The big change is already happening. Think of free and open-source software, Wikipedia, or Amazon Mechanical Turk—these are all models of a new form of production rather than consumption. More than that, they are influential entrants into spaces once exclusively dominated by corporate or government-based production systems. “Peer production”—large-scale distributed action by many individuals—is transitioning from a curiosity to a general phenomenon.

The next 10 to 20 years will be marked by two trends. First, there will be systemization and widespread adoption of social practices that engage millions of people in effective, self-directed, socially motivated production. Second, there will be an increasing sophistication of what I call “social contract enterprises”—companies that have learned how to become trusted platforms for productive social practices.

You can already catch glimpses of what this future might look like. Companies entering YouTube’s space are seeking to differentiate themselves from it. One company, Metacafe, is building a platform that remunerates video creators for their popular videos; to avoid early suspicions that it was gaming the payment system, the company has begun to integrate lead viewer-users as reviewers and, ultimately, participants who can vouch for the company that it is not gaming the income distribution. Another company, Kaltura, is developing an open-source collaborative video-editing platform that will allow users to edit a movie together in the same way they would edit a Wikipedia article.

We are seeing this kind of peer production applied in new and surprising places. American intelligence agencies use a platform called Intellipedia to pool knowledge in a coherent database. The US Army’s Company Command platform allows company-level commanders to share experiences. Microlending sites like Prosper and Kiva are generating peer-to-peer lending. People have pulled together to post sightings of fires in San Diego, mapping them on Google mashups to provide information in real time. Approaching problems through peer production is becoming a basic tool.

Systemization is already happening as well. Take an example from politics. Two years ago a conservative blog, Porkbusters, harnessed its readers to ask their senators whether they were the ones who had put a secret procedural hold on a bill to improve transparency about the use of federal funds. Within days, Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, was outed as the culprit, and he was shamed into removing the hold. The Sunlight Foundation is generalizing this singular event into a system: pushing for release of public data online, and developing platforms to harness and guide regular use of this kind of pooled effort to parse the government data to improve oversight and transparency.

All of this is pointing toward a new social contract. Over the course of modern economic history, markets became evermore separated from social relations; people specialized and segmented their moral outlook. Some actions were fine in the market, even if we would never dream of taking advantage of people in similar ways in social relations. People behave differently when they understand themselves to be acting in the market, as opposed to acting in social relationships. Peer production and other forms of collaboration reverse that by breaking down the barrier between the market self and the social self.

As companies begin to see the social practices that make up peer production not as fads but as a fundamental generational shift in consumption, they will have to embrace these socially conscious values. They cannot afford to be seen as working in opposition to them or, increasingly, they will risk offending their users/customers. Such changes are not easy, so it is natural that we are seeing the adoption of diverse strategies. One is to support the new values of community and collaboration in concrete, visible ways, rather than just pay lip service. IBM’s reliance on open-source licensing, its shift to support the Linux kernel-development process, and its contribution of hundreds of patents to the Free Software Foundation are good examples. Other companies are using the reputation of a founder or brand to identify themselves as part of the new culture. The founder of Craigslist, Craig Newmark (see “Participatory technocracy,” in this section), spends a good deal of time contributing to social causes, symbolically marking that the company will be anchored in serving the public good. Vermont is introducing a special category of corporate registration to facilitate this need: the low-profit corporation.

New forms of cooperation are growing fast online, engendering a style of leadership and a set of expectations that will be transferred to other domains as well. At bottom, what all this is leading to is nothing less than a new social contract and a new way of negotiating the terrain between markets and society at large.

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