Socialist alternatives to capitalism II: Vienna to Santa Fe

Optimal control theory and information technology provide tools with the capacity to implement top-down centralized allocation of resources in complex economies organized through a social division of labor. Twentieth century political and systems thinking, however, emphasize the virtues of bottom-up spontaneously organized systems. Workers’ control can be analyzed as one variety of bottom-up spontaneous organization. Another is peer production, as in the case of open-source software. A model of peer production under the name Lifenet provides some insights into the advantages and limitations of this approach to socialism.