The Wealth of Networks Quotes

“Why do we rely almost exclusively on markets and commercial firms to produce cars, steel, and wheat, but much less so for the most critical information our advanced societies depend on?”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“As collaboration among far-flung individuals becomes more common, the idea of doing things that require cooperation with others becomes much more attainable, and the range of projects individuals can choose as their own therefore qualitatively increases.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible. That is a choice we face as a society. The way we develop will, in significant measure, depend on choices we make in the next decade or so.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“there is remarkably little support in economics for regulating information, knowledge, and cultural production through the tools of intellectual property law.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“Any person who has information can connect with any other person who wants it, and anyone who wants to make it mean something in some context, can do so.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“They can create their own expressions, and they can seek out the information they need, with substantially less dependence on the commercial mass media of the twentieth century.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“In either case, the practical individual freedom to cooperate with others in making things of value was limited by the extent of the capital requirements of production.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“From the steam engine to the assembly line, from the double-rotary printing press to the communications satellite, the capital constraints on action were such that simply wanting to do something was rarely a sufficient condition to enable one to do it.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“Why can fifty thousand volunteers successfully coauthor Wikipedia, the most serious online alternative to the Encyclopedia Britannica, and then turn around and give it away for free?”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“One needs only to run a Google search on any subject of interest to see how the "information good" that is the response to one's query is produced by the coordinate effects of the uncoordinated actions of a wide and diverse range of individuals and organizations acting on a wide range of motivations-both market and nonmarket, state-based and nonstate.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“The removal of the physical constraints on effective information production has made human creativity and the economics of information itself the core structuring facts in the new networked information economy.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

“Information, knowledge, and culture are central to human freedom and human development.”
― Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom