16 Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 25, Fall 2002.
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Biography
Yochai Benkler is the Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard
Law School, where he is faculty director of the Program on Law and Political Economy and
a co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society. Since the 1990s, he has
written about the political economy of digital technologies, focusing on how struggles over
commodification or decommodification of access to the basic resources necessary for
information, knowledge, and cultural production are a central determinant of freedom in
twenty-first century society. His current work focuses on the institutional political economy
of capitalism, combining historical and theoretical work to explain the dynamics that drive
waves of innovation and productivity growth, social struggle, dislocation, and crisis in
market societies. His books include
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production
Transforms Markets and Freedom
(Yale University Press 2006), which won academic
awards from the American Political Science Association, the American Sociological
Association, and the McGannon award for social and ethical relevance in
communications;
Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization
in American Politics
(Oxford University Press 2018), which in 2026 was recognized by the
American Political Science Association as the best book on political communication in the
last ten years, and a co-edited volume,
A Political Economy of Justice
(University of
Chicago Press, 2022 (with D. Allen, R. Henderson, L. Downey, and J. Simons)). His
forthcoming book is entitled
The Global Origins of Capitalism: Power, Productivity, and the
Evolution of Modern Market Societies
(Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2027)
