The Wealth of Networks:
How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
by Yochai Benkler, Yale University Press

© Copyright 2006, Yochai Benkler.

Acknowledgments

This online version has been created under a Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial ShareAlike license - see www.benkler.org - and has been reformatted and designated as recommended reading - with an accompanying Moodle course - for the Education Committee of CONGO - the Conference Of Non-Governmental Organizations in Consultative Relationship with the United Nations - in conjunction with the Committee's commitment to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development, the International Decade for a Culture of Peace and Non-violence for the Children of the World and related international Decades, agreements, conventions and treaties.

Epigraph

"Human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it, but a tree, which requires to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing."

"Such are the differences among human beings in their sources of pleasure, their susceptibilities of pain, and the operation on them of different physical and moral agencies, that unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable."

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Acknowledgments

Reading this manuscript was an act of heroic generosity.

This book has been more than a decade in the making.

Since then, I have been fortunate in many and diverse intellectual friendships and encounters, from people in different fields and foci, who shed light on various aspects of this project.

Much of the early work in this project was done at New York University, whose law school offered me an intellectually engaging and institutionally safe environment to explore some quite unorthodox views.

Since 2001, first as a visitor and now as a member, I have had the remarkable pleasure of being part of the intellectual community that is Yale Law School.

Oddly enough, I have never had the proper context in which to give two more basic thanks.

Finally, to my best friend and tag-team partner in this tussle we call life, Deborah Schrag, with whom I have shared nicely more or less everything since we were barely adults.