About an hour later I ran into Dlight of Tribal Oasis, who spoke eloquently of creating this type of post-modern tribal community full time. His ideas are very compelling and he now has me convinced of their attainability. He went on to tell me that regardless of what we've been told, hierarchy has ended and we now need to get used to living without those rules. The technologies of liberation are expanding so fast, that hierarchy simply cannot survive, and so we as a species need to finish the job of deprogramming ourselves out of this primitive hangover. He also mentioned that the singularity is really just another form of misguided monotheism, another type of hierarchy. The future is not a singularity, but a Cambrian explosion of diversity and creativity heading out in every direction.

Burning Man is a super-condensified experience - a day can seem like weeks have passed. I never escaped the feeling that I had landed on some beuatiful alien planet filled with novel delights at every turn. This alien feeling was immediate and viceral and I didn't want it to end. No manner of sci-fi movie watching can prepare you for it. A cross between Barbarella, Mad Max and Tatooine might give you a hint, but that's all.

In the end change is constant and Burning Man will inevitably fade, hopefully to be replaced by another similar current, appropriately occulted from dilution and evolved to bring newer generations closer to the utopic ideals of it's founders - ideals that are really the same ideals shared by all of us since the infancy of humanity: warm companionship and community, expression and creativity, freedom from meaningless routine, and a communion with the ineffable and un-namable mysteries of creation. Burning Man is simply one point in time carrying the current onward, sustaining and nurturing the human spirit as it blossoms into hyperspace.

Marxism argues in favor of collective production and against monetary rewards out of political belief that capitalism is inherently exploitative. The way to ensure a just society is collective production where production is organized and rewards are distributed fairly through central planning. But centrally planned collective production proved inefficient and corrupt.

The first puzzle about open source peer production isn't whether or not developers have marxist political beliefs, but why it works, especially since the Marxist collective model failed miserably.

This is what Benkler explains elegantly. Coase's Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explained in the 30s that firms exist when the cost of separate transactions with many independent parties is greater than the price-efficiency of a competitive market. The problem Coase was trying to solve at the time was to explain the persistance and dramatic growth of centrally managed corporations, if a market is an ideal way to allocate economic resources.

Benkler solves today's version of the same problem. If money is the ideal way to incent and co-ordinate production, why are we seeing the persistence and dramatic growth of production methods that don't use money?

Benkler explains that commons-based peer production is more efficient than either firms or markets for information goods, where the costs of communication and distribution are low, and the difficult problem is allocating human creativity. When there are masses of potential contributors, and it's easy to participate in little chunks like an open source plugin or a wikipedia article, the best way match skills and work is a million little decisions by independent contributors.

Mandatory, Marxist-style collective farming doesn't benefit from these resource allocation efficiencies. Workers on collective farms have pre-defined work and can't leave. Collective farms don't gain the benefit of unique, voluntary contributions by thousands of distributed workers.

Another attribute of political marxism is an belief in mandatory equality. Peer production projects often have a meritocratic culture with dramatic inequality, where founding leaders and high-value contributors have greater prestige, influence, and sometimes financial reward. It's not considered inherently unjust that leaders of open source projects like Perl and Python have received grant, foundation, and corporate funding to do their work (although visible leaders of peer projects can also become lightning rods for criticism).

Another marxist value is opposition to a money economy. Cash is seen as a symptom of the alienation of workers from the products that result from their labors.

Clearly, the motivation of many thousands of open source, wikipedia, livejournal, and other peer content producers is non-monetary. But is it anti-monetary?

Benkler deals with the incentive question in the excellent third section of Coases Penguin. Benkler makes an astute distinction between activities where money is commonly thought to be an inverse motivation (sex), and where it is seen as complementary (sports, music). Many people who like basketball would love to be NBA stars. By contrast, most people who like sex would not like to be prostitutes.