I’m putting together my syllabus for a course in California Politics and I want to avoid the bland, conventional approach to teaching what amounts to an upper division intro class. I’m beginning to play with a theme of Cyberfornia that draws parallels between the development of California and the emergence of Web 2.0. Yochai Benkler claims that the web’s revolutionary turn is that it turns the task of production into something that is granular and modular so that vast numbers of people can engage in peer production.
California, at least Southern California — my primary frame of reference, seems to have that same amount of modularity and granularity. Los Angeles is often referred to as a network of neighborhoods without a center. An entire Los Angeles school of urban studies has been built around the city’s postmodern, de-centered, elements. But I don’t think anyone has made the connection between California’s open-source, peer production driven nature (think of our initiative process) and Web 2.0.
What do you all think of the relationship? Am I off base?
Comments 4
Kenneth M. Kambara — October 27, 2008
The metaphor I was taught when I took a CA politics & culture course (let's just say it was pre-Rodney King) was that California is the American dream on cocaine. Reading Starr (Kevin, not Kenneth), we got a feel for the history of the place. A "startup" with a mythology that never quits.
Of course, this post makes we want to dig up my copy of Mike Davis' City of Quartz, often echoing Bentham & Foucault. Being in California is like the ultimate simulacra experience. Sure, Vegas is hyperreal in the spectacular sense, but CA is hyperreal in the everyday sense. What type of polity is required for a place that is based upon umpteen referents? A manic, factionalized one. The struggle of managing such a behemoth that sprawls physically and figuratively like an amoeba makes one wonder...what is the most effective governance for a huge economy that still acts in many ways like a startup?
Both you & Jon have sterred me towards Benkler. I need to read his stuff sooner rather than later.
Jonathan Pfeiffer — October 27, 2008
Taken to its extreme, your idea might lead to a comparison between the economic modalities behind peer production and the modes of production that drove the construction of Los Angeles. The comparison probably fails: The rise of Los Angeles required organizations of capital that are absent in peer production. In other words, the way in which Los Angeles emerged during the past few centuries was likely impossible without big governmental and industrial financing (apparently including help from the Las Californias government). Peer production does not require the centralization of capital which makes a city like Los Angeles possible. Am I missing the point?
There is a big difference between a chunk of labor and a chunk of city. Granularities and modularities come in different flavors for different contexts. I feel you might be getting close to conflating them here, if I understand you aright.
I had never heard of the Chicago School nor the Los Angeles School, but it sounds like they differ on the basis of centralization. Try this urban-design-school-to-economic-production-modality analogy: The Chicago School is to the Los Angeles School as the industrial information economy is to the networked information economy. But is peer production less pervasive in Chicago? Didn't a certain Presidential candidate do some community organizing over there?
Jonathan Pfeiffer — October 27, 2008
By the way, Jose, I will be extremely interested to see where this idea takes you. It feels pretty, you know, hip.
jose — October 28, 2008
Thanks Ken and Jonathan for helping me flesh out my thinking on this. There are a number of dimensions on which the LA school and the Chicago school differ, but the one I'm focusing in on is decentralization.
In a more general sense I want to draw parallels between the open source movement and the networked information economy and aspects of california social and political culture. I'm just not sure how it would go over in a course.