For some of us, our existence is defined by processes that entail an excess of production when compared to how we are naturally inclined to consume, and the raw materials we have to produce with. This colossal production activity is at the control of a disproportionately small number of people, and the control exists on many levels, extending to our psyches and imagination – well beyond the tangible processes we originally associated with production.
Seguing from that cheery intro, here is a quote from Bataille:
“…. any “restricted economy”, any sealed arrangement (such as an image, an identity, a concept or a structure) produces more than it can account for, hence it will be inevitably fractured by its own unacknowledged excess and, in seeking to maintain itself, will, against its own rationalized logic, crave rupture, expenditure, and loss. More specifically…. the term expenditure describes an aspect of erotic activity poised against an economy of production.”
Reading this (quoted in a section of Nechvatal’s Immersion into Noise), I started to think about how this relates to the idea of open source, and how open source can be a “noise” that breaks exisiting flows of control within the restricted economy of ideas we exist within. Taking patents as an example of an existing form of control, we cansee that they aretools for codifying flows of intellectual property, often in directions that are advantageous to the entities controlling the flow. When intellectual property extends the metaphor of physical ownership into the intangible space of ideas, it disrupts the very meaning of the word – bounds are placed on what ordinarily exists outside the definition of being a limited “commodity”. This extends the concept of a present, quantifiable ownership into an infinity of possible applications of a given idea or technology. The excess here is in the desire for control, not in the means of production themselves, which are actually being limited.
The flow can then be controlled to enable monopolies around ideas – which is what patents are set up to do. They can (for a limited amount of time) then be bought and sold like any other commodity. It is immaterial that it only takes a reasonably observant and skilled person with similar training to recreate something covered by a patent – the legal machine actively supports the creation and sustenance of monopolies. The initial intention of the law may have been to protect even smaller inventors from larger industrialists who may steal an idea because they have the means, while enabling the smaller creator to have enough control to monopolize his/her idea for their lifetime. However all this has enabled is a new breed of monopolies, where creators know how to misuse this decentralization by spreading their eggs in multiple baskets, as with the trend of tech giants developing decentralized online platforms.
Once the metaphor has been extended, institutions and tools to enable this commodification and control, such as Sony’s DRM (Digital Rights Management), can be implemented. Our legal and economic structures are built to support this form of centralized flow of property – and this dystopia is now extending to the realm of intellectual property:
- Youtube’s algorithm allows automated “takedowns” of videos which contain copyrighted material, but it does not recognize the fair-use laws that protect this use of content.
- The kindle store effectively limits the ownership of any book you purchase – lending is limited as are your means of accessing the published content.
- Aggregators like JSTOR charge exorbitant amount to access research papers that can be freely obtained from the authors. The researchers themselves rarely see this money.
- An especially egregious example is the recent attacks on the “right to repair” that many companies such as Apple and certain automobile manufactureers are undertaking – which extends the concept of ownership almost indefinitely in favour of the company that produces a product.
- Copyright law has been extended to 99 years (effectively indefinitely for a single generation), which means an author (and potentially his/her estate once they pass away) has default ownership over anything that even vaugely resembles their idea, as seen in a bunch of recent lawsuits.
There have been a few recent high-profile cases of mainstream corporate culture adopting public domain practices (Tesla releasing their patents, Microsoft buying Github). It’s perhaps more accurate to cynically view these actions as a form of virtue signalling – while they may signal a growing awareness of the need for public domain innovation, these would not have happened if not for other ulterior motives (marketing stunt/data collection) that exist, and are hence still firmly embedded in the current imagination of techno-capitalist hegemonies.
Open source breaks this trend by creating a break from the current means of production, by allowing for more graded variations of IP. This allows alternatives to the current centralization of power – now, the means of (intellectual) production are accessible to everyone. Instead of concentrating on control, focus is shifted back to power over the means of production. Ideas are free to be regenerated, remixed and reconstituted until they become something new and wholly detached from their sources. Indeed the whole concept of ideas as “capital” is free to be done away with. There is no conception of loss, as the power remains in the hands of those that develop and release their inventions under public domain license – but it can no longer be concentrated there.
I have often come across a misconception that people have of open source being inherently anarchic. This isn’t wholly true, as these licenses require strong publicly funded institutions that recognize and support them, and it is in the Public’s interest to protect these licenses. This way, when an erroneous claim is made by a third party, the onus to defend the IP no longer falls onto a single individual, who may not have the resources to do so. Additionally, as open source still allows for graded degrees of ownership, it still allows for the creation of a monopoly. These monopolies are still limited to a niche, so there isn’t a great deal of competition, or people vying to recreate a product.
Open source licenses are not merely a negation of the concept of intellectual property, and are hence not limited by its definition. In the long run, a distributed concept of ownership (and power) can only result in more resilient, trusting communities. I am hopeful that over time societies will default to releasing work into the public domain, although I doubt this will happen without a significant rupture to our current mode of thinking. It needn’t be apocalyptic, but it is easy to imagine how this might be a possibility. Taking our current large scale environmental degradation as an example: the cornucopian would view it as only being addressable by the development of appropriate technology – however, this may only be possible with wide-scale distribution and adoption of said technology as well – something that is hard to imagine when the designs for the technology are not freely available to those who may want to implement it.
Viewing it like this enables one to reimagine the future in a new light: as inevitable as rupture may be, perhaps it can even be desirable. Intellectual property in its current imagining is an attempt to create structure around the fundamentally unstructurable – where a limited notion of control enables short term gains. A limited world view allows for you to see patterns that emerge by the virtue of its randomness, but which belies the true nature of the system that is visible upon zooming out. I don’t know what that looks like, but I’m hoping our inevitable rupture will lead us to it.
noise/signal 