The Network EconomyNew role of Culture in Economics

Implications for the nature of Markets, Property & Ownership

Creativity & Work

Commons & Ecology

Benkler: “...battle over the institutional ecology of the digital environment”

Redefining Wealth

Quantitative: Money & Material

Accumulation

Qualitative: Well-being

Regeneration

McLuhan on Technology• Extension of human senses

& functions

• Civilization: extending muscles & bodily functions like heating

• Electronic technology: extending the human mind & nervous system

Questions• Is capitalism an intrinsically material-

based and scarcity-based system?

• How does information redefine property?

• How do we support or remunerate culture-based production?

• What is the appropriate balance of commercial & non-market production in the economy?

• Does ‘globalization’ of information require economic globalization?

Related Questions• Who are corporate allies in the

quest to free up culture flows?• What business models can tolerate

non-proprietary information?• What are possible negative impacts

of mass collaboration?• What are the implications for

university research & education?

Knowledge-based Development

• Dematerialization: intrinsic: substituting information for resources

• Detoxification: ...great potential to tune into benign process & substances.

• Decentralization: intrinsic part of the network economy

Hardware & Sustainability• Electronics: design for

obsolescence. The Waste Economy. • Design for monopoly: incompatibility• E-waste & toxicity• Electronics & global labour

exploitation.• Crucial role of Extended Producer

Responsibility (EPR) in reducing & reusing.

• New possibilities for efficiency in the “World Wide Computer”

Work (Creativity) in the Info Economy

• a growing proportion of work is involved in the production of “meaning & value”

• a break from the historic role of worker as cog in the Megamachine

• the decline of bureaucracy• people as means & ends of ‘development’;

inversion of ‘investment-consumption’ relationship

• all-round human development: underlying basis for “creative class” economy: freedom & individuation.

N.B.: The overwhelming portion of ecological development—green building, permaculture, renewable energy, eco-industrial networks, reuse-based waste management etc.--all require greater knowledge

Commons in the Info Economy

• Sharing & conservation: key role of design.

• Sharing: flip side of the new importance of creativity.

• Green goods and info goods as “public goods”, not easily served by market exchange.

• Key struggles today: over control of the Commons—the “2nd Enclosure”

Democracy & the New Commons

• the Digital Divide

• Net Neutrality & the Information Highway

• Struggle over Bandwidth