Antistatist technologies enthusiast and accomplished writer Kevin Carson exposed the real behavior of corporations that claim to triumph latent network-based management and production made possible with new technologies.
In a defiant post called "Uber: NOT the Networked Successor Economy You’re Looking For", Carson pointed out that in reality, corporations such as Apple, Uber and Lyft do not create anything. Rather, they stifle other people's creativity and undermine humanity's yearning for an alternative economy driven by networks and peer-to-peer production.
Instead of creating anything, such corporations make network technologies available that could have made corporate hierarchies and the state obsolete, yet then they extract rent from them by getting the state to protect them by enforcing the suffocating idea of intellectual property.
According to Carson, intellectual property is being used as a last-ditch defense by management hierarchies who feel that new network technologies will oust them. These organizations spend less time inventing new technologies that could empower networks and individuals and make them independent of hierarchy, than they spend trying to maintain dependency so that people will not be able to use such technologies without going first to such corporations.
This situation was not necessary, Carson argues, and it will become increasingly apparent that it is not necessary as a result of new network technologies that shall "render the corporate form entirely superfluous". Carson pointed to "the rise of the open-source hardware, micromanufacturing and peer production movements" as the best observation supporting this conclusion.
While today, one cannot obtain the needed technologies to network without first going to a corporation, this is the result of deliberate steps keep to corporations in power. The entire current global mode of production has been corrupted by corporate hierarchies desperate to entrench themselves, in order to extract rent from works that they do not rightfully own - the most apparent of which today is the Internet itself.
Destroy and remake education?: The BlogA recent open response to an email posted by Center for a Stateless Soc... http://t.co/FH2ci32pS1— The clubof.info Blog (@ClubOfInfo) August 28, 2015
