Yochai Benkler

Law Professor and Internet Scholar

BIG IDEAS

• The Penguin and the Leviathan
  What do Toyota's innovative supply-chain management structure, a Chicago police commissioner's call for prayer vigils on inner-city street corners, and Wikipedia have in common? The answer is that they are all examples of systems that have turned to human cooperation, rather than straight rewards, punishment, or control to achieve their desired ends. Professor Benkler makes the case for a new set of design principles—such as peer production on the internet and elsewhere—to create new systems of economic and social activity. These diverse systems fly in the face of what for decades was received wisdom about how to build incentives and manage complex economic, social, and technical systems to make the trains run on time. And yet, they move. And as they move, they teach us a bit about who we are, and how we might organize our lives to be not only more productive, but more humane as well. Tux, the Linux Penguin, is beginning to nibble at the grim view of humanity that breathed life into Hobbes's Leviathan.
• The Wealth of Networks
  Through the Internet, there has been a radical reversal of centralized communication and information production, and social sharing has become an integral part of the mainstream economy. Production is shifting from physical products to decentralized information goods, giving users more power, creating more opportunities for democratic participation, lowering costs for developing countries, and democratizing the creation cultures. Yochai Benkler’s theory of “commons-based peer production” reveals how a new form of production—based on social relations— is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. Yochai offers deep insights about the emerging patterns in the way people use network technologies and the impacts on human beings and society.

SNAPSHOT BIO

Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard. Prior to coming to Harvard, he was Joseph M. Field '55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society. Since the 1990s he has been a major theorist of the role of commons and radically decentralized individual action and collaboration in the production of information, knowledge and culture, as well as the organization of infrastructure.

Yochai’s work traverses a wide range of disciplines and sectors. It is taught in schools of law, business, and information sciences, and in departments of communications, media studies, computer science, economics, and political science. In real world applications, his work has been widely discussed in both the business sector and civil society.

His recent book, The Wealth of Networks (2006), and his earlier work, have won him awards from civil rights and social movement organizations, such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Pioneer Award for 2007 and Public Knowledge's IP3 Award in 2006, and was called a “reveille for netizens" by The Times of London and “Internet utopianism for grown-ups” by The American Prospect. At the same time, Wealth of Networks has been called “perhaps the best work yet about the fast moving, enthusiast-driven Internet” by the Financial Times, and was named the best business book about the future in 2006 by Strategy and Business. His work has been the subject of reports in The Economist, BusinessWeek, and the Wall Street Journal, as well as general publications like the New York Times and Time magazine, exploring the implications of the emergence of networked information economy.