COMMONSPACE: SEIZE THE POWER OF THE COLLECTIVE

By Darren Wershler-Henry and Mark Surman

ISBN 0-13-089361-7, 320 pp, clothbound. $36.95. Published by Pearson PTR/FT.com

Reviewed by Mark Shainblum

Originally published in Report on Business Magazine, 2000

The concept of the "commons" -- the stuff of everyday sustenance back when people depended on shared pasture -- fell on hard times in the industrial era. If the authors of Commonspace are to be believed, the internet is the commons resurrected in postmodern garb. More, its rebirth is making on-line enterprise into a deeply different, community-centric kind of capitalism.

Radical as that sounds, you cannot stereotype Toronto authors Darren Wershler-Henry and Mark Surman as old-school lefties. Their analysis owes much to the ideology of the open-source software movement and their prose style pops with the staccato rhythm of cyberpunk science fiction. But don't let that fool you either; Commonspace may spring from idealistic and esoteric soil, but it's also intended to be a concrete guide to building successful on-line community -- the heart and soul of e-business.

If TV atomized us into beer-guzzling coach potatoes, the internet’s “many-to-many” technology forces us to become participating members of a community, say the authors. The Net is us and without our active participation, it simply doesn’t exist. The short, expensive and unhappy life of Time-Warner's Pathfinder.com portal is a 21st century cautionary tale, they say – citing its doomed attempt to build "audience" rather than "community." Wershler-Henry and Surman characterize the music industry’s bitter court battle with Napster as another futile skirmish in an unwinnable war. Even if Napster itself goes under, the “peer-to-peer” content-sharing model it popularized rings the death knell of the traditional media middlemen. Amazon.com and eBay, on the other hand, are lauded as examples of true online communities that also work as capitalist enterprises.

The quest for monetary gain is not disappearing, the authors say, but its importance IS [ital] diminishing in relation to other less tangible reward systems. Volunteer open source programmers labour over applications like Linux and the Apache Web Server as much for pride and social status as out of any hope of financial reward . More, in the free distribution of these products (and free digital content in general) Wershler-Henry and Surman see the resurgence of a "gift" or “potlatch” economy based on the “excess or free circulation of goods with a general intangible expectation of return from the broader community.” At least in terms of digital goods - things made up of ones and zeroes - they claim that the economy of scarcity no longer exists.

Commonspace has some failings. As self-confessed techno-optimists, the authors are sometimes prone to melodramatic over-generalizations and simplistic solutions to complex problems. The war over intellectual property, at least, is probably going to be much uglier, and last longer than this book might lead you to believe.

That said, Commonspace is also a highly enlightening book. If in a few places Wershler-Henry and Surman slip into an unintentional Dilbert-like parody of the genre (Dogbert: I'm writing a business book called "Change Happens: Get Over It." Dilbert: The title says it all. Dogbert: Yeah, it needs filler), they also bring some radical new insights to the table. Agree with them or not, they shake up your worldview.

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