer networking. Our core staff of 5 defines the questions to ask, the process to follow, the technology. I really want to switch us to something more “starfish”-like, which creates and self-directs and sustains itself from with, as I believe that would be far more durable than the arrangement we have now. But it’s not always obvious how to do that, and giving up control is hard.
Enjoyed this post, thank you.
Jonathan at Global Integrity
By Phil Bailey on Jul 3, 2010 | Reply
Sadly, IMHO, the power of the internet will be exploited by the powerful eventually. Mobilising current thought and turning it into tangible political pressure is becoming easier by way of the internet, but exposing people to thoughts that would never have crossed their minds is also easy now.
Big business, governments and cults have all got access to the minds of the masses. All they need to understand is what buttons to press and we’ll soon be doing their work for them, all in the name of belonging.