Zero Marginal Thinking : Jeremy Rifkin gets it all wrong
▻http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=5558
Quand Eric « Gun » Raymond (c’est un adepte de la NRA) sort son flingue pour dézinguer les bêtises de Rifkin, il n’y va pas avec le dos de la cuiller. Et c’est souvent jubilatoire.
Un passage intéressant sur les communs, ou plus particulièrement la vision qu’Eric Raymond a des communs... qui n’est pas exactement celle du « mouvement des communs », mais qui montre à la fois l’étendue de ce concept... et les interprétations divergentes qui peuvent s’y jouer, le tout autour des pratiques des individus et de leurs contradictions.
Perhaps the most serious error, ultimately, is the way Rifkin abuses the notion of “the commons”. This has a lot of personal weight for me, because I have lived in and helped construct a hacker culture that maintains a huge software commons and continually pushes for open, non-proprietary infrastructure. I have experienced, recorded, and in some ways helped create the elaborate network of manifestos, practices, expectations, how-to documents, institutions, and folk stories that sustains this commons. I think I can fairly claim to have made the case for open infrastructure as forcefully and effectively as anyone who has ever tried to.
Bluntly put, I have spent more than thirty years actually doing what Rifkin is glibly intellectualizing about. From that experience, I say this: the concept of “the commons” is not a magic wand that banishes questions about self-determination, power relationships, and the perils of majoritarianism. Nor is it a universal solvent against actual scarcity problems. Maintaining a commons, in practice, requires more scrupulousness about boundaries and respect for individual autonomy rather than less. Because if you can’t work out how to maximize long-run individual and joint utility at the same time, your commons will not work – it will fly apart.
Most of us also understand, nowadays, that attempts to drive an ideological wedge between our commons and “the market” are wrong on every level. Our commons is in fact a reputation market – one that doesn’t happen to be monetized, but which has all the classical behaviors, equilibria, and discovery problems of the markets economists usually study. It exists not in opposition to monetized trade, free markets, and private property, but in productive harmony with all three.
Eric Raymond restera un libertarien avec une belle plume, le sens de la répartie et un aplomb impeccable. Ne pas partager son analyse globale ne m’empêche pas d’apprécier à la fois la forme et certaines incises qu’il porte.
