Frihetens rike : Wikipedianer om sin praktik, sitt produktionssätt och kapitalismen

Abstract

This study is about voluntary productive activities in digital networks and on digital platforms that often are described as pleasur­able. The aim of the study is to relate the peer producers’ perceptions of their activities on a micro level in terms of play, game, work and labour, to their views on Wikipedia’s relation to capitalism on a macro level, to compare the identified ideological formations on both levels and how they relate to each other, and finally compare the identi­fied ideological formations with contemporary Marxist theory on cognitive capitalism. The intention is to perform a critical evaluation of the economic role of peer production in society.Qualitative and semi-structured interviews with eight Wikipedians active within the Swedish language version of Wikipedia con­stitute the empirical base of the study together with one public lecture by a Wikipedian on the encyclopaedia and a selection of pages in the encyclopaedia that are text analysed. The transcribed interviews have been analysed using a version of ideological analysis as it has been developed by the Gothenburg School. The views on the peer producing activities on the micro level has been analysed in a dialecti­cal way but is also grounded in a specific field model.Six ideological formations are identified in the empirical material. On the micro level: the peripheral, bottom-up- and top-down-formation, on the macro level: the Californian alikeness ideology, communism of capital and capitalism of communism. Communism of capital has two sides to it: one stresses the synergies and the other the conflicts between the two phenomena. The formations on the macro level conform broadly to contemporary Marxist theory, but there are important differ­ences as well. The study results in a hypothesis that the critical side of communism of capital and the peripheral and bottom-up-formation could help to further a more sustainable capitalism of communism, and counteract a deeper integra­tion of the top-down-formation with Californian alikeness ideology. The latter is the main risk of capitalist co-optation of the peer produc­tion that is underway as the manifestly dominant formations on the macro level are Californian alikeness ideology and communism of capital.© 2015 Arwid Lund, used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 3.0 license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/</p