Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

Marx & Proudhon in the Digital Age

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growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual, educational content, and to providing

the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge”. Wikimedia has operating expenses of $70 million, 16 but is able to provide open education to many hundreds of

millions of people. The key way in which Wikipedia, an encyclopaedia supported by the

Wikimedia foundation, breaks from traditional encyclopaedias’ business models is the

distribution method. Powered by the crowdsourced nature of their content, Wikipedia does

not need to charge for access to this resource, and instead uses the internet in order to distribute

this knowledge freely. Thus, labour has low value, but the product of ’knowledge’ is valued

highly. This free distribution of knowledge is an important upheaval in social structures, as access

to this knowledge is no longer restricted to the elite. In this case, Wikimedia is eroding the

financial structures under which traditional encyclopaedias operated.

Wikimedia’s activities accord with Proudhon’s conception of machinery as a force for liberation.

The Wikimedia foundation’s projects have effectively served to increase the availability of

knowledge for a significant portion of the world’s population. This also serves as a counterpoint

to Marx’s claims of machinery only serving to exacerbate class divides and the division of labour,

as both Wikimedia and the internet at large serve to massively reduce the limitations placed on

the dissemination of knowledge, both through the removal of costs associated with the

distribution of knowledge as well as through the freeing of access to public debate.

Case Study 2 - OpenSSL

OpenSSL is a software tool which allows for easy to use, free, encryption for everyone on the

16 Wikimedia Foundation, “Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2016-2017,” accessed September 5, 2017, https: / / meta . wikimedia . org / wiki / Wikimedia _ Foundation _ Annual _ Plan/2016-2017/Final.

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