In fact, it sounds like the kind of deliberate mistake the Libertarians regularly make, as an excuse for their inexcusable denigration of all government and law.

On this point, I am in agreement with you. When I first glanced at the article about a month ago, I was impressed with the boldness of the idea. However, the way the author defines socialism (“When masses of people who own the means of production work toward a common goal and share their products in common, when they contribute labor without wages and enjoy the fruits free of charge”), means that this new economy is NOT socialism.

As you say, Fbook et al. are not doing this out of the goodness of their heart. Thus, when we share online, we don’t own what we create: my Facebook profile belongs to Facebook, not me. If I do something they don’t like, they can delete my profile without giving me warning. That does not sounds like “owning the means of production” to me.

in your book Code you say that “code” (i.e.,the set of instructions that dictate how a machine should operate) is law. as others in this thread have observed, any rule of law is coercive. it is thus not a matter of coercion versus no coercion. indeed, web 2.0 is an effort to memorialize into code certain rules behaviour that are highly coercive. (there is nothing more restrictive to freedom than code stacks.)

with its fundamental (we mice would say chinese red guard extreme) hostility to private property, the coercive shoe of “socialism” well fits the foot of web2.0.

wear it.