The paper stating the RUM conjecture was published by a group of Harvard DASLab researchers in 2016. They also have created a more easily digestable RUM conjecture home page with graphics. Yet, in this blog post I try to describe the idea in even simpler terms than that page.

In December 2007 I was invited by www.re-public.gr to participate in a debate on the social web. While I like writing and the topic was good for me, getting a grip on the topic proved to be surprisingly difficult. In the past months I've had the privilege to hang around academics who study the phenomenons of Free Software, Internet or as one group calls it in the broadest possible way, peer-to-peer production. Listening to and reading some of the academics has been quite difficult, as socio-economics is not something I would know much about. Yet the setting of the re-public.gr discussion seemed to belong to a category I've had especially difficult to relate to. Thanks to my friend Michel Bauwens I've now learned to categorise these contributions as some kind of leftist socio-economical school of academics.

The basic framework seems to be that no matter how much progress we've had since the 19th century, and no matter what phenomenon is being discussed, somebody somewhere is being exploited!!! With this realisation I was able to scribble some kind of very non-academic reply: