Peer-to-Peer

Chapter 2. Listening to Napster

Clay Shirky, The Accelerator Group

Premature definition is a danger for any movement. Once a definitive label is applied to a new phenomenon, it invariably begins shaping—and possibly distorting—people’s views. So it is with the present movement toward decentralized applications. After a year or so of attempting to describe the revolution in file sharing and related technologies, we have finally settled on peer-to-peer as a label for what’s happening.^[2]

Somehow, though, this label hasn’t clarified things. Instead, it’s distracted us from the phenomena that first excited us. Taken literally, servers talking to one another are peer-to-peer. The game Doom is peer-to-peer. There are even people applying the label to email and telephones. Meanwhile, Napster, which jump-started the conversation, is not peer-to-peer in the strictest sense, because it uses a centralized server to store pointers and resolve addresses.

If we treat peer-to-peer as a literal definition of what’s happening, we end up with a phrase that describes Doom but not Napster and suggests that Alexander Graham Bell is a peer-to-peer engineer but Shawn Fanning is not. Eliminating Napster from the canon now that we have a definition we can apply literally is like saying, “Sure, it may work in practice, but it will never fly in theory.”

This literal approach to peer-to-peer is plainly not helping us understand what makes it important. Merely having computers act as peers on the Internet is hardly ...