Proponents of the view that commons-based peer production represents an alternative paradigm for organizing the economy like to point to how the steam engine ushered in the final death knell of feudalism. Why should it not be possible, then, to harness the digital revolution in a similar way to bring about another fundamental shift, this time out of capitalism? The internet's power to capture and disperse the digitized general intellect could here be the impetus for a transition to a commons-based, collaborative economy characterized by the abundance of digital information/content and massive leaps in the quality and efficiency of material production (Arvidsson, 2020; Mason, 2016).

As the previous chapter revealed, however, there are many obstacles that still stand in the way of achieving a liberated general intellect for which the internet could serve as a facilitator and conduit. Apart from these constraints, which centre on capital's ability to enclose and commoditize digital value, it is, however, important to acknowledge that the internet itself has become a controlled, cyber infrastructure in the service of capital. With the establishment of the more interactive Web 2.0, and Web3 on the horizon (based on blockchain-enabled smart-contracts), the capitalization of people's use of cyberspace has taken centre stage. This reality poses novel and difficult challenges, but also some openings, for a compeerist-aligned evolution to a new, post-capitalist mode of production.

We can begin by reiterating that compeerism views the liberatory potential of the digital revolution with a great deal of caution. While technological upheavals can challenge capital, capitalism has been historically adept at bringing any lines of flight back into the fold of wealth-extracting commodification. More to the point, as Dmytri Kleiner, a long-term (h)activist and disabused believer in the revolutionary potential of the internet put it: ‘so long as capitalism is the dominant mode of production, it will produce platforms that reproduce it’ (Wilson and Kleiner, 2013, np). Kleiner refers specifically here to the ‘client-server-capitalist state’, an arrangement engineered to control and centralize what would otherwise be a decentralized and free network of information and exchange. In this way the internet has been reconfigured into a set of interlinked assemblages/apparatuses composed of technologies, ‘providers’, and ‘consumers’ that make up the basis of capitalism's latest wave of renewed profit and growth.