I have been trying to figure out for some time what exactly it is about the age of networks and cooperation that is so threatening to the property conceptions of the industrial era. I just posted on Smart Mobs about Electric Mobs cooperatively producing electricity from their collective movements, when I read this:

It raises all sorts of questions I'm sure Jacques and Pierre Curie, who discovered piezoelectrics in 1880, never got around to thinking about. Who really owns energy? Should we start thinking of walking (or just standing still and vibrating) as a commodity we could sell, or a gift we should give?

Then I finally saw the pattern.

Cooperation problematizes property.

Here are some examples:

* Cooperatively produced content, like wikipedia
* Cooperatively produced context, like tagging
* Cooperatively produced software, like Linux
* Cooperatively produced media, like mashups
* And now, cooperatively produced electricity

In each of these environments, the outcome of the process is a collective good. In the industrial era, cooperation, typically in a corporate setting, resulted in a proprietary product owned by the company. But, in the network age, cooperation becomes what Benkler calls "commons-based peer production," and it is the production of this commons, i.e. what is held in common, that erodes the foundations of old-fashioned property.