Sharing the Wealth of Networks

Yochai Benkler's book The Wealth of Networks is published in hardcover by Yale University Press and distributed online in various forums, including in a wikimedia workspace--and that workspace has been pornospammed. Whoops. (This link IS safe for work, but the links at the bottom of the page probably aren't.)

In Chapter Five--we read this for class last night--I was underwhelmed by Benkler's understanding of a "network"--his fear was that you could inhibit communication from A to C by buying up or controlling B. Um, that's a phone line. A network reroutes through D. Or through 7 or the King of Siam. This is hard to conceptualize--even if you happen to have a fishing net lying around and you're looking at it (perhaps you're in the pirate bar?), some of the implications aren't clear. So let's look at a couple. In fact, following Sterling's "Jets and Nets," let's look at one reason a network is a tempting target.

The porn spamming is related to head-phaking. Head-phaking is a (largely legitimate!) way to exploit Short Head namespace and branding work to send your obscure meme higher up the Long Tail. I'm going to call the spamming "coattailing"--it's more relevant to the Tail and it avoids that phlabby phreaking connotation. (They got us into this "it's all about the phones!" mess in the first place...let's put a little more 2006 into our understandings of communication modes.)

Basically, here we see the Net reward a superior conceptual model--again. Taking a page from viral behavior, the spammer associates himself with a more common, easily transmissible entity such as Benkler's work (which the professor is almost begging you to look at, online and via a number of speaking appearances). In short, the spammer hopes to co-infect, and the incredibly low cost of making the association means that even a few responses to his spam will end in profit for him.

The truly brilliant thing is that this model is a natural, if probably unintended, consequence of Benkler's ideas. If Benkler removes the spam, doesn't he impede the "free culture" he is so desperate to promote? Has anything of "value" been "stolen" from him? And let's consider the targeted host: an academic who, as so many do nowadays, has "intertwingled" the way he lives, or the way he represents the way he lives, and the ideas he propounds to support that life. Faithfulness to the first is a condition of the second. At the very least he'll probably think twice before he does anything. Meanwhile, every minute he delays the spammer makes money.

And regarding another class discussion we had last night: this is why the Net and blogs and all the rest of it are starting to boil down to economics.