Articulo de Johan Söderberg sobre las impresoras 3D

Nos dió permiso para publicarlo bajo la PPL

atoms_want_to_be_free.markdown

+The coming of augmented property: A constructivist lesson for the critics of intellectual property. 
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+Johan Söderberg
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+Introduction
+Almost as soon as a consumer-grade 3D printer became widely available to the public, the first intellectual property conflict arose over printable, three-dimensional objects. In February 2011, the first cease and desist letter was sent to Thingiverse, a repository for files of such objects owned by the 3D printing company Makerbot Industries. The designer who sent the cease and desist letter, Ulrich Schwanitz, claimed ownership over an object that had been uploaded to Thingiverse. The object in question was a model of a ”Penrose triangle”. It is a well-known optical illusion where the sides of the triangle end in the wrong places. The object cannot exist except as a two-dimensional representation on a piece of paper. Schwanitz had designed a three-dimensional object which, when viewed from the right angle, appears to be a Penrose triangle. A user of Thingiverse had reverse-engineered the object from a photo. Fearing secondary liability under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act, Makerbot Industries decided to take down the file, though the legal situation was highly uncertain. The original, two-dimensional representation of the Penrose Triangle design is in the public domain, and it remains unclear if Schwanitz asserted his copyright over the design file, that is, over the software code, or over the blueprint of the structure of the object, or over the photo with the image of the Penrose triangle. After public outcry Schwanitz dropped his charges and released the design for free (Rideout, 2012). However, this initial encounter has been followed by requests from more strident, and powerful, corporate claimants. It is intriguing that the first copyright claim over printable, three-dimensional objects concerned a shape that on logical grounds cannot exist in physical, embodied space, except as an optical illusion and a trickery of the eye.
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+Already a year before the Penrose debacle, many hobbyists in the community building open source 3D printers had expressed doubts about the role of Thingiverse. Responding to those doubts, one of the founders of the Swedish filesharing service The Pirate Bay launched a new website called ”The Product Bay”. It was announced that the repository would be fully dedicated to information freedom. In conjunction with this initiative, young adherers of the Swedish Pirate Party made visits to furniture- and design fairs in order to pass the message on to IKEA-salesmen and professional designers. Their days were numbered, just like the days of the middlemen in the music- and film-industry. This threat, or promise, cuts to the heart of the rationale behind the development of the open source 3D printer. The technology was developed by a group of hobbyists and hackers with the explicit aim of expanding the conflict over intellectual property to tangible, physical goods (Bowyer, 2004). A pointer is an auxiliary project to the 3D printer, the development of a user-friendly 3D scanner. It holds out the promise of circumventing in physical space any control that legal authorities might try to exercise over repositories and computer networks. With a 3D scanner sitting next to the 3D-printer, design files can be generated (that is, scanned) directly from existing physical objects.
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+The proposition that the 3D printer/scanner will make physical goods copyable just as software code is open to challenge. The claim has a fleeting resemblance with what the actually existing machine can do. Here I will leave aside the technical objections that one may want to raise against this idea (cf. Söderberg, 2013). My concern in the present paper is with the imaginary that propels the development of the home-built technology in one or the other direction. The chief merit of the open source 3D printer is that it introduces a narrative where ”bits” and ”atoms” converge. The convergence is destabilising for a number of disciplinary boundaries and associated theories within the academy. The study of new media and communication is pulled into a larger circuit of production, commodification and labour relations. Differently put, the old critique of political economy reassert itself over the former, not-so-new-anymore subject field. In the paper I set out to mobilise the political economy analysis against the predominant critique of intellectual property. The convergence goes to show that there are no hard lines between private property ownership (over atoms) and intellectual property ownership (over bits/ideas). The exceptionalism claimed for information vis-à-vis physical goods, by practitioners and scholars alike, is the shaky ground upon which the house of intellectual property critique has been built. In what follows, I suggest that this argument draws on the limited self-understanding of free software/open source advocates, combined with the limited theoretical presumptions of the classical, and, to some extent, neo-classical economic paradigm. Briefly stated, this limit comes from a naturalistic understanding of private property.
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+When hackers and hobbyists shift their attention from (proprietary) software to (closed) hardware, the industrial economy as a whole becomes implicated in their critique of intellectual property. Intellectual property is put on an equal footing with private property. To followers of the open source 3D printer, this is perceived as a push-back against vested interests and intellectual property advocates. But the decision by hackers and hobbyists to open a new front in the struggle against intellectual property could be given an alternative interpretation. It might reflect developments that are taking place in the property regime at large. According to such an interpretation, intellectual property, far from being rendered obsolete by recent, technological advances, stands to become the dominant form of property everywhere. Tangible, physical goods will not be spared from the most offensive traits of intellectual property, such as intricate schemes of price discrimination and digitial rights management techniques. In addition to the 3D-printer and other digital fabrication tools, the rise of the so-called ”Internet-of-things” and ”augmented reality” points in the same direction: a bleeding-out from the virtual and informational realm to physical, embodied existence. Corresponding with this movement, one can foresee a future where ownership, market exchanges, rent extraction and labour relations are regulated through what I elect to call “augmented property”. The push towards augmented property demonstrates that naturalism has been abandoned by the most advanced section of the capitalist party, i,e, the Neo-liberal Thought Collective (cf. Mirowski, 2013). Here the constructivist lesson has been embraced because it holds out the promise that property and markets can be constructed 'all the way down'.
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+The two sources of the predominant critique of intellectual property
+In the early 1980s, copyright law was extended in most Western countries, from literary and artistic works to machine-readable language, i.e. software code. Corresponding with the expansion of the property regime, resistance to the same came into being. It was now that Richard Stallman invented the concept of free software and created a license to go with it. The General Public License (GPL) exploited the contractual rights invested in the author of a copyrighted work to specify the conditions of how his/her work may be used. The conditions laid down in GPL ensured public access to a work by ”excluding the excluders”. The rhetorical armament against intellectual property was worked out in the same decade. Stewart Brand, publisher of the Whole Earth Catalogue, veteran of the American counter-culture movement in the 1960s, and a pioneer of the computer underground, articulated the key tenets of what later became the predominant critique against intellectual property:
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+“Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive. Information wants to be free because it has become so cheap to distribute, copy, and recombine—too cheap to meter. It wants to be expensive because it can be immeasurably valuable to the recipient” (Brand 1987, 202).
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+Brand correctly identified two conflicting tendencies and situated them in an economy of information. Next he contrasted the uniqueness of the economy of information with the ordinariness of the economy at large. The exceptionality of information consists in that it can be copied infinitely, and thus it is a non-rivalrous good. In contrast, tangible physical goods are scarce and rivalrous. The merger between, on the one hand, an (ontological) assertion about what information is, and, on the other hand, classical and neo-classic economic theory about scarcity, provided the founding stone of Brand's argument against intellectual property. The integration of off-the-shelf economic ideas in this emerging social movement points to another sub-terranian connection beween counter-culture and cyberculture, out of which Stewart Brand was the chief exponent (Turner, 2008). His line of reasoning has since been endlessly elaborated and extended by hackers, fileshares and activists, as well as academic sympathisers. It is most succinctly summarised in the rallying cry: ”information wants to be free”. In order to make a critique of this critique, I first attend to the way ”information” has been conceptualised and constructed, thereafter I discuss how economic theory underpins this position.
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+The boundary object: information exceptionalism
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+The communication scholar Dan Schiller has produced a compelling critique of what he labelled the ”information exceptionalism hypothesis” It is a fallacy, he charged, to make any special claims for information as opposed to other commodities. It is difficult to take aboard his argument because the differences between (digital) information and tangible, physical goods appear to be self-evident. To avoid a gut feeling rejection of his argument, I begin with a flanking manoeuvre developed in constructivist science studies. By bracketing the question of truth and facts, science studies scholars avoid getting bogged down in debates about realism. The focus can instead be placed on how the semblance of matter-of-factness and reality is produced by various practitioners. I am the first one to acknowledge that the constructivist detour can go astray, especially if it hardens into a positive description of the world in its own right. When used in a more restrictive sense, as a flanking maneuver to arrive at the essential of an argument, it can be legitimate. If used wisely, the constructivist detour helps to bring out nuances, which would be lost in a reasoning which starts and ends with a positive assertion about how the world is. Here I propose to make such a detour in order to loosen up some certainties about the nature of information (discrete, non-rivalrous, etc.). For the time being, I will bracket the question if information can be said, truly, to be different to tangible, physical goods. I will come back to it in the second half of the text, and thus to Dan Schiller's critique. First I need to historicise the given understanding of what information is.
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+The process in which ”information” was defined and constructed has been extensively debated in the social sciences. I have little to add to this debate, but I will give some pointers to it in order to arrive at the argument that I want to put forward here. As is well known, Claude Shannon's seminal article A Mathematical Theory of Communication from 1948 was key in defining the dominant conceptualisation of information (Shannon 1948). He sought to define information in terms of codification and transmission of messages. In other words, as signals indifferent to the meaning that they convey to the receiver. As Rafael Capurro has argued, this marked a watershed compared to how information had been understood in previous ages, going all the way back to the days of the Greeks and Romans. The concept of information used to have a broader meaning than ”sending messages”. It implied the act of giving form to something, such as knowledge or the human mind. This in turn implied a context dependent language and meaning creation (Capurro 2009). It is no accident that context and meaning was taken out of the equation by Shannon. Katherine Hayles has shown how his definition answered to the needs of an ascending techno-scientific industry. The industry wanted a definition that allowed reliable quantifications. Competing definitions was proposed at the time, according to which information and its content were treated as part of an inseparable whole. To assess ”information as meaning”, however, would require some means of measuring what had changed in the head of the recipient. It was such practical considerations, which persuaded the scientific community to side with a narrow, mathematical, and decontextualised definition of information (Hayles 1999). A whole world has since been erected around this notion of information in order to make it work the way it was originally conceived.
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+Of course, and in spite of the efforts to the contrary, the creation, transmission and operationalisation of information remain situated, embodied events that cannot be completely divorced from meaning making. Although it can be relevant for other reasons to distinguish between knowledge and information, as many cultural critics have done, the two are not antithetical in the sense that one carries meaning and the other does not (Malik 2005). The setting apart of information from the material substrate in which it inevitably is inscribed should be recognised as a cultural invention. From it has followed notions about ”cyberspace” and ”virtual reality”. In the 1990s, the Internet was customarily depicted as a disembodied realm of information flows. The attractiveness of this idea can partly be explained by that it drew strength from a millennial-old dualism in philosophical thinking, sometimes spoken of as an opposition between form and matter, other times as mind and body, and so on (Hayles 1994; Fuchs 2003). In the new media studies literature, variations upon this dualism have been equally prolific. For instance, the same opposition tends to resurface when the ”virtual community” is contrasted with real, geographically bounded communities (for a critique: Proulx and Latzko-Toth , 2005). Among legal scholars, a parallel discussion has raged if the virtual worlds constitute a separate jurisdiction requiring unique laws (Lastowka and Hunter 2004).
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+The notion of cyberspace as a disembodied realm of information exchange has come under sustained critique from feminists and cultural scholars. Instead of reiterating those critiques one more time, I would like to redeem the counterposition, although flawed it may be. One should keep in mind that the positing of a transcendental Beyond has often in history served as a point for critique and opposition to that which exists. Some examples include a kingdom of heaven, natural rights and technological (or historical) determinism. Perry Barlow's now infamous declaration of independence of cyberspace could rightfully be considered as a continuation of this long, potentially critical and emancipatory, tradition. Indeed, the declaration would have been pointless to Barlow had he not thought that cyberspace would bleed into and change the states of the industrial world (Barlow 1996). The lesson is the following: The moment something (information, cyberspace, etc.) is posited as a separate Beyond vis-à-vis its surroundings, it has already spilled over that boundary and begun to affect the ”outside”. The same strategy is adopted by the adversaries of the current intellectual property regime when they adopt the information exceptionalism hypothesis.
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+The observation above can be further elaborated on by borrowing two popular terms from the science studies literature, boundary work and boundary objects. The first term was proposed by Thomas Gieryn. He used it to describe how science is separated from non-science by the efforts of scientists to uphold their professional status against amateur scientists and religious contenders. The lesson worth emphasising in the context of the present argument is that the boundary is not naturally given. It does not exist independently of the practitioners' whereabouts. The boundary has to be perpetually maintained, defended and re-negotiated (Gieryn 1983). The second term was introduced by Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer. Their contribution consisted in treating the boundary not merely as a marker of difference but equally as an interface enabling communication across heterogeneous, scientific communities. The boundary object was plastic enough to adapt to local needs, while robust enough to maintain a common identity across different sites (Star and Griesemer 1989; Lamont and Molnár 2002). The original definition of boundary work does not match perfectly onto the information exceptionalism hypothesis outlined above, but it does a good enough job to bring home my key point. The boundary between informational resources and physical goods is not a given. It must be upheld through continuous work. The exceptionalism of information and the separateness of the virtual realm constitute the boundary object of the campaigners for information commons.
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+In line with Susan Leigh Star and James Griesemer’s understanding of the term, the vagueness of the notion ”information” is not a flaw but a strength. It is this imprecision, which allows hackers and activists of varying persuasions to communicate and collaborate with each other. This is probably even more important to hackers than to the average science community, given their sharp ideological differences. This corresponds in a way with the observation about the ”political agnosticism” of hackers outlined by Gabriella Coleman (Coleman 2004) There is a less innocent side to this story. As Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star clarified in a later work, the classifications laid down by a boundary object have biases, which validate some points of view while rendering other positions invisible and/or unspeakable (Bowker and Star 1999) . That which has been rendered invisible in the boundary object of “information exceptionalism” can be seen from a quote by one of the chief architects behind the movement for creative commons licenses, Lawence Lessig. After having made a passionate case in favour of that information and culture should be distributed in a commons and free of charge, Lessig reassures his readers that markets and commons can co-exist side-by-side. He underlines that not all resources can nor should be organized in a commons:
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+"While some resources must be controlled, others can be provided much more freely. The difference is in the nature of the resource, and therefore in the nature of how the resource is supplied" (Lessig 2001, 94).
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+It is in the nature of informational, non-rival resources to be organised in a commons. In the same vein, rival, tangible resources are thought of as suited for markets. It is the nature of the resource which determines if a product is rival or non-rival. While intellectual property is said to create scarcity, traditional property is assumed to be grounded in objectively existing limitations in the real world. By implication, ownership of tangible, rival goods is seen as ”operational”, not to say ”optimal”. The same line of thought underpins Yochai Benkler’s argument,which has been no less influential in shaping the predominant critique against the current intellectual property:
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+“In the context of information, knowledge, and culture, because of the non- rivalry of information and its characteristic as input as well as output of the production process, the commons provides substantially greater security of context than it does when material resources, like parks or roadways, are at stake” (Benkler 2006, 146).
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+More so than Lawrence Lessig, Yochai Benkler recognises that his reasoning rests on technological and social conditions that are transitory. As a consequence, the balance scales between commons and markets might shift and needs to be reassessed from time to time. However, Benkler understands technological and social change as external factors acting upon his computations from an Outside. What goes unrecognised is that those factors are integral to a larger social conflict, in which the two law scholars are taking part. What is at stake in this struggle is precisely the demarcation line between commons and markets. The idea that the optimal balance point between commons and markets can be established in a technical, neutral manner is fictitious. Lessig and Benkler are not unaware of the presence of a struggle, but they put it down to the machinations of uninformed and/or corrupted legislators. Plenty of evidence can be marshalled in support of that claim, but it leaves out what is most fundamental. This is due to the boundary laid down by the hypothesis about information exceptionalism. It asserts that a critique against the current intellectual property regime does not imply a general critique of private property as such. It affirms that the advocacy for information commons is not at the same time an assailment against the free market.
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+The bias of the boundary object must be respected by everyone in the geek public, on pain of being marginalised. This includes critics of intellectual property who are typically identified as ”leftists”. For instance, Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation, insists on not using the word ”intellectual property”. He argues that this term causes confusion by gathering a range of distinct legislation under a catch-all phrase (Stallman 2006). This wish to separate private property from the critique of intellectual property is also suggested by the iconic catch-phrase of the Free Software Foundation: ”free as in free speech, not free as in free beer”. By framing the issue in this way, the case for information commons can be portrayed as a defence of civil liberties, rather than being seen as an attack on private property and thus a struggle for economic redistribution.1 No one can deny that this way of presenting the issue has tactical advantages. Perhaps even the case for information commons becomes all the more efficient in criticising private property and free markets by not giving itself away as such a critique. Concurrently, this suggests the embeddedness of the critique of intellectual property in a liberal, commonsensical worldview, largely defined and systematised in the economic discipline.
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+Abundance - the anomaly of classical/neo-classical economic science
+The information exceptionalism hypothesis exploits an anomaly in a (scientific) paradigm, that is, the economic discipline and its predominant traditions, large part of the classical and the entire neo-classical economic theory (Daoud 2011; 2010) I am using the term ”anomaly” in the strict sense given to it by Thomas Kuhn (1996). In his classic theory of science, to put it briefly, an anomaly is defined as something which gainsaid the prevailing scientific wisdom of the day. It is hard even to catch sight of the inconsistency, and impossible to resolve it within the scientific worldview of the day. Hence, an anomaly points beyond the established order, towards a new scientific paradigm which can make better sense of the observational data. However, since no way of conceptualising the world can give the ultimate and exhaustive explanation of reality, new anomalies are bound to crop up again.
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+A common denominator and key postulate in classical and neo-classical economic thinking is the omnipresence of scarcity. Because resources are limited in relation to unbounded human needs/fancies, humans act as economic, maximising agents. It is for this reason, we are told, that economic theory can make predictions about human behaviour. The economist must posit scarcity in order to see anything in the world. Scarcity is his condition for seeing, and his blind spot. To such a science, the existence of something non-rival becomes an anomaly. This phenomenon has been recognised by economists as the problem of “public goods”. Seen from inside this paradigm, public goods is something that causes market failures. By defining public goods in those terms the anomaly has not been resolved. It merely reaffirms the starting assumptions of the economic science. An example closely related to the present argument is the talk about the rise of a so-called “attention economy” (Simon 1971). The abundance of information is said to have resulted in a new scarcity, i.e. the lack of attention among audiences. Hence, the market in information is superseded by a market in attention. Abundance is here defined as a scarcity of scarcity. My point is not that non-rivalrous, abundant goods exist in the world and the economic science is flawed to the extent that it fails to acknowledge them. Rather, what is important is that the anomaly is itself a product of the economist’s particular way of looking.
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+Being an artifact of the economic way of looking, it follows that the problem with non-rival goods arose at the same time as this discipline was staged. To the founding fathers, however, it was light rather than information which caught their puzzled attention. Henry Sidgwick observed that “the benefits of a well-placed lighthouse must be largely enjoyed by ships on which no toll could be conveniently imposed” (Sidgwick 1901, 412). John Stuart Mill concurred that the service provided by lighthouses was best administered collectively as a public good (Mill 1965, 968). A hundred years later, Ronald Coase returned to the debate over lighthouses and affirmed that it still posed a challenge to economic theory (1974). The connection between light and ideas was made by Thomas Jefferson (Peterson 1984). He famously concluded that both must be freely shared. Inventions cannot, by their very nature, be subject to exclusive private ownership. All of those statements converge in the claim that the political economy of information abides to laws different from those found in the political economy in general. This assumption was more systematically explored by the economist Fritz Machlup. He underlined the unusual properties of information:
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+”If a public or social good is defined as one that can be used by additional persons without caus-
+ing any additional cost, then knowledge is such a good of the purest type.” (Machlup 1984, 159).
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+When Stewart Brand declared that information wants to be free, he jumped on an anomaly in the economic science. Grievances about intellectual property law could now be addressed by turning the economic science against itself. It laid the foundation for the present, dominant critique of intellectual property in its innumerable variations. Despite the many garden varieties, the argument pivots around the discrepancy between endless digital resources and limited tangible resources. The non-existent marginal cost of reproducing knowledge is said to be in conflict with its treatment as a scarce property. It is for this reason intellectual property law is found guilty of the cardinal sin in the economic sciences: sub-optimal efficiency. Hence, the same judgement is passed on it as would befall any other obsolete industry or sector: it must perish. This conclusion is underlined by connecting back from time to time to economic theory. In the case of Yochai Benkler, the connection is even written out in the title of his major book: The wealth of networks (2006). It is a beautiful rhetorical move. In a world where the economic science has shaped much official discourse and human self-understanding, a self-contradiction within the same worldview becomes a powerful lever for delivering critique against status quo. With the same self-assurance as economists lay down the omnipresence of scarcity and the inescapable laws of the market, critics of intellectual property assert the non-rival nature of informational resources and its exception from those same laws.
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+The drawback with this critique of intellectual property is that it has taken over the limited horizon of the economic science. The anomaly of non-rival (informational) goods is always-already inscribed in the logic of omnipresent scarcity. Allegedly, the exceptionality of information as a commodity consists in that it has artificially been made scarce through a fiat by the state. The implicit assumption is that intellectual property defies the law of gravity and sooner or later must fall to the ground. The defenders of this position are oblivious to the fact that the economy pivots around at least three more commodities, labour, land and money, which are just as fictitious as information. The fiction that labour (i.e. living human beings) behave in accordance with price fluctuations and contractual agreements can only be maintained through continuous state intervention, and often repressive at that. Although the policing of this illusion is never airtight, most of the time it works well enough to keep the labour market and the economy in place (Polanyi, 2001). The only exceptionality that can be granted to information as opposed to labour, land and money, is that the former has very recently been made into a fictitious commodity. Hence, resistance to intellectual property feeds from the living memory of what information used to be and/or could have become. The achilles heel of this resistance is its indebtedness to commonsensical, economic notions, which naturalises a particular definition of information. According to this definition, information is something ready-made, predefined and unchangeable that can effortlessly be divorced from the flow of communication. The main grievance that can be voiced from this position is that intellectual property impedes the free circulation of information goods. Understood in those terms, the assignment of a content provider with intellectual property claims over the information units follows like a brief postscript. The rallying call ”information wants to be free” contains the seed of its own unfreedom: commodification.
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+Political economy of information
+The flanking maneuver is completed. Having got this far into the argument, the time has come to close the bracket in which I initially put the question, if the information exceptionalism hypothesis is an outright false proposition. My answer is that the exceptionalism attributed to information is not incorrect per se. The hypothesis is problematic only because it sets our inquiry off in the wrong direction by choosing a partial and one-sided point of departure. It holds out the wrong end of the rope when we try to make sense of intellectual property and information commons. If this seems like a minor correction, hardly worth all the stir I previously made, then I contend that this difference in nuance leads to an altogether different approach, both analytically and politically. By questioning the exceptionality attributed to information, the orientation of the inquiry as a whole is put in question too, because the ”exceptionality” is an artifact of the way the inquiry has been framed. The crux is the notion of scarcity, the alpha and omega of the economic discipline which gives raise to its radical Other: inexhaustible abundance of informational resources.
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+The starting point of the information exceptionalism hypothesis is a matter-of-factness assertion about the positive existence of scarcity in the physical world, borrowed from the economic discipline. The alternative is a historically and sociologically informed approach, according to which scarcity (both of intangible and tangible goods) is always-already inscribed in prevailing social relations. It is here that a robust analysis of intellectual property must start. My claim might sound counter-intuitive. Scarcity in the physical world is a condition of modern life, everywhere experienced as shortage and unfulfilled want. Certainty of such experiences must be suspended in favour of a viewpoint that relates scarcity to the social whole of the market-industrial system. The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, drawing on his studies of archaic societies, talked from such an elevated vantage point when he made the following remarks:
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+"The market-industrial system institutes scarcity, in a manner completely unparalleled and to a degree nowhere else approximated. Where production and distribution are arranged through the behaviour of prices, and all livelihoods depend on getting and spending, insufficiency of material means becomes the explicit, calculable starting point of all economic activity" (Sahlins , 1972, 4).
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+Numerous historians have demonstrated how this state of affairs came to be, starting with the enclosure movement in fifteenth and sixteenth century England (Perelman, 2000). Land that previously had been held in common was fenced in and assigned to individual property holders. Land was made into a scarce resource, just as information at one point was made to be an abstract and decontextualised entity. The current expansion of intellectual property, in James Boyle’s memorable words, amounts to ”a second enclosure movement” (Boyle 2003). He exemplifies an analysis that starts with a broader critique of private property and commodification as moments in a historically unfolding, social whole. The historical perspective on scarcity puts stress on continuity rather than discontinuity, and shows that the political economy of information is not so exceptional after all. Nothing said so far denies the common sense notion that there is a qualitative difference between information goods and tangible goods. Nor do I deny that it can be meaningful to reflect over this difference. What is at stake is solely how to best frame such an inquiry. The point was forcefully made by Dan Schiller in his critique of the information exceptionalism hypothesis:
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+“As against the postindustrialists' assertion that the value of information derives from its inherent attributes as a resource, we counter that its value stems uniquely from its transformation into a commodity — a resource socially revalued and refined through progressive historical application of wage labor and the market to its production and exchange.” (Schiller 1988, 41).
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+What appears to be inherent characteristics of information turns out to be, on a second look, a passing moment in a larger, historical process. Previously in the text I mentioned that information was defined in the mid-twentieth century as an abstract and decontextualised entity. Competing definitions of information existed at the time but this one was best aligned to the needs of an ascending scientific-industrial complex. Fifty years down the road, Claude Shannon's definition of information has sunk into the infrastructures, practices and representations of our society. To say that his definition of information is a cultural innovation and a construction does not imply that it could be wished away tomorrow, simply by making a critique of it. Information thus understood is real enough, and it has contributed to a rupture in the fabric of society, roughly corresponding with the spread of information technology. My only contention is that this rupture should be located in the labour process, not in some inherent characteristics attributed to information as-such. Instead of speaking of ”infinitely reproducible information treated as a scarce resource”, it would be more appropriate to say ”private property straitjacketed onto a socialised labour process”. The chief advantage with the latter description is that it allows a more dynamic style of reasoning. A given, empirical reality can be studied as transitional in its becoming.
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+The advantages of the latter approach is plain to see when the object of study is technological change and creative destruction. The convergence of hardware and software is a case in point. This trend was working its way long before the surge of home-made, open source 3D printers forced the issue. A case in point is field-programmable circuits, widely used in the computer industry since more than a decade. The circuits are manufactured in such a way that the final design can be reprogrammed at a later date, as if it was software code. Needless to say, we owe the existence of field-programmable circuits to something more than the innate trajectory of scientific and technological progress. A testimony from an industry leader in the 1990s, anticipating the increased use of field-programmable circuits, makes this point succinctly:
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+"Our edge is that we can use easily available programming skills to do what previously required expensive and hard-to-recruit chip designers" (Gibson 1999, 38).
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+Both the abstract, mathematical definition of information famously stipulated by Claude Shannon, which later underpinned the many claims about cyberspace as a realm detached from physical, embodied existence, and the latest narrative where the two realms converge again, should be located in a larger circuit of production, commodification and labour relations. That is to say, intellectual property needs to be analysed from the vantage point of a critique of the political economy.
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+Conclusion
+In the article, I have questioned the information exceptionalism hypothesis, upon which the predominant critique against intellectual property rests. This critique has been cut out from the same cloth as the economic discipline. Neo-classical economic theory, the dominant tendency within economics, is not an academic pursuit like any other. It is a feedstock of hegemonic thought and as such a material force, rewriting the world according to its own abstractions. In order to make any prediction about the economy, neo-classical theory must first postulate the omnipresence of scarcity. Scarcity is a condition for seeing, and, subsequently, the constitutive, blind angle of this 'scientific paradigm'. It is this anomaly that critics of intellectual property exploit when they talk about the exceptionality of non-rival information goods. The irony of the reversal is easy enough to appreciate. The rationale for having intellectual property is overthrown from within the citadel of property. The liturgy of free markets is being chanted in praise of information commons. The price to pay, however, is that the blind spot of the economic discipline is duly reproduced in the critique of intellectual property. This is evident from the works of Lawrence Lessig and Yochai Benkler, as well as in the thinking of many hackers and hobbyists. It is not sufficient to criticise the intellectual flaws of this narrative without also recognising how practitioners make it work for them when they engage in boundary work. A case in point is the distinction between “free speech” and “free beer”. When advocates of free software insists on this boundary, they present themselves as strictly advocating civil rights issues, while exempting a critique of ownership, markets and wealth distribution from their openly declared opposition to intellectual property rights.
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+The boundary work that hackers, activists and academics have engaged in since 1980s is now being destabilised due to the introduction of a new narrative element. Namely, the exclamation that, to put it in the jargon of the Californian ideology: “atoms are the new bits”. At the heart of articulating this new imaginary are the hobbyists building open source 3D printers. The machine was devised with the stated objective of knocking down the railing between information and physical goods. The expectation among many of the hobbyist is that the same disruptive forces will be unleashed on industrial manufacturers as have already beset the music- and film industry. Filesharing will be generalised to the whole of the economy. Stated in more abstract terms, the hobbyists pay tribute to the insight, that the line between information commons and property markets is not given once and for all. The line is not inscribed in the nature of the resources, as the naturalist position would have it. Since this line has been constructed, it is subject to being reconstructed and renegotiated anew. Note to be taken, the articulation of a new narrative around atoms and bits plays a minor role in this renegotiation process. What counts more are the ability and dedication of hobbyists to put work into and steer the development process of 3D printers. From the vantage point of the hobbyists, this is perceived to be an offensive move. They are opening-up a new front in the struggle against intellectual property.
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+Unfortunately, the same move away from a naturalist towards a constructivist understanding of private property has already been made by the most advanced sections of the 'vested interests'. The naturalist or foundationalist understanding of private property does not only legitimise property by portraying it as an eternal state of nature, a well-known critique on the left since Karl Marx's denounciation of commodity fetishism. By the same token, everything that is not-property is portrayed as equally belonging to a state of nature, be that light or ideas. This lays down a floor or foundation beyond which property cannot be conceived. No wonder then that the naturalist fallacies of classic liberalism and classic political economy have been discarded by the Neo-liberal Thought Collective (Mirowski, 2013). As much can be seen in a text published by the Cato Institute, one of the many think tanks that make up the neo-liberal avant-guarde. The book discusses the relation between property, markets and technology. In a re-examination of the old debate about lighthouses and public goods, mentioned above, one economist observes that light is now being replaced with radio signals as a means for assisting navigation. The latter technology is designed in such a way that rent can easily be extracted for the service. The writer rejoices: Due to technological change, there are no such things as natural public goods anymore. It is only institutional inertness which holds back the relentless expansion and intensification of markets (Foldvary 2003). The last comment clarifies why the Neo-liberal Thought Collective, although its official agenda is to 'smash the state', first and foremost is preoccupied with capturing the state. It is through state power that institutional inertia against the expansion of markets can be smashed (Mirowski, 2013). The parade example, extensively discussed elsewhere, is the privatisation of public services. But the projection of intellectual property on top of physical objects can be added to this list. This points to a future where the most controversial aspects of intellectual property, i.e. digitial rights management systems, real-time customer surveillance, and intricate price discrimination, have spilled over the former boundary between virtual and physical. It has, in other words, transformed private property as we knew it. The two types of property converge into what I have elected to call “augmented property”. The vindication that this projection is logically impossible, that it will leave many loopholes and corresponds badly to the actually-existing objects, is of little importance. The Penrose triange cannot exist on logical grounds, but the illusion of one suffices for the purposes of laws and markets. Augmentation of property means that the granularity of commodities can be made infinitely fine. Infinite are the ways to parse up information and provide it on a pay-per basis. The coarse way in which goods and services are being charged for today will, a few years down the line, look like an endless long tail of market failures. Technology holds out the promise of closing the market failures, over and over again. Paraphrasing the anti-foundationalist and constructivists meme, markets go ”all the way down”. As with private property regime before, this new order can only continue to exist if transgressions against it is sanctioned by the state. As the conflict over augmented property unfolds, piracy will be generalised to every corner of society. And everywhere we will hear the battle cry: atoms want to be free too!
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+References
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+1) This argument has been taken one step further by libertarian critics of intellectual property. Instead of talking about ”intellectual property”, they promote the derogative term “intellectual monopoly”. The case against property rights can thus be refashioned as an attack on state regulations and market distortions (Boldrin and Levine 2008). This line of argument is underpinned by the old libertarian fallacy that private property and markets can exist independently of the state and its legal powers.
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