And yet this genealogy is only partial. These pioneers of information technology were seeking a way of sharing and collaborating based on equal, non-competitive and non-economic exchange. This opposition becomes very visible in debates and legal action concerning piracy, where two opposing visions of the Internet are set against each other.
Numerous studies (Flichy 2007; Cardon 2010; Castells 2001; Fuchs 2008) describe how the emergence of the Internet was the complex result of an encounter between ‘many circles’ (Cardon 2010) and ‘many cultures’ (Castells 2001)6, mostly hailing from universities and groups of amateur technology enthusiasts or hackers. In his article ‘Where the Counterculture Met the New Economy’, Fred Turner shows that, alongside innovations by those working in research institutions, the disparate activist groups that emerged directly from the alternative movements of the 1960s and 1970s played a considerable role in the early experiments that led to the development of modern digital communications networks. With none of the desire for control characteristic of the mainstream culture and media industries, these users designed and developed communications systems according to their own needs and personal aspirations, and as a function of the communities they belonged to. The creation of new protocols for exchanging data normalized communications between members of these communities. For example, it was this process that led to the gradual adoption of the standard for email address formatting designed by Ray Tomlinson in 1971, which would lead to the development of email as we now know it.
The main idea guiding the development of these networks (which were not yet interconnected) was collaboration, and the sharing of data—software, algorithms and programming languages—which allowed users to contribute to the development of this nascent world. These networks were structured according to a deliberately decentralized schema.
As the sociologist Philippe Breton has shown (1992), the ‘meritocratic and collective’ ideology which drove hackers and academics borrowed heavily from the ‘cybernetic utopia’ of the physicist and mathematician Norbert Wiener, with its ‘unbridled circulation’ of information. ‘Free software’ emerged at the beginning of the 1980s with the GNU project and the creation of the Free Software Foundation, led by the programmer Richard Stallman. It incontestably represented a concrete incarnation of this combination of decentralization and collaboration.
Far removed from any concerns about financial remuneration, intellectual property, or contractualization, the idea of free software was dependent on source code that was open and could be freely altered, modified and improved. This led to a decentralized conception of knowledge, visible in Wikipedia, the first collaborative online encyclopedia project. The hacker logic functioned on the model of a gift economy: one gives to the community (a software package, an improvement, a text), and can expect reciprocation (Castells 2001: 63). As a result, legitimacy in the community was established independently of its members’ initial socio-economic position.
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Cultural Crowdfunding: Platform Capitalism, Labour and Globalization