Search

This chapter opens with a discussion of MOOCs (massive open online courses). In 2018 there were some 101 million enrolled “learners” in one or more of the 11,400 courses offered by these platforms. While there are several not-for-profit MOOCs, many of them are aimed at making money, and Coursera, our case study, is the leader of the pack. The company currently has some 37 million learners and made roughly USD 140 million in revenues in 2018. Revenues come from charging individuals, companies and universities for different services (such as certifications on the completion of freely accessible courses). Profits are to some extent based on unpaid knowledge delivered by teachers through online classes. In most cases teachers are paid once for these classes, or receive no additional payment at all, despite the fact that they are streamed several times to huge numbers of “learners”. Some 900 universities partner with Coursera and are positioned as middlemen: they lawfully provide the courses developed by their teachers, contribute with some kind of “trademark” and deliver recognition (the certification, degree, etc.) to the learners in exchange for some of Coursera’s revenues. This is only possible due to some intellectual property regulations and contracts that we discuss in detail. But for this exploitative relation to succeed, ideology is also needed. In this case, we analyze the role played by specific vocabulary (“learners”, “partners”, “instructors”), concepts (such as freedom, openness, community, peers) and the association between value and labor time.

In this final chapter, we present a summary and a comparison of insights gained from the case studies done, followed by the presentation of four major strands of policy suggestions that challenge the for-profit perspective that has been criticized throughout this book. In so doing we are challenging liberal ideology from the point of view of socialism’s understanding of freedom as an effective power to act, an ideological position that logically and ideally is dependent on an effective openness that is not open for subsequent enclosures. Within this change of perspective we will prioritize horizontal ways of organizing production in more participatory and horizontal ways—as in the cases of cooperatives and commons-based peer production (CBPP)—that stress the importance of commoning together. This ideological position can in turn be tied to republicanism. We propose policies in four related sectors of cognitive capitalism in order to operationalize and structure this shift of perspective. The policies relate to economy, technical infrastructure, legal regulation (where we introduce the Commoners License Family) and alternative digital platforms.

Capitalism has been undergoing a metamorphosis over the last few decades, resulting in a change of phase from industrial capitalism to cognitive capitalism or informational capitalism. Some instead speak of a movement within capitalism from Fordism to post-Fordism that has changed capital’s regime of accumulation and the regulation of the capitalist system, transforming its reproduction. The profit from openness model, introduced in Chap. 1, emerged as a complement and alternative, both to the ideological opposition and to the practical limitations of the profit from enclosures model. It was greatly inspired by the success of the globally peer-produced Linux operating system and the so-called Web 2.0 in the first years of the new millennium. But, all talk of openness warrant a closer look: openness is often used as a synonym to freedom, but it is not. To be open is to be open for someone else’s freedom to act. The kind of openness that fosters commoning and the building of robust commons is one thing, and the openness that supports interoperability in a capitalist world is another thing. This difference is connected to classical ideologies. The study’s ideology analysis is elaborated in the chapter, followed by a presentation of the contemporary discussion about immaterial and digital labor with all its ramifications. Finally, the concepts of commons, peer production and platform are defined and clarified, before introducing the social actors and flows connected to the profit from openness model.

A total of 830,000 peer reviewers, of which a large part can be estimated to be unpaid or underpaid, are open to Elsevier’s and other commercial academic publishers’ exploitation. On top of that, Elsevier and other commercial academic publishers are prospering from research that is paid for by someone else, and that someone else (often the public) is in most cases paying the companies to publish the research. This is profit for free at its prime. The company Elsevier and other commercial open access (OA) publishers profit from openness in a direct way by charging Article Processing Charges (APCs) for its OA publishing, and by not reimbursing allocated articles (within Read & Publish agreements) that have not been published. It is also hard to control the company’s claim that it is not using the commercial strategy of double dipping in relation to hybrid journals. The system with hybrid journals, together with the engagement of company representatives, naturalizes the existence of high APCs. Finally, the analysis shows that Elsevier profits indirectly and ideologically from openness by open-washing enclosed and toll-accessed subscription articles in hybrid journals with its OA-publishing. Recently Elsevier has started to co-opt and commodify even green OA’s institutional repositories. This move, together with the many other platforms and services (like Mendeley, Scopus and CiteScore) that concern the whole of academic life, risks creating a closed system in which the universities become locked into and dependent on the company.

This chapter provides a theoretical perspective on contemporary cognitive capitalism. A Marxist analysis of the relation between the inside and outside of capital is presented; Marxist theories on cognitive capitalism and concepts such as capitalism of communism and communism of capital are explained, together with a presentation of the study’s methodology, the ideological analysis. Key models that structure the analysis on the micro level and in the comparisons of the concluding chapter are presented. Finally, the informants and applied interview methods are presented.

This chapter contains the empirical study of the Wikipedians’ perceptions of their activities on the micro level. Six relationships are investigated in the informants statements: the relations between playing and working, gaming’s relation to the other three main categories (playing, working and labouring), the relation between working and labouring, and, finally, the relationship between playing and labouring. These relationships structure an ideology analysis that aims to identify ideological positions in the empirical material.

This chapter concludes the book with a comparison of the results of the analysis of the micro and macro level. Identified ideological positions are analysed on a more abstract level for patterns of ideological formations. Six ideological formations are identified. The comparison of these ideological formations contribute to an understanding of how the overarching systemic understanding relates to an understanding by the stakeholders of their micro-level activities, and vice versa; the analysis also provides “outside of the box” insights about the political potentials of Wikipedia, as well as the political threats to the project, by investigating the relations between the formations. Finally, an empirical evaluation of contemporary Marxist theories on cognitive capitalism is conducted, and the further relevance of the book is pointed out.

This article contributes to the debate on the possibilities and limits of expanding the sphere of peer production within and beyond capitalism. As a case in point, it discusses the explicit and tacit monetary dependencies of Wikipedia, which are not only due to the need to sustain the technological structures that render the collaboration possible, but also about the sustenance of the peer producers themselves. In Wikipedia, the “bright line” principle for avoiding a conflict of interest has been that no one should be paid for directly editing an article. By examining the case of Wiki-PR, a consultant firm allegedly involved in helping more than 12,000 clients to edit Wikipedia articles until 2014, the goal of the analysis is to shed light on the paradoxical situation where the institution for supporting the peer production (Wikimedia Foundation) found itself taking a more strict perspective against commercial alliances than the unpaid community editors.