The capitalist Web develops via a curious mutual parasitism, in which the value form abolishes itself. The end users parasitize the free services offered. But the providers of these free services in turn parasitize the end users by selling information about their activity and interests to third parties. But the very possibility of Google being able to offer a useful indexing service depends on there being lots of free information. It depends on people being willing to write blogs, post news about themselves, take and upload videos, make their own audio recordings, etc. It depends on scientists being willing to post their research on free archive sites, on public bodies making statistics and reports freely available. Free information on this scale is something qualitatively new. Some free knowledge has always existed. That taught in schools belonged to nobody. Scientific results have been the common property of scholars. Folksong belonged to the community of musicians. But their encoded distribution, as books, sheet music, phonograph records, etc., took commodity form.

The work individual people do posting stuff on the web is communism in action: work done for self-realization, unalienated labor, uncommodified labor. Even the means of web production escape, in the main, value relations. Much of the edifice rests on free open-source software. Some open-source software is written during paid working hours by employees of firms that, for their own business reasons, choose to release the software open-source. But another large part is written by people in their free time, or by people at educational or research institutes, with no commercial motive. The existence of these new productive forces gives rise to a new form of communist ethic among those who work them, summarized in the slogan: information wants to be free [Brand, 1987].

This nascent non-commodity distribution is restricted to information goods rather than physical ones, and further restricted by intellectual property rights. Personal computers are the means by which multiple copies of software, music, books and so on can be produced by minimal labor. But if people engage in such production they are labelled pirates. Thus a label originally applied to violent criminals who seized ships and killed their crews is attached to people engaged peacefully in production. Here we have a clear example of property relations holding back production. If pirates grab the cargo of a ship, they deprive others of it. If a hacker distributes copies of a song, nobody is deprived of it. Indeed more people get to hear it. The only deprivation is that of the copyright holders who forgo some of their monopoly profit.

PREDICTION IS A RISKY AFFAIR, especially, one might add, when applied to the future. The best one can do is make rational extrapolations from apparent causal processes. We know that technological change and labor productivity have been slowing down for fifty years. The transition to a post–fossil fuel economy will put further pressure on labor productivity and particularly on transport costs. It may be that this portends the inherent limits of industrial civilization and its mode of production. Alternatively, maybe it is the capitalist structure of the world economy that is to blame. I have identified several areas of technology, in energy production and information distribution, where capitalism appears to hold things back.

How The World Works, Paul Cockshott.