On commercialization

When I read Rafael Behr’s “Access Denied“, a longish article in Sunday’s Guardian, I felt like we were both blind men trying to ID an elephant. Are we using the same Internet? I certainly wouldn’t call it a “parallel society” to capitalism; nor would I call the blogosphere “self-governed on principles of trust and common ownership.” The Internet I see is aggressively capitalist. The vast majority of ‘web pioneers’ are actively trying to enrich themselves – everyone’s trying to create a start-up successful enough to be acquired by someone larger. For every business that’s threatened by or afraid of Internet-related change, there’s another that sees the change as an opportunity.

Of course, Behr could point to non-commercial ventures like Wikipedia as an example of ‘common ownership’, but I’m a bit skeptical that it’ll last in its current form without commercialization. No matter what it is or why it was created, once something acquires financial value its creators will try to make some money off it. The CDDB became Gracenote. The Firefox browser is beginning to be used as a base for commercial ventures like Flock. Cool tool and initially business-planless del.icio.us took some venture capital and is attempting to become a profitable enterprise. WordPress.org is giving birth to WordPress.com. Drupal has its Bryght. Even Craigslist – a great example of a website that’s not aggressively capitalist – took in some money from eBay. None of these examples are all that different from Yahoo, which started as a hobby. There’s no doubt in my mind that the biggest enablers of Wikipedia – the creators and maintainers of the software that runs it – will one day take that software as well as the free Wikipedia content and combine it with something else to form a for-profit venture. And I suspect that venture will do very well.

Given this, Behr’s description of ‘Big Media’ and ‘big business’ feels off to me – rhetoric from an older age (or a mythical age that never was). “To experience the sharing culture of the blogosphere today is like living in a commune built on an oil field,” he’s written. “One day, the diggers will move in.” But the diggers are already here, and they’re not ‘Big Media’ or ‘big business’. They’re the Technoratis and WordPresses and Six Aparts; they’re the very web gurus Behr admires. Like it or not, the diggers are us.