Peer Production and Collective Action

Over the last decade, a number of progressive social movements around the world have embraced peer-production principles such as collaboration, co-production, and self-organization. Technological innovation has radically altered the dynamics of organized collective action, promoting novel ways to engage in peer production and to mobilize peer production for social change. This chapter investigates the consequences of peer production for social protest, looking at how peer production reshuffles and "remediates" social change activism today. It explores three types of consequences of peer production for social movements, namely cultural production and norm change, collective identity, and the commons. The chapter then examines three tensions that might emerge in the process of embedding peer-production mechanisms and values in instances of collective action, namely: individual vs. collective engagements, peer networks vs. social movement organizations, and self-organized vs. commercial infrastructure.