I am very humbled and proud to present “Wikinomics and its discontents: a critical analysis of Web 2.0 business manifestos”. An article I co-authored with my professor José Van Dijck, it appeared in New Media & Society (vol 11, no. 5). It is an article (and an argument) I deeply care about, it took some time (two years) to get published but now it’s finally here. I think I am allowed to share the proofs. Here’s the abstract:

‘Collaborative culture’, ‘mass creativity’ and ‘co-creation’ appear to be contagious buzzwords that are rapidly infecting economic and cultural discourse on Web 2.0. Allegedly, peer production models will replace opaque, top-down business models, yielding to transparent, democratic structures where power is in the shared hands of responsible companies and skilled, qualified users. Manifestos such as Wikinomics (Tapscott and Williams, 2006) and ‘We-Think’ (Leadbeater, 2007) argue collective culture to be the basis for digital commerce. This article analyzes the assumptions behind this Web 2.0 newspeak and unravels how business gurus try to argue the universal benefits of a democratized and collectivist digital space. They implicitly endorse a notion of public collectivism that functions entirely inside commodity culture. The logic of Wikinomics and ‘We-Think’ urgently begs for deconstruction, especially since it is increasingly steering mainstream cultural theory on digital culture.