#botsman

[listopadsergey]

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Коллектив с незатейливым названием "Осень" #vorkuta #komi #russia #боцман #botsman #music #chiz #fender

[iamandrecampbell]

[blomstre-prospects-blog]

Access is better than ownership.

Rachel Botsman.

[communitp]

different networks are different.

NOTE: These are only impressions of the first ~70 pages of Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers' book What's Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collective Consumption, and shouldn't be taken as a reflection on the book as a whole.

Rachel Botsman and Roo Rogers definitely do a good job of framing the basic properties and character of "Collective Consumption," and deploy a coherent and useful language and set of analytic tools for examining developing trends in collaboration and consumption. They present a broad and at times deep knowledge of what's out there and what's exciting, and perhaps more importantly, why it's worth looking at and why it counts as new. At the same time, they managed to do some of my least favorite things that our generation of psuedo-social scientists love doing.

The first of these, and by far the most common, is the "example orgy." By this I mean a rapid-fire list of examples of a point that they're trying to make, accompanied by well-placed anecdotes, but bereft of any really deep analysis that could enrich and complicate their claims. Take, for example, the case of the NASA programs and the Let's Do It initiative. Botsman and Roo cite these as two examples of the phenomenon of getting things done through distributed, open, and inclusive networks. The issue here is that NASA is still a highly organized, centralized, and elite body, one that relies on hierarchy, institutions and institutionalism, and that still needs scientists who have gone through all of the years of schooling mentioned in passing by the authors. More than this, NASA in turn is connected to a whole network of groups organized along similar lines, and is in turn reliant upon a similarly hierarchic and elite-focused set of institutions- the American state apparatus. A similar, although less extreme, version of this deep centralism at the core of a distributed network exists in the Estonian case. What we have here is an assertion that all networks are distributed networks. The best example of this might be the SETI@Home example, which is cited along similar lines as the NASA and Let's Do It ones. The calculations, while done using a broad network of machines, are then sent back to a central computer which is doing all of the managing of the task. The personal computers aren't in any control over what's happening to them beyond the fact of allowing something to happen. They're certainly participating, but it's a limited participation.

What we have here is a hub-and-spokes network, not an all-channel, "flat" network. And that's fine. That kind of network is better at doing certain kinds of tasks- like organizing a country-wide clean-up day, a grass-roots political fund-raising initiative, or a set of highly complex calculations. What's important is not to claim that the kind of network involved in that kind of work is based on the same principles as something like Airbnb or Linux or Flickr. Networks that do different things involve different kinds of relationships and relationship-oriented tools.

This is the kind of thinking that gets lost in facile, unsubstantiated, and cringe-worthy claims like "The Internet is inherently democratic and decentralized."

Even with a more critical understanding of the new kinds of relationships made possible by digital communication systems, Botsman and Roo do provide some genuine examples of more peer-to-peer style networks. However, even in these cases it is important to recognize that the network isn't completely flat and open, that some people have more power than others, and that that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Airbnb, for example, is an extraordinarily open tool. There are, at least at the time of the book's writing, very constraints on who could rent what where for how much and how long. The tool was designed to connect peers, and the two main roles presented by the site, renter and rentee, are extremely fluid- being one doesn't preclude someone from being the other as well, now or in the future. However, even this kind of network isn't totally flat: the site managers and creators still set the rules. The community using the site might form its own set of conventions and norms, but it will always be bounded by the tools and rules created and deployed by the people who own and operate the site. This is important to keep in mind, as these people are participants in the site's community as much (if not more than) everyone else. Their relationship to the site and to the other participants deserves just as much analysis and attention as the renters and the rentees.

What I'm trying to get at here is that while Botsman and Rogers rightfully point out the creation of space and communities of consumption operating with frameworks, tools, structures, and values very different from those that existed under 20th century capitalism, that doesn't mean that they're all different in the same way, or that old models aren't replicating themselves using some of those same frameworks, tools, structures, and values. Nor should we assume that the generalization of "old models" is an especially useful one. The arguments against consumerism, and the discussion of its origins, while incomplete (especially as relates to the conditions of production), are compelling and well done in a lot of ways, and the communities and constructs described are intriguing and genuinely worth examining, but the analysis feels superficial and tunnel-visioned.