How does “laziness” work?

In chapter one, much of the focus on the economics of CBPP rested upon transaction theory. Transaction theory plays a fundamental role in examining the economics of the market model of production, the firm model, and CBPP. In economic theory, transaction costs are the price any economic entity (individual, firm, or otherwise) incurs for getting a product to market.

For Ronald Coase, lowered transaction costs were the key reason why firms existed: he demonstrated that firms would exist for as long as they were able to offer individuals transaction costs lower than when they worked on their own. But when individuals could sell their goods to market more cheaply, then they would do so directly, bypassing firms.

Similarly, Benkler’s insight is that under certain conditions (granular work, modular work, low costs of fixation, low costs of transmission, an environment of public information, and successful low-cost integration) CBPP offers lower transactional costs than either the market model or the firm model.

Transaction costs for CBPP are lower than in the market model because, as in firm theory, the individual is not responsible for ensuring that the entire product reaches the marketplace – he or she can produce a smaller subset of the entire product.

But the firm is inefficient in that it creates a middle layer between the productive individual and the market – management – which undertakes the responsibility of assessing each individual contributor’s creative potential and matching it with the market’s needs.

Benkler’s insight is that CBPP allows individuals to self-select projects to work on, and that this choice carries with it an increased efficiency in transaction costs, presuming that the individual is best suited to assess his or her own potential aptitude for successful contribution to a project.

In other words, no one can know our creative preferences better than ourselves.

And here is where the discussion of “laziness” enters again: the computer network culture which spawned hacker culture enables individuals to work for motivations beyond traditional pay.

Individuals are free to pursue passions, in part because larger productions are broken in to smaller components over the network and the scope of any one individual’s contribution – from seconds of passing attention to years of dedicated research – are controlled by that individual.

Thus “laziness” serves as a masthead for this particular set of conditions where individuals are motivated to work by intrinsic desires, rather than solely traditional motivations, and to the extent that this condition is persistent in our students’ lives, the field of composition must embrace it.