5 Liquid collaboration 1 Dariusz Jemielniak and Tomasz Raburski Introduction Zygmunt Bauman is highly critical of the social media and the digital information technologies. He observed, for example, that ‘authoritarian, nay tyrannical regimes may beat the alleged freedom fighters at their own game, using the technology in which the apostles and panegyrists of the internet’s democratic bias vested their hopes’ (Bauman 2012 n.p.). In his work on ethics Bauman has also claimed that the ‘adiaphorization of human action seems to be a necessary constitutive act of any supra-individual, social totality; of all social organization for that matter’ (ibid. 1991: 146), highlighting the ‘use of technology as a form of societal rule’ (ibid.: 150) as an example. Sceptical of the ‘net delusion’ (Morozov 2012), he perceives the development of pseudo- egalitarian, but inherently corporate and profit-oriented, social networks as rapidly advancing the liquid surveillance (Bauman and Lyon 2013) of the contemporary world. With this critique in mind, we believe that the Baumanian concepts of liquid modernity (Bauman 1998) and liquid life (ibid. 2005) – liquid as in uncertain and insecure modernity (especially with regard to ethics and trust); flexible work-life and organizational forms; global-local economy and politics – offer an attractive interpretive key for studying open collaboration communities. Open collaboration communities, including expert-driven projects such as the FLOSS (Free/Libre/Open Source Software) movement, as well as non- expert-driven projects such as those developed by Wikimedia, are often more successful in the open capitalist market than their commercial counterparts (Weber 2004; Benkler 2011). And yet, they partly evolve from the radically anti-capitalist and anti-consumer culture (Lessig 2001; Berry 2008; Zittrain 2008), and they openly question the neo-liberal economic paradigm of self- interest (Ostrom 2000; Benkler 2011), even though they sometimes rely lar- gely also on a radically libertarian ideology (Stallman and Gay 2009; Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010) and use market metaphors (Raymond 1999). In this chapter we would like to present the results of an analysis of the social organization of Wikipedia, the largest collaborative movement of humankind, based on the theoretical framework offered by Bauman. The