Paul Mason

The interplay between supply and demand does not come into the price of an iTunes track: the supply of the Beatles ‘Love Me Do’ on iTunes is infinite.

The small number of companies that dominate each sector is striking. In traditional sectors you have usually four to six big players in every market: the big four accountancy firms; four or five big supermarket groups; four big turbofan makers. But the signature brands of info-tech need total dominance: Google needs to be the only search company; Facebook has to be the only place you construct your online identity; Twitter where you post your thoughts; iTunes the go-to online music store. In two key markets – online search and mobile operating systems – there is a two-firm death match, with Google currently winning both of them.

Firefox, an Open Source browser, has currently around 24 per cent of the global browser market.19 A staggering 70 per cent of all smartphones run on Android, which is also technically Open Source.20 This is in part due to an overt strategy by Samsung and Google to use Open Source software to undermine Apple’s monopoly and maintain their own market position, but it does not alter the fact that the dominant smartphone on the planet runs on software nobody can own.

Following the disaster John Perry Barlow, a cyber-rights campaigner who’d lost 95 per cent of his money, drew the harsh conclusion: ‘The whole dot-com thing was an effort to use 19th and 20th century concepts of economy in an environment where they didn’t exist, and the internet essentially shrugged them off. This was an assault by an alien force that was repelled by the natural forces of the internet.’ And he pointed out where the debate might go next. ‘In the long term it’s going to be very good for the dot-communists.’

Wikipedia is the best example. Founded in 2001, the collaboratively written encyclopaedia has, at the time of writing, 26 million pages and 24 million people registered to contribute and edit – with about 12,000 people regularly editing and 140,000 people vaguely taking part.32
Wikipedia has 208 employees.33 The thousands who edit it do so for free. A user survey found 71 per cent of them do it because they like the idea of working for nothing, and 63 per cent because they believe information should be free.34 With 8.5 billion page views per month the Wikipedia site is the sixth most popular in the world – just above Amazon, the most successful e-commerce company on earth.35 By one estimate, if it were run as a commercial site, Wikipedia’s revenue could be $2.8 billion a year.36
Yet Wikipedia makes no profit. And in doing so it makes it almost impossible for anybody else to make a profit in the same space. Furthermore, it is one of the most valuable learning resources ever invented and has (so far) defied all attempts to censor, subvert, troll or sabotage it, because the power of tens of millions of human eyeballs is greater than any government, stalker, interest group or saboteur can match.

Economists like to demonstrate the archaic nature of command planning with mind-games like ‘imagine the Soviet Union tried to create Starbucks’. Now, here’s a more intriguing game: imagine if Amazon, Toyota or Boeing tried to create Wikipedia.

Next, you need what Benkler calls ‘planned modularity’: that is, a task is broken up into chunks small enough for people to complete on their own and then submit the outcome to a wider network. A Wikipedia page is a perfect example: adding a snippet of info or deleting an erroneous one is a modular task that can be done from the top deck of a bus on a smartphone, or from a PC in the web café of a Manila slum.

If you think about it this way, the purpose of patenting the advanced HIV drug Darunavir can only be to keep its price at $1095 a year

But what if somebody did anticipate the information-driven fall of capitalism? What if someone had clearly predicted that the ability to create prices would dissolve if information became collectively distributed and embodied in machines? We would probably be hailing that person’s work as visionary. Actually there is such a person. His name is Karl Marx.

Marx’s resources are limited. He has a pass to the British Library, giving him access to the latest data. By day he writes articles in English for the New York Tribune. By night he is filling eight notebooks with near-illegible scrawl in German: free-flowing observations, thought experiments and notes-to-self.