COOPERATION AND COMPETITION IN OPEN PRODUCTION

Implied in concepts such as social media, social production, participatory culture, etc. is that value creation on the social web is founded on cooperation, downplaying the obvious role played by competition and rivalry. This paper is an attempt to theorise the relationship between cooperation and competition through Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire. The claim of the paper is that the infrastructure and interfaces of the social web functions as mimetic machines, extracting value from both cooperation and competition. The first part discusses the importance of cooperation and competition in immaterial production by engaging with theories from autonomous Marxism and Rene Girard respectively. The two following parts discuss YouTube’s business model and how the site structures participation through its algorithms and interfaces. In the fourth part the theoretical framework is used to develop an interpretation of YouTube’s Partnership program through an analysis of a number of video clips that express discontent with the functioning of the site – a genre of video clips that are usually sidetracked in the literature. Finally, the paper suggests that the sentiments expressed in these clips should not be seen as exceptions but as constituting the very core of participatory culture as we know it.