The Pile of Books to Read Grows Larger

Henry Farrell has just added one to the pile:

Henry Farrell: Yale University Press has just released Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom. You can buy it at Powells, and Amazon, but it's also available from Benkler under Creative Commons with an associated wiki. There'll be more about this book on CT soon -- for the moment, suffice to say that I think that this is a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally. It fizzes with ideas.

Comments

[Arun Khanna]

If you have not read it already then Berton Roueche's The man who grew two breasts is good light reading material.

[Les Brunswick]

"a really important book, not only for people interested in the politics of technology, but for people interested in left or liberal politics more generally."

Libertarians, too. The only political group that really opposes what Benkler is talking about is mainstream corporate conservatism.

From the description at Amazon: "The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment."