The Zero Marginal Cost Society

I'm really conflicted about this book. At times, it frustrated me so much, I wanted to put it down, but I'm glad I didn't.

On one hand, the book is riddled with passages that predict that in the future, society will do away with the market, and turn to a distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer, laterally scaled Internet-of-Things architecture to organize economic activity. Yes, this sentence is full of buzzwords, and they are taken straight from the text. Yes, it seems as if the author is talking about computer science and the Internet, because I believe that's where the author got all this from.

The buzzwords are also often combined in this exact cavalier way, without much thought as to the specifics of how and if they can be combined. The author makes the case, for example, that since 3D-printing is part of a movement of people who make their own things and share them, instead of buying them, that this phenomenon will obviously favour distributed, collaborative, peer-to-peer, laterally scaled power sources, ie power produced by private people who have their own solar cells, who sell the excess back to the energy network. Which they might, but neither the concept nor the technology of 3D printing is partial to whether its power was produced by a "prosumer" (a fun term presumably created by the author) or whether it comes from the centralized power network.

In general, the author takes the similarity of the ideas behind people producing their own power, people producing their own things, people offering services directly (eg. via Uber), and (bafflingly) the Internet of Things, and greatly exaggerates that similarity, claiming that all these phenomena will naturally encourage each other, creating an avalanche of collaboration, making everything collaborative.

The author also seems to think the Internet of Things is a very collaborative thing, which will give the Power of Big Data to the People. Am I completely deranged, or can't large corporations deploy smart sensors, smart dust, and other IoT technologies, and use them in a completely closed, non-collaborative manner? What does the IoT have to do with collaboration?

And for my final complaint, and then on to the good: after spending 70% of the book telling us how the tide of collaboration cannot be turned back now, how the Collaborative Commons are sweeping the world (all the while, presenting figures that show that currently, the Collaborative Commons populate the sidelines of economy), after all that certainty and hope, the author briefly also explains, that it isn't certain that any of this will happen. It will depend on the people making it happen, or, presumably, on big corporations keeling over and dying.

On the other hand, besides the above (and other complaints, which I will not list here and take out all the fun of discovering them yourselves), I found the book valuable for reasons that it seems to me were only half-intended. It contains many interesting figures about the size of the collaborative economy today. It also talks about interesting collaborative initiatives taken by people. It broadened my view of how people can organize.

All in all, an interesting, albeit sometimes frustrating read.