How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

The talk will outline Benkler's argument that social production is reshaping the production of information and culture, offering new challenges and opportunities to market actors in the networked environment, while creating opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. These results are by no means inevitable, however. A systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment.

About the Speaker: Yochai Benkler is professor of law at Yale and author of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (Yale University Press March-April 2006).