Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society. Before joining the faculty at Harvard Law School, he was Joseph M. Field ‘55 Professor of Law at Yale. He writes about the Internet and the emergence of networked economy and society, as well as the organization of infrastructure, such as wireless communications. www.benkler.org. Below is his Foreword to the book as re-mixed by Hassan Masum.
The Wealth of Networks:
Highlights Remixed
His book, The Wealth of Networks, How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom, became an instant classic when it was praised by Lawrence Lessig at Wikimania 2006. Although not the first to contemplate the concepts of Infinite Wealth, Wealth of Knowledge, or Revolutionary Wealth (Tofflers' expansion on earlier insights), Benkler did something no one else had done: studied and explained in concrte terms the social context for creating wealth outside of a hard money economy. His work is among a number that are energizing the Open Money movement and when combined with C. K. Prahalad's work, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, is a foundation for ending the concentration of scarce money and focusing instead on diversity of non-moentary wealth that is infinite and in common.
